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Seven Days to save the Pub

Went to a press conference yesterday as the Axe the Beer Tax campaign enters its final week.  I doubt whether the eerie Alastair Darling will listen, but the case against raising the tax now seems irrefutable:

  • Rate of pub closures is up to 39 a week – that’ll increase further if the tax goers through
  • 2000 pubs have gone to the wall since last year’s budget
  • Last year’s 18% tax rise has cost the beer and pub industry an additional £540 million – and yet the total tax revenue from beer has gone down thanks to the tax slaughtering demand for beer. 
MPs have shown an astonishing level of disapproval for the proposed further tax rise:
  • 70% of all MPs oppose further tax rises
  • 202 MPs have now signed the EDM calling for the rise to be scrapped – that’s only the fourth EDM EVER to get more than 200 MPs signed up, and the first time an EDM about fiscal policy has received such strong support.
  • 45% of Labour’s own back benchers oppose the rise.  It’s rare for such a high level of back bench revolt.
MPs only do things for political reasons.  There’s an election looming, and this widespread support for the pub industry can only mean they think beer tax rises are a vote loser, that their constituents are unhappy with their local pubs shutting down.
There’s still a week left to help change this cretin’s mind.  If you haven’t already done so, please sign up – you can see it’s working.

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All adverts must be filled with lies, says Watchdog

As ever, the Daily Mash nails yesterday’s story with perfect precision…

ALL advertising must be filled with blatant, insulting lies from start to finish, the industry watchdog has ruled.

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Take Volcano Water’s 14-day I’ll-Believe-Any-Old- Shit-You-Tell-Me Challenge

The Advertising Standards Authority clarified the regulations last night after banning a beer advert which was obviously true.

The ASA said the advert for Courage beer was unacceptable because it implied that drinking alcohol could enhance self-confidence in a way that anyone who has ever drunk alcohol is completely aware of.

The advert shows a chunky woman squeezed into a tight dress, asking her husband how she looks. The man is shown reaching for a pint of beer, accompanied by the slogan, ‘Take Courage and tell your wife she’s a big fat cow’.

The ASA said its latest ruling was in accordance with its remit to ensure that all British advertising can be safely viewed by two year-olds.

A spokesman added: “Brands should at all times avoid the honest depiction of realistic situations and instead follow the excellent example of yoghurt or mineral water ads that make sufficiently vague claims about health-giving properties that are impossible to disprove.

“If companies want to avoid really aggressive lies they could copy the latest Persil advert which tells you nothing about the effectiveness of the product but does imply that if you do not use it you should have your children taken away from you by social services before they die of a dirty shirt.”

Roy Hobbs, a consumer from Hatfield, said: “My wife is extremely large but also surprisingly fast, so I reckon I’d need at least six pints.”

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Danger: Looking at this ad could turn you into an alcoholic

Here at Pete Brown’s Beer Blog we’ve never flinched from the truth.  We’ve always been brave, going where others fear to tread.  And I know that this sentiment is shared by our regular readers.  

That’s why, after long deliberations and sleepless nights spent agonising with my conscience, I’ve taken the decision to publish the following advert – I believe that you guys can handle it:
I know, I know, it’s shocking isn’t it?  The clear exhortation that the man should get steaming drunk and then tell his girlfriend she’s fat, before losing said girlfriend and embarking on a downward spiral of alcoholism that will see him sitting in the gutter in a pool of his own piss, is so powerful, so persuasive, that we should be thankful to the three members of the public who complained about it, and grateful to the Advertising Standards Authority for banning it from our streets on the grounds that “the combination of the text and the image of the man with an open beer can and half empty glass of beer was likely to be understood by consumers to carry the clear implication that the beer would give the man enough confidence to tell the woman that the dress was unflattering.” 
Sleep soundly in your beds tonight, readers, grateful that we live in a country where the authorities go to such inspired lengths to protect us from the dangers of a 440ml can of 4% ABV bitter.  

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Cask Ale Caption Competition

So Cask Ale Week launched yesterday at the Betjeman Arms in St Pancras.  The first thing that struck me about the event was how stunningly beautiful Melanie Sykes is in the flesh.  The second thing that struck me is that the only journalists in attendance were me and a bloke from The Publican.

So in the face of total and utter indifference from the British press and, it seems, the beer community, let’s have a caption competition instead.  The winner receives a free copy of my new book Hops and Glory, on publication date – now a mere eight weeks away.
(Oh by the way, the less attractive person in this picture is TV’s Oz Clarke).
Away you go!

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By ‘eck! It’s Cask Ale week!

The UK’s biggest ever celebration of cask ale starts next week.  When I posted about it a few weeks ago people were a bit, “um, what’s the point?”  So here’s a bit more detail.

Cask ale is the best performing sector of the British market, and the work in our Intelligent Choice report shows why.  It gives pubs a point of difference over supermarkets.  If it’s kept well, it speaks volumes about quality standards in the rest of the pub.  It attracts an older, more affluent clientele.  So that’s why it’s being promoted.  It’s the first time all Britain’s major cask ale brewers have pulled together to do something like this.
Things kick off with a press launch at St Pancras station at 10am on Monday 6th, where Melanie Sykes will kick things off and, perhaps unfortunately, Oz Clarke and James May will also be in attendance.  From noon till 7pm, thousands of samples of cask ale will be handed out to commuters – only 35% of people have ever tried it, but when people do 40% of them switch to drinking it.  If you write about beer and you’re nearby, it’s worth popping along.
On Wednesday there’s a big push to get women to try cask ale, because only 16% of British women have ever tried it. 
On Thursday there’s a big push to get ale drinkers to introduce a friend to it.
On Friday and Saturday, hundreds of breweries will be throwing open their doors to the public for tours.
And on Sunday, they’re going to attempt the world’s biggest toast, getting thousands of people in pubs up and down the country to raise a glass at the same time, monitored by the Guinness Book of Records.
Your local pub should have some interesting guest ales on.  At the very least, it’s an opportunity to have a few pints and maybe try to convert a friend.  I’m sure it won’t be perfect as an event, but it deserves to succeed and it can only be in any beer lover’s interest that it does.

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Quizmaster Pete on the telly

Well, despite the fact that I look like shit, and despite expectations of the old joke about the camera adding five pounds (“so how many cameras did you have on you then?”), with half a bottle of cough mixture down me I managed to get through my TV appearance on Market Kitchen without coughing phlegm onto the other guests.  And despite several people beforehand telling me Rodney Marsh was a bit of a git, I found him perfectly charming, great fun to spend an afternoon with.  Brilliant to hear his stories about George Best, and he didn’t even burst out laughing when I told him I was a Barnsley fan.

The programme is on UKTV Food tonight at 7pm and again (cos I’m so good) at 10pm, Sky channel 249, Virgin 260.

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National newspaper in anti-beer bias shocker

Today The Independent carries a hatchet job on ‘extreme beer’, claiming that the likes of Brew Dog and Thornbridge are targeting young binge drinkers.  It uses my recent Beer 2.0 piece for The Publican as background research, and creates a master class in hypocrisy that would be funny if it wasn’t for the fact that it might damage brewers I care about who spoke to me in good faith, and find themselves featured here as a result.  Here’s an extract (sorry, but if you read this blog regularly you know I’m unforgivably wordy) of my response to the editor and the journalist concerned.  If this issue makes you angry, please write to the paper and complain:

  • It is entirely inaccurate to suggest that these beers are targeting the 18-25 age group.  They may ‘remind’ the guy from Alcohol Concern of alcopops, but Alcohol Concern is a pressure group funded by anti-alcohol campaigners which is regularly quoted in articles like yours as if it is an official health body.  It’s not.  Some of these beers are marketed in a stylish and modern way – that is not the same thing as targeting younger drinkers.   Each of these brewers has a strong corporate feel to their range, so how can you imply that the 8% beer has been designed and packaged to appeal to younger drinkers any more than the 4% beer has?  To suggest that stylish packaging can only be appreciated by the under-25s is patronising to the people these beers are really aimed at – affluent, stylish drinkers in their late twenties and older – in other words, your readership.  Secondly, As Martin Dickie points out, these beers are expensive.  One of Brew Dog’s beers may be sold in Tesco, but as a rule they are sold by specialist beer shops, beer bars and online retailers, and cost upwards of £4 a bottle.  Anyone simply seeking high ABV is going to buy something else first.  My Publican feature even points out that one of the brewers you’ve mentioned – Otley – actively refuses supermarkets who wish to stock their beers and sell beer at steep discounts.  Thirdly, anyone who works in the drinks industry would tell you that the trend among young binge drinkers is for drinks that combine a high alcohol content with an unchallenging flavour.  The whole point of these beers is that they are full-flavoured, designed for savouring and almost impossible to glug quickly.
  • The alcohol levels in these beers are not ‘mind-blowing’ – this is entirely inaccurate, misleading and potentially damaging.  Some of these alcohol levels may be cause for concern if the beers were sold in pints, with the expectation that several would be consumed in one sitting.  But these beers are hardly ever, if at all, sold on draught.  As your feature points out, they are sold in 33cl bottles.  They are designed for sipping and savouring.  Wine is sold in 75cl bottles, which are commonly shared between two people.  If a 33cl bottle of beer at more than 10% is more than daily recommended alcohol intake (and almost all the beers you mention are not this strong) what’s half a bottle of wine (37.5cl) at 12-14%?
  • Building on these points, Saturday’s Independent demonstrates breathtaking hypocrisy which does a disservice to its readership.  The magazine carries its usual page of wine hagiography (funny how you hardly ever feature beer in this way, even though a cursory look at TGI readership data would show you that your readership are enthusiastic consumers of quality beer).  This week  Anthony Rose talks us through Italian whites.  In total 18 different wines are given enthusiastic endorsement.  There’s not even a single mention of the alcohol content of any of these wines.  And yet I can promise you that every single one of them has a higher ABV than any of the “mindblowing” beers in your extreme beer article, three of which are illustrated with alarmist starbursts drawing attention to their alcohol levels – levels  that are so low that if wine was to be produced to that strength, EU law would prevent it from being called wine because it would be too weak.  
  • But it gets better.  In the main paper, 24 pages after the “extreme beer” feature, there’s an article entitled ‘War of the rosés’, about a scheme to make French rosé wine more popular.  Here is a direct quote from that piece: “If we are forced to put the word ‘traditional’ on our bottles, people will think, especially young people, that it is a fuddy-duddy wine, an old-fashioned kind of drink.  That will ruin everything we have achieved.”  That’s from a winemaker.  And here’s the journalist himself:  “Young people, especially, have taken to rosé as a fun drink, which is refreshing, uncomplicated and relatively cheap.  (Anjou rosé sells in the UK at between £5 and £8 a bottle.  Other French rosés sell for as little as £3 a bottle.)”  Despite the clear admission that rosé winemakers are targeting younger people, despite the fact that rosé wine is being sold cheap and marketed in a contemporary fashion in order to lure these drinkers, there is no worried quote from Alcohol Concern.  No sensationalist headline.  No mention of the ABV of rosé wines.  The attractive illustration of three glasses of rose – unlike your illustration of extreme beers – carries no bold starbursts.  The inference is clear: when winemakers admit that they are selling cheap wine (12-14% ABV) and actively targeting young people with 750ml bottles for as little as £3, that’s OK.  But when a brewer creates a beer (6-12% ABV) and sells it in a 33cl bottle that retails from £4 upwards, and tells you it is emphatically NOT targeting young drinkers, you run the piece with a ‘health fears’ headline and a subhead that claims the beers are, in fact, targeting younger drinkers – despite the fact that this is a lower ABV drink, being sold at a higher price. 

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Sod’s Law and that G-word again

Got me best clothes on today because I’ve been invited to film an episode of Market Kitchen on UKTV.

They’re having a week of ‘save the gastropub’ programmes.  I have no idea why they had to single out gastropubs to be saved – whether they think they are more under threat than ordinary pubs, whether they think they are more worthy of saving, or whether it was just that they felt they had to say gastropubs in order to be allowed to do the feature.  I’ll try to find out.
Anyway, I’ve been asked to compere a pub quiz, with the contestants being the regular presenters and today’s special guest, Rodney Marsh.  It’s the first time I’ve been on the show for over a year so I was keen to do it.  It could be brilliant, it could be disastrous.
The way the day is going, I’m guessing the latter.  I’ve been wearing my hair long for about 18 months now.  Every single day for at least the last three months, when I’ve dried it it’s just fallen quite naturally into a shaggy, wavy style that I’ve never been totally convinced by but which people insist looks nice and suits me.  Today I did exactly the same things I do every morning and ended up with a hairstyle I’ve never seen before that makes me look like a paedophile.
Added to that, I’ve developed a stinking cold as the morning has worn on.   I can’t stop sneezing and every time I try to speak I have a coughing fit.
This is going to be comedy gold, for all the wrong reasons…

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Pubs and class

I’ve tried to write about what’s really wrong with pubs many times, and think I’ve made some valid points.  But Boak and Bailey just hit the nail on the head quite squarely and with minimum verbiage via the simple expedient of asking Boak (or Bailey’s) working class mum and dad why they didn’t go to the pub any more.

In this industry we spend a lot of time talking about how hard it is for publicans, and not enough time looking at the problem from the drinker’s perspective.  Anyone who runs a pub or works for a PubCo should read this post.

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