Tag: Beer

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What I did on my holidays

Post Cask Report launch, the Beer Widow and I took a much-needed week’s holiday and went to Majorca.

I’d heard that there were nice parts of it, that it wasn’t all Costa del Puke.  What I wasn’t expecting was for the vast majority of the island to be beautiful, with loads of fantastic historic towns and villages, with the seedier side of British and German holidaymaking confined to a few small strips of coastline.  It’s a wonderful place.

Beer
Admittedly it doesn’t start well, when this is what greets you even before passport control:

Oh.  Great. 
Spain has some great lagers.  They’re not finely structured Pilsners.  They don’t have a delicate nose of grassy, spicy Saaz hops.  But they come with a tight, creamy head, and they have flavour – a nice full-bodied sharp sweetness followed by a drying bitter finish.  There’s substance in the likes of Estrella and Cruzcampo.  They’re satisfying drinks.
We didn’t do much in Port de Pollensa.  We read books and sat on terraces along the unspoiled, pine tree-lined pathway along the bay shore, relaxing and gazing at sunsets like this one:
“Of course they were much better than this on board Europe you know.”
“Yes dear.”
Wary of the airport Carling ad, for the first few days I asked what the beer was whenever I ordered one, and it was always Estrella or Cruzcampo.  The latter soon emerged as my favourite, and we gravitated to the bars that served it.
And so I relaxed.  And I grew complacent.
On our fourth night we tried a new restaurant, and I just asked for a beer.  When it arrived in a Strongbow pint glass, an alarm bell started ringing in my head, but not quickly enough.  I took a mouthful of something that was thin and watery, and yet still managed to taste offensive – overly sweet and cloying, like watered down Cresta soda.  
“That’s Fosters,” I spluttered, to an eye-rolling Beer Widow.
The thing is, I can actually drink Carling.  If you haven’t yet had a beer that day, so your palate hasn’t yet been woken to the flavour profile it expects, Carling is merely bland.  It’s unremarkable but inoffensive, like a sense memory of a decent beer that you almost evoke, but not quite. Whereas Foster’s is one of those special beers that manages to be bland and actively taste foul at the same time.  I’ve never been able to understand how they do that.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part was that later, when I went inside to the loo.  I walked past the bar and saw that there were two draught beer fonts: Fosters (so I had identified it correctly – get me) and next to it, Cruzcampo.
My heart sank.  Because this meant that when I’d ordered my Cerveza with a heavy English accent, the waiter hadn’t even bothered to explain that there was a choice of beers, and ask me which I would like.  He’d simply heard my accent, and assumed that I would be a Foster’s drinker.  I was English.  Therefore I would want the shit, English beer rather than the halfway decent Spanish one.  He knew this.  He didn’t even have to ask.
When I wrote about Chodovar I wondered why we Brits actively choose to drink shit quality lager.  I pointed out that well made lagers were no more challenging or difficult to get into, no less fizzy or refreshing.  They were just nicer.  Now, more depressing than that, we actually insist on taking our inferior beer abroad with us, and drinking it when there is a much nicer beer waiting there for us.  I’m sure it costs more to buy Foster’s in Spain than Cruzcampo, and there’s simply no comparison between them.  Depressing.
Booze
To cheer myself up, we went to the offie.  I was hoping to find a decent Fino or Madeira.  I failed, but we found something much better – the two best spirits brands I’ve ever seen.
First up, here’s Capitan Huk rum:

I’ve no idea who makes this.  I’m guessing it’s not Diageo.
This is one of the best brands I have ever seen in my life.  I can imagine the meeting that gave birth to it. Translated from the Spanish, it went roughly as follows:
“OK, so we’re going to launch a rum. How should we brand it?”  
“Well, the history of rum is tied inextricably with the British navy.  If we’re going to sell this to holiday-making Brits, that would be a good association to evoke.  They’re always wearing England shirts and that, so if we create a sort of naval ensign flag that combines the Union Jack and the St George’s Cross we’re onto a winner!”
“Brilliant!  Let’s do it! So who shall we get to draw the label then?”
“How about my eight year old son?”
“Brilliant!  Does he know what the Union Jack looks like?”
“No.”
“OK, but given that we’re investing a sizeable amount of money in launching a new brand, should we at least perhaps give him some visual reference so he gets it at least partly accurate?”
“No, fuck it, I’ll just describe vaguely what a Union Jack looks like, and then invest several thousand Euros in printing up the first thing he comes up with.”
“OK, cool.  So what about a name?  Something English and naval…”
“How about Captain Hook?”
“Wasn’t he a pirate in a children’s story, and therefore both fictitious and absolutely nothing to do with the British navy?”
“Yes.”
“Ok, works for me.”
But Capitan Huk was not the best brand in that offie.  Oh no.  The best brand, high on the top shelf, out of reach without the use of a stepladder, was this muscular bad boy:
It says ‘Viking Ship’ on the bottom.  In case you don’t know what the drawing is.

LARSEN, the cognac of vikings.

The very concept of a ‘cognac of Vikings’ is wrong in so many different multi-layered ways, the person who dreamed it up can only be genius.

Every single part of the execution of that concept reinforces the original wrong-headedness of it.

The random inclusion of ‘fine champagne’ just to reinforce the quality cues.

Labelling it with ‘Viking Ship’ like a child would label his drawing.

‘Le Cognac des Vikings.’

I’m in mourning that I didn’t go out and get a stepladder and buy this, just so I could look at it every day when I needed to smile.

Sparkly hat
Anyway we had a great holiday, even if we did have to fly Ryanair.  At the airport on the way home we, along with a long, snaking queue of other budget holiday makers, used unstaffed check-in desks to weigh our bags and repack them to stay within the airline’s draconian baggage weight restrictions.  Here and there, items were discarded.  And in one waste bin, about half an hour’s queuing away from the one check-in desk Ryanair deigned to open, we saw this:

Majorca.

At some point, the glittery cowboy hat has replaced the Kiss-Me-Quick policewoman’s hat in British holidaymaking law, quickly and completely.  If a picture paints a thousand words, this one tells you the story of a thousand Mediterranean holidays, encapsulated perfectly.  The object itself.  The fact that it’s been discarded.  The fact that it was only discarded minutes before check-in.

Did its owner intend to take it home then change her mind? Or did it symbolise her holiday, and was she clinging to that holiday till the last possible second?

Did she think “Oh I can’t be arsed to take this on board now I think about it,” or did she think, “I can’t bear to part with you, and all that you represent.  But I must.  For tomorrow I have to go back up Tesco’s.”

The tanlines fade.  But the pint of Carling will always be there for us.

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What now?

I must be losing my touch.

This ad is obviously a few years old, but I only just became aware of its existence.

If you’re familiar with it and your reaction is “Oh keep up grandad”, I invite you to move along quickly.

If it’s new to you, however, this is a banned ad from the successful ‘no nonsense’ campaign that ran in the early noughties, when Peter Kay was fresh and interesting and when large ale brewers still made some kind of serious attempt to sell their beers.

Ah, those were the days…

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The Cask Report

Have spent most of the day in a radio studio doing syndicated interviews about the Cask Report, which we’re launching today.  This means the Report, which I was hoping to put up here as an exclusive here earlier today, has already been picked up by several bloggers which, along with some favourable national media coverage, is great stuff.
Regular readers of this blog will know I’m hardly a cask ale purist.  I regularly criticize people who are.  But cask ale is the most misunderstood of beers.  And it was cask ale brewers who got together and decided we needed an industry report on their part of the beer market.  I’m proud to write the report each year, and to be a spokesperson for cask ale when the report comes out. 
This year’s report contains great news for cask ale brewers and pubs that sell it.  In fact, it’s the best news we’ve had in the four years I’ve been doing the report: 
  • 5% value growth versus 2% value decline for beer overall.
  • Volume steady versus 4% volume decline for beer overall – the first time since 1994 that cask volume hasn’t fallen.
  • 120,000 new drinkers taking total cask drinkers to 8.6 million
  • 4% increase in distribution, with 3000 new pubs stocking cask
  • Average age of the cask drinker is getting younger – 17% increase in 18-24 year-old drinkers.

This in an amazing performance given the general state of pubs and the collapse of volume in the beer market as a whole.
But despite the fact that many people simplify this good news into “cask is growing”, actually it’s not.  Cask’s fantastic performance is great news for drinkers, but good as it is, it’s still only static in volume terms.  That’s because most cask ale drinkers only drink it infrequently, and average throughput of cask ale (in line with beer generally) is down 5 per cent.  
I have a tiny worry that in spreading the good news about cask, we might make drinkers, brewers and pubs complacent, that all you need to do is stick a few handpulls on the bar and everything will be sorted.  
It doesn’t work like that.
In the beer world, we spend time with other like-minded people.  The brewers and publicans I speak to are all doing really well, but that’s because they work hard developing beers, keeping them in great condition, and telling people how good they are.  It doesn’t happen automatically.  46% of the UK population have still never tried cask ale.  Only 18% of drinkers claim to drink it on a regular basis.  People still don’t know that much about it.  
It’s important that anyone who loves cask ale who reads the report (downloadable here in full) reads the warnings as well as the fantastic news on cask’s resurgence.
Look, I just do as I’m told.

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Hardknott comes to the Rake

We used to call him Woolpack Dave, because he ran a pub called the Woolpack, and wrote a thoughtful blog on life as a publican, which earned him the runner-up spot to Young Dredge in Best Use of New Media at last year’s Guild of Beer Writers Awards.
Yeah, he looks friendly.  And he is.  Most of the time.
But Dave also brewed in his cellar, and soon realised that making rather than selling the stuff was where his true vocation lay.  It is a statistical fact 79% of all brewers north of Birmingham are in fact called Dave, so Dave fit right in.
Now, just because he no longer runs a pub called the Woolpack and instead runs a the Hardknott Brewery, he expects us to call him Hardknott Dave instead of Woolpack Dave.  Well, I suppose it’ll catch on, but he’ll always be Woolpack Dave to his longtime followers.
Anyway, Dave his bringing his beers to London next week, with his long-suffering partner Woolpack/Hardknott Ann (Following them both on Twitter is like eavesdropping on an online George and Mildred style marriage sitcom.  Sitting across from them in the pub while Ann rolls her eyes at some of Dave’s observations and they bicker over the remains of the packed lunches Ann lovingly prepared for their day out is like being front row in a really funny Alan Bennett play).  
Come and meet them at the Rake next week and you’ll see what I mean.  They’ll be there from 4pm onwards next Monday, 28th June, talking about the beers on offer. 

These consist of three ales on hand pump:

  • Fusion – a 4% ginger beer that has had chilli added to the mix.
  • Dark Energy – a 4.9% ‘sort of a stout perhaps, dark and fruity dry hops’ in Dave’s words 
  • Continuum – their 4% ‘standard’ beer, dry hopped in the cask

From the cellar there’ll also be Infra-Red, a 6.2% IPA (apparently ‘hoppier than a bucket of frogs’)

And in bottle there’s Granite (Barley Wine style) and Aether Blaec (Islay whisky barrel-aged stout).  
Then only one of these beers I’ve tasted so far is the Aether Blaec, but it’s one of the finest whisky-aged beers I’ve had – packed full of flavour, but incredibly smooth and welcoming.  Dave’s an independently-minded bloke, and I suspect all the above beers will carry a personal streak, something that could possibly become a bit of a Hardknott trademark.  
See you there.

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The Jewels in Greene King’s Crown

He’s the Guv’nor, Brian Blessed.  If Labour had used him during their election campaign, they’d still be in office with a healthy majority:

And now he has a marketing relationship with Greene King, telling Man Walks into a Pub jokes on Dave in the sponsorship idents during Friday night comedy.  The more I think about it, the more perfect that seems.  Here he is doing my favourite ever MWIAP joke:
And best of all, he’s from Barnsley – Mexbrough to be precise, a small mining village on t’other side of town from the mining village I grew up in.  I met him last week.  He’s 72 now, and he was telling me how when the war ended and he was just a lad, he ran down to the prisoner of war camp at the bottom of the village and bellowed – even at the tender age of 7 or 8 – “HITLER’S DEAD!” through the fence, and all the Italian POWs were really pissed off because it meant they would have to leave the paradise of an open prison in Barnsley and return to shitholes like Tuscany and Milan.  
From “Hitler’s dead” to “Gordon’s alive” – the symmetry of genius.
I met Brian because I was invited to a couple of events being hosted by Greene King, one of which he was doing a speech at – but more of that later.
I spent two days in Bury St Edmunds, having a brewery tour and tasting, a meeting about the forthcoming Cask Report, a charity black tie dinner and a head brewer’s lunch for publicans.  I came away with a changed impression of Britain’s biggest  (depending on how you look at it – Marston’s would probably disagree) cask ale brewer.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend I love Greene King IPA, or tell you they’re my new favourite brewer, or defend corporate howlers like the debacle they had in Lewes over trying to make people drink their beers instead of Harvey’s, but I saw a different side to them, and detected a change of attitude.  Greene King is perceived in many places as the cask ale brewer we love to hate, what with them being booed when IPA was runner-up Champion Beer of Great Britain a few years ago.  I’ve never written a single favourable word about them on this blog before now and I’m not sure many other beer bloggers have either, so in the interests of fairness and balance, I merely offer the following observations:
1. The brewery tour starts on the roof.  From up there, you can see the whole of Bury St Edmunds, incredibly green and pretty.  You can see where the locally sourced malt comes from, less than two miles away.  You can see that while the brewery is big for such a small town, it’s nowhere near the size of the big corporate behemoths the multinational lager companies own.  And inside it still looks like this:
2. I have never met a brewer who is more obsessed by quality and rigour throughout the brewing process than head brewer John Bexon. I’ve started having nightmares about being caught in a crossfire conversation between him and Stef Cossi from Thornbridge, staring down an eternal abyss of enzymes, sugars and Kieselguhr.  GK does product tastings every morning in a tasting room deep in the bowels of the brewery, where there are no atmospheric effects or odours to interfere with the palate.  Tasting is done from black glasses, under red light, so all stimulus apart from the aroma and taste of the beer is stripped away.
3.  I’ll never really get on with Greene King IPA, but tasting it in the brewery tasting room, fresh and perfectly kept, almost made me utter the words, “There are some amazing beers from around the world, but none of them can match a cask ale at its peak” (a sentiment I’ve seen on other blogs this week, but not in relation to Greene King IPA).  There’s a light in the tasting room that they use for checking the condition of the beer.  This is what it looks GKIPA looks like in front of it:
4. The water for GK’s beers comes from artesian wells beneath the brewery.  This water has to be purified because fertilisers and chemicals from the surrounding farmland have got into the aquifiers.  Once it has been purified, Bexon adds back in the salts for Suffolk water for Greene King beers, the salts for Nottinghamshire waters for Hardy & Hanson’s beers, the salts for Essex water for Ridley’s beers, and so on.
5. Greene King have a reputation for going around swallowing up smaller brewers.  But in two high profile cases over the last few years – Ridley’s and Hardy & Hanson – it was the other brewer that first approached Greene King asking to be bought.
6.  St Edmund’s Ale is nothing special but a perfectly pleasant drink on a balmy spring evening on the lawn.  Strong Suffolk Ale is a really good beer.  Abbott Reserve is one of the best beers I’ve tasted this year. And they’re just launching a 7.5% ‘Special IPA’ based on an authentic Victorian recipe.  They’ve compromised on the hop levels (the simple fact is Bexon is not a hop-head) so it’s not a hop bomb, but it’s strong, complex, nicely balanced and fantastically and dangerously drinkable for 7.5%.  So yes, Greene King IPA and Abbott Ale are fairly unchallenging if you’re really into your beer.  I choose not to drink them if I have a choice.  But this brewery can and does produce some pretty special beers.  
7.  I get the distinct impression there’s been some soul searching going on.  It felt like GK has realised they’re seen as the big corporate baddies of the ale world and taken some of that on board.  I found them more reflective, more open, more friendly, than ever before, with a renewed emphasis on being proud of being a Suffolk brewer, proud of Bury St Edmunds.
8.  Brian Blessed’s dad drinks Greene King IPA. ‘Nuff said.
So back to Brian’s speech.  It was mad, hilarious and inspiring.  He holds world records for going up in planes to the edge of space, and going up Everest without oxygen.  He tells us this is because his brain doesn’t need oxygen to function.  
He warns us of the dangers of going out from a tent just below the summit of Everest for a shit, of how the howling wind can catch your turds, throw them back into the air so they land on your shoulder as you climb back into the tent.  
He tells us of the time he told this story to the Queen.
He tells us he’s almost finished his astronaut training, and that next Spring he will become the oldest person ever to fly into space, when he will enjoy a stint on the international space station.  He’ll be 73 years old.
And he treated us to “GORDON’S ALIVE!”
Anyone who is alright by the guv’nor is alright by me.

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Ice Cold in Alex

“They served it ice-cold in Alex…

For the moment that he shut his eyes, he could see every detail of that little bar in the lane off Mahomet Ali Square; the high stools, the marble-topped counter, the Greek behind it. The sound of the place came back… the purr of the overhead fan, a fly, buzzing drowsily, the muffled noise of the traffic seeping through the closed door…

Then he thought about the beer itself, in tall thin glasses, so cold that there was a dew glistening on the outside of them, even before they were put down on the counter; the pale amber clearness of it; the taste, last of all.”

I like to look at how writers who don’t normally write about beer treat it when it crosses their path – some of the best ‘beer writing’ doesn’t come from beer writers at all.  They’re starting from a different perspective and with a different frame of reference. If they’re good, they can make even the most knowledgeable and experienced beer enthusiast think again about the essence and the role of great beer.

Christopher Landon served as a ‘Desert Rat’ in North Africa in the Second World War. In 1957 he fictionalised his experiences for a novel that went on to become one of the most famous war films of all time: Ice Cold in Alex. It contains possibly the most iconic beer drinking shot in the whole history of cinema – but we’ll come to that later. A few months ago I spotted a reprint of the novel in a bargain bookshop. Tempted by the cover illustration of a tall, full, pilsner glass, I decided to give it a go.

The opening passage above forms the opening of the book. Captain George Anson is a man ‘with too much sun, too much sand, too much of everything to bear.’ Stuck in Tobruk as a circle of Nazi armour closes around it, he’s succumbing to alcoholism, cauterizing his senses with a repetitive, metronomic swigging of the whisky bottle.

As the fall of Tobruk becomes inevitable, all non-essential personnel are shipped out to Alexandria before the noose closes. Anson is charged with getting two nurses in an ambulance to safety. He takes with him his faithful mechanic, Sergeant Major Tom Pugh, and on the way they pick up Zimmerman, a stranded South African officer who is not all he seems.

(Oh alright, he’s a German spy.)

Needless to say, things don’t go according to plan. They’re forced to detour deeper and deeper into the desert to avoid the German armour. At one point a German armoured column fires on them, killing one of the nurses. As the Germans decide whether or not to let them go, Anson’s old self emerges, and he swears off the whisky for the duration of their journey:

“Anson’s voice went on, it was different, held a faraway, dream-like quality. “If he has… I’m going to tell you something right now, Tom. It will be a sort of peace offering. Do you know the next drink I’m going to have? A beer, Tom. A bloody great, tall, ice-cold glass of Rheingold in that little bar off Mahoment Ali Square in Alex… and I’ll buy you one, all of you one, because I’m bloody well going to get you there.”

Rheingold was an American lager, from a New York brewery founded in 1883 by a German Jew called Samuel Liebmann.  Anson calls it “The best and coldest Yankee beer in the Delta”. But reading about it in this context, its German name and ancestry says something in and of itself about war’s bitter ironies.

The biggest character in the book though is the desert itself. Landon’s descriptions of the mirage – a solid, shimmering wall throwing all manner of illusions at them – the blazing sun and the unyielding, hostile but ever-changing sand, render North Africa as a different planet. As the book forces you to consider the desert from the point of view of the average Briton in the early 1940s – it strikes you that it might as well have been.

Anson, Tom Pugh and Diana the surviving nurse figure out that Zimmerman’s a kraut spy pretty quickly. But the desert forces them to unite against a common enemy, survival coming before the war against Nazism.

Anson rallies and his inspirational leadership galvanizes the other three. The beer has become totemic to him, not just for the alcoholic hit he’s denying himself until they reach safety, nor for the promise of near-orgasmic refreshment after the parched dessert: he’s promised to buy them a beer. And to buy them a beer, he has to get them to Alexandria.

One night, Anson and Diana are talking on watch, under the stars:

““Let’s talk about something else… Beer.”

“But I thought that was out.”

“It is – until that date in Alex. Do you know – I’ve been thinking about that one particular drink all day. I’ve told you about the bar, haven’t I? But that Rheingold – it’s so bloody cold that there’s a sort of dew on the outside of the glass. I always run my finger up and down – to make a sort of trail – before I have my first sip.””

Beer is hope.

I wrote in Man Walks into a Pub about some ancient myths in which beer is a gift of hope to humanity, a consolation prize for having to cope with knowledge, sin and inevitable mortality. Here it’s a rock that Anson can cling to, to prevent himself from falling apart.

On the outskirts of the city, KATY the ambulance is on her last legs – or last wheels I suppose – rattling and wheezing and leaking and steaming as the city reaches out and pulls them in. The book flits between the perspective of each of the four characters, and as the finale approaches we’re with mechanic Tom Pugh:

“He was not hungry, not thirsty – but once when the captain said, “I hope that beer’s bloody cold,” his mouth started watering uncontrollably.”

Finally, they make it. The bar is just as Anson described it, empty because it’s still early. The barman sees four unwashed, filthy tramps until Anson rouses him with a parade ground bark.

““Get cracking, Joe. FOUR VERY, VERY COLD RHEINGOLDS.”

When they came up, again they were as he said they would be, pale amber in tall thin glasses, and so cold, the dew had frosted on the outside before he put them down. They stood in a row now, but Tom waited, as he knew the others were waiting, for Anson to make the first move. He stared at his for a moment, looking all round as if it were a rare specimen, then ran his finger up and down the side of the glass, leaving a clear trail in the dew. He said, “That’s that,” and lifted the glass and tilted it right back. Tom watched the ripple of the swallow in the lean throat, and there was a tight feeling inside him and his eyes were smarting and he knew that in a moment he would cry. So he lifted up his own glass and swallowed it fast.

When Anson put his glass down it was empty. “I quite forgot to drink your healths,” he said. Then to the barman, “Set ‘em up again.””

It’s ready-written to be the climactic scene of the film adaptation. This is the ultimate thirst, the best beer you’ve ever tasted, a reward for the hardest day’s work imaginable. It works perfectly in the film – so perfectly, in fact, that all it took was one editor’s snip, one line of dialogue and a title to turn it into the second-best beer ad of all time.

Of course, the fact that for some reason the filmmakers switched Rheingold for Carlsberg detracts a level or two from the meaning. But without that bit of corporate chicanery, there’d have been no ad. And if there hadn’t been an ad, I would have forgotten about the film. And if I’d forgotten about the film, I would never have read this powerful, moving little book.

I can’t find the ad itself on YouTube, and blogger won’t let me upload the mpeg I have of it from my laptop, but here is the piece of film Carlsberg later used in the ad, without title and voice over:

So let’s hear it for the ice-cold, dew-dropped glass of lager. Given the choice I tend to go for cask ale these days. But if you were in Anson’s baked, cracked shoes, you’d have to be some kind of pervert to fancy anything other than one of these frosty bad boys.

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CAMRA’s noxious culture of entitlement

Long ranty post alert – apologies in advance, but this all needs saying…

One of my character flaws (I promise you I only have two, maybe three max) is that I can sometimes come across as arrogant. I never feel arrogant on the inside, but things I say or do can sometimes make it look as though I am.

When it happens, it’s not because I think I am superior – quite the opposite. It’s because I feel insecure and need reassurance. I over-compensate. Curiously enough, as I’ve become more successful as a beer writer, my ‘arrogance’ has declined as my inner confidence has grown.

The same is probably true of many other people who come across as arrogant. I guess it’s a kinder explanation than thinking that these people truly do believe they’re God’s gift.

But sometimes, I’m not so sure.

This is something that’s been tickling my brain since the scheme of pub discounts for CAMRA members was announced. It’s become quite controversial. Tandleman, as ever, gives a very reasonable argument in defence of CAMRA. (If only more of its prominent members were like him, there would be far fewer rucks like the one I’m about to prompt.) He claims that any organization is free to negotiate discounts for its members. If they put the effort in, and they succeed, fair play to them.

I can’t possibly disagree with that argument – I’ve worked in offices before now where HR have negotiated a staff discount in local shops – so why is it that the CAMRA discount winds up so many?

It’s this.

I was in the Sheffield Tap a few weeks ago, nursing a half of Thornbridge St Petersburg at the bar. In came two middle-aged guys with – and I swear I’m not making this up – plastic carrier bags full of VHS videos of locomotives, which they were swapping with each other. They went to the bar, ordered a couple of beers, and said, loudly enough for all the pub to hear, “We should get a discount in here!”

“Why’s that?” asked the barman.

“Because I’m a CAMRA member! And we spread the word about places like this!”

Now. Solipsistic as I am, I can only judge this by my own actions and experience. I’m Beer Writer of the Year. It seems that what I say carries a certain measure of influence in some misguided corners of the world. Sometimes in the Sheffield Tap the staff recognize me and insist on buying me a drink or giving me one on the house. If they do, I thank them as graciously as I can (being a Yorkshireman it’s hard, but I try) and accept.

I hope it’s not too arrogant of me to suggest that I “spread the word” about pubs more widely than Mr Deltics 1975-82 on VHS.  But I have never – in my life – walked into any pub and either demanded or expected a free or discounted drink because of who I am, or what I do. If I did, I would expect and deserve to be called a complete and utter fucking twat by anyone who witnessed it.

But with some CAMRA members there’s this sense of entitlement. It has nothing to do with head office having negotiated a commercial discount; it’s about this or that individual believing they deserve special treatment simply because they are a CAMRA member.

They know that a local branch can choose to make or break a pub over some perceived slight that has nothing to do with the quality of the real ale on offer. Similarly, CAMRA’s brewery liaison officers know they carry a great deal of influence. I’m sure many branches and many BLOs do their jobs conscientiously and responsibly. But I hear regular stories of others who let the power go to their heads.

When the bloke in the Sheffield Tap said his piece, he said it with a threatening tone. “We spread the word about places like this” was delivered with the protection racketeer’s implicit threat that ‘the word’ could just as easily be bad as good if his demands weren’t met. The Tap needn’t worry – no word this pathetic little man could spread would have anything like the power of the positive buzz coming from the vast majority of decent, sensible people – CAMRA members and non-members alike – who are raving about the pub.

So all this was buzzing around my head when we sat down to a free dinner in the National Brewery Centre last week. Master Brewer Steve Wellington had chosen a beer to go with each of the three courses we were served, and he stood up to introduce and explain each match.

Every time he took the microphone, the specially invited CAMRA members on my table heckled him, bellowing “P2 stout! Give us some P2 stout!” Now, this is a remarkable beer. But it wasn’t available. The first time they demanded it, Steve explained that there was none available because it hasn’t been brewed for a while. This didn’t put them off.  The first time it could be excused as good-humoured banter.  As the evening wore on, it just became fucking rude.

The final course was served with Kasteel Cru Rose. Like most beer geeks, it’s not a beer I care for that much, but Steve had his reasons for matching it with the dessert. Not a single one of the CAMRA guys would even touch it. They were disgusted, insulted, seemingly forgetting that this was not a CAMRA dinner, and that CAMRA has not financed the £700,000 reopening of the brewery centre. A private leisure company had, and Molson Coors – license owners of Kasteel Cru – had.

The demands for P2 stout grew louder. Finally, Steve went out into the driving rain, ran across to his office and found five bottles from his personal stash. He placed them on our table, and the CAMRA members, without a word of thanks to Steve, proceeded to divide these bottles among themselves, not offering to share them with anyone else. The guy sitting next to me told me that I could have some of his if I could get the bottle opened. Why he felt he was in a position to decide whether I was entitled to drink some of Steve Wellington’s beer speaks volumes.

When I opened the bottle and poured it for him, he grunted, “This had better be bottle-conditioned.”

While we were enjoying a dinner that had probably cost the NBC in the region of eighty quid a head, for CAMRA members to show such visible and audible disgust at the beer choice of a brewer they and everyone else has huge respect for, to barrack and heckle in such a way, and to display such a sense of entitlement when they got what they had so rudely demanded, was not just grossly disrespectful; it was the behaviour of sugar-rushed ten year-olds at a birthday party.

I hope that every decent CAMRA member reading this is appalled by the behaviour of people who were there in their name, representing them. These were not some junior local branch hangers-on; they were senior members with significant responsibility for pursuing the aims and objectives of the organization.  But they acted just as obnoxiously as the inadequate trainspotter in the Sheffield Tap.

From their point of view, there had been a perceived slight in the speeches when CAMRA had not been thanked adequately for their role in the brewery centre being reopened. Personally I don’t think there was any such slight. But even if there had been, it didn’t excuse this behaviour. And the perceiving of a slight in the first place is yet another manifestation of what I’m talking about. (As soon as the reopening of the centre was announced, CAMRA members were phoning up demanding free/discounted entry.)

This culture of entitlement is – as far as I can see it – arrogance in its truest form, a genuine belief that simply by being a CAMRA member you are somehow superior, more deserving than other paying customers.

Of course, not everyone who is a CAMRA member behaves this way (I’m not even suggesting every CAMRA member at the dinner behaved this way). 
But everyone who does behave this way is a CAMRA member.

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Do we need another brewing competition? Dunno, but I think we need this one…

The Brewing Industry International Awards are back. They were last held in 2005, but are happening again on 9th – 11th February 2011 in Burton on Trent, hopefully in the new National Brewing Centre (grand opening tonight – I’ll be there!).

These awards are notable in that brewers are judged only by their peers – other brewers.  Pundits and hacks like me don’t get a look in.  (This led to a fantastically entertaining meltdown by a certain beer writing legend when the Guild of Beer Writers discussed at the first AGM I ever went to.  As I said at the time, it was worth the price of joining the Guild on its own.) 
Anyway, there’s lots of stuff here about categories, judging and all that.  In the gap since these awards were last held, the World Beer Cup has become pre-eminent in this field.  The BIIA are joining to give them a run for their money once more from now on. 
But what interests me most is not yet official news, but was revealed yesterday by Ruth Evans, CEO of BFBi, which runs the BIIA (OK, that’s enough acronyms for one blog post), at a conference we were both speaking at.  Ruth said that at the end of the competition, there are approximately 10,000 pints of beer left.  Wouldn’t it be a good idea if, instead of pouring this beer down the drain, they had an international beer festival?  As Ruth points out, it wouldn’t be like a CAMRA beer festival – it would incorporate the best beers from around the world, of all styles, and there would be plenty of brewers on hand to talk about them.  And if this festival were held in the National Brewery Centre… well, talk about putting Burton back on the beer map.
Ruth stressed that nothing is definite yet – discussions are ongoing.  But if this came of, it would fill the gap left by the extremely premature demise of Beer Exposed after just one fantastic event in 2008.  It would be a phenomenal event for everyone involved in the global beer industry, and could be the start of something much bigger, giving Burton a new role on the global beer stage.      
I urge everyone connected with the National Brewing Centre to play nicely on this, and any potential sponsor or media partner to jump in.  Let’s make this happen. 

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At conference

Writing this on my way home from the SIBA annual conference, on a cold, draughty train with no tables, no refreshment trolley, no power sockets. Wedged sideways on a hard, narrow seat, developing pins and needles in my left leg which is curled up to provide a surface for the laptop, the cold grey light, bare branches and churned, muddy fields gliding past the window, everything conspiring to accentuate what was a surprisingly mild hangover, draw out the nuances of it, develop the waves of pain and nausea like a symphony orchestra playing variations on a theme, and turn it into something that forces me to seriously contemplate tearing my eyeballs from their sockets. But it was worth every groan, whimper and noxious whiff. I first went to SIBA two years ago, to present a summary of the first Cask Report. They treated me well, looked after me, and I said yes like a shot when they asked me back to present on the second cask report a year later. But three years running felt like overkill, so this year I wasn’t invited to speak. It got to Monday and I thought, sod it, there’s no actual reason for me to go this year, but it’s such a good crack I’ll go anyway. Not for the speeches and presentations – even though some of them were quite good, they weren’t really aimed at me – but for the chance to be in a room full of brewers sharing their beers. Every year a local MP or mayor will open the conference and inevitably talk about how real ale is not a binge drink, and everyone will nod furiously, and throughout the day the theme will be referred back to in presentation after presentation – real ale drinkers are moderate drinkers, responsible drinkers, you can’t really binge drink real ale, and we all nod every time it comes up, and then at 5pm the speeches finish and we charge the bar and get riotously, deliciously hoonered on real ale. SIBA conference drinking is drinking with gusto, with relish. It’s hearty drinking, lustful for life drinking, and more importantly, it’s only £1.50 a pint. The conference (or just ‘conference’ without the definite article according to the people running the thing – it makes it sound more important) also sees the announcement of the winners of the SIBA National Brewing Competition, which is becoming a serious contender to CAMRA’s Champion Beer of Britain. The overall winner was Triple Chocoholic from the Saltaire Brewery in Bradford, also winner of the speciality beer category. Brewed with chocolate malt, actual chocolate and chocolate syrup towards the end, it’s a very easy beer to write tasting notes for; a very difficult beer to write good tasting notes for. It’s very, very chocolatey and very, very gorgeous. Sorry, that’s the best I can do. Saltaire also won their category for their Cascade Pale Ale. People have been murmuring about Saltaire for a while now, they’ve won a bagful of awards already, but this felt like a coming out party for them. Definitely a brewery to watch, and after chatting to the brewer after dinner I’m looking forward to arranging a visit as soon as I can. Thornbridge Lord Marples, Bank Top’s Dark Mild, Salopian Darwin’s Origin, Green Mill Big Chief Bitter, Dorothy Goodbody’s Country Ale, Blue Monkey Guerilla and St Austell Proper Job were the other category winners. And Christ, I’ve laughed a lot in the last two days. Sometimes I laughed at someone’s expense (I’m sorry, but even if the bloke selling stillaging units has never seen Swiss Toni on The Fast Show, he still can’t be forgiven for that haircut, moustache and grey suit combination) but mostly I laughed because the people I was in conversation with were extremely funny. The theme of the conference was people – working with people, valuing people you work with, getting the best out of them. It brought home just what a people business the beer business is. That’s a rubbish thing to say, because every single business on the planet is a people business, but what we mean is that it’s a sociable business. Someone on my table at dinner last night told a story about when he was at another conference in a hotel, and in the bar afterwards he was sitting enjoying a few beers with some of the other delegates. There was another conference in the same hotel – packaging or IT systems or insurance or something – and the guy in charge of that conference decided to – ahem – ‘work the room’. He came over to our brewer’s table and said, “Hi, what do you guys do?” “We’re brewers,” replied the brewer. “Right! Cool. Which brewery?” “Well… we all work for different breweries.” The guy was incredulous. “I’d get fired if I did something like that! There’s no way we could simply sit round a table having a laugh with our competitors. It just wouldn’t happen.” This is one of the things I love most about beer. You doubtless have a pile of stories yourself that illustrate the same point. And it’s why I get so bleeding angry when the infighting starts. We’re better than that. We have something no one else has. SIBA has its critics, as do small brewers generally (I was in a room recently where one big brewer turned a small brewer he’d only just met and said “You lot are all parasites.”) And SIBA itself has its own share of infighting and politicking. There are always issues and genuine areas of disagreement, competing priorities and conflicts. And I’m lucky that I can stay half in, half out of such conflicts, not being a brewer or pub owner myself. But the sociability and the common cause are much greater, much more important. Which is why I’ll be at ‘conference’ again this time next year.