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.
Tag: Beer
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Exclusive – more details about the future of Tetley’s
I’ve blogged in the past about how Tetley’s was my trainer beer, my local pint, and how even though its star has fallen, it retains a special place in my heart.
In 2008 Carlsberg UK announced that the brewery in Leeds would be closing. Today they’ve announced that from 2011, Marstons will brew Tetley’s Cask in Wolverhampton, while Smoothflow will be brewed by Molson Coors in Tadcaster. Carlsberg say they are delighted that most of the volume brewed will be remaing in Yorkshire, and that with cask, they looked into every option for keeping it in Yorkshire but this proved not to be possible.
I’ve just had a chat with Darran Britton, Carlsberg UK’s marketing director, and got a bit more background. I’ll scribble down what he said first, and reserve some personal reflections till the end of this post.
The most contentious part of the whole deal is the move of cask out of Yorkshire. Was there really ‘no other option?’
“It may not be as fashionable as it once was, but Tetley’s is a still a very sizeable cask ale,” replied Britton, “it needed somewhere with enough excess capacity. But it also needed someone who is experienced in brewing other people’s beers, someone who is technically excellent.”
Lots of names have been speculated – Black Sheep, Timothy Taylor’s, Heineken (as in John Smith’s in Tadcaster) but if you agree with those criteria – and it’s hard not to – then it’s difficult to disagree with the conclusion, however unpalatable it may be.
So why Marston’s?
“They have a great reputation for their ales, and they’re an experienced contract brewer. In Wolverhampton they have traditional square fermenters, which Tetley’s has always been brewed in. We’ll work with them to keep the same recipe, the same ingredients, and we’ll continue using Tetley’s unique two-strain yeast.”
And what about Leeds? What are the plans for the brewery site?
“Production in Leeds will end mid-2011. We’ll be transferring the brewing earlier in the year. We’re in talks with Leeds council about their plans for the city, but there are no plans for the site yet.”
Tetley’s – like its counterparts Worthington’s, John Smiths and Boddington’s – has been in a phase of managed decline for several years now, ceding the cask ale market to regionals and local brewers. Now that cask ale is back in growth – tiny, tiny growth, but growth nonetheless – will this move coincide with renewed support behind the brand? To be clear, Carlsberg is retaining ownership of Tetley’s for the foreseeable future, with Molson Coors and Marston’s brewing on a contract basis. Despite this, I’m reminded of when Courage brands moved from S&N, who clearly didn’t want them, to Well’s & Young’s, who did. In that case there was a change of ownership, but it saw the beers being revitalised to a dramatic extent. As I said, this move for Tetley’s is different, but after reports of new investment and the return of the huntsman to the brand’s identity, I wondered if this was a cue for somer kind of relaunch.
Britton refused to be drawn, saying more that this was “business as usual”. Rather than there being any renewed energy behind the brand, he insisted that there wouldn’t be any less support behind it, that investment will continue, and that there’ll be a new sampling campaign later this year.
So there we go.
In my job, I get to see both sides of stories like this. Sometimes I’m with the marketers when difficult decisions have to be made, when the harsh realities of modern business and the demands of shareholders make unpalatable choices inevitable. Other times I get to be a beer fan, and to be able to say “Fuck the shareholders, this is beer we’re talking about! A short term view not only betrays the core drinkers of the brand, it actually doesn’t make sound business sense in the long view.”
In this case, I’m torn. I am grief-stricken at what has happened to Tetley’s, appalled that the link between the brand and the city of Leeds will be broken. (“Tetley’s will always have a relationship with Leeds”, insists Britton, but that relationship will only exist in an abstract, emotional sense). I’m frustrated that for one of the biggest beer brands in the country, Carlsberg seems unable to make the huge power of provenance and place of origin make commercial sense for them. Lots of people will say that Tetley’s can never taste the same if it’s brewed in Wolverhampton but I’m not one of them – it’ll taste exactly the same. But it’s not about that – it’s about the story, the soul of the beer.
On the other hand, I feel we have to accept the commercial reality that it no longer makes business sense for big breweries to sit on lots of expensive land in city centres. We don’t have to like it. We can rage against it. But that doesn’t stop it from being true. It’s difficult enough to make money in brewing.
I think that to fairly criticise Carlsberg for what they’ve announced today, you have to be able to suggest something they could have done instead.
Keeping the Leeds brewery open was not an option. Moving cask to another brewery in Yorkshire was – if we take Britton at his word – not an option.
The one thing I think may have been an option, and which I’m disappointed by, is not keeping a small part of the space in Leeds and continuing to brew cask there. Most of the land is a massive distribution centre, which would be way better somewhere else. It doesn’t make much difference at all where Smoothflow is brewed and I’m not sure any0ne cares. But if you sold off all that lot, and kept hold of the old brewery bit or redeveloped a new purpose-built cask ale brewery for a few million quid, this could only have enhanced whatever plans Leeds will eventually have for the space (I’m guessing “luxury apartments” with the odd Starbucks and panini shop.) It would add heritage, character and romance, something uniquely Leeds, to what is sure to be a development that will look identical to any city in the UK. This would have sent the right signals to the ale community, given the city a stake, mollified hardcore Tetley’s fans. Maybe they looked at this option and found reasons why it wasn’t viable. Maybe not. But the fact that it is not happening is a crying shame.
I have no problem whatsoever with Marston’s – they certainly know how to brew beer.
I think Britton is right – it will be business as usual. Nothing will change in the beer itself. And it has always been a decent cask pint, brewed with love and care, no matter what anyone thinks.
But I had hoped that this would be more than business as usual. It’s emotional and sentimental because that’s what beer is, but when Tetley’s cask is no longer brewed in Leeds, I for one will have one less reason to drink the beer. I’d rather been hoping for new reasons to drink it instead. Sadly, I’ve heard nothing to suggest that there will be.
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Apologies…
Dropped out of circulation for a few weeks there while I was rewriting Man Walks into a Pub. Just got final rewrites off to the editor and am now resuming normal service.
Apologies if you entered the Budvar/Publican Why Beer Matters competition – it’s a month since closing date and it’s very remiss of me not to have done the judging by now. I’ll be resolving that asap.
Lots of great stuff happening over the next few weeks though – I’ll be posting about my recent trip to Denmark, the Welsh beer revolution, lager, and plans for Cask Ale Week over the next week or two.
In the meantime, here’s a column I did for the Publican when I was out after the Liverpool Beer Festival last week.
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Beer sales not quite as shit as they have been lately
Every quarter, the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) releases a quarterly ‘beer barometer’ that gives you a snapshot of how beer sales are doing in the UK.
As you’re probably aware, UK beer sales have been tanking over the last few years, and this has put the much-criticised BBPA in a difficult position. As the body representing British brewing interests it should be a cheerleader for the industry, actively promoting beer. But increasingly it sounds like a doom-monger, doing more than any other organisation to give the impression that no one is drinking beer or going to the pub any more.
Fortunately, the latest figures – while not exactly positive – are significantly less shit than they have been recently, and this has allowed the BBPA to take a welcome, slightly more upbeat tone.
The headline of the press release is “Beer starts to shake off recession slump”. The key figures are:
- Total beer sales down 3.6% in October to December 2009, the lowest 4th quarter fall since 2006
- Beer sales for the whole of 2009 fell by 4.2%, compared with 5.5% for 2008
- Sales in pubs and bars for the final quarter of 09 were down 5% – compared with 9% in 2008
- Beer was down in supermarkets and shops in the final quarter by 2.1%, compared with 6.4% in 2008
- However, over the year a a while, off-trade beer sakes were down 3.1% – the largest annual fall since records began in 1978. This at least raises questions about the received wisdom that the main problem facing pubs is cheap beer in supermarkets
- Based on these figures, despite Alastair “A barman nicked my girlfriend when I was 18 and my entire economic policy is based on extracting a slow and humiliating revenge from an industry I have learned to hate” Darling having raised duty on beer by more than 20 fucking per cent in the last two years, and having done so purely as a revenue raising measure (anti-binge drinking etc was not a consideration), government revenues from beer have in fact fallen by an estimated £258 million. Nice one, Thunderbirds-boy.
So. People are drinking less beer, and it’s looking like the recession has been a key cause of that. But as BBPA chief executive Brigid Simmonds comments, “As the economy moves into recovery, so will the beer and pub sector. In fact, as in previous recessions, it may emerge first and fastest.”
But Simmonds also warns “What is certain is that any recovery could be thrown off course and destabilised by Government intervention on tax or regulation. What is equally certain is that any move by Government to increase beer tax further this year would be very damaging and place pubs and jobs at greater risk.”
Come on Alastair, get over it. It was a long time ago. Let her go.
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Elk in the Woods in the passage
London was positively Dickensian yesterday. The Beer Widow and I a couple of friends spent the afternoon in the Elk in the Woods, a Swedish restaurant in Camden Passage, Islington. We were sitting near the window by the Christmas tree watching the snow come down and it was just perfect.
Lunch itself was very fine. Just one problem though – the menu at Elk lists wines, cocktails, soft and hot drinks, but there’s no mention at all of beer. When you ask, they’ll admit to stocking Kronenbourg, a Swedish lager whose name I didn’t catch, and a perfectly serviceable keg Theakstons Old Peculier, plus a range of bottles that don’t exactly push the frontiers of beer appreciation but do create a more interesting range of drinks than you’d find in an average boozer.Why?
It always irks me when cafes and bars don’t put beer on the menu – they’re saying it’s “just beer” – not even worth listing, less interesting than whether they stock Coke or Pepsi. Usually in places like this when you do ask you’re given a choice of Bud, Becks or Stella. But still, why? And why stock some more interesting beers and then not tell your customers about them?
Anyone know?
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Beer Tickers – A Loquacious Film Review
As a writer, there are many other writers I admire and appreciate.
Sometimes I just enjoy them, other times I’m deeply envious of them. I can savour the wonderful lyricism of, say, Arundhati Roy without even thinking about my writing because it’s so different from anything I would ever do. But one writer I wish I could simply be is George Orwell. I will never, in all my days, be one hundredth of the writer he was, but he shared many of my ideas and beliefs about the world at large and about how to write in particular.I quote him several times in Man Walks into a Pub because it’s a book I wish he had written before me. But then, he didn’t need to – being Orwell, he said everything worth saying about the pub in a short essay, The Moon Under Water. (Arguably the only truly unforgivable thing Wetherspoons have ever done is appropriate that name.) As a piece of writing it is simple perfection. If I’m feeling sentimental and it’s one of those evenings where I’ve made the fatal transition from beer to whisky, I can literally read it and weep.But I’m wandering off the point – something Orwell would never do. And going on too much. Ditto.The reason I brought up Orwell was that he also once wrote:We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres around things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”… It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.But one hobbyist Orwell never had the dubious pleasure of encountering was the beer ticker.Hobbyists today are nerdy, and the only areas it’s socially acceptable for blokes to be nerdy about are cars and football. If you can name every player in England’s unsuccessful 1970 World Cup side, or talk knowledgably about the engineering perfection of a Maserati, you’ll get admiring nods from other blokes, and even women will roll their eyes with an affectionate “ah, you guys” shrug.But thanks to the hoary CAMRA socks-and-sandals stereotype, claim an interest in beer and blokes and women alike will start to edge away and make excuses.It’s fascinating how contextual this stereotype is. For about two years now I’ve worn a beard and long hair. If I’m working in an ad agency, people think this makes me look cool – they simply assume I’m one of the creatives.But in the beer world, the exact same look is increasingly uncool – people tell me I’m “starting to look like a CAMRA member”. With CAMRA’s membership having doubled in the last ten years, the average CAMRA member increasingly looks no different from anyone else. But they don’t mean that. They mean I look like the stereotypical CAMRA member.The beer ticker. And whatever your views on that, it’s not meant as a compliment.Within the beer world, tickers are the people even the saddest geeks can look down on. Adult life is merely the school playground writ large, and tickers are the snivelling, emphysemic, half-blind larvae that the most bullied kids in the school – the fat kids and the ones with sellotaped national health glasses and Oxfam clothes – turn on with joy when they realise there is in fact someone one rung below them. We all recognize that part of our interest in beer is driven by a nerdish tendency, and that’s not something we like in ourselves. And when we find that someone is inarguably more nerdish than we, they become an outlet for all the pisstaking and antipathy we’ve ever received. It was the tickers those people were suspicious of, or bored of, or regarded with pity and condescension – not us. We merely channel their disdain to its rightful target.Except now someone has gone and made a film about them.Surely that’s just not fair. It should be a film about the broader appreciation of beer. It should be a film about how great beer is and why more people should take an interest in it. Surely if you focus on the tickers no one will go and see it? And those who do will simply have their prejudices about beer nerds reinforced?The thing is, if you’re a filmmaker who’s keen to shine a light on little-known, entertaining and intriguing corners of the British psyche, tickers are – say it – pretty interesting.Phil Parkin is an independent filmmaker who lives in Sheffield. One day he was drinking in the wonderful Hillsborough Hotel. There’s a brewery in the cellar, where the phenomenally talented and hugely underrated brewer Stuart Ross pretty much does as he pleases and makes it up as he goes along, continually creating new beers. And every week, the tickers descend. Sheffield competes with Derby for the title of ticker centre of the universe – some of the biggest names in ticking are regulars at the Hillsborough and the nearby Fat Cat and Kelham Island Tavern. As soon as Phil had asked what they were doing and had it explained to him, he had his next project.Phil’s method of filmmaking is what social anthropologists call ‘participant observation’. He lived among them, like that woman out of Gorillas in the Mist, becoming accepted by the tribe.
What emerges is a warm, funny, and amazingly non-judgmental portrait of a hobby Orwell would have been quite proud of – perhaps even indulged in. The principles are explained with disarming simplicity ‘you find a beer, you drink it, you tick it’. What could be easier?And rather than coming across as unbearable nerds, the characters do make fascinating viewing. Mick the Tick – the man who allegedly invented the hobby and gave it its name thanks to its easy alliteration – is a deeply likeable character, like a cuddly, benign bear. The Beer Widow has a special designation for people she has fallen in love with and wants to protect from the world and care for. She talks about keeping them in a special luxurious room in the cellar wrapped in cotton wool and feeding them biscuits and soup. So far we’ve got Bill Bailey, the band Lamb, and psychologist and thinker Eckhart Tolle down there. Mick the Tick is the latest recruit.Dave Unpronouncable is deeply fascinating – a natural in front of the camera, articulate, intelligent and surprisingly normal looking – at least for the first half of the film – but there are clearly kinks and complications to his character.There’s a story going on with him through the making of the film that we never quite get to the bottom of.Brian the Champ – the king of the tickers – is probably the closest to what we would imagine a ticker to be, but he has a wife who indulges him and a pleasant suburban house, and you share his excitement as he sets off for the Great British Beer Festival to mark a momentous tick in his book.I have to declare an interest in that I met Phil several times while the film was being made, and he’s become a mate. I provided him with a lot of the historical context, and pop up in the film showing him round the Museum in Burton.One time we met in the Rake, and he seemed to be taking a long time sending a text message. I became suspicious.“You’re ticking aren’t you? You’ve gone native. You’ve become one of them.” This was ticking 2.0, ticking invisibly, with minimal risk of losing your social status.This brings me to my only criticism of the film – the definition of its narrative. Phil spends as much time in front of the camera as behind it, and very charming he is too. The film is his personal journey into the world of ticking (which I was fortunate to witness). That’s a great construct, but the arc of Phil’s journey doesn’t quite make it on film. It’s as if he can’t really decide whether this is a story about him or about the tickers he meets. There’s no real exploration of his motivation for doing it, or what he was trying to discover or prove, other than that it’s a great topic to make a film about.But as I said to Phil after watching an early cut – it made me thirsty, and it made me want to spend more time in Sheffield, and it made me proud of my involvement in the beer world. And it made me think differently about tickers. I won’t be starting any time soon – despite the fact that, apparently, I’m starting to look like one – but the tickers featured in this film at least are not the Aspergers stereotypes other beer enthusiasts enjoy looking down on.
You can find out more about the film and watch a trailer here. I’m not sure whether or not it will recruit more people to the cause of great beer, and some will see it as a missed opportunity for that. But that’s not what it’s about. It’s not about beer – not really – it’s about people. And in that respect, it is a very successful film indeed. And anyway – it’s got a bright, young, ambitious filmmaker all passionate about the beer world. Who knows what he’ll do next?There’s a public screening of the film at the Showroom in Sheffield at 8pm on 15th December. Tickets are available through the Showroom box office.
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New Beer Club
Just received an introductory box of beer from myBrewerytap.com, a new mail order beer club. (Disclosure: they sent me the box for free in return for me writing about them).
The idea is that you get 13 bottles of beer each quarter – not enough to keep you going, I know, but the first box certainly provides an interesting addition to the cellar. It’s a really thoughtful selection of beers and the ones I’ve had so far – Burton Bridge’s Burton Porter and Eccleshall Brewery’s apallingly-named ‘Top Totty’ (Please, guys. Stop it. Now.) were really great beers.
I may be wrong – I may just have been lucky – but I suspect that there’s some quality control happening on beers that are included. There are ones I recognise from Meantime and Breconshire, but most of them are form micros around the country I haven’t come across before.
And you get free glasses and bottle openers and stuff too, and some notes about each beer.
Well worth checking out.
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Me and microbrews on the telly
Was asked by More 4 News yesterday to appear on the news in a positive story about beer!
The new Good Beer Guide, published yesterday, reveals that 71 new Microbreweries opened in the last year. In the midst of both the shitstorm being faced by the beer and pub industry, and the usual negative coverage of beer by the media, it’s great news, even better that we got our two minutes worth on the telly.
Thanks to BLTP for working out how to bung it up on YouTube.
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Britain’s Best Beer: All is Revealed
Me, my worthy adversary Sabine von Reth, and presenter Matt Tebbutt
Thanks for the record number of comments when I asked you about the best British beer. Consensus is somewhere around Landlord, White Shield and London Pride, which I find hard to argue with.
But now I can reveal what it’s all about.
Market Kitchen, the food magazine programme on UKTV Food, is running a Beer World Cup to find out which country makes the best beer in the world – and has the best beer culture. Each week two countries face off in rounds then go through to semis in October, then the final. It’s all just a bit of fun of course.
I was honoured to be asked to represent the UK in the first game in the first round, and I drew Germany. We filmed it yesterday evening.
Now this was a tough gig. I was expecting Germany to bring a very good lager along – and I was right. And the thing is, the decision is made by a studio audience vote on a combined blind tasting of the beer with a heated studio debate. The audience is not sophisticated in its beer appreciation – it’s an audience of people who go along to the filming of a daytime cookery programme. Lots of men who drink lager, and lots of women who think they don’t like beer. A really good German lager – to this audience – would surely be more acceptable than a complex, intriguing, flavourful ale. I had to think clever on this one.
So thanks for all the suggestions, but thanks to Mike from Utobeer for the inspired tactical suggestion of Schiehallion – a British lager, cask conditioned, that last year won ‘best pilsner’ at the World Beer Awards. Not the beer that represents everything great about British brewing, but a beer that shows what Britain can do, a British take on a European style.
So how did we get on? Was this particular meeting a return to the glory of 1966 or a rerun of the agonising defeat on penalties in 1990? You’ll have to wait till 24th September and tune in to UKTV to find out…
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