Tag: Beer

| Beer, Craft Beer

Is anyone still interested in a definition of craft beer?

I wonder…

It’s been a depressing spectacle this last couple of years watching people who share a love of great beer tear each other apart over trying to define what craft beer is.

I’ve been using the term for years in a very loose way to describe most things that are not mainstream commercially produced lager. But in the last three years, as craft has become a defined movement, some people have felt an increased urgency to give it a proper technical definition. Others have asserted that because it doesn’t have one, it does not and cannot exist – an attitude that seems to me to display a curious mix of arrogance and paranoia.

There are various obstacles to coming up with such a definition.

One is competing interests. The nearest thing we have to a definition is that put forward by the American Brewers Association. It talks about size of brewer, ownership and adjuncts. The thing is, this is a trade association’s description designed to benefit members of that trade association. It serves their purposes, not the drinker’s. It changes to suit the evolving needs of its members. Which is fair enough – for them. What’s not fair is when they seek to impose this definition on the whole world of beer. The best beer I’ve had this year is a bourbon aged Imperial stout with cherries from Goose Island. According to the BA, this is not a craft beer because it’s owned by A-B Inbev. Now I hate A-B Inbev as much as anyone, and I’m deeply wary of their intentions to Goose Island. But any universe where the beer I had is not a craft beer is a strange place indeed.

Then at the other end there’s the whole “if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck…” school of thought, which says you don’t need to be able to define a craft beer to spot one. This has been criticised for reducing things to “I like this beer so it’s a craft beer.” I think that’s a bit disingenuous. Amid all the debates about what is and isn’t craft beer, those arguing could probably agree on nine out of ten beers being craft or not. But many people would rather spend their time arguing about the one out of ten that’s ambiguous.

The definition I have the least time for is the “craft beer is quality beer that is served in keg” school. This is absurd and feeble minded. The kind of people who say this in a positive way do so to distinguish ‘craft’ from what they see as ‘boring brown’ cask ale. It’s nonsense. By taking this stance against the real ale diehards who believe anything in a keg is bad, they’re merely proving themselves to be a mirror image of those diehards, just as ignorant and bigoted. If craft beer is about anything specific, it’s certainly not about the container it’s in – the whole point of it is that it should be all about the beer.

My personal view, as I expressed in response to Mark Dredge’s excellent recent post about craft beer whiners, is that it’s more useful to think of craft as an adjective rather than a noun. Not as a specific style of beer, but as a general description, the same way we’d say ‘dark’ or ‘full bodied’ or whatever – deliberately non-specific, but carrying a degree of commonly understood meaning.

That’s how I’ve always thought about craft beer. But I’m all too aware that many people in the beer world NEED technical definitions – it’s how they navigate the world.

Well if you’re one of those people, how about this?

At a recent conference on innovation in beer, St Austell brewer Roger Ryman gave a presentation about craft beer in which he quoted an article by Dan Shelton, which appeared in the last edition of the Good Beer Guide to Belgium. This guide is currently out of print because a new edition is launching this summer. But editor Tim Webb very kindly sent me a copy so I could read the piece and write about it here.

Dan Shelton clearly has some axes to grind of his own, but I found his multi-part definition of craft beer quite compelling. He identifies five aspects:

  • – Ingredients: does the brewer seek the best possible ingredients or is s/he more concerned about keeping costs down?
  • – Methods and equipment: the brewery’s intent – does the brewery do everything it can to maintain quality or does it let things slip as it grows? Is the brewery making the best beer it can?
  • – The brewer’s spirit: hard to measure, but does the beer reflect the brewer’s personality or is it simply generic and lacking in faults? Are they just following the market, or trying to do something special?
  • – Company structure: who’s calling the shots? It’s not necessarily about company size, but does the brewer decide what beers are brewed or does the marketing department?
  • – Control: is the brewer able to exercise some control over how the beer turns out or is s/he simply throwing in ingredients and hoping for the best?

Everyone who I would call a craft brewer ticks each of these boxes. What I like about this definition is that it’s objective. A global giant could produce a craft beer if they followed these rules, but they don’t. Their structures don’t permit it. But it doesn’t rule them out on size or ownership. It’s about intent.

And this definition does what no other does – it excludes small brewers who aren’t very good. Any idiot can throw an extra bag of citra hops into a copper, it doesn’t make them good brewers or their beer good beer. I’ve tasted bland beers that are not craft created by huge corporations, and I’ve tasted bloody awful beers created by tiny breweries that call themselves craft when they are not, because craft has to be about skill as well as size. I don’t know how you measure some of these criteria, but of it’s a neutral, objective detailed definition of craft you want, I think this does the job.

But like I said, I’m not sure we need it. While I was thinking about this post, I looked up ‘craft’ in the Oxford English Dictionary and it says “An activity involving skill in making things by hand.” Do we really need it to be any more complex than that?

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And finally… Bondi Beer!

I can’t really write any more on this blog until I’ve closed the story of Bondi Beer.

The story so far: in December I saw an appalling advertorial in The Grocer magazine for a beer called Bondi, which was calling itself a craft beer. I wrote a scathing blog post about it, assuming (I could find very few details about it online) that it was another cynical attempt to move into craft territory by a big brewer. I found a beer called Bondi online being promoted by Paris Hilton and obviously thought it was the same beer. (It wasn’t – turns out that was a different brand, different company, with the same name from the same country!)

Days later, the owner of Bondi beer contacted me. He was pretty angry and asked me to take the piece down. At first I resisted, and then I realised that this was in fact a very small company and that they were trying to do the right thing. They admitted the advertorial was rubbish and were very upset at the way it had been heavily edited. They asked me to meet them and taste the beer, and I agreed. I took my original post down – the first time I have ever done so – and explained why.

I’ve owed them this write-up ever since, but as you can see, I’ve hardly been blogging, because I’ve been so busy up against book deadlines. I could have slipped this post in at a time when this blog wasn’t really active, but I thought that would be the equivalent of trying to bury bad news at a time no one would see it. I wanted to wait until this blog was properly active again to guarantee this would reach my full audience. Sorry that has taken so long.

I met the Bondi guys in the fantastic Porterhouse in Covent Garden, which stocks their beer. We had a few beers and made peace. It was a good meeting. And it was a very, very good beer. Bondi is a four per cent lager that does not taste like you’d expect a four per cent lager with Australian branding to taste. It is contract-brewed in the Czech Republic, and it shows. There’s a brilliant Saaz hop character on the nose, bready and grassy, and a perfect balance of flavour, with proper body, a good buzzy finish, and yet the crisp refreshment of a good lager. It drinks way over four per cent – you’d guess at five, easily – so it’s very satisfying at such a low ABV.

I would heartily recommend this beer to anyone. I wouldn’t call it a ‘craft’ beer, as the advertorial originally did, but it’s a far better lager than any of the main commercial brands.

And that’s it, apart from two caveats.

One, I’m not writing this because Bondi asked me to. I promised them I would, and that was four months ago. They’ve put no pressure on me at all to get this post up here. I’m not saying it’s a great beer because anyone has told me I have to, I’m saying it because it’s a great beer, and if it wasn’t, I’d say that too. The only reason this didn’t appear before now is that I haven’t had time to blog about anything until the last week or so.

Two, in my defence, I just want to reiterate one point given that I took my original post down. A few commenters have been very keen for me to issue this clarification. One or two have accused me of slagging off a beer without having tasted it. I never did that. In my original post, I made no mention at all of the taste of the beer. I was slagging off the marketing – something I went way over the top with and regret in retrospect – but I make a professional point of not dissing a beer’s character without tasting it. (I took a similar approach with previous posts dissing the launches of Stella Black and Stella Cidre, following up with posts about the drinks themselves when I was able to try them).

Now I have tasted Bondi, I’m more than happy to talk about how good the beer is. I still think the launch marketing approach was ill-advised, and we talked about that too. The best thing Bondi can do is forget the jargon and sloganeering, and just put all their effort into trying to get beer into people’s hands.

I wish them all the luck in the world in replacing other Aussie beers on British bars.

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The mischievous Swede and the truth about Stella Artois

A few months ago I was contacted by Jonas Magnusson, a Swedish TV programme maker who wanted to interview me for a series of programmes he was making about beer. We met in the George Inn and had a great chat.

I normally confine remarks to stuff I feel positive about in interviews such as this – when talking to a mainstream audience, I’d rather concentrate on what’s great about beer than moan about what’s wrong. But somehow we got on to big global megabrands that don’t actually care about beer at all, and we talked a bit about Stella Artois in particular in this respect.

A couple of days ago Jonas e-mailed me a link to a YouTube clip of when he went to Leuven to interview AB-Inbev about Stella. “You might be interested in this,” he said.

24 hours later there was another email titled ‘Did You Watch it’? I thought this was a bit pushy, as I’ve been frantically busy, but Jonas seemed really, really keen that I watch the clip.

And then, this morning, writer and blogger Max Brearley posted a link to the clip on Twitter, urging me to watch it.

I took the hint.

Here’s the film: if you’d like to watch it without my commentary, go ahead now. If you don’t have eleven minutes to watch it through, skip below to read about why you should.

Meet Jean-Jacques Velkeniers, Marketing Director for both Stella Artois and Jupiler in Belgium, Netherlands, France and Luxembourg. Jean jacques is a career marketer who is clearly passionate about his brand.

He says “it all started” with the merger of Interbrew and AmBev to create Inbev in 2004.  (Funny, because I thought Stella was a giant brand before then and was already in steep decline in the UK by this time.) He tells Magnus that these two companies shared the same vision and passion for beer.

What is this vision and passion?

“Conquering the world, market by market, using fantastic brands like Stella Artois,” replies Jean-Jacques.

Magnus then asks what would seem to be a fairly straightforward question: what does this world conquering beer actually taste like?

To which Jean-Jacques replies: “Can we cut there? That’s a very difficult question.”

The man responsible for marketing Stella Artois across a good chunk of Western Europe is unable to describe what the beer tastes like.

After consulting two colleagues he recovers his poise and claims he just didn’t know the words in English – this is astonishing as (a) so far his English has been impeccable – he has a perfect grasp of marketing jargon especially – and (b) even if he’s telling the truth, this means that as Marketing Director he’s never been asked what his beer tastes like in English before.

After being briefed on what his product tastes like, he tells us that it is very refreshing with a full-bodied taste, “crispy” (let’s be fair and put that one down to genuine translation issues) and that “after a couple of seconds you get that bitter after-note in your mouth that makes it quite unique.”

Yes, you read that right.

The marketing director of Stella Artois thinks his beer is unique because it has a bitter aftertaste.

To be fair, AB-Inbev do not allow their employees to taste beer from any other brewer, even when they’re off the clock, so maybe he wasn’t to know that bitterness is a common characteristic in almost all  beers – and that his brand rates pretty damn low in the bitterness stakes compared to most others. But still, you might have expected Jean-Jacques to have been given special dispensation given his role.

You might expect a man responsible for selling a huge beer brand in four European countries to have the first clue about what a typical beer’s flavour profile is.

But we press on. Magnus asks Jean-Jacques if he would be able to pick out this special, unique flavour in a blind taste test. He’s definitely up for it – you can’t fault him on his conviction.

But what he doesn’t know is that Magnus has already been out on the streets of Leuven, doing blind taste tests with people who regularly drink Stella and are loyal to the brand. It quickly becomes clear that no one can taste any difference at all between Stella and its sister brand, Jupiler. They do come from the same brewery – Jean-Jacques looks after them both – so perhaps they are – ahem – very similar beers packaged differently?

To make things more interesting, Magnus then gets out a cheap, crummy can of Swedish beer. “Yes, that’s definitely Stella,” say more Stella drinkers. “I had a pint five minutes ago and that tastes just the same.”

Back at AB-Inbev HQ, Jean-Jacques is gearing up for the blind taste test between Stella, Jupiler and the crappy Swedish beer when Natasha, the PR person intervenes. She tells Jean-Jacques that there was a pre-agreed script for the interview, and that this was not part of it.

If you want to interview someone from AB-Inbev you have to give them prior approval of a script!

As they discuss whether the taste test is going to be possible or not, Natasha briefly mulls over whether it would be OK just with Stella and Jupiler (Jean-Jacques is never allowed to drink a non-AB Inbev beer, remember) and Jean-Jacques has to remind his PR person that “They are filming everything we say.”

In the end, they decline to take part in any taste test, for three beautifully crafted reasons:

  • The beer is the wrong temperature
  • Jean-Jacques is “not prepared”
  • You need a glass of water to clean the mouth between beers 
I guess a glass of water was not available.
This is a sublime piece of film making. The number of different ways it skewers this marketing organisation, demonstrating that not only do they not care about beer, they don’t even know what it tastes like, is sublime.
You might not think there’s much difference between commercial lagers. But when I worked on Stella Artois fifteen years ago, before the merger that created Inbev, before the relentless cost-cutting came in, before everyone at Interbrew who had a genuine passion for beer was fired and replaced by career marketers like Jean-Jacques, everyone on our team could have picked out Stella in a blind taste test. We pursued this old-fashioned notion that you can’t sell a product properly unless you know and understand it. And you can’t do that unless you can train your palate to taste it – no scratch that – unless you can even be bothered to try it every now and again.
It’s something craft brewers do every day of their lives. And even among big global corporations, if you asked a similar corporate drone working for, say, Heineken or Carlsberg, they’d be able to tell you what the beer tastes like and why. They’d know that beer tends to have a bitter finish. They might not even have learned it for themselves in tutored tasting sessions, but if not they’d have access to some sort of cribsheet.
But of course, AB-Inbev is not a brewer, and Stella Artois is not a beer. It’s a fantastic brand that is too busy conquering the world, market by market, to worry about such trivial things as what the product is, or what it tastes like. 
The Great Beer Tour consists of three one-hour episodes, and starts on SVT (Swedish television) on 16th April. 

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Beer Awards

I hate the Beer Writer of the Year awards.

It should be a special occasion where you just socialise with all your mates in the industry.  Instead, if you’ve entered your work, you sit there with a snake writhing in your guts, desperately anxious that your work be recognised, and when somebody else wins you have to be happy for them and try to hide the self-doubt and jealousy that try to consume you.

The year I won Beer Writer of the Year for Hops & Glory was actually the worst, because I was so anxious about winning.  I felt I’d given the awards my best shot, and if I didn’t win that year I would never win. So I could hardly eat anything, and when I was announced as the winner I’d managed to get myself into such a state that my only emotional response was relief.

What an idiotic way to live.

But I don’t think I’m the only person trying to make a living from writing who is an idiot, emotionally.

Last night was this year’s Guild of Beer Writers dinner and Beer Writer of the Year awards.  And for the first time I managed to work out a more grown up approach to it.  I didn’t have a book out (Shakey’s Local would fall into next year’s awards) and I’ve only ever won a category with a book before. There was a record number of entries.  While I thought I’d written some good stuff, I was aware that there has been so much beer writing and communication this year that I was able to go to the dinner for the first time with no hopes, expectations or anxieties about winning, and just enjoy the night.

When I got runner-up in online communication for this blog, I was happy but knew that was it – the rules are you can only win one category,  and only category winners go through for the final award.

So I was happily texting my wife when my name was read out as winner of the Trade Communications category for my column in the Publican’s Morning Advertiser, and I was genuinely shocked when chairman of judges Ben McFarland started reading out one of my blog entries in the run-up to his announcement of Beer Writer of the Year 2012.

I’m very happy and proud to win this award for my journalism, because somehow it feels easier with a book – it creates a bigger splash.

And I’m gobsmacked given what else was in contention this year.

I hadn’t realised Tim Webb and Steve Beaumont’s World Atlas to Beer was being entered this time – I thought it would be next year.  When it was announced as winner of the Travel Category, I texted the wife to say it was obvious now that it would win overall.  I’ve been meaning to review it for ages.  Michael Jackson’s World Guide to Beer set the bar for beer writing.  It takes balls to try to measure up to that book.  And at the same time, anyone trying to do so needs to make a case for why they should even bother trying.  Do we really need another beer coffee table book, especially when the information at its core is precisely the kind of stuff that now fills beer blogs and websites?  This book answers the call brilliantly.  There’s easily enough knowledge and authority between the two writers to make it worthwhile.  This sings through in the text, which acknowledges the changes that have happened since Michael was writing, updating this style of book for the twenty first century and the state of craft brewing today.  It even acknowledges mainstream beer, with the brilliant term ‘convenience beers’.  And it looks great.  You should obviously have my new book on your Christmas list, but if you can stretch to two, you need this one as well.

Tim Hampson does a great deal of work behind the scenes as Chairman of the Guild of Beer Writers and rarely gets any credit publicly.  His book on beery days out was runner up to Tim and Steve, and would have stormed the category any other year.

What a year for beer books though. On top of these two there was Roger Protz’s History of Burton which scooped Gold in the award for national writing (Roger was also runner up in trade for his PMA column) and Melissa Cole’s book Let Me Tell You About Beer – a book aimed at the beery novice rather than the geek – which would also have been a worthy winner.

Dan Saladino’s Food Programme is evidence that beer is being taken seriously on a wider scale and finally making inroads into mainstream media consciousness.  And Will Hawkes’ Craft Beer London app, which deservedly beat this blog to the online/social media top prize, demonstrates the new possibilities open to beer writing.

Martyn Cornell showed he can write about matching beer with food as well as he can its history, and Alastair Gilmour, who has won the top gong about a zillion times for his regional journalism, won that award again for his own magazine about beer and pubs in the north east, which should make any other region jealous that it doesn’t have something similar.  And props to Simon Jenkins for being runner up in that category, proving his triumph a couple of years ago was no one-off.

Ben McFarland says the final choice of Beer Writer of the Year was an incredibly difficult decision.  From that line up, I’m not surprised.

So yeah, I’m well chuffed.

In explaining the decision, Ben mentioned my obituary to Dave Wickett and then, to the consternation of some in the room cos it’s weird), read out an extract from my review of the Guinness film on the excellent Roll Out the Barrel DVD.

I’m delighted that both these pieces gained recognition.  I know I can sometimes be overbearing, facetious, irritating or just plain wrong. I know not everyone likes my style or the way I approach beer. But thanks for reading my stuff.

Check out the links to the rest of the work mentioned above too.  I don’t think there’s ever been so much good stuff being written about beer by so many different people.

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Two contrasting responses to the growth of craft beer from two different big brewers

The big global brewers are coming for craft beer.  And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Craft beer, interesting beer, flavourful beer, microbrewed beer, whatever you want to call it and however you insist on defining it, is the only part of the beer market where there is any significant margin. In First World, mature, developed beer markets, brewers have willingly commoditised big brands and increasingly treat them no different from pet food or toilet roll.  The power of retailers has stripped any profitability out of these brands for the manufacturer, which is why all the big guys are now focusing on developing markets such as China, India and Brazil.  The huge scrap over who gets to own Tiger beer shows just how important these markets are to the giants of beer.

But the guys left in boring old Europe and North America still need something to do.  They can’t simply give up on beer’s homelands.  So they’re hearing all this noise about craft, and coming over to see what all the fuss is about.

This year I’ve had several conversations with global brewers about craft – from the very rich companies who say “please tell us in detail who all the main players are, the secrets of their success, what the main drivers of craft are, who’s drinking it and where it’s going to go,” and then decide they don’t need to know after all when I ask for a fee in return for this insight, to those who seem genuinely interested in developing more of a craft-like arm to their business.

You know it’s getting serious when you see a ‘segmentation’ of craft beers buyers, like I did this summer.  I used to do this kind of thing for a living, and it requires lots of expensive research to put together.  There were four different kinds of craft beer drinker in this study – each segment was a different size, with a different level of knowledge and different reasons for drinking craft.  And you know what?  You were in one of those segments.  Yes, YOU.  So was I.

So the big boys are going to start flirting with craft, to see if they can take some dollars, pounds and euros from hopheads and beer geeks.  In fact, they’ve already started – with Anheuser-Busch having dabbled with a half-decent pumpkin beer, Blue Moon of course, Carslberg’s Jacobsen range, and now, new offerings from A-B and Carlsberg that talk about ‘craft values’ in their launch press releases.

Some of these things are going to be horrible.  Some will be badly thought-out and misconstrued.  Some will even be insulting to the intelligence and the palate of craft beer drinkers.

But will they all be?  I don’t think so.  We all know there are some very talented brewers within the global giants. The question is, will any of them be allowed to make interesting beer that will then be given sympathetic support by the rest of the organisation?

In recent weeks, I’ve learned about two different approaches to craft by two different beery behemoths.

One is excellent, the other is cynical, lazy and contemptuous.  Let’s deal with the good one first – no reading ahead, I’m sure you can guess who the poor relation is.

Last month I went to see my mates Steve and Rudgie in Toronto.  Steve is the world’s greatest beer writer* and Rudgie works for MolsonCoors.** Rudgie will be familiar to readers of Hops & Glory as one of the key men who made my whole trip to India possible, and is now the world’s greatest Professional Canadian.  (Not bad for someone who spent the first three and a half decades of his life being a northerner from Warrington.  But he says al-oo-minum now and everything.)

So anyway, last time I went to see Rudgie, he took me to Creemore Springs, a craft lager brewer in the heart of Ontario that proudly boasts of being ‘a hundred years behind the times’ and was bought by MolsonCoors seven and a half years ago.

Having watched what happens when giant brewers buy little brewers, you could be forgiven for expecting these excellent beers, including a sublime kellerbier, to have become blandised, cheapened and bastardised.  Instead, MC invested in increasing capacity and worked on spreading distribution, and simply left the brewing alone, with the clear admission that if they did get involved they would screw it up, because they didn’t understand how the market worked at that level.

In a global market that usually looks no further ahead than two years for return on investment, if they were going to screw it up, they would have done so by now.

Then they took over Vancouver’s Granville Island Brewing – possibly the first craft beer I ever drank when I spent a lot of time in Canada in the 1990s.  Same arrangement.  Granville Island gets sales and distribution support, and doesn’t get accountants sniffing around the hopping rates.

Last year, this flirtation with craft was expanded and consolidated.  Molson Coors bought a brewpub the founders didn’t want any more and created the Toronto Beer Academy.

Here, the brewery makes a range of interesting beers as authentically as possible, from classic styles around the world to new craft creations.

They’re brewed by good brewers who want to make good beer (and have significantly improved the old kit so they can do so), and are sold on site.  Creemore Springs and Granville Island beers are also sold here, in a bar that celebrates beer in all its shapes and colours.
Together, Creemore Springs, Granville Island and Beer Academy are now part of an independent unit within Molson Coors called the Six Pints Specialty Beer Co.  It’s part of MC, but not controlled by it.  It runs as a separate unit, to different rules. There is no MolsonCoors branding here, and no MolsonCoors brands are stocked.
The bar holds brewmasters dinners, and seminars on beer ingredients and the brewing process.  There are new beer launch nights, beer and cheese matching evenings and beer dinners.  All stuff a good microbrewer should do, and done well.
Talking to the guys who run this, there’s a philosophy of enlightened self-interest.  It’s only going to work if it’s done right – and that means not doing it the MC way.  But if it’s done well, it might just create a halo effect that makes people think a little bit more of beer in general, in relation to wine and other drinks.  And that would, ultimately, help the rest of the MC business. 
I’m not saying it’s the best beer I’ve ever tasted, and I’m not saying Beer Academy is the best beer bar I’ve ever been in.  I am saying that this is proper craft beer, served in a proper craft beer bar, and that there is no evidence whatsoever of the ultimate owners trying to screw anything up with short cuts, dumbing down, cost cutting or corporate bullshit.
It’s an extraordinarily intelligent response to the growth of craft beer.
Compare that then, with the billboard spotted in Los Angeles by ace beer photographer Robert Gale:
Photo: Robert Gale – his blog has photos of way nicer beery stuff than this
That’s right: the biggest brewery conglomerate in the world reacts to the growth of craft beer by trying to claim that one of it’s top three priority brands for global domination is somehow in the same space as microbrewers and craft beer.

No shame. And no clue whatsoever.

You might feel that you would always want to support a true micro rather than a big brewer, and that’s a view that’s difficult to argue with.

But not all big brewers are the same.  They all want a piece of craft.  Personally I’ll be welcoming the stuff they do well, in the hope of killing off the crap, insulting stuff as quickly as possible.

* In joke. Not saying it isn’t true of course.

** Full disclosure following the admission that I do some consultancy in this area – while Rudgie is a mate, I have not been paid any consultancy or PR fee by MolsonCoors, and have had no advisory role or any other involvement in what’s discussed here

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Telling Stories and Drinking Beer

It’s less than six weeks now until the launch of my new book, Shakespeare’s Local.

I had some very exciting news about the book yesterday, which I can’t reveal until contracts have been signed in a few days’ time.  It’s also been confirmed that the book will have a US edition some time next year.

But books don’t sell themselves these days, so I’m gearing up for various events up and down the country where I’ll be reading, talking about the book, and doing beer tastings.

Here’s the schedule so far:

Saturday 29th/Sunday 30th September – Taste Cumbria, Cockermouth
At 3pm this afternoon I’ll be tasting a world of Cumbrian beers as part of this excellent food and drink festival, and maybe doing the odd reading.  I’ll be repeating the tasting again at 1pm tomorrow.

Monday 1st October – Beer tasting mash up at the Manchester Food and Drink Festival
They asked me to do an event.  I said yeah, I could do a tasting of local beers, or beers that match with my books, or a beer and cheese pairing maybe?  Or what about beer and music matching?  It’s the right city for it.  And they said, they all sound great – can you do the whole lot?  So I’ll be attempting to weave together four completely different events at 7pm on Monday in the festival hub.

Tuesday 9th October – Ilkley Literary Festival
I had a blast here with Hops & Glory a few years ago.  Can’t wait to go back and unveil the new show I’ve put together around Shakespeare’s Local – it’ll be a multimedia extravaganza I tell you!  And it’s already sold out! No pressure then…

Thursday 8th November – Official Book Launch!
Finally hits the shops. I may have a celebratory beer at the George.

Monday 12th November – Corbridge
Details to follow

Tuesday 13th November – Urmston
Details to follow

Wednesday 14th November – Caught by the River at Rough Trade East
I love Caught by the River.  I love Rough Trade East.  Thrilled to be doing an event with them.

Wednesday 21st November – Richmond Literary Festival
An event in a beer shop.  And not just any beer shop – realeale.com’s HQ is beer paradise.

There will be many more events to follow, including a few at the George itself in the run-up to Christmas.

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Cask ale in volume growth! How to stock the perfect range! Yes, it’s the launch of the Cask Report

Cask ale, real ale, handpulled ale – call it what you will – grew by  1.6% in 2011.  This is the first time cask volume has grown (as opposed to not declining by very much) for twenty years.  Sales in 2012 to date are steady, which is still excellent news given that the total UK beer market – down 3.5% in 2011 – is down again this year.  Cask now has such momentum behind it that it has overtaken keg as the most popular draught ale format.

This all made my launch of this year’s Cask Report last night very pleasant indeed.  When you’re the messenger, it’s nice when no one wants to shoot you.

This is the sixth time I’ve written the Cask Report.  Up to now, it’s been a weighty tome that acts as a snapshot of what’s happening to cask ale, who’s drinking it and why, and a detailed source of information for licensees about how to choose, stock and sell cask ale in a way that will increase pub turnover and profitability.

This year we’ve done it a little differently.  All the advice for licensees is now running as a monthly section of the Publican’s Morning Advertiser called ‘Cask Matters‘.  With greater frequency we can tailor the advice more precisely, examining in detail how cask can contribute to the character and bottom line of the pub in different ways, with case studies, Q&A’s, advice, industry comment and the occasional bit of whimsy from yours truly.  You can download PDFs here.  We should probably do Boxing Day TV ads saying you get a free binder with the first issue and it builds up into a beautiful collection or something.

The market stats are now in a thinner, flimsier Cask Report that gives a much more concise and easily navigable picture of what’s happening to cask ale.  Apart from the basic stats, this year’s report examines in further detail two issues that have emerged as key in the last couple of years:

  • What are the main drivers fo cask ale growth?  Why do drinkers like it?  And what are the barriers to trial among those who have never tried it?
  • What range of cask ales should a landlord stock?
Drivers and barriers
53% of British adults have now tried cask ale.  Among those who have tried it, 84% have gone on to drink it, at least occasionally.  People like cask because of its flavour and variety – microbrewers are now brewing a wide array of different beer styles:
The problem for cask is that 71% people who’ve tried it drink it occasionally or rarely.  Only 13% claim to drink it often or regularly.  Like ‘Guinness drinkers’ who only ever have a pint on Paddy’s Day, an awful lot of cask ale drinkers are people who tend to order a Peroni or Stella, until the rare occasions they go to a beer festival or visit a nice country pub. 
Those who love cask, as well as loving the flavour, tend to have other reasons for drinking it too.  Some like to support a local producer, others a great British tradition. Some like it for its natural ingredients.  Cask ale allows people who know it to support causes or make statements about things they care about.  This gives brewers and pubs a list of things they could say about cask to encourage trial, or get occasional drinkers more interested.
Among those who haven’t tried cask, there are no real barriers – they just haven;t been given a good reason why they should try it:
  

The negative stereotypes about it being warm, flat or an old man’s drink are tiny reasons compared to a simple lack of any reason why they should care.  Again, looking at committed drinkers gives us some good clues as to what those good reasons might be.

Stocking the optimal cask ale range
Talk to a beer blogger and they’ll tell you you should be stocking awesome craft ales from the awesome new wave of microbrewers using awesome New World hops and awesome wood ageing and an awesome lack of finings.  Talk to a regional brewer and they’ll tell you people want to see familiar, tried and trusted brands on the bar.

Both are right.

If I were to open a pub in London tomorrow, London Pride and Doom Bar would be on the bar permanently.  I would then have a seasonal beer from a traditional British family brewer, and three pumps stocking a range of IPAs, milds, porters, stouts, golden ales, all depending on seasonality and availability, the most eclectic and exciting mix I could find.

Most readers of this blog, I would guess, are dismissive of Doom Bar.  So am I. But it sells by the bucketload, and it sells to people who would never buy Magic Rock Human Cannonball.  There are at least 3000 different cask ales in Britain, which is amazing.

But know what?  The top 39 most recognised brands account for half of the total market volume.  Most pubs are stocking too many unfamiliar beers and not enough recognised brands.  Sales go up the more familiar, established brands you have on the bar.

Conversely, it’s eclectic, unfamiliar beers, often brewed by micros, that are driving the current excitement in the cask ale market.  Stock only familiar brands and people will think your range is crashingly dull, and rightly so.

Also – and this is common sense, but you’d be surprised – know your audience.  If you are a self-declared craft beer bar and you know that your clientele consists of people who actively seek out new beers, weigh your range to rotating new and unfamiliar beers.  If you’re a typical high street pub, refresh your range constantly, but always have a few favourites on the bar.

Whoever you are though, it’s good business sense to have both.  75% of cask ale drinkers say a familiar, trusted brand is important when choosing what beer to drink.  And 78% say they like to try new beers from microbreweries.  You may have noticed that adds up to more then a hundred – the same people want both familiarity and novelty – and that’s consistent across every piece fo research we did for the report.

Download.  Digest.  And maybe we can stop arguing – from a commercial point of view at least – about what’s best, big brands or micros?  Both are essential from the point of view of a good pub.

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Announcement: The Beer Marketing Awards

Older readers will know I came into beer writing via a somewhat unlikely route.

My favourite of all the ads I helped create.  (No, I didn’t write it.)

I used to work in advertising, and one day I was appointed to work on the campaigns for Stella Artois and Heineken.  I was responsible for strategy, and this entailed looking at trends and deeper dynamics in society and culture to establish the motivations behind the brand choices people made.  When I had to do this with beer it completely captivated me and ignited an interest that went much deeper than what I had to do for the latest Stella ad.  It ultimately led to me writing my first book, which in turn led to me developing a much broader love for and interest in beer.

When I tell this story at events or readings, it usually gets a good-natured chorus of booing and hissing. There’s a suspicion among many beer fans about marketing – in its purest form, the belief is that advertising brainwashes people to drink shit, bland commercial beer instead of interesting, quality beer produced by nice people.  At best, there is at least a suspicion that many people choose beers for style over substance.

And to be fair, there is some truth in that.  Back in the day we used to tell each other that people ‘drink the advertising’ – but only when the beers themselves were interchangeable and pretty much identical.  Advertising can’t really persuade someone to drink standard lager instead of a microbrewed IPA if the standard lager doesn’t appeal to their tastebuds, but it can sure make you drink one standard lager instead of another.

Beer ads were the ads that made me want to in advertising in the first place.  The ad below is the one that I talked about in all my interviews, and I still think that it’s a pretty perfect beer ad:

Great gags, plays to the obsession of its target audience, brand name in the punchline. Perfect.

But if beer marketing was ever just about TV ads, it isn’t now, and won’t ever be again.  Back when ‘Dambusters’ played there were only two commercial TV channels and you could be sure pretty much everyone in the target audience saw it.  And regulations meant you could get away with outlandish claims so long as you were obviously joking about hose claims.  One casualty of our binge drinking paranoia is that advertising regulatory authorities have lost their sense of humour.

Marketing in its broadest sense is, at worst, a necessary evil, and at best a great, positive addition to the experience of choosing and drinking beer.  Whether we like it or not, we are a brand-literate, marketing savvy world these days.  I regularly see great beers stymied by awful label designs.  Branded, shaped glassware is at least as much about marketing as it is about enhancing the flavour of beer.  And with more beers than ever before to choose from, we’ve got to find out information about them somehow.  If a brewer chooses to impart some of this information themselves rather than rely entirely on crowd-sourced web reviews, that’s marketing.  When a brewer chooses a bottle shape, designs a label, launches a website, hosts a meet the brewer event, issues a press release, tweets or blogs or sends a punk dwarf to petition parliament, that’s all marketing.

Beer marketers now have to be much smarter.  The tightening regulation and the explosion of different media channels, not least social media, means it’s a much more complex game – but the playing field for that game is more level than it was.  Simply having the biggest budget is not enough (if it ever was – remember Watney’s Red Barrel?)

This is why I was very excited indeed when two industry acquaintances approached me and asked if I would like to be involved in organising the inaugural Beer Marketing Awards.  We have so, so many awards that celebrate the beer itself – and rightly so.  But marketing should not and canot be ignored, and the best stuff deserves to be equally celebrated.  If it takes off, it might even help raise the standard of the shit stuff.

And the joy of it is, it’s about the whole industry.  If you’re AB-Inbev, we want to hear about the best TV ad you’ve made this year.  If you’re Heineken, we want to know how proud you are of sponsoring the Olympics.  If you’re Brew Dog we want to hear how successful your best PR stunt was.  If you’re Magic Rock we want to hear about your Twitter presence.  And if you’re Wye Valley, tell us about your label redesign.  Huge or tiny, established or new, every brewer does marketing of some form or another, and there’s a category for everyone.  Here’s the full list:

Best Advertising Campaign – Print

This category rewards outstanding marketing activity in print media. Designed a standout campaign for national newspapers? Publicised your brand to great effect in glossy magazines? This category’s for you.
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Best Advertising Campaign – Broadcast

If you’ve implemented a TV ad campaign that’s really caught the attention of the viewing public, or a series of radio slots that stop people in their tracks, you’ll want to enter this category.
—–

Best use of Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or whatever other social media channel floats your boat – if you’ve devised a campaign that has provoked thousands of comments, likes and follows, get your entry written.
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Best Public Relations Campaign

If you’ve generated column inches by the score, captivated journalists with your creative approach, or devised an industry focused thought leadership campaign, use your most persuasive talents to tell us why you should win this category.
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Best Branding / Design

Making sure your product stands out on the shelves or behind the bar requires a well-designed and consistent brand. You’ll have a good chance of winning this category if you can demonstrate success in this area.
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Best use of Competitions

If you’re into competitions, you’ll no doubt have noted that these awards are a fine example of the genre.  If you’ve created a competition or promotion that has gained a high profile for your brand, submit your entry here.
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Best Integrated Campaign

Jack of all trades? Accomplished all rounder? If you’ve created a high quality multi-platform campaign that hits print, broadcast, social media and anything else, add it all together and submit it for this category.
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Best Stunt / Guerrilla Marketing

If, like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, your chief weapon is surprise, try and catch us unawares with your specialism for stunts or your gift for guerrilla marketing.
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Best Business to Business Campaign

Targeting the trade can be as exciting and innovative as targeting the consumer, so if you’ve concocted a campaign that persuades landlords to serve your beer, or masterminded an approach to the off-trade, here’s your category.
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Best Website

HTML, CSS, jQuery, JavaScript, PHP – if these terms make sense to you, think about developing (geddit?) an entry for this category. You’ll need to have created a site that is creative and compelling as well as technically brilliant, mind.
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Best use of Sponsorship

Sporting events, celebrities, TV programmes – if you’ve created a sponsorship package that has complemented and benefited from a partnership with any of these, you know what to do.
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Best use of Merchandise

From beermats to t-shirts, branded glassware to bottle openers – and beyond. If you’ve branded up complementary merchandise to add to your marketing campaigns, let us know how and why you did it.
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Overall Winner

No need to enter this one – we’ll choose the most impressive, innovative and successful campaign from all the above categories and give it a special award. You can bet it will deserve it.
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Outstanding Individual Achievement

Again, no need to enter this – if you’ve overachieved, chances are we’ll have heard about you anyway. You’ll need to have created a stunning body of work, either this year or throughout your career. We’ll make sure everyone hears all about it.

We’re recruiting a panel of judges from the brewing, pub and creative marketing industries, as well as prominent beer writers and other industry figures.  (Some brewers will doubtless be encouraged to hear that I won’t be judging myself – it’s incompatible with helping organise the event and encouraging entries.)

There will be a media launch at Craft Beer Co in London on 12th September.  The competition is now open for entries, and you can enter here.  Entries will close on 10th December, and the awards event will take place at the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, on March 13th 2013.  More details will be on the BMA website, which will now be updated on a regular basis with chat about beer marketing as well as details about the competition.  If you’d like to sponsor one of the above awards, we’d love to hear from you.

I’m proud to be associated with this great idea.  Whether you’re a brewer or drinker, we hope you’ll be as excited by it as we are.
  

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“How many beer bloggers does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Take my head brewer.  No, seriously, please, take him.”

That was the question I asked on Twitter on Saturday afternoon.  
Some people thought I was angry, that I’d been pushed over the edge by one too many pedants at GBBF last week.  Not at all.  I was hacking away at the garden, feeling a bit bored and a little mischievous, and thought it might be a bit of harmless fun – remember that?
I think it’s safe to say the replies address the whole spectrum of beer blogging.  Some are very similar and I’ve grouped those together.  Some are funnier than others, though this may depend on who you are, so I’ve featured the whole lot below – about half are my own, half other people’s.  I’ve structured some as conversations because they work better that way.
So, how many beer bloggers does it take to change a lightbulb?
“That’s not the question. The question is, what is the true definition of a lightbulb?”
“12 – One to change it & 11 to sit around talking about how much they preferred to old one!”
“4 – 1 to rate it on http://ratebulb.com . 1 to video it. 1 to retweet it. 1 to Google an electrician.”
“Don’t we all just sit in the dark?”
“None. They just stumble around in the dark and end up
peeing in the airing cupboard.”
“We don’t change the lightbulb, we just sit in the dark
arguing about cask vs keg.”
“It depends. If the lightbulb’s in the cellar and there’s
no beer, then one and all.”
“Why oh why do so many people persist in repeating the
unfounded myth that the lightbulb needs to change?”
“A dozen take turns at it whilst pronouncing the old bulb
‘boring’ & the new one ‘awesome’. But nothing actually gets changed.”
“None – as you’re not going to actually find a blogger who
can do the thing they want to moan about.”
“They go on at great length about the importance of an
‘authentic’ light bulb but somehow nobody gets round to it.”
“It all depends who made the lightbulb. If it was mass-produced it was probably shit at giving out light anyway.”
 “I prefer these
local, artisanally produced lightbulbs instead of those cheap macroluminiscent
excuses for illumination.”
“Is it an artisan produced bulb, or mass produced yellow
fizz of light?”
“But how is the electricity made ? I’ll sit in the dark if
it’s not wind power.”
-> “I’m a CAMRA member. I won’t
conform to this new ‘energy saving’ rubbish.”
“One to form a bunch of committees. Then another 140,000 to
sit around reminiscing about the old days before electricity.”
-> “Tallow, it’s the future.”
“I actually preferred the Mk2 lightbulb, which they made for
6 months before they were closed by Mazda.”
“To be real thing, the gas should be vented before turning
on the bulb, although obviously it won’t last as long, about 3ms.”
“I change my lightbulbs every two minutes. That way I know
they aren’t sell-outs.”
“No matter how many try, they’ll never do it as well as
Michael Jackson did.” 
“Why did the proverbial lightbulb die in the first place?”
“Those Americans are doing things with lightbulbs that we
Brits can’t even begin to imagine.”
“Your old lightbulb was shit. The lightbulb revolution
starts here.”
“I think you’ll find that there is no direct proof the
lightbulb was ever invented.”
“That has nowhere near enough wattage to be classed as a lightbulb.”
-> “It’s not the quality of the
light, but the provenance of the inert gas within the bulb.”
“WTF? Lightbulbs!? Why aren’t you guys talking about halogen
striplights?! FFS”
-> “I cannot BELIEVE you people are
still talking about ‘strip’ lights. The correct term is TRACKLIGHTS. JESUS.”
-> “I just bought some AWESOME
tracklights!!!! Over a hundred units of brightness. Awesome!!!”
-> “I think you’ll find they’re
called lumens, not units of brightness.”

“I’m keeping the old lightbulb in, to see how it ages.”

Thangyouverymuch, I’m here all week, etc…

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