Tag: CAMRA

| Beer, CAMRA, Cask ale, Media bollocks, Real Ale

Now “disgusting” CAMRA is trying to destroy the country.

They’ve really gone and done it this time.

(*Not really.)

The comments below the articles about CAMRA’s latest outrage in this week’s national dailies are damning:

“And because of that I’ve just cancelled my membership.”

“Right, thank you. I will not be renewing my CAMRA membership. This is absolutely disgusting.”

What have CAMRA done that’s so terrible?

Well, it seems they have been “overrun” by “woke communists”.

“I will just have stop drinking real ale now because it has just become “Unreal Ale”. An utter woke joke.”

“That’s my membership cancelled , can’t believe camra has gone disgustingly woke”

“Go woke go broke. Another organisation overrun with communists who will now lose membership.”

“You have just lost this normal person with your wokery.”

“CAMRA try to appease B,la c k Lives Mateer Marxists because they are scared. of them”

In doing so, the supposedly real-ale-supporting organisation has revealed that, far from wanting to preserve one of our greatest cultural assets, its secret agenda is to destroy Britain itself.

“When will the real people in this country take it back from those who want to destroy it.”

Obviously, CAMRA is not powerful enough to do this on its own. It’s obviously become part of a global conspiracy.

“Why does all this seem Co-ordinated world-wide? Who is the global puppet master?”

(I could take a pretty good guess at the kinds of people the commenter thinks might be behind this.)

But here’s my favourite comment, and this one is dedicated to the overworked people at CAMRA’s head office and the thousands of volunteers who make the organisation run with no financial reward in return:

“Looks like CMARA has gone the same way as the NT and the British museum,and quite a few more our national institutions,they are now run by overpaid woke and PC executives.”

‘Going woke’ is a terrible crime, particularly in the eyes of people who use the term daily without having the slightest clue of what it means.

So what form has CAMRA’s wokeness taken? Has it banned beards? Has it insisted that everyone at GBBF must take the knee before the bars open? Given that it is now run by communists, has it called for the means of beer production to be seized by the proletariat?

No. Worse than that, CAMRA has asked people to complete a QUESTIONNAIRE.

CAMRA has asked for feedback. Via a SURVEY.

What evil fucking Commie bastards they are. Why don’t they just burn Olympia to the ground like they so obviously want to?

After years of being criticised for only being relevant to white middle-aged men, CAMRA is asking how it might broaden its audience from that base. After decades of women reporting that they are patronised, ignored ridiculed, harassed or even assaulted at beer events, CAMRA is asking people for their experiences, to gauge how serious the problem is and, if necessary (spoiler alert: it is) to do something about it.

Speaking as an overweight, bearded, middle-aged real ale drinker, I’d say this is long overdue, and is to be welcomed. Many people like me on Twitter share the same view. But the sewers that run below the lines of Daily Mail articles contain creatures that are less happy:

“what the hell do women know about beer…”

More than you know about how to write a sentence, mate.

“I better stop drinking, then they can have more of the other lot”

“One of the last bastions of being a white middle aged man is going. Can we have nothing that is ours alone, why does everything have to be shared with minority groups!!”

Dudes. Not enough people are drinking beer for all the people who make it to stay in business. There’s lots of real ale. If all the women, gay people, trans people, black and brown people, and all the people I have not mentioned in this sentence all start drinking it, there’ll still be more than enough left for you and your mates. And didn’t your mummy tell you that it’s nice to share?

This is the odd thing about people who are frightened of sharing the planet with other people who are different from them in some way. They believe rights and freedoms are like a cake – or a pint, I suppose. We middle-aged white men have more rights and freedoms than most. If other people win more rights and freedoms – the (lack of) thinking goes – then that must mean we lose some, because the cake is only finite in size.

If we’re not scared – or “triggered” – by the thought of sharing a space with people who are a bit different from us, we might actually gain quite a lot. The size of the whole cake grows. Which is better for everyone.

Eventually, this fear turns itself inside out and becomes slightly surreal:

“If CAMRA do not give up this woke nonsense then you expect there to be a splinter real real ale group that ANYONE can join, no questions asked, you just need to like real ale.”

Yep – if CAMRA carries on trying to broaden its appeal so that anyone who likes real ale can feel happy to join, then don’t be surprised if there’s a rival organisation springing up to replace it, based on the radically different principle that anyone who likes real ale can feel happy to join.

It’s easy – and necessary – to take the piss out of small-minded, ignorant bigots. It’s alarming to live in a world where initiatives to be open, friendly and tolerant are seen as evil, disgusting and communist, and people who despise anyone different from them, who feed on hate, somehow feel that it is they who are normal and decent.

I get that some of this driven by genuine fear, however misguided or based in ignorance that fear might be. But I’d suggest the fear of being ignored, patronised or physically or verbally assaulted that women and minority groups share is more justified, based as it is on real-world experience.

Since the 2010 Equalities Act, it is illegal for any public body, company or organisation to allow discrimination, harassment or victimisation on the basis of:

  • age
  • disability
  • gender reassignment
  • marriage or civil partnership (in employment only)
  • pregnancy and maternity
  • race
  • religion or belief
  • sex
  • sexual orientation

If CAMRA did preside over a culture where such behaviour was endemic, then like any other public body, society, workplace or organisation, it would be breaking the law. Workplaces must have policies in place to protect their employees against such behaviour. Even before you get to the fact that it might be a nice idea if flagging real ale sales could be boosted by making it more relevant to more people, CAMRA has a legal responsibility to make sure people feel safe at its meetings, events, and offices.

It’s also worth noting that CAMRA is asking everyone to complete this survey. Nowhere does it say that overweight, middle-aged white blokes are excluded. I filled it in weeks ago, and I didn’t get a response saying “Sorry, you don’t count.”

If membership and punters respond and say there’s nothing wrong, that everyone feels safe and happy at beer festivals etc, and there’s no evidence of widespread discrimination, then fine – nothing needs to change, does it?

But somehow, I doubt that will happen. I suspect the survey will uncover stories as troubling as craft beer’s “Me-too” moment did last spring. And if that does happen, then CAMRA has an obligation to act. It’s incredibly positive that the organisation is being so proactive in recognising that. So please, take the survey, whatever age, weight, ethnicity, gender, sex, colour, race or sexual orientation you are. The whole point of this is that everyone matters.  

And you know what? In the unlikely event that CAMRA is taken over by woke communists who go out of their way to put women, people of colour, trans people and differently abled people into every key position in the organisation, even then, the stereotypical CAMRA man will still be as welcome in every aspect of the organisation as he is now.   

Except the people who left the comments I cut and pasted above, and the far worse comments I felt I couldn’t repeat.

Those people can fuck right off.

Enjoyed reading this? Then please have a look at my Patreon and consider subscribing, from as little as £1 a month. It features exclusive and preview content and many other benefits such as free books, depending on your subscription level.

You might also like...

| Beer, CAMRA, Cask ale, Cask report

What Ails Cask Ale? (Part One)

The latest edition of the Cask Report has prompted quite the debate around the plight and possible future of cask. I didn’t write the Report this year (well, only bits of it) but I did do the research behind it. With a head full of stats, here’s my take. 

For a minute I almost regretted going on holiday. 

I didn’t have much choice though: between late July and the start of September, I read a mountain of documents, recruited and moderated eight focus groups, designed and ran three separate online surveys, crunched the data from them all, and pulled the results of all this together into six separate documents running to hundreds of PowerPoint slides. It was essentially a three-month research project condensed into six weeks, all done at the same time as finishing off the final draft of my new book and keeping up with regular writing commitments. People have commented that I look tired in the video at the bottom of this post. No shit. 

This was by far the most comprehensive programme of original research ever conducted for the Cask Report, and while I was recovering in the Andalusian hills, the report’s release created quite a stir. It’s got people talking seriously about cask, which means it’s done its job. There’s already been a lot of commentary on the report’s findings and implications – Martyn Cornell gave a good summary, and today Matthew Curtis follows up and explores some issues that got less coverage in the report. If I hadn’t been on holiday, I’d have got my oar in first, but like I said…

The top line is, cask ale is in double-digit year-on-year decline. For the last couple of years – after I stopped writing it – the Cask Report tried to draw a veil over this worrying decline. This year, wisely, the Cask Matters steering committee decided this approach was no longer wise or helpful, and tasked the report with identifying the reasons for cask’s decline and trying to devise some actions to halt and ultimately reverse it. For this first time, Matt Eley edited a team of different writers rather than a single author – another positive move forward – and I did the background research.

I wrote the first nine editions of the Cask Report, from 2007 to 2015. During that time the outlook for cask was relatively positive. So what had changed? My going-in point was this: If we were to look at both macro and market trends and see that cask was no longer relevant to what beer drinkers want, there would be a case for saying cask has had its day and it is futile to resist that. But in a market that’s being driven by demands for flavour, novelty, a breadth of styles, local and small scale production, and an interest in tradition and quality, (craft in other words) then cask is on paper as relevant as it has ever been. That means something has gone badly wrong with how cask is being presented to the drinker.

The finished report could only summarise the most important headlines from the research I did. Companies that subscribe to the Cask Matters group  will have access to all the documents later this week. In the meantime, without weighing in with too many personal opinions on what we should and shouldn’t do about cask, I wanted to share some insights – some of which are touched on in the report, others that aren’t.

1. Occasions are more occasional

The number of people who claim to drink cask ale is actually going up, even as sales are in freefall. But most cask drinkers – about 60% of them – say they drink it every now and then, or hardly ever. They drink it in pubs, and they’re going to pubs less often than they used to. They might drink it on holiday, or when they go home and go out for a drink with mum and dad, or when the cask lover in the group is buying his or her round. But it’s not part of their core repertoire of drinks.

Also, that core repertoire of drinks is growing wider all the time. When I did focus groups ten, fifteen years ago, the typical ale drinker might say, “I usually drink lager, have an ale every now and then, or maybe a Guinness.” Now they’re just as likely to order a cocktail or a craft gin, or even a coffee depending on where they are and what the occasion is.

2. ‘You’ve been talking about cask ale wrong all your life!’

Remember how the lack of a precise technical definition is one of the criticisms often levelled at craft beer? Here’s CAMRA’s official definition of cask ale:

In the early 1970s CAMRA coined the term ‘real ale’ for traditional draught cask beers to distinguish them from processed and highly carbonated beers being promoted by big brewers.

CAMRA defines real ale as beer that is produced and stored in the traditional way and ferments in the dispense container to produce a reduction in gravity. It is also dispensed by a system that does not apply any gas or gas mixture to the beer other than by the traditional Scottish air pressure system.

I presented this, along with three other definitions, to focus groups consisting of people who said they occasionally drink cask ale. The reactions ranged from hilarity, to concern, to bemusement to complete and utter apathy. (Before I read this, even I hadn’t heard of the ‘traditional Scottish air pressure system’ before. Needless to say, no one in my Edinburgh groups had heard of it either.) Talk to the average punter, and a reduction in gravity has something to do with space travel. They’re not being funny – it’s thirty years now since ‘gravity’ was replaced by ABV as a measure of alcohol on drinks packaging. People felt this definition was more about what cask ale isn’t than what it is. Other definitions that talked about live yeast in the cask put off more people than it interested.

The average ale drinker is not interested in technical definitions (which must be why 13 million Brits seem perfectly happy to call themselves craft beer drinkers even without such a definition.)

After talking through the various definitions, I explained what cask ale is in my own words. If you were to read the transcripts from the groups, the reaction to this was very positive. “Yeah, that’s interesting.” ‘I never knew that.” “I might give it a try now.” But this is why you have to be careful with focus groups. There were long pauses between these statements. The people saying them were slumped in their chairs, looking bored or staring off into space. Their body language was saying “I really couldn’t give a shit.” I challenged them on this and asked whether they meant what they were saying, and they replied that while all this stuff about live beer in the cellar was fairly interesting, it wasn’t relevant to how they choose what to drink, and would make no real difference to how likely they are to choose cask. All they want to know is if they’ll enjoy drinking it. What difference does all this make to the taste?

3. Imagine if were talking about curry…

I got a thousand people on an app called OnePulse to describe cask ale in a few words, and then I put those words together into a cloud:

Here’s what the cloud looks like if you just take those who really like cask:

And here it is for people who have never tried it:

When I explored these further in the focus groups, it emerged that the biggest barriers to trying cask are the perceptions that it is strong, bitter and dark, none of which is necessarily true. ‘Don’t know’, as always, is a big issue – people simply don’t have the knowledge about cask, and don’t see any reason to change that. 

Cask is an ‘old man’s drink’, traditional,  but widely perceived as good quality. In groups, people said that cask ale should be served in big, dimpled mugs. It should be poured from wooden handpulls. It should look old-fashioned. There should be a group of old codgers standing around the pumps drinking it. None of these attributes make my respondents any more likely to drink cask more often, but that’s not the point – to them, this is all part of the background ambience of what a proper pub should be.

I likened it to an Indian restaurant. Imagine you weren’t that fond of spicy food and only ever ate a korma. But you went to an Indian restaurant and there was no vindaloo, no madras, nothing spicy at all on the menu. You’d probably think, “Hang on, this isn’t a proper curry house,” even though you had no intention of ordering a spicy dish. 

Cask is an institution. It’s part of the fabric of a ‘proper pub’. That in itself counts for something. But it doesn’t really help[ stop the decline.

Where to from here?

This hopefully gives a sense of the general mood and attitude around cask. In Part Two, some time later this week, I’ll dig into the thorny issues of quality, temperature and pricing.  

In the meantime, here’s the video of tired, pre-holiday me summarising some of these findings for the report’s launch.

You might also like...

| Beer, CAMRA, Cask ale

What should CAMRA do now to save cask ale – and itself?

CAMRA members who voted against a motion to extend the remit of the organisation think they did so to preserve cask ale. In reality, they’re killing  it. 

On Saturday, the Campaign for Real Ale’s (CAMRA’s) Revitalisation Project reached its conclusion. At the organisation’s AGM, members voted on a range of measures that would modernise the campaign and broaden its scope. All but one of these measures was passed, and there is undoubtedly cause for celebration that the campaign has resolved to promote the benefits of moderate social drinking, show more support for pubs, and think more about inclusivity. But the one proposal that would have really changed everything – that CAMRA should “act as the voice and represent the interests of all pub-goers and beer, cider and perry drinkers” – was not passed. 72% of CAMRA members voted for it, but it needed 75% to pass. A small minority of the organisation’s members have prevented the majority from moving it forward.

I’ll concede that this tweet, posted on Saturday night when I heard the news, was a bit melodramatic:

But I stand by the feelings of sadness and dismay that prompted it. I really didn’t anticipate that it would cause so much discussion on Twitter yesterday, with agreement and disagreement both being expressed passionately. The comments of many of those who delighted in the motion’s failure only deepened my feelings that both CAMRA and cask ale are in deep trouble. So I’m going to outline why here, in a lot more than 280 characters.

First, let’s deal with some of the predictable responses and get them out of the way.

 

1.”Real ale is the only beer worth drinking. CAMRA is right to fight for it exclusively because anything else is fizzy industrial piss.”

If you really think this, I have nothing to say to you. You might as well stop reading now. You know nothing about beer. Go and do something else.

 

2. “Duh – the clue is in the name! Its the campaign for REAL ale.”

No, the clue is not in the name. It’s not called the Campaign for Cask Ale. (Although CACA is perhaps a more descriptive acronym for the campaign at the moment.) Cask ale has a precise technical definition. ‘Real ale’ is a marketing and campaigning slogan created by CAMRA when it was already two years old. CAMRA invented the term and decided what it meant, and can change that meaning whenever it chooses. Leaving aside the campaign’s support for cider and perry, its commitment to pubs, and its arm’s-length support for traditional German, Czech and Belgian beer styles (so long as they stay over there) CAMRA already has changed the definition of what it considers to be real ale. It did so when it decided bottle-conditioned beer also counted as real ale, and again more recently when it declared key keg to be real ale. It has the freedom to apply the term ‘real ale’ to anything it wants, because it invented the term, and controls its definition.

 

3. “OK, I do like some other beers, but cask ale is always better so we should stick to campaigning just for that.”

No it’s not. Green King IPA is not a better beer than Westmalle Tripel. Doom Bar is not a better beer than Pilsner Urquell (although ultimately, it comes down to individual taste). British brewers are now making decent lagers and Belgian style beers, among others, that do not have cask conditioning as part of their traditional production or dispense. Is cask special? Absolutely. Does it deserve to be supported and campaigned for? Totally. But you don’t have to pretend it’s always better than anything else in order to support it. If you do, you sound like me and my fellow Barnsley FC supporters, standing on the terraces at Oakwell chanting that our club is by far the greatest team the world has ever seen, when clearly they aren’t.

 

4. “If you love keg beer so much, go and start your own campaign for keg beer.”

This is the most important and complex issue to address, and I’m going to spend the rest of this blog on it.

I suppose it’s easy to assume that the reason people like me want CAMRA to support a wider range of quality beers is that we want the the campaign to help what CAMRA drinkers insist on calling ‘craft keg.’ But for me at least, that’s not the point. And anyway, craft keg os doing just fine without CAMRA’s help. The point is that segmenting the market into cask and keg is no longer the most relevant and useful way of looking at things, if it ever was. There’s the obvious point that what ‘keg’ beer is has changed fundamentally since CAMRA was founded. But it’s about much more than that.

Cask ale’s health has recently gone into severe decline. Over the twelve months to February 2018, and in the twelve months before that, cask volume declined by over 4% each year – that means almost ten per cent of the entire cask market has vanished in the last 24 months.

It’s curious, perhaps, that this decline comes at a time when CAMRA’s membership is increasing. It’s easy to equate CAMRA’s growth with burgeoning interest in cask. Clearly, this is not the case. Cask ale has gone into steep decline as CAMRA’s membership soars. CAMRA does many fine things in support of cask, but the sum total as it stands is not doing enough to protect cask ale. So something has to change.

What I find most alarming is that no one in the cask ale industry wants to ‘fess up that there’s a serious issue here. This is a recipe for disaster, like the middle-aged man who won’t go and get that pain checked out at any the doctor because he’s scared of what he might hear, and anyway it might just go away. Last year. when I wrote about the quality issues around cask in London, I was comprehensively attacked from all corners of the industry, in a number of different publications.  Now, the plight of cask is actively being covered up. From 2007 to 2015, I wrote eight editions of the Cask Report. Every single one of them contained a figure for cask ale’s value and volume performance versus the previous twelve months. The two editions of the report that have come out since I resigned from doing it have not contained this figure – because it’s so bad. The most recent edition of the Report stated that cask had declined by 5% over the last five years, which was in line with the overall beer market. The reason they gave a five-year figure is to disguise the fact that almost all that decline has come in the last two years.

It also disguises the fact that cask, for the first time in a decade, has begun to perform worse than the rest of the beer market.

One of the central arguments of the Cask Report since year one was that while cask ale was in steady decline, it was actually outperforming the rest of the on-trade beer market. This is no longer true. The total on-trade beer market is steadily improving while casks performance worsens.

The other thing that used to be true was that cask was performing way better than keg. It was strongly increasing its share of total ale as people turned away from smoothflow and traditional keg. While that is surely still happening, the arrival of craft keg finally seems to be having an impact on total keg’s performance. For a long time, keg was in seemingly terminal decline. Now, it’s outperforming cask. (Although it would be useful if craft keg could be separated from old keg to get a clearer picture.)

Now, I imagine that to some seasoned casketeers, this chart will represent a battle cry. “See? We were right! Evil keg is making a comeback, we must protect cask at all costs! Keg is or enemy!”

Well, good luck with that. It really was nice knowing you. You know those clickbait headlines that tell you you’ve been brushing you’re teeth wrong your whole life? To a non-cask drinker, that’s what you sound like., only more annoying. And if you want to save cask ale, you need to get more non-cask drinkers to start drinking cask. You can’t do that by going on about how awful keg is. Especially when it’s not true.

Year after year, research for the Cask Report showed us that there were no deep-seated objection to cask, not in significant numbers. any way. The main reason people hadn’t tried it was that they hadn’t been given a reason to. Cask needs to be made relevant to these people in the context of what they’re already drinking: if you like that, you might like this. Craft keg drinkers are a soft target for cask to convert – they’re half way there already, as this piece of research commissioned for Box Steam Brewery (which produces both traditional cask and modern craft beers) shows.

Source: Big beer ballot 2018, Colour and Thing

Most drinkers just want good beer, irrespective of who made it or what it comes in. Most cask ale brewers now brew in other formats as well – cask now only accounts for 74% of SIBA members’ output, which puts CAMRA in the strange position of endorsing some but not all of the beer of the breweries it claims to support. Most cask drinkers also drink other drinks. Back in my advertising days. I had access to a big survey database that asked pretty much anything you could think of. One attitude statement was ‘The only beer worth drinking is real ale.’ I took people who ‘strongly agreed’ with this statement, and split them to see what beer brands they claimed to drink ‘most often’. Top of the list was Stella Artois. Some cask drinkers switch to Guinness if they’re in a pub with nothing good on. Some Stella drinkers have a pint of cask with their dads when they go home to visit. Many drinkers I know make a choice based on style, ABV or brewery before they decide whether they want cask or keg. From both a producer’s and drinker’s perspective, saying you’re only going to support cask and keep it in some isolated bubble actually confuses things rather than helping get the message across.

To engage the occasional or non-cask drinker more often, cask needs to speak to them on their own terms, where they are, and in a way that’s relevant to them. In other words, in order to save cask ale, CAMRA needs to engage with and represent the interests of all pub-goers and beer, cider and perry drinkers – precisely the thing its most reactionary members have just voted against.

Craft keg is not the enemy. There are many reasons people are walking away from cask. Look at the graphs above – no sector is having a great time here. Pubs are closing, partly because we’re visiting them less often than we used to. We’re drinking less alcohol overall, which is being exacerbated by increasingly blatant lies from the anti-alcohol lobby. Within that shrinking market, we’re drinking more at home than we do out of the home. When we do fancy a drink, we’re increasingly likely to order wine or spirits – both of which are in growth at beer’s expense. And within this scenario, cask is doing worse now than any other beer style because of its appalling quality issues – which need to be saved by training and education as a matter for urgency – and because the price of this premium product has been depressed to such an extent that publicans can sell other beers – which are easier to keep and have less wastage than cask – for a lot more money. The are the main reasons cask is in decline. CAMRA’s leadership do of course recognise all this, and deserve huge credit for working so hard to moderniser the organisation. But while CAMRA members are still spending most of their time fretting about the kind of container beer comes in, they are not tackling these other, far more important issues as urgently as they could. Broaden the remit to good beer, establish cask’s relevance within that broader remit, and champion the bigger picture. You just might turn cask’s fortunes around.

Or you could just sit there and carrying on ranting like these guys, and fade into deserved irrelevance.

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

Sexy or sexist? This is not just CAMRA-bashing

I wasn’t going to comment on this. But I started leaving a comment on someone else’s blog and it started getting a bit too long so I thought I should stick it here instead.

In case you haven’t heard: CAMRA, quite reasonably, would like to recruit more young people. To help do so, it produced and distributed a leaflet for use by university real ale societies. Some people who saw the leaflet were offended by it, finding it sexist. One even started a petition to have the leaflet withdrawn.

The outcry was a success. CAMRA has withdrawn the leaflet and apologised ‘for any offence caused’, defending its actions by revealing that sizeable numbers of young men and women were consulted on the design, and liked it. Crucially CAMRA’s statement stops short of acknowledging that there was any real justification for people to be offended.

It’s a classic beer industry ding-dong. Now the offending leaflet has been withdrawn and CAMRA has admitted that they ‘got it wrong’, some on either side think it’s time to let the matter drop. But with opinions ranging from not seeing what all the fuss is about to wanting to burn CAMRA’s offices to the ground, it’s not going to go away easily.

It’s important then that before we move on, everyone – especially CAMRA – needs to acknowledge what the problem is.

Everyone I’ve shown the leaflet to – mainly people outside the beer industry and with little interest in either CAMRA or CAMRA-bashing – has been appalled by it.

Whatever your views on sexism (or not) the women are highly sexualised and stylised, whereas the bloke in the top picture is just wearing an ordinary T-shirt. That gives a very clear contextual suggestion that the sexualised women are there for the ordinary ale-drinking bloke’s delectation.

The front of the leaflet is sort of better in that both the man and woman are dressed in the same period costume. That would make it forgivable, were it not for the fact that in the pose, the man is physically possessive of the woman. You see, it’s not just the clothes: in both sets of images, the women are portrayed as being subservient to the men.

The picture of the woman on her own shows a pose I have never seen a real woman strike when she’s drinking a pint. Again, it’s highly stylised, highly sexualised, and clearly has its roots in the imagery and shapes of Burlesque dancing.

Burlesque has been championed by some women as empowering, but ridiculed by others as ‘middle-class stripping’. If a woman wants to dress like this, stand like that or even take her clothes off in public, she has every right to do so, but the choice is hers.

The problem here is that the women shown are presumably there to demonstrate that women drink real ale too. The reason CAMRA wants to communicate that message is that CAMRA, real ale and beer generally are still seen as being male-dominated. This broader context again reinforces the suggestion that these women are not empowered, but are here as eye candy for the lads.

There is still a great deal of sexism in the drinks industry, and real ale is no exception. I’ve just been working at drinks trade shows where young women were leered at and openly complemented on the merits of their tits and arses, sometimes by senior figures in the industry. Every female real ale drinker I know has at some point been subject to sexist comments for daring to drink real ale.

If these tasty birds had been in a Foster’s or Carling ad, or in a lad’s magazine, few would have defended their use as anything other than lairy, laddish titillation. If they’d been in an article about beer in Cosmopolitan magazine, I think they would have caused less offence, but I suspect ale-drinking women would still have seen them as condescending and patronising. Context is all.

And then there’s the student context: when the LSE’s rugby club has had to be banned for persistent misogyny, and Oxford and Cambridge have had to introduce compulsory sexual consent training, and the National Union of Students has published a report on the increasing prevalence of harassment,
stalking, violence and sexual assault, it’s obvious that campus sexism is a real danger to female students and not just harmless ‘banter’.

In the recent Cask Report, one of our main and most widely repeated headlines was that real ale drinkers no longer agree with the statement that ‘real ale is not a drink for women or young people.’ But nearly half of all publicans still DO agree with this statement.

The industry is behind the times when it comes to gender equality and relations with women. Someone in CAMRA – even if they personally felt the leaflet was fine and operated within the style and tone of contemporary studenty imagery – should have realised that it was simply too risky for a supposed consumer champion to use. If I try to tell my female friends that beer has thrown off its sexist image, as we were trying to suggest in the Cask Report, they could simply bring up this leaflet and laugh in my face.

It’s good that CAMRA reacted so quickly and withdrew the offending article, but the damage is done. And what still upsets those who complained is that, while the organisation genuinely did not want to cause offence, it doesn’t seem to understand why it did.

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

Alliterative Book Review: Boak and Bailey’s ‘Brew Britannia’

Imagine if the history of rock music was done in the style
of beer writing:
“Unknown Pleasures by
Joy Division was recorded at Strawberry Studios, Stockport, between 1st
and 17th April 1979. It is 39 minutes and 24 seconds long and consists
of ten songs, which contain drums, bass, guitar, synthesisers and vocals, with
added special effects.”
There would then be an online debate about whether or not
the use of synthesisers meant that the record was ‘real indie’ or not, segueing
into a huge disagreement about whether the album should best be described as
‘indie’ or ‘goth’, or perhaps neither as, being completely original and
ground-breaking, it was in fact ‘not to style’.
I thought about this when reading How Soon is Now? – a
definitive history of indie music by Richard King. Read a biography of a band,
or a sweeping review such as King’s that seeks to contextualise and explain a
musical movement, and it’s not about what instruments they played or how big
the studio was: it’s about the people, how they were influenced previous bands,
other artistic forms or just what was in their air at the time, and how music
made them and their fans feel.
‘Wouldn’t it be brilliant if someone wrote a history of
craft/good beer following the conventions of music journalism rather than beer
writing?’ I thought. ‘Not writing so much about cascade hops and the structure
of the industry, but more broadly about the trends and most of all the people,
the decisions and sacrifices they made, the chances they took, the ideas and
creativity that drove them. That would be a good book. I should give that a go.”
Of course, I never did. Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey did it
instead. Sort of.
Boak and Bailey are two of my favourite beer bloggers. I
love their combination of obvious passion and clear reason. Occasionally their blog
posts can be a little too po-faced and navel-gazing, but their air of slight
detachment means they usually end up calling things right much more often than
most other bloggers, this writer included.
Their first book, Brew Britannia (Aurum Press, £12.99) seeks
to explain ‘the strange rebirth of British beer’ from the 1960s to the present
day. While I’d quibble over the adjective ‘strange’ (interest in beer has
mirrored – and mostly followed – a similar rediscovery of flavour, tradition
and experimentation across many food and drink categories) it’s a smart
approach. Many beer history books (my own included) take the long view and deal only briefly
with the modern period. Whereas that idea of writing a history of craft beer
would probably have started around the early 2000s, would have been much too ‘of its
time’ and would have dated badly.
What we have here instead is a story of beer gradually
becoming something worth caring about, something to be appreciated – at first
by retired World War Two officers looking for an excuse for a piss-up, through
the foundation of CAMRA to the discovery of new ideas in beer, the growth of
the brewpub and the microbrewery, and finally, yes, the modern craft beer
phenomenon, in all its wonderful, frustrating, murky glory.
Anyone who follows B&B’s conjoined Twitter account will
be aware of how many months of painstaking research went into this book. It
seems as though they’ve read every old issue of What’s Brewing, tracked down every living person who has ever
brewed beer on a small scale in the last fifty years, as well as the surviving families
of those who are no longer with us, and then cross-referenced everything,
caveating any claim they were not able to wholly substantiate. In an age where
some observers obsess over tiny details rather than seeing the big picture, the
working here is meticulous.
But the big picture is there too. I knew that in its early
days, CAMRA had a fresher approach than the strict orthodoxy that binds it
today. But I had no idea that the founders didn’t even know what cask beer was
until the campaign had all ready formed with a semi-serious purpose to
revitalise ‘ale’, a word chosen simply because ‘it seemed solidly Northern and
down to earth – less pretentious… than beer’.
And modern ideas of ‘craft’ have much earlier roots than I
ever realised. I was aware that Sean Franklin, was using cascade hops at Rooster’s last
century, but had no idea that his craft – and that of others – went back to the
early eighties. Or that the current arguments between big brewers and
microbrewers have been raging in one form or another since the mid-1970s.
Sometimes the formal tone becomes a little stilted – the
insistence on putting anything from ‘real ale’ and ‘world beer’ to ‘greasy
spoon’, ‘foodie’ and even ‘tasting’ in ‘inverted commas’ often jars and
occasionally evokes those high court judges who need to ask someone to explain
what this ‘rap music’ is that the ‘youngsters’ are listening to.
But on the whole, the approach works. You need a steady hand
on the tiller when trying to unpick the various internecine squabbles and
Judean People’s Popular Front posturings of CAMRA, and give an accurate record
of the campaigns evolution. You need someone who doesn’t use words and phrases
like ‘squabbles’ and ‘Judean People’s Popular Front’. I’m sure there will be
some who feel their particular point of view on the use of gas dispense or
BrewDog’s Portman Group battles haven’t been given enough room, but no one on any side of the debate can
go so far as to be upset by such a clear-eyed and dispassionate account of
controversial and often confusing subjects.
What stops the detachment becoming boring is the
all-important contextualisation. Having just learned about Ian Nairn and hisideas of ‘Subtopia’ though an event at our recent literary festival, it was
fascinating to see how his ideas extended to beer – a passion that became his
eventual undoing. We learn that it was an appreciation of wine that eventually
led Sean Franklin to brew with cascade hops, that the Firkin chain – which had
an incredible influence before it was bought and cheapened into oblivion – was
originally a product of one man’s intuition and creativity. And that possibly
the most brilliant craft brewer you’ve never heard of (if you’re under fifty)
is now revolutionising the principles of banana growing – in Ireland.
Some writers who were quicker than me at reading and
reviewing this book have commented that it goes downhill at the end – that the
account of the last decade or so feels a little rushed and scrappy. Zak
suggested it’s perhaps too soon to analyse what’s just happened with the same
insight as things that happened twenty or thirty years ago. The last few
chapters do read more like blog posts from the end of 2013 rather than a
complete account of trends. But that’s OK too: the story is open-ended. It
hasn’t finished yet. Interestingly, many of my beloved music books – including
How Soon is Now – neatly avoid this problem by telling the story from one date
to another, flagging up an artificial cut-off point after which the
protagonists don’t necessarily live happily ever after, and the struggle
continues. I really don’t think that was an option here for a book that was
published as the story it tells is yet to reach its dramatic peak. 
If I had written my version of this story it would have been bloodier and more chaotic than this one: more evangelical, more
critical, more involved. I’d have made a lot more of the indie music analogy, and
gone Big Picture to the point of wilful digression.
Which is why I’m glad Boak and Bailey got there first and
did it their way. We need this account, in this form, if we are to fully
understand where beer is today, how it got here, and from there, to start to
speculate about where it might go next.
While they were pitching this book to publishers, Boak and
Bailey wrote a review of Shakespeare’s Local in which they kindly said I was a ‘writer
[publishers] think has really nailed it in commercial terms’ when it comes to
beer books. Here I can return the compliment by saying this is a book that I
wish I had written, but was beaten to it by people who have done a better job than I would have.                                                               

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

Dave Wickett, Beer Legend, RIP

Dave Wickett died. Bastard cancer.

This award-winning, iconic Sheffield pub would not have existed without Wickett

Wickett gave cancer more than it bargained for.  When cancer said, “You’ve got six months,” Wickett replied, “Fuck you,” and went off and planned and opened a new brewery, and carried on living life to the full for another two years.

Dave Wickett died, aged 64, on 16th May 2012.

He’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer in January 2010.

How’s that for six months?

The much-loved 2004 Champion Beer of Britain would not have existed without Wickett

Beer is a tight-knit community.  If you’re reading this blog, you may well have met Dave Wickett.  If you didn’t, you probably know someone who did. And if you don’t think you did, I promise you you’re more closely connected then you might think. You’re probably no more than two – at a maximum, three – degrees of separation away from one of beer’s singular heroes.

I knew Wickett (everyone just called him Wickett) pretty well.  Not as well as his close friends and colleagues, but pretty well, because I was supposed to be ghosting his autobiography.  To my shame I didn’t get as far with that as I wanted to before he died – not by a long way.  I hope it will eventually reach fruition, but that discussion is for some time later.

Wickett grew up on the outskirts of London in the swinging sixties. He saw England win the World Cup at Wembley in 1966 (football was his great passion before beer ever was), and off the back of that, in a somewhat unlikely fashion (the story of his life) ended up in Sheffield – a city he much preferred to the UK’s capital. That, in itself, is a big clue – here was a man who saw things differently.

You’re probably familiar with the story of how CAMRA came to the rescue of British cask ale in the 1970s.  You may be less familiar with what Wickett did.  He never threw himself into committees and mock funerals for closing breweries.  He had little interest in the politics of the organisation.  But he read and absorbed, and used the fledgling Good Beer Guide like a bible. But as a Polytechnic Economics lecturer, he also balanced passion for real ale with objective business nous – which brought him to the same place as his passion.  So he bought a run-down freehouse pub in a derelict area of Sheffield, named it the Fat Cat, and set out a stall consisting of a decent real ale selection and a food menu that always had a veggie option, winning heaps of awards over the next 30 years.

This brewery would probably never have happened without Wickett

In order to make the pub work as he wanted it to, Wickett challenged the declining 1970s real ale brewers to change the way they did business. They had to, if they wanted to supply him – and this new business arrangement would change the fortunes of countless other pubs.

In his lectures, he used real ale as a case study to prove how big business was distorting the ‘principles’ of the free market by using anti-competitive measures to deny choice to the consumer – something even Margaret Thatcher would have objected to – and when the Tories did object, and created a guest beer rule that freed pubs from a 100% brewery tie, Wickett opened his own brewery, Kelham Island in Sheffield. Kelham Island Pale Rider was Champion Beer of Britain in 2004, an early example of the golden ale that has now come to dominate Britain’s cask ale revival.

He’d been busy in the day job too, and had taken on responsibility for an innovative student exchange/placement programme that saw some of his Sheffield business students going to Rochester, New York, to run the first proper English pub in the US – the Old Toad, which helped pioneer cask ale in America.

The brewer on the left was hired for his first job in brewing by Dave Wickett

Wickett was never in it to make a high pile of cash.  He wanted to live a comfortable life doing what he loved.  He often compared himself to J D Wetherspoons’ Tim Martin, who opened his first pub in the same year Wickett did.  Wickett sometimes pondered if he should have gone down a more aggressive, chain-building route, and was often asked why he didn’t do that.  But he was always happy with his choices – he preferred running what he had, and taking on new challenges as and when they interested him.

So while Wetherspoons expanded with a fixed format across hundreds of branches, Wickett decided to open Champs, a sports bar in Sheffield.  Then he decided to invest in and guide the development of a tiny new brewery called Thornbridge.  He hired the two young brewers – one of them being Martin Dickie, who would later go on to co-found Brew Dog. But when Thornbridge wanted to grow at a greater rate, Wickett pulled out amicably, wished them well, and looked for new projects.

Sheffield is the real ale capital of the world thanks to Dave Wickett

After he was diagnosed with cancer, he opened another new brewery, Welbeck Abbey, as part of the School of Artisan Food.  It’s still in its infancy, but as part of a brilliant set-up that teaches people about great food and drink across the board, offering lessons in disciplines such as baking and butchery, with the makers of Stichelton cheese also included as part of the set-up, it’s another innovative operation that will help take serious beer appreciation onto a broader foodie stage.

Meanwhile, back in Sheffield, the ripples of Wickett’s actions were extraordinary.  Wickett wasn’t always an easy taskmaster, and over the years various brewers fell out with him, felt frustrated with his direction, or weren’t good enough to keep their jobs.  The extraordinary thing is that just about everyone who quit or was fired from Kelham Island went on to start a brewery of their own, often less than a couple of miles away.  Kelham is now at the centre of a dense cloud of microbreweries, and Sheffield has more cask ales on tap at any one time than any other city in the world.

Dave Wickett leaves an extraordinary legacy to the beer world.  Not just from his own actions, but from the people he inspired and who have imitated him.  The ripples of his brilliant life and career will continue to influence the beer world for years to come.

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

Why I’ve finally joined CAMRA

Well there we are.  I’ve set up the direct debit and got my membership number.

This is in some ways a ‘hell freezes over’ moment for me, and there are traces of discomfort around the edges of my decision.  But it was the right thing to do.

What’s the big deal?  Many of my readers (and friends) simply assume I’m a CAMRA member already, given what I do.

A few words of explanation for people who may have started following me more recently:

Back in the day, when I wrote my first book, Man Walks into a Pub, I earned a bit of notoriety by attacking CAMRA in its pages.  I have carried on attacking them – albeit with declining frequency – ever since.  With hundreds of beer blogs now, many written by younger, craft beer fans, there’s nothing unusual these days about seeing CAMRA slagged for being out of touch, blinkered, too set in its ways etc.  But at the time I wrote MWIAP, in ye olde pre-beer blogging, pre-social media days, you didn’t do that.  I was unable to find anything else in print at the time about CAMRA that deviated from the line that cask beer was facing extinction until they came along, and then they arrived, and saved the world.

I was a big real ale fan, but I also drank mainstream lager (there wasn’t much else between them back then.)  When I went to CAMRA beer festivals I felt alienated.  It came across as a clique – one that I really didn’t want to be part of.  There was a sneering, condescending attitude towards people who drank lager – and as I keep saying, calling someone an idiot has never been a great strategy for persuading them round to your point of view.  There was that social stereotype of the socially inadequate, visibly outlandish beer nerd, with his big belly, beard, opaque glasses, black socks and sandals, and leather tankard on his belt.  I didn’t want anyone to think that just because I was writing about beer, I was one of those people.  (Distressingly, in the last ten years I’ve grown to look more similar to this stereotype than I would like.  But beards are trendy now.  As for the belly, well, I need to so something about that.  The rest of it, mercifully, remains at a distance.)

I wanted no part of a world view that denied there was any such thing as good beer that wasn’t real ale.  It rankled when lager was unfailingly dismissed as ‘industrial yellow fizz’.  I gnashed my teeth whenever I picked up a book with a title like ‘Beers of Britain’, and brands like Carling weren’t even in the index.  OK, you might not like big mainstream brands, but saying you were writing about British beer and then pretending 70% of the market simply didn’t exist was childish.  Include them and dismiss them as crap in one line if you must, but really… I’d come away from events such as the Great British Beer Festival (not the ‘Great British Real Ale Festival’, note) feeling genuinely angry at the distorted picture it gave of British beer, and the contradictions that riddled CAMRA’s stance on “We’re the campaign for real ale, that’s our name, we can’t support anything else (oh, except if we feel like campaigning for cider, oh and Budvar.)”

I shared many of CAMRA’s beliefs.  But I felt I couldn’t sign my name to an organisation that believed real ale was the only beer worth drinking.  The emphasis on format and container rankled whenever I thought about it.

So what’s changed?  Is this a sell out, a kind of tiny scale inversion of Bob Dylan going electric?

Well, the nerds are still there, and I’m still uncomfortable about people at parties thinking I’m one of them when I tell them what I do.  And some of those issues I objected to are arguably more prevalent than ever, now craft beer has expanded beyond real ale to incorporate quality drinks of all shapes, sizes, formats and containers (jeez, even canned beer is good nowadays).  And CAMRA still refuses to change its stance on campaigning for real ale, and only real ale (unless they feel like bending the rules for cider, Budvar, etc.)  I still have fundamental disagreements with them on major policy directions.  I still think they often present an image that’s by turns cheesy, out of date and out of touch, and sometimes pompous and arrogant.

But many things are different now.

I could talk about how CAMRA’s membership has doubled since I started writing about beer, but the number of outlandish nerds hasn’t, about how CAMRA’s membership is broader, younger, more female, more inclusive now.

I could talk about how key figures such as CEO Mike Benner and magazine editor Tom Stainer talk nothing but good sense whenever they open their mouths, or how branch chairmen like Tandleman present a moderate view that, even if I sometimes disagree with, I can see the point of, and how these are all great people to enjoy a beer with.

I could reflect on the fact that 140,000 people represents a very broad church and a huge spread of opinions, that there is no monolithic ‘CAMRA’ to rail against, and that every time I criticise aspects of CAMRA there are many members who agree with me.

I could point out that there is a new rhetoric coming from a senior level, along the lines that a Campaign FOR Real Ale does not mean a Campaign AGAINST Other Beers, that even if CAMRA does not act for other great types of beer, it doesn’t (or rather, shouldn’t) act against them, and that while there are still some dinosaurs with positions of influence within the organisation who don’t reflect this official stance, I am as ‘for’ real ale as I am ‘for’ any other type of craft beer (because real ale is one type of craft beer – of course it is).

I could admit that for the last four or five years I’ve really, really enjoyed the Great British Beer Festival, despite its Gordian knots of logic and bureaucracy.

And I could argue that, as a writer who likes to campaign for great beer when it is being attacked or derided, when pubs are being hammered by successive governments and beer is still, for the most part, either ignored or scapegoated by the press, it’s important to stop playing Judean People’s Popular Front and recognise that what unites us is more important than what divides us.  This is what I’ve been preaching at industry conferences and in the trade press for a while now, and my own anti-CAMRA stance is increasingly at odds with what I’m saying.

I could promise to campaign from within, and try to justify my decision by saying that I’ll continue my criticism at conferences and AGMs, where it might have more effect. (But I’m not sure I have the time or the will for that.)

I could say all these things to justify my about-face.

But while I’m not saying any of that is untrue, or not a factor, the real reason I’m joining CAMRA is that being a member is the only bleeedin’ way I can get hold of BEER magazine, which now goes out to members only, and is the only consumer-oriented beer publication in the UK, and pretty much the only publication on beer of any description that I always read cover to cover when I can scrounge a copy from Tom.  I give in.  I surrender.  OK, I’ll join your bloody organisation.  Just send me the magazine.

Please?

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

CAMRA. Shotgun. Foot. Again.

So CAMRA have been inventing new enemies again.

Zythophile informs us that, according to chairman Colin Valentine, beer bloggers hate CAMRA, hate cask ale and wish everyone would just drink keg beer.  We have no respect for history and can’t even define our beloved ‘craft beer’ properly.

What’s set Colin off is the growing contention that keg beer has changed over the last forty years, and that some brewers who create amazing cask beers now also produce amazing keg beers.  In Colin’s strange little world, the fact that one has some carbonation and the other doesn’t makes the one with carbonation evil.  Some bubbles make, say, keg Camden Pale or Punk IPA more similar to Watneys Red than to their respective cask versions.  And if we tolerate them, we’ll all suddenly want to drink really shit keg beer again.

“What’s Brewing, Mr Ludd?”

CAMRA chairpersons have form when it comes to creating imaginary enemies on which to vent their spleen and look tough.  One of my first ever blog posts saw me first try out my ranting style when Col’s predecessor, Paula Waters, thought it would be a good idea to use the one occasion when CAMRA has the ear of the national press to suggest that lager drinkers who might be curious about trying real ale were not welcome at the 2006 Great British Beer Festival.

But I’m not going to rant here.  I don’t need to.  As I tweeted over the weekend, it’s far more damning simply to draw attention to what these people say.

It’s just such a shame that when CAMRA is doing so much good, the chairperson – of all people – publicly says something that takes it back to the dark ages, that deliberately antagonises people who are by and large on the same side – people who are in total agreement when it comes to CAMRA’s stated aim: “CAMRA promotes good-quality [sic] real ale and pubs, as well as acting as the consumer’s champion in relation to the UK and European beer and drinks industry”.

The fact that as one of the more visible of those nasty bloggers who has argued passionately for good quality keg ale, I also write the annual Cask Report which has been credited with doing quite a bit to spread cask ale in pubs, is something which seemingly does not compute in this paranoid, binary ‘us and them’ world. For Colin and for Roger Protz – who has also recently attacked ‘noisome bloggers’ for daring to suggest that, after having largely achieved its aim in saving real ale, after forty years CAMRA might just be able to, y’know, evolve to take account of the fact that it’s not 1971 any more – we don’t want to encourage CAMRA to evolve; we want to destroy it and all it has achieved.

I really am not interested in going over the same old “the clue is in the name, idiot” arguments.  Instead, I want to make one observation.

Over the last four years, while I’ve been doing the Cask Report, I’ve spent a great deal of time reviewing research on the reasons why more people don’t drink more real ale more often.  Some of the most important pieces of research have been done with CAMRA.  We work very well together.

The main barriers to cask ale – according to the people who don’t drink it, or drink it only occasionally, are as follows:

  • Lack of knowledge – people simply don’t know where to start
  • Lack of confidence – linked to the above, not knowing what to order.  People regularly say that if samples were offered, they would try them.  The irony is that those who already know real ale are perfectly comfortable asking for samples; those who really need to try samples are not.
  • Lack of a reason – they’re perfectly happy with what they’re already drinking.  (To them, lager is not horrible ‘chemical fizz’, and you’re not going to convince them it is by telling them they have no taste.  And wine is a perfect drink when you want flavour, complexity, sophistication, and something to match with food.)  For most people, while many of the stigmas around real ale have disappeared, there’s nothing about it that makes them think they have to try it.  It lacks the social currency and image values that would make it a cool choice at the bar.  (Remember, this doesn’t apply for everyone – just the vast majority of people who don’t drink it).
  • Issues around quality – it’s inconsistent, and a bad pint can put off a novice for life
  • Image – from some.  It’s important to distinguish between two negative stereotypes here.  The geeky, socks and sandals image of real ale does not exist for mainstream non-drinkers – it’s only people who go to beer festivals already who worry about this stereotype.  But the other negative stereotype – which happens to be completely untrue when you look at the stats – is that it’s a drink for old men with flat caps and whippets.  In the words of one focus group respondent, drinking real ale on a night out is not going to help you pull. 
He’s actually far more likely to be drinking John Smiths Smoothflow, you know.
Those are the main barriers to “promoting good quality real ale” in pubs.  CAMRA know this – they are an active and vital part of the coalition that directs me to write the Cask Report, and some of this is from their own research.  So you’d think that these would be the issues that CAMRA would devote most of its time to addressing.
Instead, an admittedly unscientific trawl of press releases, online chatter, articles and speeches by people like Rog and Col, suggests that in many of their most visible interactions with the public, CAMRA mouthpieces spend most of their time addressing the following:
  • Cask breathers are bad – thou shalt not put a blanket of CO2 on top of thy beer to extend its life
  • Keg ale is bad – bubbles are dangerous
  • Lager is horrible chemical fizz – i.e., it’s bad
  • The tie operated by large PubCos is bad
  • Not being served a full pint of beer is bad
  • Big brewers of real ale buying smaller brewers of real ale is bad
  • Pretty much anything that’s not ‘traditional’ (whatever that means) is probably bad

Now let me be the first to point out that beer festivals, particularly the Great British Beer Festival, the Good Beer Guide, campaigns like Mild Month and so on, do a great deal to promote cask ale in a really positive way.  A lot of what the professional arm of the Campaign for Real Ale does is excellent.  And there are one or two of the issues above that I actually agree with!

But I’m suggesting that what the campaigning arm of CAMRA talks about most is parochial, uninteresting to 95% of beer drinkers, and does nothing – absolutely nothing – to address what CAMRA knows are the biggest barriers to achieving its stated aim.

I’ve never heard CAMRA calling for a widespread campaign to give samplers out to novice drinkers.  I’ve never seen them effectively trying to address the image issue (please, no one even try to suggest the horrible ‘pint head’ thing does anything other than damage real ale’s image further.) In terms of education, one might argue the Cyclops scheme addresses this – except I’ve just been involved with two separate research projects among real ale drinkers and not one person in 15 focus groups across the UK has ever seen it.

MISSING: Have you seen this beer rating scheme?

Keg versus cask, cask breathers etc are of deep, passionate interest to the most committed, active, vocal CAMRA members.  They’re of no interest whatsoever to the average beer drinker – the potential real ale drinker.

Those advocating that CAMRA might consider evolving to reflect the reality of the modern beer scene do so because they recognise that CAMRA has a vital role to play in the promotion of good beer.  We do so because we recognise that setting up a ‘campaign for good keg beer’ entirely misses the point – it makes issues of dispense method and carbonation when these are NOT the issues, and it formalises an antagonistic relationship between two factions of people who are equally passionate about great tasting beer.  I don’t want to bring up the Judean People’s Popular Front again, but seriously, can you not see the parallels?

Whenever I or anyone else says anything like this, the same thing always happens.  Many CAMRA members write to say they agree with me.  One or two, Tandleman being the main example, usually disagree with me but do so in a way that is based on rational argument, engaging with the issues raised and challenging my view of things in a reasonable, constructive manner.  But the people with the loudest voices and the biggest potential to engage in constructive debate shy away from direct argument, retreat to their heartland and make tub-thumping speeches at conferences and in What’s Brewing where they seem genuinely offended and outraged that these newly-imagined enemies of CAMRA even DARE to suggest such heresies, because if CAMRA were to, I dunno, allow Meantime keg beers or Freedom lagers to be sold with gas at beer festivals, before you know it we would all be zombies drinking Watney’s Red – itself miraculously back from the dead.

These two beers are EXACTLY the same.  Can you not SEE that?

Guys – you are doing your campaign – and real ale – a grave disservice.  I know you’ll never agree with me, but can you not at least see that in making this post, I’m not attacking real ale?

Most beer bloggers are passionate real ale advocates – it’s just that we, like the public, judge a beer on how it’s made and how it tastes rather than how it’s served.  And for that, Chairman Col et al think we are the enemy.

The irony is that thanks to his hostile, knee-jerk approach, with this constant paranoid focus on the wrong targets, keg-drinking bloggers like Mark Dredge, Zythophile and RabidBarFly do more to usefully, truly promote real ale to new converts than someone like Colin Valentine ever will.

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

“Lager drinkers are brainwashed morons.”

How CAMRA volunteers greeted guests at the Great British Beer festival a few years ago.

There was a welcome but just a teensy bit patronising piece in the FT on Saturday about how the sandals-and-black-socks twattish image of real ale – and CAMRA – is no longer accurate, particularly given that the latter has doubled in size over the last decade.  The number of – shall we call them ‘characters’ – in society has not doubled, meaning that while some of us may still have issues with the organisation in some areas, it is succeeding in reaching out to a broader base of people.  (And yes, I know some critics believe people are just joining for the Wetherspoons vouchers, and many join and are not active, but still.)

Next month is CAMRA’s 40th anniversary, which is likely to generate a lot more media focus and a lot more debate.

But how’s this for an extraordinary acknowledgement of some of the issues CAMRA has, some of the problems people like me have with the way the organisation can sometimes put itself across?

The following is a quote from Michael Hardman, one of the original four founders of CAMRA back in 1971.  Talking to the FT last week, what do you possibly think he could mean when he says:

“I must point out that we’re not fighting against anything, we’re fighting for something,” he says, as measured as a well-poured pint. “There may be some members who give a different impression and I apologise to the general drinking public for the fact that we’ve recruited those people.”

Any CAMRA member/activist who agrees with these sentiments from their founder – and I know there are many of you – will find no quarrel with me.

Mr Hardman MBE, next time I see you I owe you a pint.

(Thanks to Glenn Payne for pointing sending me the article.)

You might also like...