Tag: obit

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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.

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Don Younger – a beer world legend

Don Younger RIP

Last night the brewing world lost one of its best, someone who summed up everything – every last little wave and particle – that is good about the world of beer and pubs.  And that’s no hyperbole – anyone who ever shared a drink with Don Younger could tell you what those qualities are, and how Don encapsulated them.
I was introduced to Don when I was in his hometown, Portland Oregon, while researching my second book, Three Sheets to the Wind.  If I tell you that I have read out the bit about our encounter at every single event at which I was promoting the book, that might give you the first inkling as to what a great man he was.  It was one of the highlights of the book – one of the funniest passages, but also one of the most revelatory about the nature of beer.
I was in Portland because it’s the heart of North American craft beer.  You might now say that’s San Diego, or wherever has produced this month’s latest extreme whisky aged Imperial stout, but Portland still has more craft breweries per capita than anywhere else (I think), and its brewers and drinkers perfectly capture the cooperation, camaraderie and conviviality that make beer great – uniquely great.
And Don was its Godfather, its benign inspiration, in his passion, his kindness, and more than anything else, his legendary drinking prowess.
The story I was told is that he bought the Horse Brass Pub after a night on the piss.  He woke up the next morning clutching a piece of paper bearing his signature, confirming that he was the new owner of the pub. He’d never wanted to run a pub, and had no memory of signing the paper.  He could of course have blamed the booze and negotiated his way out of it.  But he always lived by a strict code: if you make a decision or promise while drunk, you either follow through with it when sober, or you give up drinking.  And Don never gave up drinking.
Under his leadership, the Horse Brass became the hub of the emerging craft beer scene, attracting beer loving locals, many of whom went on to start celebrated breweries.  No one in that brewing scene speaks of him with anything other than love.
Don was 68 or 69, and had a fall last week in which he injured his shoulder.  According to reports, this led to multiple complications, and he died around midnight last night, West Coast time.
I’ll leave it there.  I only met Don the one time and I’ll leave the proper obituaries to the people who were lucky enough to know him well.
But on the basis of one meeting, he was one of my favourite people in the beer world.  Even if you didn’t know who he was till now, take a while to read about him, and raise a glass of your favourite US craft beer to him tonight.  After all, there’s a good chance it may not have existed without his influence.

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Father of Beer Writing Dead

I just learned that Michael Jackson, the Beer Hunter, died this morning. He’s been ill for a long time, and the reports don’t yet say what the cause of death was, but the beer community has been increasingly concerned about his health for some years.

Michael was simply the most famous beer writer, beer advocate, beer fan, beer drinker, in the world. When I was researching my last book, I visited countless breweries around the world, and Michel had been there first. I knew this because people there couldn’t wait to tell me – many of them had framed pictures by the mash tuns, evidence of his visit, a mark of approval, a stamp of credibility to rival any brewing award.

Every single person who ever puts pen to paper about beer (or finger to keyboard I suppose) is influenced by him, whether they know it or not. Because before Michael started writing about beer in the 1970s, nobody did – not in the way we recognise. He was the first champion of Belgian beers, then languishing in obscurity. He was the insipiration for god knows how many microbrewers setting up, a sort of patron saint of the American craft brew industry. He invented the way we write beer tasting notes, often imitated, never equalled.

Because the thing about Michael’s writing was he understood that beer writing should be like beer itself – accessible, democratic, relaxed. His articles welcomed you in and sat you down. He made beer and brewers human, and realised you needed a bit of context around the piece, setting the scene, bringing it to life, if you wanted people to truly engage. He knew that it was only partly about what goes on in the glass – and at the same time made that compelling.

Earlier this year I was at a dinner where he was interviewing two young British microbrewers. The questions he asked them got them to open up and talk about their beer in a way they had probably never done before. He drew them out and made them eloquent. They were in awe of him – to them he was a pop star or movie idol, and they actually insisted on getting his autograph as the interview ended – but he treated them with respect and made them shine.

Coming only weeks after the death of John White, I think the whole community of British writers is just shellshocked now – I certainly am. It’s no exaggeration to say that the whole world of beer has suffered a massive loss.

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