Tag: real ale

| 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.

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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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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?

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FINAL Video Blog – It’s August. It’s GBBF!

I would say it’s been a long twelve months but it only seems like last week that our motley crew assembled in Nottingham for the first time, to talk to last year’s Champion Beer of Britain one month on from GBBF 2010.

That’s when we began our series of 12 monthly video blogs over the course of the year, financed solely by Peter Amor of Wye Valley Brewery, who wanted to put something back into an industry he felt he’d done rather well out of.

Peter’s brief was strictly to champion British real ale, and to address the lack of pride and attention we have for it.  Regular readers will know I’m becoming increasingly frustrated by partisanship and the creation of false enemies within the beer world, no matter what side it’s on.  Single-minded real ale advocates have long been the worst for this, but craft beer snobs are making efforts to catch them up.

But wherever your own beliefs lie, no one can argue that British real ale, while not entirely unique, is one of the most special, individual, eccentric, flavoursome, well crafted beers in the world.  It is the only style of beer that can pack in a flavour explosion at 3.8% (excepting beers that are so hop-imbalanced they’re undrinkable – and I say that as a hophead).  Belgian and American beers are just as wonderful on their day – but they only seem to start being so at around 5% ABV.

If real ale were French, it would no doubt be iron-clad in appellation controlees and EU Protected Designations of Origin. It would be as famous globally – and as celebrated in its homeland – as Bordeaux wine, French cheeses and foie gras.  It is a peculiarly English trait to be indifferent or even negative about things we’re good at.  I’ve never met a single non-real ale drinker who nevertheless sees our brewing prowess as something to be proud of, and I’ve met many real ale drinkers who believe it is not.

So even though I get frustrated with Old CAMRA diehards and am personally at least as likely to enjoy an American craft beer or German lager as I am a pint of best bitter, I was proud to be asked to co-present these blogs.  We’ve toured the country, seeing a year of beer first hand, trying many excellent ales and meeting people from brewers large and small who love their craft.  Every pub we’ve drunk in has been of outstanding quality.  We’ve hopefully shown that Britain really should be proud of its beer and its pubs.

This final blog is from GBBF 2011 – edited and finished in time for you to watch it and then go along and try both the beers and the atmosphere.  We both use the occasion to make some points we’ve come to feel strongly about on the journey.  And I get to taste some beers that we missed along the way, several of them among my all-time favourite real ales.  We didn’t get chance to get everywhere in the country, and I’ll always regret missing out Yorkshire and, to a slightly lesser extent, Kent and Sussex.  But maybe there will be chance of another series.

Anyway – hope you enjoy the blog:

Thanks to Eggy, Kaz and Dave, to Ian for channeling an exasperated primary school teacher as he tried to direct and produce us, and especially to Mr Amor for the funding, the cantankerousness, and most of all the hats and bow ties.

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“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.)