Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

What Happened to the United Craft Brewers?

United Craft Brewers (UCB) launched in the UK last year and seemed to be a pretty big deal, but has since fizzled out. How come?

Having written about it at some length last summer, and being nosy, we approached one of the founder members, Richard Burhouse of Magic Rock.

Our impression from various interactions over the years — we’ve never met him — is that he’s a relatively straightforward person not prone to spin and we thought we might rely on him to give us a fairly direct answer.

Here’s what we got from a short phone call.

So, what happened?

Like I said when we agreed to speak, there’s not a lot to say. I’m conscious of… I don’t want to criticise any individuals.

The main issue was not being able to come to a definition. I thought we were making progress but it sort of slipped away. It kept falling down on technicalities, like, what happens if you’ve outside influences and investors. What percentage? Etcetera. It was all very nebulous, hard to pin down.

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That Type of Cask Ale…. You Know the One

You know, the type that’s very pale but still has a bit of body… It’s not just about hops… But it’s definitely got hops. Yeah, you could call it balanced, but there’s a problem with that…

On our recent trip up North, without really trying, we stumbled upon a few examples of this which might, we’re beginning to think, be our favourite very specific, hard-to-pin-down type of beer.

Manchester Bitter in a pint glass at the Marble Arch.

Marble’s Manchester Bitter — currently tasting good in both bottle and on cask, by the way — is a pretty good example. It’s not like a bunch of flowers being shoved in your face but nor is it a miserable old bowl of soggy cornflakes. It’s somewhere in between. It tastes zesty, fruity, fresh and very bitter, but it’s not ‘Like drinking bloody grapefruit juice.’ Which leaves space for the actual flavour of malt — the bread-nuts-cracker chewiness that isn’t just a backdrop or a base but a pleasure in its own right.

So, that’s actually balanced, right, in a positive sense? The constituent ingredients are each allowed to express themselves fully, with none overpowering the rest.

We did a bad doodle that might or might not help:

Golden Ales, 1: extravagantly hoppy, 2: boring and flaccid, 3: balanced, shining bright.

Number 1 is your grapefruit beer — a delight in its own way but ultimately one-dimensional. Number 2 is what we think of when we read ‘golden ale’ these days — it might be yellow but only in a sense of the absence of brown; it’s sweet, bland, balanced like an empty see-saw. And number 3 is what we’re into right now — a nice bit of engineering, but nothing flamboyant.

In Liverpool, we had Okell’s IPA (4.5% ABV) which we’d put into this category, though we suspect they think it’s a Number 1 – ‘Said to be hoppier than a hopping mad hopi’. And, in Manchester, at the Piccadilly Tap, Northern Monk Brew Co’s True North (3.7%) struck us as another example, as satisfying as a fresh roll ten minutes out of the oven. Down in Cornwall, Penzance Brewing Co Potion No. 9 fits the bill. (St Austell Proper Job, while hardly over-the-top, is biased towards hops over malt.)

We’re not arguing that this is a distinct style that needs a name or anything but it’s a thing we know when we encounter it.

Any others spring to mind?

Magical Mystery Pour #6: Headlands Pt. Bonita Rustic Lager

The second of Joe Stange‘s suggestions is another canned American lager whose blurb hints at pre-prohibition credibility. Joe says:

“I have never had this beer, but I’m fascinated by the idea of an old-fashioned American lager revival. This one’s from San Francisco.”

We bought it from Beers of Europe for £3.99. Its ABV is 5.3% and the can is big by craft beer standards (US 18oz — 473ml) but also, with its bare metallic finish, brings to mind supermarket own-brand beers and energy drinks.

We drank it in the same session as Ruhstaller’s Gilt Edge and our impressions were definitely influence by the proximity.

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Boddington’s Pump Clips, 1963

Here’s a little detail that caught our eye in the Boddington’s Brewery board minute books, from August 1963: an order for pump clips.

Advertising — Pump Clips.

It was decided to place an order with Nightingale Signs Ltd for 5000 Pump Clips, yellow barrel design, at 3 and 4 each, to be apportioned as follows:-

2500 Bitter Beer
1250 Best Mild
1250 Mild

We didn’t notice any earlier reference to pump clips in these documents, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any — we had half a day to read the lot and might have just missed them. And even if this is the first mention of pump clips, it might just be that no-one bothered to write it down before this point.

But, still, our gut feeling is that this was recorded precisely because it was the first time — it was something new for Boddington’s, and literally remarkable.

We haven’t spent any time studying the subject, really, except when Oliver Gray asked for our input on this article, but our cautious assumption, based on photos and marketing materials like these, from 1984 and 1994 respectively…

Young's Pump Clips 1984 and 1994.

…is that the ubiquity of pump-clips, like logo-printed glassware, is essentially a development of the Big Six era that came alongside TV advertising and the growth of national brands. Before the 1960s, there wasn’t much need for them, because most pubs sold standard beers from the breweries that owned them, and you either wanted a pint, or you didn’t. There was no hard sell, and bars usually looked something like this:

Black-and-white photo: beer pumps without clips. — Ceramic Beer Pumps, by Humphrey Spender, 1938. Copyright Bolton Council Image ref. 1993.83.16.21

Nowadays, a naked pump handle would lead most British drinkers to assume they’d run out of beer, wouldn’t it?

The numbers of pump-clips Boddington’s ordered is interesting, too — a 50/50 split between mild and bitter sounds about right for the early 1960s, when the Financial Times was reporting on the decline of mild and the rise of bitter, kegged or otherwise.

Anyway, that’s it — just a little note for a quiet Sunday. As you were. Carry on.

News, Nuggets & Longreads 09 April 2016: Sheep Dung, Italy, Scotland

Here’s all the reading about beer and pubs that’s made us sit up and take notice in the last week, from sheep dung beer to brewery takeovers.

→ It’s easy to scoff at the silly things silly craft beer sillies but in their silly beer but what if the novelty ingredients have a connection to regional traditional, like salted cod or malt smoked with sheep droppings? Knut Albert reports from Iceland and (spoiler alert) says, ‘the shit does not give any pronounced flavor’.

→ Food 52 has an interview with Rome-based food and drinks writer Katie Parla in which she reflects on why Italian craft beer is so expensive, and so exciting: ‘It’s one of the few facets of food or drinks culture here that is, by definition, creative.’ (And there’s a brief companion piece by Parla herself here.)

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