Categories
Beer history

Golden Pint ’76 Awards

Golden Pints 76

Yesterday, we offered our two penn’orth on 2012, but that got us thinking about how, with inflation in mind, the Golden Pint Awards might have looked several decades ago, just as the real ale craze was kicking off. With thanks to Barm aka @robsterowski for unearthing the original logo, here are some extracts from Boak and Bailey’s Beer Newsletter, December 1976, scanned from the tattered copy kept in a shoebox in the attic.

Scan of text from the December 1976 Boak and Bailey beer newsletter.

15 replies on “Golden Pint ’76 Awards”

How strange that you’ll find today’s hipsters drinking from dimpled glasses just like the one above, as they adjust their manbuns.

I was speaking to a guy who is now one of Hong Kong’s biggest independent beer importers yesterday, who told me he got into “craft” beer in Wisconsin in the mid-1990s through drinking Old Peculier.

Holsten was, indeed, actually quite good (or at least not so bad), until the marketeers got hold of it in the UK and decided to tweak it to make it more like Beck’s, in an attempt to capture some of Beck’s sales. Of course, it failed to do that, and lost all the drinkers who liked it for what it had been …

Richard Boston went on in 1977 to launch The Vole, a ‘Green’ magazine sadly about 20 years ahead of its time which lasted just three years. Contributors included Terry Jones – beery link, he helped fund the Penrhos brewery, one of Wales’s early micros – and Miles Kington, who wrote a fantastically funny column in The Times and then the Independent, and whose father used to run the Border brewery in Wrexham.

Not just hipsters drinking out of dimpled glasses Martyn. If I catch a barperson putting my pint in one, I’ll stop ’em and ask (like Michael Caine in ‘Get Carter’) for a thin glass

Holsten was my tipple at the end of the 1970s and early 80s, could get 10 bottles down on a Friday night, no hangover Sat am as I watched Sally James on Tiswas with a full English on my lap.

Wow what a trip down memory lane. Holsten was indeed the drink of choice for many of us young dudes-all the sugar turns to alcohol, don’t you know-but it was an acquired taste, as they say. Then they started brewing it over here, putting it in cans, bringing out non-alcohol versions and the magic faded. Happy days, though.

Brahnms and Liszt? The one in Manchester? Now, you’re talking.

Comments are closed.