Categories
Beer history pubs

How Many Pubs Are We Actually Losing?

We were surprised to note from Ron Pattinson’s very useful compilation of beer- and pub-related statistics that the number of pubs in England and Wales increased in the forty years up to 2001.

What is particularly confusing is that numbers from the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) seem to show the opposite. Here they are plotted against each other on a graph:

Graph: UK Government statistics (England and Wales) via Ron Pattinson vs. numbers given by the  BBPA.
UK Government statistics (England and Wales) via Ron Pattinson vs. numbers given by the BBPA for the whole of the UK.

Perhaps the BBPA are defining ‘pubs’ very precisely? Guess we’ll have to save up for a copy of their Bumper Book of Statistics to find out.

We haven’t yet identified a set of UK Government figures that deal specifically with pubs over a very long period, but the graph below is based on their numbers for licences to sell alcohol in England and Wales for 1960 to 2010. (We’ve also used UK population stats from Wikipedia to give a rough on-licence-per-head indicator.)

Graph: on licenses, off licences and on licences per head.

Even assuming that a good number of those new licences are for cafes and restaurants, this doesn’t seem to show a catastrophic collapse in the number of places where booze is available.

This is, of course, just an early morning pondering session, and we’re not drawing any firm conclusions just yet, but we do have a theory: if pubs are closing en masse, it is in post-industrial communities, and is a symptom of localised economic decline rather than a wholesale rejection by communities of the very idea of the pub.

We’ll let Ron have the final word, from a note accompanying his statistics page: ‘All I can remember are pub closures and derelict boozers on every other corner. Just shows the value of subjective observations.’

Can anyone point to reliable statistics on the numbers of pubs opening and closing, ideally from a source other than an industry or lobbying group whose argument depends on a story of woe?

Categories
American beers beer reviews Beer styles

Two American Wheat Beers

Two American wheat beers from Fordham and Widmer Bros.

‘I’m such a huge obsessive enthusiast for American wheat beers,’ said no-one, ever.

After our recent experience with a Japanese wheat beer that brought nothing to the table, we had low expectations for these two specimens from Widmer Brothers and Fordham. We were pleasantly surprised by both, at least in terms of their difference from other wheat beers on the UK market.

The Original American Weizen

Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen (4.9% ABV, £2.19 330ml from Noble Green Wines) has been around long enough to have earned an ‘oral history’, being first brewed in 1984. Its claim to fame is that it invented a new ‘style’, American Wheat: despite its otherwise German-inspired recipe, it is not fermented with the famous yeast strain that makes Bavarian wheat beer smell like bananas.

Or, to put it another way, it is German wheat beer without the very thing that makes it so distinctive. Curry without all those stupid spices. Opera without all the singing.

We expected something like Erdinger Alkoholfrei, especially given its journey across the Atlantic, and it had the same dirty, dusty look about it. But — phew! — it was actually bright and fruity — a wholesome multi-grain health food of a beer. (The Portman Group can’t tell off bloggers, can they?) In lieu of bananas, we were reminded of pineapple cubes. There was a spot of spiciness, too, that brought to mind Chimay Gold.

One complaint: we’d have liked a bigger bottle, as this is a beer to be drunk by the pint without too much pondering or pontificating.

Too orangey for crows

Fordham Wisteria (4% ABV) was one of a case of samples we were sent by the brewery’s UK distributor last month. Though it is an American wheat beer, it is not an American Wheat, if you see what we mean, being fermented with the ‘authentic’ Bavarian yeast.

It needed more carbonation and sparkle — not something that can be said of most German wheat beers — and its semi-flatness made it look unappealing in the glass, and taste somewhat sickly.

As well as the expected banana, we also thought we detected orange oil, and a spot of rose-water. It had a dry chalkiness, presumably from the suspended yeast that made it cloudy, which helped to counteract some of the toffeeish malt and fruitiness.

That malt might be this beer’s other problem: it is dark orange in colour, exactly like wheat beers we’ve bodged together at home using English pale ale malt rather than the prescribed super-pale pilsner malt. We would probably prefer it if it had been made with a paler base malt, and with more wheat in the mix.

After all those complaints, on the whole, we liked it, and would drink it again.

Categories
Uncategorized

Fordham Flower on Keg vs. Cask

“[A] fair description of a beer keg is a smallish metal cask, from which beer is dispensed by carbon-dioxide pressure, and of which the three essential properties are: an ability to be sterilised, a capability to withstand fairly high pressures, and… a perfect and unalterable measure… The first container casualty has been the traditional wooden cask, which falls down on all three counts.

Sad though this is for those of us who were weaned on ‘beer from the wood,’ the advent of the metal cask, the only major change in centuries for containing draught beer, is not really as revolutionary as some people think. All that has happened is that familiar materials, like stainless steel and aluminium, have been developed and fashioned in known ways for a new purpose.”

Sir Fordham Flower, Chairman of Flower’s Brewery, 1962, explaining the benefits of ‘space age keg’.

Categories
Blogging and writing

Bits of Yolk From the Pickled Egg Jar

Detail of the cover of 'More About Inn Signs'.
Detail of the cover of ‘More About Inn Signs’, kindly scanned for us by Mark Landells.

Here are a few things we’ve spotted around and about that prompted a thought or two.

1. This interview with James Watt from the Daily Mail contains the most concise summary yet of the contradiction at the heart of Brewdog: ‘behind all the anarchy there’s a very stable profitable company’, he says. They’re KER-azy, but also very sensible; anti-corporate, but also… really corporate. What a balancing act.

2. Has anyone ever published a book of Michael ‘Beer Hunter’ Jackson’s columns for CAMRA’s What’s Brewing? If not, they should. Here he is talking ‘big picture’ in May 1985:

For consumers who wanted a beer of some character, real ale was shown to be more satisfactory than keg bitter. On the other hand, keg was also unsatisfactory to drinkers who wanted a bright, refreshing beer. They eventually defected to bland lagers… The real ale movement may, in fact, have encouraged a polarisation of public taste in beer… [At one end of the market] there is a growth in interest in products of quality, character and tradition, and at the other end… a demand for bland, light flavours; the middle ground is vanishing.

3. There’s been a flare-up in attempts to define ‘craft beer’. Here’s ‘Hardknott’ Dave Bailey’s take on the efforts of one drinks industry consultancy firm to pin down a working definition; and here’s Max Pivni Filosof Bahnson (via Lars Marius Garshol) with a very hard-line approach. CGA’s effort would benefit from the expertise of, say, Pete Brown; and Max’s reminds us of something David ‘Firkin’ Bruce said:

[At H.G. Simonds in Reading] it was… real ‘craft brewing, not in the current American sense. I was a wooden spoon brewer. I’d never get a job as a ‘proper’ brewer, in a ‘proper brewery, because they only wanted Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt microbiologists, but I could certainly brew. 

4. Beyond the blog, we’ve posted a few new things on Facebook, such as this small gallery of images of Dirty Dick’s on Bishopsgate in London (apostrophe important…); and, on Twitter, people seemed to find this interesting.

Categories
Beer history pubs

Pubs: Forget Sky Sports, Get Rats!

Billy the celebrated rat-killing dog.
Billy the celebrated rat-killing dog, 1822.
The grand consumption of rats… is in Bunhill-row, at a public-house kept by a pugilist. A rat-seller told me that from 200 to 500 rats were killed there weekly, the weekly average being, however, only the former number; while at Easter and other holidays, it is not uncommon to see bills posted announcing the destruction of 500 rats on the same day and in a given time, admittance 6d. Dogs are matched at these and similar places, as to which kills the greatest number of these animals in the shortest time.

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor1851.

Mock up of a flyer quoted by Mayhew.
Our mock-up of a flyer quoted by Mayhew.

* * *

I now propose laying down a few abstract questions for the due consideration of our worthy magistracy, as to the propriety of their interference in rat-matching, &c. The first point I would wish to draw their attention to, is the case of the rat-catcher of Witnesham in Suffolk, who brought, in twenty-one weeks, to one public-house in Ipswich, no less a number than 11,465 rats, which he sold at two shillings and sixpence per dozen. This man, in this short space of time, took from the public-house the sum of £254; and all these were genuine barn-rats, which were brought for the purpose of training dogs, matches, &c…

I shall now lay before you the complaint of a landlord of a tavern. His house was situated about a stone’s throw from the police-station. Here he was landlord for seven years and, though considered something of a sporting house, still, during that period, he declared that not one case of disturbance ever went from his tavern to the station… Yet because this man had rat-matches in his establishment, and trained dogs in the art of rat-killing, he was persecuted… till he was compelled to leave his house.

James Rodwell, The Rat: its history & destructive character, 1858.

* * *

In 1812, a RAT of astonishing Size, was killed at a Public-house, in East Clandon, near GUILDFORD; it measured from the tip of the Nose, to the end of the Tail, two Feet three inches, and was of proportionate Bulk. It is supposed, he had infested the Cellar, where caught, for Years, and the Landlord calculates, he had drank at least a Barrel of Beer, out of the Tap-tub, and eat upwards of a Bushel of Bread, besides a Quantity of Other Provisions.

William Barker Daniel, Supplement to the Rural Sports, 1813

* * *

With apologies to the squeamish, this post was inspired by reading E.S. Turner in Angus McGill’s anthology Pub (1969), and Kellow Chesney’s The Victorian Underworld (1970). Now let us never speak of rats again.