Categories
Beer history real ale

Cheating by Making Tasty Beer

Watney Fined Bitter beer mat.Last week, everyone got in a proper tizz over an eccentric rant about ‘craft keg’ in the programme for a local beer festival. We thought it an interesting statement of a particular (extreme) point of view, and were especially fascinated by this line:

The only thing that has changed 1974 to 2013 is that cynical Craft brewers, in an attempt to hide the potentially bland characteristics of their beers, have chosen to champion the new breed of super hopped US-style IPAs and or sledgehammer Imperial Stouts among their beer range.

The suggestion seems to be that giving these beers intense flavours and aromas is a con trick designed to dazzle the drinker into overlooking the essential soullessness of the product, ‘blandness’ being misused in this context. (The music is really loud to conceal its potential quietness?)

It brought to our minds the time in the nineteen-seventies when the Big Six began launching or re-launching cask ales, once CAMRA had become a serious nuisance. They were not mainstream products, on the whole — you had to know where to look, and be willing to pay through the nose — and only Ind Coope Draught Burton Ale really seems to have excited anyone. Nonetheless, CAMRA’s National Executive were obliged to welcome them. There was some dissent — arguably the original ‘craft vs. crafty’ debate — but what else could CAMRA do, having built the Campaign around the simple rule that cask=good and keg=bad?

We can’t help but feel that, in some mysterious way, it was an underhand tactic on the part of the brewers. Echoing the writer above, weren’t they, in an attempt to hide the potentially bland characteristics of their beers, and the monopolistic tendencies of their huge companies, choosing to champion the then hot trend for ‘real ale’?

Sometimes, the relationship between commerce and consumer feels less like a battle, with obvious winners and losers, and more like Cold War espionage, where the moves are subtle, and the outcome won’t really be clear for years to come. In a situation like that, those with rigid rules are easily outmanoeuvred.

Categories
Beer history beer in fiction / tv

What did John Lennon say about beer?

The Beatles in the pub.
‘Two lagers and lime and… two lagers and lime, please.’ Help (1965)

Nev, who recently made 800 posts on his long-running beer and music blog, mentioned the other day, in passing, a quotation from John Lennon that we’d not previously come across:

The price of fame is not being able to go to the Phil for a quiet pint.

‘The Phil’ is the Philharmonic, a pub in Liverpool. We love the Beatles almost as much as we love beer and pubs, so we liked this a lot, but we’ve also been fretting about sources a lot recently. Aware that 99 per cent of beer quotes, just like statistics, are either made up or inaccurate, we decided to look into it.

The fact is, we can’t find any reference to where or when Lennon is supposed to have said the above. Some websites quote other websites. Most just say that he ‘famously’ said it, or that he said it ‘once’ to a reporter. The earliest reference in print, according to Google Books, is the Let’s Go guide to Europe from 2000.

That doesn’t mean he didn’t say it, but we can’t help wondering if the attribution ought to be a clever brewery PR man or pub landlord. Chris Routledge had this to say on the subject:

Did Lennon talk about beer, pubs or pints at all? We did find this interview from 1971 which includes a classic bit of Lennonian belligerence:

As kids we were all opposed to folk songs because they were so middle-class. It was all college students with big scarfs and a pint of beer in their hands singing folk songs in what we call la-di-da voices- ‘I worked in a mine in New-cast-le’ and all that shit… mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It’s all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group. Today’s folk song is rock and roll.

We think he’s trying to wind up Nev and Phil, and pre-emptively taking a pop at CAMRA two months before they even existed. He certainly manages to give ‘pint of beer’ a particularly sneering spin.

Astrid Kirchher, a friend from the Beatles’ time in Hamburg in the early sixties, recalled, in the 1996 Anthology TV series, that, when Lennon drank beer as young man, it was because it was cheap, and a particularly effective accompaniment to Preludin pills (uppers). In the accompanying book, also talking about Hamburg, Paul McCartney says the he was the last to make the move (the upgrade?) to taking drugs, having said, until then: ‘Oh, I’ll stick to the beer, thanks.’

If you happen to know the interview where Lennon mentioned ‘the Phil’, or have come across him or any Beatle saying anything else about beer or pubs, we’d love to know. You might also enjoy this longish piece on rock music and pubs which mentions Ringo.

Categories
Beer history homebrewing

Happy Maudlingsday, Home Brewers!

Reginald Maudling as proud mother of the 1963 budget.
Reginald Maudling as proud mother of the 1963 budget.

Fifty years ago today, Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling made this statement as part of his spring budget speech:

Under the present law, people who brew beer either for their own consumption or, in the case of farmers, for consumption by their workpeople are required to take out an Excise licence and, in some cases, to pay duty based on the Schedule A valuation. The amount of revenue involved is very small indeed, and is probably less than the cost of collection. The abolition of the Schedule A valuation system provides a convenient opportunity for getting rid of these licences. So the private citizen will have the same freedom to brew beer as he already has to make wine.

He didn’t legalise home brewing in Britain, but he did remove the requirement to register and pay for the privilege.

What effect did this have? It led to a boom in home brewing supplies available on the high street, instead of through a handful of specialist suppliers. It meant that home brewing ceased to be a clandestine activity (few people actually registered — they just did it in secret) and prompted a flood of books and columns.

Among the first handful of new British breweries in the seventies, one was based on a back-room plastic fermentor, and another was founded by the owner of a home brewing supply shop.

Now, years down the line, there are quite a few new British breweries being started by home brewers. Would many of them have even got started if they’d needed a licence? Even if they had brewed, in secret, would they have become as good as they are without the option to talk openly with their peers online?

Categories
Beer history Blogging and writing

No Beer in the Archives, Please

1970s radio
Detail of photo by David Martyn Hunt from Flickr Creative Commons.

Because beer and pubs aren’t, frankly, seen as terribly important (example…), lots of their history is depressingly poorly documented.

Everyone knows that Michael Young, later Baron Young of Dartington, described CAMRA in ‘the mid-seventies’ as ‘Europe’s most successful consumer movement’, right? But how do we know this? Because, from the late-seventies, it entered CAMRA folklore, and got repeated endlessly.

But how do we know he really said it? If he did, what were his exact words, in what context? We think we’ve pinned down the time and place — at the 1976 National Consumer Congress in Birmingham, on 17 September that year — but trying to find an official record is proving difficult. The National Consumer Council doesn’t exist any more and no-one at its successor organisation recalls seeing papers from as far back as the seventies in the archive. They were, we suspect, thrown in a skip during an office move.

All we have, so far, is this tantalising clue from coverage of the event by The Times:

Many agreed that they could best achieve their aims by working together, but a representative from CAMRA said his organisation had only been successful because it had adopted an entirely self-interested position.

Then there’s the radio programme on which members of the CAMRA National Executive appeared in the early seventies. After much digging, we have worked out when it was broadcast and on which station (BBC Radio London, in around May 1973, as part of the Platform strand) but no recording exists in the BBC’s collection (‘there was no policy of archiving output until much later’). We’d love to hear it, not least because John Young of Young’s Brewery, a fascinating character, was also on the panel.

Not everything can be preserved, we know that, but it’s sad that moments like these, almost in reach, and which played out in front of cameras and tape recorders, seem to have disappeared.

Categories
Beer history Generalisations about beer culture

All this History is Making us Thirsty

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale 1981.

Researching, reading and writing about the history of beer can feel rather remote from the important business of actually drinking the stuff but, nonetheless, it has made us crave some very specific beers.

We want to drink Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in the California sun, ripe with Cascades, with yeast ‘an inch thick in the bottom of the bottle’, and flavour so powerful we can ‘taste it on the bus home’.

We’d like pints of Marston’s Pedigree in Burton on Trent, bursting with orange aroma, and so profoundly brilliant that they seem to make time stand still.

Or how about a shared four pint stoneware jug of the local brew on a village green in Cheshire?

Timothy Taylor Landlord, tasting of grapefruit and tangerine, without having been near a ‘New World’ hop, would hit the spot.

Actually, what would be perfect is several jars of palate-stripping, bone-dry Young’s Bitter — too much for most people to handle — or of a similarly grown-up-tasting Boddington’s.

The problem is, few of these beers exist any more. Yeast strains have been ‘cleaned up’, bitterness levels have been reduced, and breweries have closed, moved or been refitted. All that remains, in most cases, is the name, and whispers of the flavours and aromas which once inspired people. Some of these beers are, today, embalmed corpses.

Fortunately, there are living, exciting beers — descendents of those listed above — which we can drink. You can’t, after all, get much flavour from a trademark, but the spirit lives on.