Categories
Beer history

Recipe for a brewing boom

Foaming pint of homebrew.

We’re making good progress on our book and, as we leave the nineteen-seventies behind us, we’ve been reading up about the early 1980s UK brewing boom. In interviews with brewers, one theme crops up time and time again, as in this report from 1983: ‘Raising their glasses to success yesterday were three redundant brewery workers and them man who helped them get back into business… Now THEY are the bosses of Britain’s newest brewery — Aston Manor in Birmingham.(Daily Express, 20 May.)

The theme we’re talking about is, of course, redundancy.

At the very start of 1980, Britain officially entered a fifteen month recession. That year saw a huge bump in the number of redundancies, from 187,000 in 1979 to 494,000. Here’s one of those lovely graphs showing redundancies in thousands during this period.

Graph
Great Britain redundancies (thousands) 1977-1985. Source: figures provided inBritain’s Redundancy payments for displaced workers’, Lawrence S Root, University of Michigan, Monthly Labor Review, June 1987.

And here’s a graph showing new brewery openings in the same period.

Graph
New breweries in the UK 1977 to 1985. Sources: New Beer Guide, Brian Glover, 1988 (1977-1982); Quaffale.org (1983-1985).

The sources for that last chart are flaky, and we’ve got a lot more research to do into the circumstances behind the founding of the 100 or so new breweries that appeared between 1980 and 1983, but it’s probably not going too far to say that the sudden boom in breweries coincides exactly with the highest peak of redundancies, is it?

On a similar note, and also on our to do list, can it be a coincidence that the most recent boom in brewery numbers occured in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis?

(We are, by the way, slowly working our way through editions of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide to compile our database of brewery openings by year, which we’ll make available for others to use once its done.)

Categories
Beer history Generalisations about beer culture

Seventies sexism, pearls of wisdom

The Alps.
The Alps.

When the drays roll out of Paine’s Brewery into the market square of St Neots, Cambridgeshire, with 612 gallons of Silver Jubilee Ale on board, a young lady will smack her lips in the knowledge of a job well done… She is Fiona McNish — an unlikely name for an unlikely lady in an unlikely profession… She is one of the elite in the brewing industry. She tastes beer.

This Daily Express article from 21 February 1977 hinged on the idea that it was hilarious that a woman — a 23-year-old woman at that — should know anything whatsoever about beer. But the important thing — what all 1970s readers wanted to know — was whether she was sexy. Good news!

Fiona, long brown hair, topographical as the Alps, a very feminine lady, has worked her way deep into male territory.

Good grief. When they stopped laughing at her and eyeing her up, and actually let her speak, Ms McNish came out with a nugget of wisdom which holds up pretty well today:

There is nothing mysterious about beer… It either tastes good or bad. You don’t need to be a genius to tell which. Just thoughtful and honest.

Categories
Beer history Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Beer for the super session

Mann's Brown Ale beer bottle.
A lower ABV beer that’s been around for a long time and has its fans.

While our chums across the Atlantic grapple with the idea of tasty beer at less than 5% ABV, British brewers, it seems, are pushing even further downward, seeking to create exciting beers that  nonetheless gesture towards ‘low alcohol’.

There is, it seems, a magic 3% boundary below which it’s hard to make a satisfying pint. We’ve had a couple of crackers, from Brentwood and Harvey’s, but, in bottles at least, c.2.8% beers rarely seem to work. Just above the line, however, we found Brodie’s Citra (3.1%) and Redemption Trinity (3%) to be not only passable but very, very good indeed. We’re also very interested in Simpleton, Magic Rock’s entry into a market they’ve called ‘session IPA’.

It’s a market driven, we think, by consumer demand. For our own part, we like drinking pints, and we like the pub, but we’re terrible lightweights, so beers like this, or 20th century style milds, are perfect. It also makes a lot of sense in a world where ‘craft beer bars’ are banding draught beer prices by ABV: if your beer is the cheapest on offer, while still presenting ‘craft’ credentials, you’ll sell a lot of it.

What’s also interesting to us is that the 3% line was pretty much the line in the sand for the CAMRA campaign in its earliest days: most big brewery bitters were c.3.5% and getting weaker each year, leading to several consumer investigations and outraged newspaper articles. Were Watney et al sweating the details to make sure those weaker beers were satisfying? Probably not. Once again, something that is a problem in a near-monopoly isn’t so much of an issue in a more diverse market.

Maybe it’s time we wrote one of those ‘eight alternativesposts dealing with the word ‘weak’?

Categories
Beer history Germany

Beer halls and duelling in Heidelberg

Beer hall: German student society c.1897.

Mark Twain on drinking and duelling clubs at Heidelberg University in A Tramp Abroad (1880).

Nine-tenths of the Heidelberg students wore no badge or uniform; the other tenth wore caps of various colors, and belonged to social organizations called ‘corps’. There were five corps, each with a color of its own; there were white caps, blue caps, and red, yellow, and green ones. The famous duel-fighting is confined to the ‘corps’ boys. The ‘Kneip’ seems to be a specialty of theirs, too. Kneips are held, now and then, to celebrate great occasions, like the election of a beer king, for instance. The solemnity is simple; the five corps assemble at night, and at a signal they all fall loading themselves with beer, out of pint-mugs, as fast as possible, and each man keeps his own count — usually by laying aside a lucifer match for each mug he empties.

The election is soon decided. When the candidates can hold no more, a count is instituted and the one who has drank the greatest number of pints is proclaimed king. I was told that the last beer king elected by the corps — or by his own capabilities — emptied his mug seventy-five times. No stomach could hold all that quantity at one time, of course — but there are ways of frequently creating a vacuum, which those who have been much at sea will understand.

[…]

There seems to be no chilly distance existing between the German students and the professor; but, on the contrary, a companionable intercourse, the opposite of chilliness and reserve. When the professor enters a beer-hall in the evening where students are gathered together, these rise up and take off their caps, and invite the old gentleman to sit with them and partake. He accepts, and the pleasant talk and the beer flow for an hour or two, and by and by the professor, properly charged and comfortable, gives a cordial good night, while the students stand bowing and uncovered; and then he moves on his happy way homeward with all his vast cargo of learning afloat in his hold. Nobody finds fault or feels outraged; no harm has been done.

Text adapted from Project Gutenberg etext edition; illustration from ‘Duelling in German Universities’, by ‘An English Student’, The Strand Magazine, Vol 13, 1897, p.149.

Categories
Beer history real ale

Local beer for local people

Beer mat detail: Tisbury Local Bitter -- a Local Authority.

We think we’ve identified one of the earliest examples of ‘local’ being used as marketing schtick for a post-CAMRA ‘real ale revolution’ beer.

In 1980, a Victorian brewery building at Tisbury in Wiltshire was taken over by a civil servant, Alistair Wallace, and an ‘executive’, Christopher Baker. With a former Whitbread brewer, John Wilmot, who also had connections with Godson’s in East London (aka Godson, Freeman & Wilmot), they started turning out a beer aimed at the local market. They called it Local Bitter.

Their marketing, handled by a local agency, emphasised that the ingredients were local (‘except the hops’), and that is was brewed to local tastes, to be drunk in local pubs, at a price local people could afford — they undercut the bigger brewers by between three to five pence a pint.

The problem with making a specific location your ‘unique selling point’, however, is the lack of flexibility that comes with it. Like a lot of breweries founded c.1980, they struggled for various reasons, and, for a time, Local Bitter had to be brewed about a hundred miles away at Godson’s, in Bow. The name, during that period, must have seemed a little unfortunate.

Tisbury ceased operations in 1985.

Sources: ‘The local brew adds strength to the village’, Trevor Bailey, The Guardian, 11 September 1981, p.16; Twenty Five Years of New British Breweries, Ian Mackey, 1998.