Category Archives: Generalisations about beer culture

Brewery Numbers Aren’t Everything

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It seems that, between 1980 and 1983, around a hundred new breweries opened in Britain — about as many again as there were in total ten years earlier. Last year, as you’ll have heard repeated over and over, for the first time in a century, there were more than a thousand breweries operating across the UK. London alone now has almost fifty.

But how excited should we be about those numbers?

On the one hand, many small breweries, each brewing a range of beers, means lots of choice for consumers. There are multiple examples of the most obscure varieties of beer on the market — yes, but which British-brewed Berliner Weisse would madam like?

But, on the other hand, some of these breweries are so small, and their beer has so few outlets, that we’re not even sure they really exist in any meaningful sense.

Looking in more detail at the early eighties brewing boom, which was greeted with breathless excitement by beer enthusiasts desperate to believe, it’s notable how many breweries were literally just a bloke with a bucket in his kitchen, or off-the-shelf ‘brewpubs’ jumping on the Firkin bandwagon. Even some apparently bigger breweries were actually small ones occupying corners of grand buildings. Easy come, easy go.

Are there figures for the total number of different beers in regular production knocking about somewhere? Or the number of people employed in the brewing industry? One really interesting figure, following on from this discussion, would be how many breweries are making any kind of profit.

An Unworked Stream with Just Enough Gold

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Panning for Gold

Believe it or not, we’re not completely stuck in the seventies, Life on Mars style: we’ve also spent a bit of time recently talking to the current generation of British brewers, and have a few more interviews scheduled. In particular, we’ve most recently been considering those parts of the industry which, if it hadn’t become a hated buzzword, we might have called ‘innovative’.

The critics are right, though — innovative isn’t the correct word, because there’s rarely anything new being done, even if it’s being presented differently. Let’s express it another way: we mean brewers who are producing beer for which there is apparently almost no market.

They’re making beer which hardly anyone has asked for; which most people won’t like; which will make some people downright angry; and cause many of their peers to look at them with raised eyebrows.

And yet… these brewers are paying the bills, it seems, and finding money to invest in their businesses too boot. They’re optimistic for the future and worrying less about finding new accounts than fulfilling outstanding orders while they await delivery of shiny new fermenting vessels. There was even tentative talk from one exhausted-looking brewer of taking a holiday abroad this year, for the first time in several years.

Maybe they can be likened to bands with ‘one thousand true fans‘? In his 2008 article of that name, Kevin Kelly suggested that was how many devotees a ‘creator’ needed to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

All breweries making freaky beer need to do is find the handful of freaks who will love it.

Tasting Language in the Real World

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Beer is a grand drink.

CUSTOMER
What’s that 1913 Stout? I keep seeing it around on the posters and meaning to try it.

TEENAGE BARPERSON
It’s, er, got chocolate and coffee, er, flavours, and it’s, er, smooth. [Suddenly remembering] Vanilla!

CUSTOMER
It’s actually got coffee and chocolate in? Wow. That sounds interesting.

TEENAGE BARPERSON
It’s an old recipe. They found this old recipe, or something, and, like, brewed it up again, to the old recipe, and that.

CUSTOMER
And they were using chocolate and coffee in beer back then, where they?

TEENAGE BARPERSON
[Totally baffled, backing away] They were, were they? I didn’t know that.

 

THE CUSTOMER TAKES THE BOTTLE BACK TO THE TABLE.

CUSTOMER’S PARTNER
What’s this? Stout? I don’t like stout. Too bitter.

CUSTOMER
No, this is chocolate flavoured, apparently. [Tastes] Ooh, ah, blimey, yeah… Coffee and chocolate and, er, um, vanilla.

CUSTOMER’S PARTNER
[Reading] There’s nothing about chocolate on the ingredients list.

CUSTOMER
Oh. Weird. [Sheepish] Actually, to be honest, it just tastes like sweet Guinness to me.

A Real Obsession With Authenticity

Real Burgers sign.

Though the Campaign for Real Ale weren’t the first to talk about ‘real’ beer, their enormous success in the mid-seventies did popularise the term and, before long, a whole range of other consumer products were having their ‘realness’ assessed.

The very first edition of What’s Brewing contained an exposé of a pub which was pretending to serve beer direct from a barrel on the bar while actually pumping it from a pressurised container in the basement, and it didn’t take long before those were known as ‘fake’, ‘false’ or ‘bogus’ barrels. ‘Fake handpumps’ became a similar source of irritation.

In 1974, Michael Hardman went mad with ‘real’ in an article about the Cambridge Beer Festival for What’s Brewing:

The whole event had an atmosphere of reality. The beer was real. The food was real (bread and cheese). The occasional bursts of music were real. And, most important of all, the people were real. There was no synthetic beer, no processed food, no piped music… typical of the events which big business tries to push on the gullible public of England.

Real people!? This is surely an expression of Phildickian paranoia from a time when people imagined we’d soon be eating flavoured vitamin pills for dinner, confusing androids with humans and listening to nothing but Switched on Bach.

Real fire from the cover of Good Beer Guide 1984.Before long, ‘real lager’ (German or Czech) was being described as the alternative to the ‘ersatz’ license-brewed variety. In 1978, CAMRA voiced its support for CAMREB — the Campaign for Real Wholemeal Bread. The 1983 Good Beer Guide mentions ‘”real” bottled beers’ and includes an article entitled ‘Real Cheese Please’. The 1984 edition (detail from cover, right) contained an article about ‘real fire’ heating as, for the first time, the presence of a suitably authentic blazing hearth was indicated in pub listings.

In the last forty years, CAMRA’s approach has been imitated by various other campaigns, giving us real education, real pet food, real books, real gravy, real milk, real farming, real beauty…

That last, of course, was a marketing campaign by cosmetics company. Hmm. Maybe we need an overarching Campaign for Real Realness, perhaps with a technical committee, to guard against ‘fake real‘?

 

Dairylea Wonderloaf Beer

Isinglass Collagen beer treatment advertisement.

Ron Pattinson’s enjoyably snarky post about keg bitter and craft beer used an interesting turn of phrase: ‘Over-priced, trendy, processed beer’.

Arguably, all beer is processed, unless you are drinking the spontaneously fermented liquid which gathers at the bottom of your grain bucket after heavy rain. But people use the phrase ‘processed food’ to mean something quite particular — that which has been treated, often using patented methods, to make it more ‘stable’ and increase its shelf-life. In other words, where the taste of the product is a secondary consideration after efficient production, easy distribution and stability in storage. (Is that what’s being described here?)

Does processing necessarily result in bad-tasting food and drink? Freeze-dried strawberries covered in chocolate are one of the most delicious foodstuffs known to man, and there are certain purposes for which only a fluffy, sweetened, processed bread will serve. On the whole, though, few people would choose a triangle of Dairylea cheese over a nice piece of ripe cheddar.

Is it easy to decide if a beer has been ‘processed’? Bottle-conditioned beer which has been pasteurised and re-seeded with a clean yeast might resemble unprocessed beer, but it’s actually been subjected to additional processing. Meanwhile, there are an increasing number of kegged beers which are barely processed at all, though they might be in sealed containers.

Reading descriptions of the taste of the much-derided Watney’s keg bitters, one of the most offensive aspects seem to be their sweetness. Is arresting fermentation while sugars remain in the beer, or adding sugar after fermentation, processing? As far as we know, they weren’t bunging in saccharine. (Which, by the way, some rustic, ‘real’ farmyard Somerset cider producers do.)

If a beer is inefficiently manufactured, difficult to distribute, with a short shelf-life, will it taste better? Will it burn twice as bright for half as long? And is ‘processed’ actually the antithesis of ‘craft’?

Sorry for the barrage of questions. This is your classic ‘thinking aloud’ blog post. Answers welcome but not expected.

The Stale Language of Beer

Two glasses of beer.

This guest post on Sophie Atherton’s blog is interesting for several reasons. First, because Ms. Woolgar, not being a fully-fledged beer geek, seems to have been able to react honestly to the beers she tasted without the fog of hype clouding her vision. Secondly, because of some of the language she uses to describe flavour and aroma:

  • a hint of Maltesers
  • a fresh, zesty lemon mousse aroma
  • a slight toasted cumin flavour
  • mustard and cress
  • blue cheese.

That refreshingly original vocabulary, apparently based on gut feeling, is a pleasure to read.

A lot of people, us included, write about beer using words and terms largely informed by Michael ‘Beer Hunter’ Jackson, Roger Protz, and others in that lineage. People will describe ‘horse blanket’ when they really mean ‘that thing you get in that other beer that Michael Jackson said had a horse blanket character’. Who, apart from Adrian Tierney-Jones, has actually smelled a horse blanket? Seriously?

The same goes for ‘styles’. The established style framework has its uses, we think, but Alan is right to ask why there aren’t any/many alternatives. New ways of cutting the deck can be revealing, even if they ultimately fail. For example, we’ve been enjoying and pondering upon Tandleman’s distinction between beers for ‘supping’ and those for ‘sipping’. An entire classification system could be worked up from that — one that reflects the question of ‘sessionability’ while recognising that carbonation, bitterness, balance, and intensity of flavour are arguably as important as alcoholic strength.

Dregs from the Drip Tray

Detail from the cover of Beers of Britain (1975).

Detail from the cover of Beers of Britain (1975).

Here are a few odds and ends which didn’t warrant a post of their own.

  • We’ve updated this post on the Pub Users’ Protection Society with new (old) information from a 1979 edition of CAMRA’s What’s Brewing, including a picture of their famous ‘beerometer’.
  • On a similar note, we’ve stumbled across information on a couple more pre-CAMRA beer clubs — Derby’s Black Pig Society (c.1959) and The Honourable Order of Bass Drinkers (1967). Simon Johnson, who tipped us off to the latter, was surprised to know we hadn’t heard of both of them; if you know of any similar clubs or societies, assume we’re ignorant, and let us know. We love this kind of stuff.
  • The late Michael Jackson continues to give useful advice. Reading the almost hidden preface to his The English Pub (1976) we came across mention of yet another lost pub guide, a copy of which is now on its way to us. Beers of Britain by Conal Gregory and Warren Knock, Jackson says, is a ‘broader guide’ than the GBG. We’ll let you know if there are any nice nuggets.
  • This article from last year by Leigh ‘Good Stuff’ Linley is a cracker. It’s an interview with the founders of North Bar in Leeds marking its fifteenth anniversary, and there are some great reminders that not everyone likes the same thing, e.g. pubs: ‘You’d get the bus from Headingley straight to a club. There was nowhere in between to have a beer, except Pubs.’
  • We keep finding useful ideas in Nairn’s London, and his warning about the ‘dreary finger of good taste‘ struck home. Balance and class are great and everything, but it’s good to have the occasional King Ralph of a beer to keep things lively.
  • Stanley Unwin made an advert for Flowers Keg Bitter in 1959 (‘For the best picket in a brew flade, pick Flowers!) which we’d love to see. It’s not on YouTube as far as we can tell. Any other ideas that don’t involve a trip to London and a private screening at the BFI?
  • A frustrated question: at what point do publicans stop saying ‘there’s no demand for it’ and accept that the fact we’ve asked might indicate that there is hidden demand?
  • Here’s a permanent home for our generic beer infographic.
  • And, finally, why we’re in favour of two-third-of-a-pint glasses: we get out of sync when we’re drinking together, prompting all kinds of up-and-down to the bar to fetch halves, or forcing us to wait for each other. If Boak could drink two-thirds while Bailey drank pints, we reckon that’d be us back in step.

The Decent Pint

Ansell's Mild beer mat (detail)

These days, it seems, every wedding has to be a fairy tale; every book a best-selling tour de force; and every glass of beer a ten-out-often life-changing experience.

This is another example of the inflation of expectation that has taken place in the last fifty years: what early beer consumer campaigners wanted was a ‘decent pint’, i.e. one that wasn’t ‘lousy’. That’s a pretty modest demand.

You might say it shows a lack of ambition — why aim for merely ‘decent’? What’s the point, when you could reach for the sky, chase your dreams, be all you can be, and so on?

Without highs and lows, on a diet of constant mind-blowing brilliance, its easy to lose perspective, and for a beer which is truly excellent by any objective standard to elicit from jaded palates only that monosyllabic response which sums up the age: ‘Meh.’

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.

Of course beer wants you to drink it

Phil ‘Beersay’ Hardy has kicked off another of those periodic rounds of fretting among beer British beer geeks: are we, by definition, in an unhealthy relationship with beer? Do we drink too much, too often? Are we dependent on alcohol?

We don’t think it’s silly to ask this question from time to time, or to consider the possible impact of beer on your own health.

There are those who will tell you, however, that even acknowledging a possible problem gives succor to ‘the enemy’, viz. those who would like to see drinking regulated, marginalised or even banned outright. We say, ignore them: the belief that how much you drink is a personal decision has to go both ways, and if you choose to drink less, that’s your shout.

Some people in the industry, however, do drink a lot, every night of the week, apparently, and at breakfast time, if their Twitter feeds are to be believed. That last is a taboo for many, and one of those safety indicators we use to check our consumption: as long as we still feel queasy at the thought of beer before midday, we’ll feel reasonably happy that we’ve not gone over a cliff just yet.

There are also brewers and publicans who will urge you to go to the pub RIGHT NOW, and make it plain you’re letting down ‘the movement’ if you don’t. You need to up your game, they insist, and drink more. If you don’t drink strong beer, you risk losing it to the taxman and the ‘neo-prohibitionists’. We’re not saying they’re being irresponsible, only that, well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? You should only drink because you want to and if you feel comfortable doing so, not because someone who gains from your drinking is sending you on a guilt-trip.

Of course, it is possible that some people in the industry have lost perspective themselves, being around free-flowing beer all day every day. We remember talking to a former pub landlord over a few jars: ‘I loved running a pub — loved it. It’s what I was put on Earth to do,’ he said, then sighed. He shook his pint glass from side to side and looked at it sadly. ‘But this stuff was just too handy. I got out just in time.’

If you want to take January or any other month off drinking, do it. You’re not letting anyone down by taking a night off, or drinking water in the pub every now and then. And if you’re worried, turn to your loved ones for help or reassurance, not to your drinking buddies, online or otherwise, and certainly not to a publican or brewer.