Category Archives: Generalisations about beer culture

Barmaid as Sex Object

Detail from the cover of London Pub Guide, 1968.

Detail from the cover of London Pub Guide, 1968.

In, we think, around 1970, Cyril Hughes entered and won a competition in left-wing magazine The New Statesman. His contribution was this couplet:

Not turning taps, but pulling pumps,
Gives barmaids splendid busts and rumps.

It is very much a product of the era when sexy barmaids were a marketing asset, and entered the beer geek’s arsenal of ‘beer quotations’ fairly promptly.

Beric Watson, first publisher of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide, made it the basis of his preface to a 1971 book called Hand-Pulled Beer and Buxom Barmaids; Christopher Hutt quoted it in his The Death of the English Pub (1973); as did Richard Boston; and Michael Jackson, too. It was generally used as an illustration of the all round earthy splendidness of traditional draught beer, as opposed to the sterile coldness of big brewery keg.

In 1975, The Daily Mirror quoted Watson as a representative of CAMRA saying: “Pulling pints develops the chest muscles… Girls who serve beer from a pump are going to wind up with better bosoms than those who press a button or throw a switch.” The response from Watney Mann? “We can produce barmaids any time with busts of more than 38 inches–without them ever having pulled a pump.”(ADDED 17/10/2012.)

Michael Jackson expanded further upon the subject in 1976:

…there are two basic types of barmaid: surrogate mothers and surrogate bedmates. The types are quite distinct, though the pub-goer who drinks too much may eventually confuse them, especially if the barmaid in question is of the buxom mould characteristic to her occupation. Not only does beer inflame lust if taken to excess: heavy-beer drinkers are often male-chauvinists. In the days when Nice Girls Didn’t, it was popularly thought that barmaids did… Now that Nice Girls are out of style, so are blousy barmaids. Happily, there are still a few pubs which bulge with anachronisms.

The English Pub

Michael! Eew! (And let’s not bring Freud to bear on those opening lines…) It does seem to be true, however, that the role of barmaid was, in the nineteenth century, not so far removed from that of a sex worker, specifically a clip joint hostess:

Barmaids are a seductive study — a charming institution. Barmaids are born, otherwise they fail… B begins barmaid and B begins beautiful, but it does not therefore follow that all barmaids are beautiful — some are even plain… See the custom a good barmaid attracts!… how clever she is, and what a talanet she shows in making these swells provide her with… chains, rings, brooches, lockets and bracelets… what jealousies and heartburnings she causes among the golden youth by her guileless indecision in the matter of “Sundays out!”.

Fife Herald, 15 February 1872.

Do women working behind bars still feel the gaze of horny, half-legless customers? Probably, but less often, and it’s no doubt more discreetly done. Are they still expected to flirt? If so, then it’s more often couched these days in terms of ‘providing a welcome’, and male bar staff are expected to perform, too. Do publicans still hire  bar staff based on how they look? We suspect that the answer is yes, sometimes, but that having the right hairstyle might have become more important than large breasts.

Pete Brown’s appreciation of a barmaid in Wales suggests that in some places, however, the idea of the ‘sexy barmaid’ lives on, and that where it does, male customers, and male beer writers, are still paying attention.

Pop Will Drink Itself

We have a weakness for music analogies when it comes to talking about beer, perhaps because of the similar levels of geekiness and subjectivity involved in appreciating both.

This weekend, with a particularly weird UK Top Ten singles chart, we found ourselves pondering this question: what is the beer equivalent of pop music? Pop music (a lot of which, by the way, we like, in a chin-stroking, over-analysing kind of way) is:

  • designed to grab your attention
  • to make you want to listen again — it’s ‘catchy’, full of ‘hooks’.

It’s also targeted at the very young and so songs are usually:

  • short
  • repetitive
  • in 4/4 time and
  • ‘loud’ (actually compressed, but that’s a technicality).

What the most successful pop tunes are not is bland: they are not Muzak. Their creators would rather they were irritating than have them treated as background music. So, here’s our first nomination for a ‘pop beer’: Fruli. It’s bright red, sickly sweet and strawberry flavoured — bubblegum, if you like.

But maybe the one-off ‘craft beer’ novelties that so offend some conservative (small c) beer geeks — the Chili Black Belgian IPAs and the like — are also a nod in this direction? They’ve got hooks (“Cucumber! White chocolate! Bright purple!) and offer instant gratification.

Even though we sympathise with the conservative point of view on this, we do think they sometimes sound a bit like this: “Bah. I can’t tell if half of them are lads or lasses with all that hair; can’t make head or tail of the bloody lyrics; does no-one has the attention span to listen to one LP all the way through? And loud!? Don’t get me started….”

The Cult of Beer

It’s Friday and we’re feeling mischievous, so here’s an entirely (mostly) tongue-in-cheek comparison chart.

People’s Temple CAMRA Brewdog
Problems reduced to one simple explanation, repeatedly emphasised Imminent nuclear holocaust. Real ale. Craft beer.
Gain a new identity based on the group Church member. CAMRA member. ‘Punk’ or ‘scamp’.
Isolated from mainstream culture, mass gatherings, access to information controlled People’s Temple Agrictultural Project. Great British Beer Festival; What’s Brewing?; real ale pubs; Good Beer Guide; AGM. AGM, bars, blog, TV programmes.
Charismatic leaders Jim Jones. Michael Hardman and Christopher Hutt. James Watt and Martin Dickie.
Financial exploitation Religious communalism. CAMRA investments; direct debit membership. Equity for Punks.
Exaggerated membership numbers Claimed 20,000; probably had c.5000. “…journalists… began to over exaggerate… how big we were and that perhaps made the breweries take more notice than we deserved.” Graham Lees, 2011. ?
?Persecution complex Believed corporations and government were ‘out to get them’. ‘CAMRA-bashers’, noisome bloggers. Diageo-gate, CAMRA ‘bans’.

If we’re making a point, it’s that no-one should confuse a membership society or a brewery with a Way of Life or Path of Righteousness. If you find yourself preoccupied with or becoming angry about CAMRA or Brewdog, consider deprogramming.

How to grow a beer consumer group

Chart showing growth in membership of beer consumer groups.

The chart above shows membership numbers for the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA, from 1971), the Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood (SPBW, from 1963) and the Campaign for Really Good Beer (CAMRGB, from 2011). Its based on actual data for the first ten years of the life of the SPBW and CAMRA, as given in newspaper articles, and for the first year of CAMRGB. The red dotted line projects CAMRGB’s membership on a linear course, assuming it continues to grow.

You’ll note that CAMRA wins, so far.

If CAMRGB wants to avoid being an SPBW and instead emulate CAMRA’s early success (which it might not) what do its leaders need to do?

1. Avoid vague objectives and changes of course. The SPBW took an initially hardline stance — wooden casks! — which it then watered down. Their stance was never clearly articulated. When pushed, their president would admit that he wasn’t that fussy about beer.

2. Keep it simple. CAMRA started out as a campaign for good beer and against bad beer, with no clearer definition than that. The focus on cask beer emerged towards the second year after the founders visited some pub cellars and asked a few questions. It was dogmatic, yes, but it was an objective that could be expressed in a single sentence.

3. Get some journalists on board. Three of CAMRA’s founders were journalists and more came on board in the first couple of years. They knew how to write great press releases, grab attention and had contacts in the right places.

4. Democratise and minimise the cult of personality. CAMRA’s founders are still occasionally wheeled out even today, but Michael Hardman handed over his role as Chair in 1973, only two years after getting the ball rolling. There was a healthy turnover of committee members from then on, keeping things fresh.

5. Get a corporate sponsor. CAMRA had some solid support from John Young of Young’s brewery, and then later from other regional brewers. Their patronage put money in the campaign pot and gave CAMRA officials time to devote to the campaign. If Brewdog could be trusted to take a back seat, they might be good partners, or perhaps the quietly massive Meantime? UPDATED 18:10 7/9/2012.

6. Be ambitious in engaging the consumer. CAMRA began publishing a newsletter (What’s Brewing) in 1972; the Good Beer Guide in 1974, when the Campaign was only three years old; and launched their first national beer festival in 1975. The SPBW engaged government and annoyed brewers, but did little to talk to drinkers.

7. Be lucky and seize opportunities. There was a buzz about beer in the mid-seventies which CAMRA latched on to. Their big bump in membership c.1973 coincides with the publication of several books on beer and pubs and the launch of Richard Boston’s column in the Guardian. Mind you, there’s a bit of a buzz about beer now…

8. Support regional activism, don’t get sucked into London. The SPBW has regional branches and little central control, but the bulk of its activity was London-based. City of London based, in fact. CAMRA, being founded in the North West, by northerners, and with its first regional branch being founded in Yorkshire in 1972, was much more in touch with life outside the capital from the off. London CAMRA is just another (big) regional branch.

Disclaimers: we’re still members of CAMRA but haven’t yet taken the leap to join CAMRGB, though we watch its progress with interest. It currently has c.500 members and c.2500 followers on Twitter. It is still free to join but accepts donations.

The Global Aspect of Alterno-beer

Detail from a sign reading Praha, Prague, Praga, Prag.

Zak Avery’s latest blog post touches on the links between British and American brewing and how that has contributed to a ‘craft beer culture’. (The penultimate paragraph is particularly perceptive.)

Earlier this week, we set about trying to identify key turning points in the development of what we’re calling (for the moment) an ‘alterno-beer culture’ in the UK and, although we pondered the issue of cultural exchange, weren’t able to pinpoint many specifics.

Surely, though, the development of cheap trans-Atlantic flights from the seventies onwards; the opening up of Prague after the fall of Communism; and the birth of Brussels as a tourist destination with the coming of Eurostar, must all have contributed to a broadening of people’s beery horizons.

It’s certainly fascinating how many brewers, from all over the world, have official biographies which contain variations on this sentence: “Their interest in beer had originally been fired by a visit to Belgium in 1980.” (In this case, that’s beer writer Michael Jackson describing the founders of US brewery Ommegang.)

Of course, the only beer that tastes better than the free stuff is that which you drink on holiday, but isn’t it also natural to take for granted what you have around you? In our case, it took German and American beer to jolt us into really appreciating straightforward British ales, as per Zak’s Australian Chardonnay analogy.

Non-Conformist Brewing

In trying to understand what’s happening with British brewing at the moment, we found ourselves wondering if a meaningful distinction is between those brewers who conform and those who don’t.

Some brewers look at what’s going on around them and do more-or-less the same as the next guy. (Let’s put them in category A.)

Other brewers (let’s put them in category B) set out to do something different.

An example of this would be the golden Summer Lightning (launched in 1987, or thereabouts). At that time, category A brewers were making bitter, best bitter and maybe mild. That’s what everyone made and it was a safe market. Summer Lightning, however, was daringly lager-like in colour and, in its paleness, gave hops chance to shine against a clean malt background.

Brownness had come to be a dividing line between ‘chemical fizz’ and good, honest English ale, but Summer Lightning crossed that line, and did very well as a result.

The same period, the eighties and early nineties,  saw the emergence of the hop experimentalists who took the risk of using ‘weird tasting’ hops from the US, New Zealand and elsewhere in their brews.* They were ahead of their time, perhaps, in commercial terms, but set a generation of British beer geeks and future brewers on a path of which the current obsession with tropical fruit, citrus and mango ‘notes’ is the end point.

Twenty years later, though, the landscape looks different. When all around you are brewing IPA with US and New Zealand hops, and you also brew an IPA with US and New Zealand hops; when you make mad-strong imperial stout, just like the brewery down the road… which category are you in?

We find ourselves looking at those mad fools experimenting with wild yeast in the UK with interest.

* There was nothing new about using US hops, of course, but making a virtue of it, and making their aroma the star, was a new idea. We also recognise that there are shades in between the two categories, and that, in the early eighties, brewing cask ale of any description was pretty out there, compared to the big boys. Sigh. Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

Session #65: Drinking Alone is a Compromise

Tony Hancock capturing the feeling of drinking alone.

This is our contribution to Session #65: So Lonely hosted by Nathaniel Southwood.

We rarely find ourselves alone in the pub because, as a bare minimum, we’ve usually got each other.

When it does happen, it’s rarely by choice, and often as a result of an inconvenience — broken public transport, being stood up by mates or needing to shelter from the rain.

We associate it with being away from home on business and lonely meals in provincial pubs, polished off as quickly as possible, trying to read a magazine while being given the stink-eye by local barflies.

We think of that awful feeling of being in the way, taking up one seat on a table in a London pub as a party of six stands nearby issuing loud passive-aggressive warnings about how there would be somewhere to sit if people were LESS BLOODY SELFISH! (This is not relaxing.)

Boak’s had too many solitary drinks ruined by the circling of creepy blokes wanting to know if she’s got a boyfriend and what she’s reading and whether she fancies a kebab later.

Bailey doesn’t have the discipline to drink alone: without conversation to distract him, he’s three pints down in forty minutes, legless drunk and maudlin.

There are better places to read books than the pub and far better places to find peace and quiet.

Anticipating lots of session posts waxing lyrical about the magic of solitary drinking, we thought we’d let loose our misery-guts tendency. If you need cheering up after this, go to the pub with your mates.

Small Details Add Up

Small detail from a brewery logo.

We’ve written about the variables in beer before, but this post on beer styles by Jeff ‘Beervana’ Alworth made us think more specifically about the tiny variables. These are the things that, on their own, might not be missed but which, together, add up to a unique fingerprint for a beer.

You can measure a beer’s attributes and replicate them and declare it ‘technically the same’; and you can categorise a beer and brew something which matches the ‘profile for the style’; but it’s the sometimes barely perceptible contributions from people, process, place and ingredients that make it what it is.

Chemists can synthesise strawberry flavour by breaking down its chemical components or make artificial musk for perfume. Technicians can replicate the sound of a violin or human voice with synthesis and samples. But, for now, what they end up with is something that works in the mix, if you don’t pay too much attention, and which will never satisfy someone who really knows their stuff.

Without the small details — flaws or wrinkles? — a beer can end up in the uncanny valley.

Could we honestly spot the difference between food-grade acid added to a beer and that which occurs naturally during fermentation and maturation? Honestly, maybe not, but we have tended to perceive added complexity in the beers made with the most roundabout, time-consuming, arcane processes.

But maybe that’s psychological?

Bonus points to anyone who can identify the brewery from the ‘small detail’ in the picture above...

People like to deal with people

There’s nothing wrong with accountants, or making money, or expanding, or modern equipment, but the fact is that we find something unnerving about facelessness.

That’s especially true when it comes to things we’re going to eat or drink. At one extreme, there’s the cake your best friend bakes, decorates and brings to your birthday party; at the other, there’s Soylent Green.

We drink beer from big breweries all the time but, if we had a choice between two identical products, one made by a bloke called Dave who we could (virtually) look in the eye during our transaction, and another from Associated Global Beverages Ltd., we’d go for the former, like a shot. We might even pay a bit more for it. (Probably because of the looking-in-the-eye thing.)

Maybe we’re being mugs; maybe we’re falling for sinister anti-branding branding; and maybe we’re allowing fripperies to cloud what should be a clinical, emotionless appreciation of the beer itself, but, the fact is, we like the feeling of dealing with other human beings. It’s part of the pleasure.

In 1948, you bought a burger from the McDonald brothers. By 1960, you were buying ‘a McDonald’s™’. Carslberg is a beer brand which has, in the same way, become divorced from particular people or a specific place: it’s now a self-preserving, self-sustaining logo, pressing human beings to its service. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you drink its bland international pilsner.

When a big international company takes over a small brewery, it’s hard not to feel a bit sad, regardless of assurances that nothing will change, and despite stern lectures about perspective from those who are less soppy than us. Sorry, we’re just wet like that.

When Did Lager Become Ordinary?

Another nugget from the BFI pub documentary collection: “When lager first appeared in quantity in this country in the early sixties, it was regarded as a luxury drink, and expensive drink,” says a voiceover in A Round of Bass (1972). Not very much more expensive than any other drink, and not just for women, he adds.

Watch the clip from a 1974 episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads above (from 3:25). Terry (James Bolam) is down-to-earth and resolutely working class; Bob (Rodney Bewes) is a well off office worker struggling upwards into the middle classes. Terry drinks bitter while Bob, of course, has a bottle of lager. So, at this point, lager was still the classy choice — a symbol of Bob’s social status.

The first recorded use of the phrase ‘lager lout’ appears to have been in about 1988. At some point in between, lager lost its ‘posh’ reputation. Stella Artois managed to cling on to ‘poshness’, we reckon, until about 2000.

With the emergence of Greenwich’s Meantime and, more recently, Camden, posh lager is back, but we don’t think that, these days, a person’s broad choice of lager, bitter or wine says as much about their social status or aspirations as it used to forty years ago.

Maybe these days, the distinction is between those who choose brands and those who (think..?) they don’t.

Hmm. Ponder ponder.