Category: Generalisations about beer culture

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Generalisations about beer culture

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.

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Beer history Generalisations about beer culture

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). It’s 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.

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Generalisations about beer culture

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.

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Generalisations about beer culture opinion

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?

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Generalisations about beer culture opinion pubs The Session

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.