Categories
Beer history Blogging and writing

Mapping Trends in British Beer

This is something we’ve been doing to help keep track of the narrative of British beer that is emerging as we research and, having enjoyed this conversation over at Ed’s blog, we thought we’d share it.

UPDATED 12:12 4 July 2013: an important line was missing between ‘real ale’ and ‘weird real ale’.

Graphic mapping trends in British beer over the last fifty years.

Notes

  1. This isn’t attempt to define terminology or push anyone into a box, but to reflect how we think people use some of these terms, and to track the ‘DNA’ of various trends.
  2. It’s simplified: we could have added quite a few more boxes (‘Real Lager’, ‘Revivalist IPA’, ‘World Keg’…) but have chosen not to, for now.
  3. There is a judgement reflected here: we’re more interested in and enthusiastic about the stuff in blue.
  4. Sorry about ‘weird real ale’ — we couldn’t think of anything better. It is intended to encompass everything ‘innovative’ (i.e. diverging from traditional styles) from Hopback Summer Lightning onward. (So that means Sean Franklin, Brendan Dobbin, Passageway and so on.)
  5. UPDATE: it’s not a graph, it’s just a kind of family tree.
Categories
pubs

Bars and Pubs and Clubs

Dada bar in Sheffield.

Last week, we interviewed the founders and owners of North Bar in Leeds, arguably the first ‘craft beer bar’ in the UK, and, in the course of our conversation, asked: ‘So, what makes this a bar rather than a pub?’ After much head-scratching, they had to admit defeat: they didn’t know. ‘But we know a bar when we see one.’

Here’s a quiz, then: are the following bars, or pubs, or something else?

  1. Dada, Sheffield
  2. Craft Beer Company, Islington, London
  3. Craft Beer Company, Clerkenwell, London
  4. The Parcel Yard, Kings Cross, London
  5. any branch of All Bar One.

A pub has to sell beer, but then so do most bars. A bar is more likely to sell cocktails, but some don’t, and some pubs do. Pubs are more likely to be brown, while bars will have white/cream/grey walls, but white-painted pubs and brown bars do exist… no, this isn’t getting us anywhere.

In the introduction to her 2002 book Bar and Club Design, Bethan Ryder defines bars as follows:

They are modern, spectacular forums, underpinned by the ideas of display and performance, rather than utilitarian, more casual places in which people meet, drink and gossip — such as the pub…

We’re not sure that works — North felt pretty casual, for example, but is definitely a bar. She also, however, says this in attempting to define the nightclub: ‘…to a certain extent they have always been whatever a… pub is not.’ Now that, vague as it is, might work as a definition of a bar.

As, perhaps, might this: a pub should always feel as if it is in the British Isles; whereas a bar should feel as if it is in Manhattan, Stockholm, Moscow or Paris.

If you think you’ve got it cracked, let us know in the comments below.

Our answers would be 1) bar; 2) pub; 3) bar; 4) something else; and 5) chain pub with pretensions.

Categories
Blogging and writing

Book Review: Government Intervention in the Brewing Industry

Worthington E Keg Beer

Government Intervention in the Brewing Industry (cover)Sooner or later in our journey through British brewing in the last half century, we knew we were going to have to look into that most thrilling of topics: the effects of government legislation on the industry. This book, originally published under the title Intervention in the Modern UK Brewing Industry in 2011, was recommended to us by several people as something of a definitive account.

The first point to note is that it is written by people associated with the big brewers: two of the writers, John Spicer and Simon Ward, worked for Whitbread; Chris Thurman was a longstanding employee of the Brewers’ Society (dominated by the Big Six); and John Walters was a stockbroker ‘specialising in the drinks and pubs industries’. This has obvious advantages, and disadvantages: their impressive inside knowledge of the processes, papers and committees is possibly offset by more than a few unsubtle attempts to direct the reader to conclude that the ‘unintended consequences’ of the Beer Orders were A Bad Thing, and sometimes without convincingly demonstrating cause-and-effect.

We don’t want to understate the good points. This is an extremely readable book considering the potentially dry subject matter. It makes extensive use of primary sources and is well-referenced, and yet still has a driving narrative, with good use made of recapping and summaries to structure the story and keep the reader afloat. The book manages to summarise the 1989 Supply of Beer report (three years in the writing; takes about the same to read) in a few efficient pages. There are lots of solid facts and tables of statistics. It is indeed, authoritative, and lives up to its aim of demonstrating wider lessons about the unintended consequences of government intervention.

A succinct history of enquiries since the mid-sixties makes the point that both Labour and Conservative governments kept coming back to the question of the beer tie, usually in the context of discussions about pricing (these were the days when prices for virtually everything were set by Government boards, and brewers had to apply to put prices up).  But we don’t feel the authors really explain why successive governments were increasingly obsessed with the issue. Could it be that they were reflecting a groundswell of popular opinion that something was wrong with the industry? Tellingly, the Campaign for Real Ale doesn’t get a mention until the story reaches 1985, and, even then, it is as if they appeared from nowhere. SIBA isn’t mentioned until the post-Beer Orders analysis and in the brief discussion of progressive beer duty.

There is a tension in the pre-Beer Orders part of the book between, on the one hand, the tendency to downplay accusations that the big brewers acted as a cartel, and, on the other, the depiction of a united front of brewers battling a succession of pesky interfering governments. This is a history that is centred on the big brewers as represented by the Brewers’ Society, at least in the main part of the book.

These may be churlish criticisms, given the background of the writers, and that their aim was to look at government intervention, not consumer or producer revolution. To us, the the rights and wrongs of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) report is an interesting debate, but the question we’re really interested in is why was there (initially at least) such popular and official support for its conclusions. How had things got to a stage where absolutely no one had a good word to say for household names such as Watney’s and Whitbread?

The book has given us a very fresh perspective on the history, and emphasised areas that can be lost in some versions of the history. For example, the role of Guinness (a major player but without a tied pub Estate) in lobbying for reform, and in undermining the Brewers’ Society during negotiations with the Department for Trade & Industry (DTI) prior to the Beer Orders being passed. There are plenty of other nuggets that may provide food for future blog posts, such as the ongoing debate on lager pricing and whether it does cost more to produce.

Some of the details in Government Intervention have prompted a fair bit of discussion in Boak and Bailey Towers. Why, for example, did some big regionals such as Vaux give up on brewing, while others, such as Greene King, stuck at it? Incidentally, the book doesn’t make the case that the Beer Orders hastened the demise of Vaux, and in fact points out that the former Chief Executive of Boddingtons said that the company had decided to abandon brewing before the MMC report.

The book’s final analysis of the impacts of the Beer Orders is nuanced, and explores various angles, but does ultimately tend to the conclusion that harmful trends in the industry during the last twenty years (decline in numbers of pubs, increases in the price of beer) are due to the Beer Orders.

Now, having read their not-entirely objective analysis, we’d love to speak to the authors as actors in the drama.

We bought the recently printed paperback (print-on-demand?) edition at a very reasonable £18 from Amazon. The 2011 hardback will set you back something like £65. Some of it is available to preview at Google Books.

Categories
Beer history breweries Generalisations about beer culture

The Town Pale Ale Built

Molson Coors brewery in Burton upon Trent.

Arriving in Burton (upon Trent; on Trent; -on-Trent), the first thing we noticed was the smell: as in Bamberg, the aromas of brewing and associated industries are thick enough to catch the breath. Though the town feels run down, it is still hard at work making beer, and enormous branded lorries thunder by every few seconds: Carling, Carling, Worthington’s, Hobgoblin, Carling, Grolsch, Pedigree, Carling, Carling…

We took our time getting to the National Brewery Centre, via the Unilever Marmite factory and Marston’s (‘Mild, Strong, Pale’). We knew we were nearly there when we spotted a forlorn Burton Union — wooden barrels, pipework and yeast collection trays — in the corner of a car park sheltering under what looks like a cowshed.Joule's of Stone brewery advertising.

It’s a funny old place, the museum. The history of beer and brewing, and Burton, and Bass (with historian-baiting myths present and correct) are crammed into one large room at the start, like a kind of ‘executive summary’. Ephemera ripped from the walls of the old brewery, such as a fire notice from the nineteen-fifties with instructions for the ‘Senior Barmer’ and ‘Senior Getter-down’, are the highlights. The explanation of the Union system, complete with cutaway, is also the clearest we’ve come across.

This being built by a ‘Big Six’ brewer in its final death throes, and then maintained by Coors, the wording is careful throughout: it was great how they used to do it in the old days, but it’s just as good now, in a different way; the Burton Union was very interesting, but dirty and inefficient; nostalgia is fine, but progress is good, too; Joule’s of Stone was a lovely old brewery and all that, but time marches on! And so on.

whiteshieldcarExiting, we followed a red line painted on the ground which leads us through a collection of drays and pub signs, past some docile shire horses the size of dinosaurs, and out into the midst of a collection of vintage brewery vehicles. The Worthington White Shield ‘bottle car’ takes pride of place. Everywhere there are reminders of regional breweries and brands Bass swallowed up in the twentieth century before it, too, was absorbed.

Finally, confusingly, we reach a second museum. This exhibition, slightly larger, tells the story of Burton and Bass in particular in more detail. What comes across here is the sheer scale of the operation at its height: besides the brewing itself, there were coopers, sign-painters, railwaymen, engineers, maltsters, bookkeepers and carpenters occupying acres of offices, workshops and yards.

There are also small but moving details, such as the officer’s beret of the Staffordshire Yeomanry from World War II, which incorporated the famous red triangle into its regimental insignia.

We, of course, loved recreations of both an Edwardian pub and a keg-only nineteen-sixties bar.

Winding up in the brewery tap, we were gasping for a pint of Bass, having forgotten that Molson Coors, who are lumbered with the premises, don’t own the brand. Rarely-seen cask-conditioned Worthington beers were a welcome substitute, though. White Shield was much juicier and fruitier than in bottles; Spring Shield was a very modern, zippy pale-n-hoppy, despite its heritage branding; and ‘E’, brewed, we think, to a nineteen-sixties recipe for Bass, was pleasingly, drily bitter, with a funky note in the finish.

Worthington White Shield and Spring Shield.

As we drank, we conducted a post-mortem. On the one hand, this isn’t the museum the British brewing industry deserves. It doesn’t tell a story as it ought to — it seemed a jumble of odds and sods — and we’d have preferred it to be more clearly about Bass, Burton or Britain, rather than a bit of all three. That we had it almost to ourselves for two hours made us worry for its future. Would it perhaps be better off as part of something like the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, where it might get more passing trade? The people of Burton wouldn’t like that idea, we suspect.

And, on the other hand, it’s better than nothing, and anyone with an interest in beer, of whatever variety, will find plenty here to fascinate them. The fact is, if we don’t play with the toys we’ve got, we won’t get anything better.

Entry to the National Brewery Centre costs £8.95, which includes four quarter-of-a-pint tokens redeemable in the brewery tap. We also picked up some interesting bottled beer from the gift shop at very reasonable prices.

Categories
Blogging and writing

A Change to the Scheduled Programme

This is what Sheffield is like, right?
This is what Sheffield is like, right?

We probably won’t be blogging this week while we’re on the road carrying out research and interviews in Sheffield, Leeds, York, Derbyshire and maybe Manchester, too.

We’ll be posting photos and news of any interesting finds on either Twitter or on Facebook.

If you find yourself twitching for a blog post to read with your morning coffee, during lunch at your desk, or on the bog, here are few recommendations from earlier in the year:

Elsewhere in the Blogoshire, why not have a look at these:

See you on the other side!