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Beer history marketing

Ersatzsteiner Pils

Detail from our own Epingwalder Pilsner label.

While bigger breweries have tended to license European or global lager brands, regional and micro brewers have often turned out their own product under what they imagine to be a Germanic-sounding name. Here are some we’ve come across in our rambles.

Davenport’s Continental Lager. Let’s start with easily the laziest attempt to imply a European heritage we’ve come across. Could they not at least have called it Continentalbrau? (c.1973.)

Elgood’s Iceberg. Clever this one — a suitably Germanic word, but also an early use of coldness as a marketing angle. (Frank Baillie said it had ‘a pleasant flavour’.) (c.1973.)

Firkinstein. This seems to have originated in 1986 at the Fleece and Firkin in Bristol, which David Bruce sold off to Allied in 1988.

Litchborough Litchbrau. It wasn’t long into the microbrewery boom of the 1970s before an ersatz lager came along, from Bill Urquhart’s Litchborough Brewery, founded in 1974. Bill’s daughter recalls it selling quite well.

Greenall Whitley Grunhalle. One of our favourite names. It was strong, apparently. Is it the same Grunhalle conceived by Randall’s of Jersey and licensed to other brewers? Or did great minds think alike? (c.1973.)

Hall and Woodhouse Brock Lager. Sounds a bit like ‘bock’, nice Germanic ring, but also another word for badger, from the Old English. Nicely done. (c.1973.)

Hilden Hildenbrau. ‘A distinctive brew which undergoes several weeks conditioning’, said Brian Glover in 1987.

Ruddle’s Langdorf Lager. Brewed at Langham. Geddit?

Samuel Smith’s Alpine Lager. AKA ‘man in a box’. Bore the Ayinger name under license for a while, but now back under it’s original, retro, 1970s name.

Taddington Moravka. We remember this being launched in, we think, 2008. Not ersatz Germanic, in this case, but faux Slavonic, and very coy about its Derbyshire origins.

Vaux Norseman. Apparently ‘passed through a cooling unit’, according to Frank Baillie, so could have been called Norseman Extra Cold, if they’d thought of it. (c.1973.)

Young’s Saxon. Young & Co. produced various lagers over their lifetime. Saxon was on sale in the early 1970s, but we remember seeing the plainly-named Young’s Pilsner on sale c.2004. Not fondly remembered.

Have we missed any corkers? And does anyone remember drinking the obsolete beers listed above?

Of course, continental brewers have also been known to apply Ersatz English names to their attempts to brew ales...

 

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Beer history

The Inevitability of Chains

Brewdog’s string of bars, The Craft Beer Company and the Pivovar empire are all expanding at a rate of knots. Every day, it seems, brings a launch party or details of a future opening. And every time a new bar opens, it seems to fill up, so why wouldn’t they keep opening more?

‘Decent beer pubs’ (diplomatic turn of phrase…) have often been part of, or turned into, chains. There was CAMRA Investments, in 1975; and, in 1979, the Goose and Firkin brewpub was such a huge success that David Bruce would have been daft not to open another, and then another, until, in 1995, there were more than forty Firkins around the country. Even JD Wetherspoon began life as a single pub in North London, also in 1979, making it to seven pubs by 1983 — growing at about the same rate as the ‘craft beer’ chains we’ve mentioned above.

Is it always bad news when a pub becomes a chain? We’re optimists and believe it is possible for a small chain to retain whatever magic it was that made the ‘seed pub’ successful. Often, however, it is the personality of one person (or perhaps a couple of people) that makes a business what it is, and that can easily be spread too thinly.

And, with chains, the temptation to compromise seems inevitable. CAMRA Investments was cut loose and became ‘Midsummer Inns’, under the leadership of former CAMRA chairman Chris Hutt; in 1981, he came under attack for disregarding CAMRA’s ideals when the pubs in the chain began to sell lager and keg bitter, and introduced fruit machines and juke boxes. Sounding rather like those he had laid into in his book The Death of the English Pub in 1973, Hutt defended this decision on the grounds of ‘customer choice’ — it was what the punters wanted, he argued.

Then there is an even bigger temptation: why not sell the whole bundle off, perhaps to Whitbread or Mitchells and Butlers, and take a well-earned early retirement? How long does the ‘decent beer’ last under new ownership? In what peculiar ways is the ‘brand extended’?

There’s another risk, too, as David Bruce discovered when Whitbread launched their own ‘fake Firkin’ brewpubs in the early eighties: chains are easy to imitate, at least superficially. Did anyone else notice the spate of ‘gourmet burger’ chains that sprang up in London c.2005, often with worse burgers, chips and beer, but at the same price?

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Beer history czech republic

Beer in Prague, 1958

Detail of 1958 Prague transit map.

Among the various piles of crap useful things that we hoard collect, there’s an ever-growing stack of old tourist guidebooks, including a 1958 guide to Prague, from the Czechoslovakian state tourism board. Here’s an abridged version of the section that caught our eye this weekend.

Prague Breweries and Beer-houses

And still our acquaintance with Old Prague would not be complete if we did not visit the places where the citizens of Prague used to go to quaff a tankard of foaming ale or a glass of wine. Innumerable are the beer and wine taverns in Prague. Many of them are of ancient standing. Of the old breweries (of which there were for instance in Dlouhá ulice alone no less than twelve) only two still survive. The older of these is the brewery “u Tomáše”, in the Malá Strana. Today nobody could count how many barrels of excellent black beer have been drunk here since the time of Charles IV, when the Augustinian monks brewed their first hops.

[…]

The counterpart to the St Thomas Brewery is the brewery on the New Town side of the river, “U Fleků”, of which we first hear in the 15th century. More perhaps than any other beer-house in Prague, “U Fleků” lives in Czech literature and has become immortal as the bohéme who frequented it at the turn of the century.

[…]

We must only add that in Prague there are several modern breweries, of which the largest is the Smíchov Staropramen — which takes us unto Prague of the middle of the 20th century where, in an up-to-date alchemist’s kitchen, hops and malts are converted into beer, the traditional Czech beverage.

And so, let’s raise our bedewed and froth-topped glasses and drink to this city that also provides so well for man’s material wants!

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Beer history

Living Beer and the Rhetoric of Whole Food

Wholefood store scanned from a 1970s cookery book.

We haven’t drawn any firm conclusions on this subject yet, but see what you make of these quotations. (Our emphasis throughout.)

“For this reason ‘whole’ corn meal, which contains the germ, will have a greater life-containing, life-giving quality than the ‘degermed’ cornmeal found in supermarkets. Whole cornmeal is a “live” food — it spoils when the oil in the germ becomes rancid. Degermed cornmeal is a ‘dead’ food, as it lacks the germ (of life). Hence, it can be kept on grocery shelves for months without spoiling, though like all milled grains it does become stale.” Edward Espe Brown, Tassajara Bread Book, 1970.

“…’natural foods’ now threaten to replace ‘gourmet cooking’ as the main topic of food conversations… More than just a revival of old familiar food fads, this is part of the general concern now felt about the deterioration of our environment. Boredom with too much smooth, bland, overprocessed and sweet food has helped to attract not only the expected faddists, hypochondriacs and axe-grinders, but at least a proportion of scientists, especially nutritionists and conservationists.” ‘From Cranks to Nuts’, The Times, 7 August 1971.

“We opted at first for a high strength bitter brewed just from malt, hops, yeast and water. As well as being more wholesome this would also be simpler to produce.” Martin Sykes recalling the founding of the Selby Brewery in 1972, Called to the Bar, 1991.

“…the adulterated sludge that is glorified under the name of keg.” Michael Hardman, CAMRA’s What’s Brewing?, June 1972.

“The first distinction that must be made by the discerning drinker of draught beer is between keg, top-pressure, and traditional (the Real Thing)… traditional beer is alive while keg ber, like most bottled beer, is dead.” Richard Boston, ‘The Quick and the Dead’, The Guardian, 25 August 1973.

“British brewers are practically free to tamper with their beer as much as they want, unlike their colleagues in West Germany, who are forbidden by law to use any ingredient other than malt, hops and water… Fortunately, many brewers in Britain have kept faithful to nature, and beer brewed and served naturally can be found in nearly every corner of the country.” Michael Hardman, Beer Naturally, 1978.

“‘Real ale’ is the popular name for traditional beer brewed for centuries in Britain from malted barley and hops, with hundreds of regional variations in recipe and taste… Many brewers, big and small, use adjuncts in the brewing process. Flaked maize, potato starch, pasta flour, rice grits, malt and hop extracts will probably do you no harm but they are detrimental to the flavour of the beer.” CAMRA Good Beer Guide, 1978.

Poor, faithful old sugar, written out of history

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Beer history

Yet More Pre-CAMRA Beer Organisations

Pub User's Preservation Society memorabilia.

In a comment on our post about the National Society for the Promotion of Pure Beer, John Lamb brought to our attention to other proto-CAMRAs — the Ancient Order of Frothblowers and the Pub Users’ Preservation Protection Society.

Though we’d never heard of it before, it turns out the AOFs isn’t especially obscure. The excellent Friends of the Frothblowers website has more information about them than most people will ever need but, for the really obsessive, there is even a book. (And, for those who like a good vintage beer mug, prepare to feel envious at the sight of Steve ‘Beer Justice’ Williams’ remarkable charity shop purchase.)

There’s less information about PUPS out there. Pint in Hand, the magazine of the Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood, ran an article on them in 1998 which we’re going to try to track down but, in the meantime, here’s a summary from a later issue of the same publication (link to PDF):

The front page of the first issue of their Journal was reproduced – dated May 1946. Subjects of concern included price, décor, rude publicans and short measures (not a lot changes, does it!). Membership cost one shilling and included a ‘beerometer’, a patented device to show how much money the customer had been cheated out of by the head on their beer.

That really does sound quite CAMRA-like, doesn’t it?

UPDATE 18 April 2013: the January 1979 edition of CAMRA’s own What’s Brewing newsletter contains an article by Barrie Pepper and Andrew Cooper with a lot more information on PUPS, based on a collection of cuttings and publications found in a Lancaster bookshop.

It was… founded by a West End author, Townley Searle, who had brushed with a landlord, been refused a drink, and felt there was much wrong with the public house system… [Its] arguments were not so much about the quality of beer, but more about the quantity and the unfair rights of landlords.

They cite an edition of the Sunday Pictorial from 1946 which says the Society had ‘4000 eager wallop-neckers who insist they’re the victims of much tavern skullduggery’.

Hopefully, CAMRA, Barrie Pepper and Andrew Cooper won’t mind us reproducing the photographs above.

UPDATE #2 18 April 2013: and now we’ve found a letter from Mr Searle published in The Times on 20 May 1946 under the heading ‘The Status of Froth’:

No one objects to the ‘collar’ of froth above the rim or brim. The trouble is that so often the collar starts an inch or so below the rim, with the result that the customer is defrauded of about two-pennyworth of beer.