Categories
Beer history

Non-keg, non-chemical, all-malt

Copies of the Campaign for Real Ale newspaper, What's Brewing.

Yesterday, we took delivery of around fifty mid-nineteen-eighties issues of the Campaign for Real Ale’s What’s Brewing newspaper, and have begun to immerse ourselves in the strange but familiar world they reflect.

Most interesting to us right now are the omens of the ‘craft beer’ vs. ‘real ale’ agonies of the last few years.

Our feeling that David ‘Firkin’ Bruce was the James ‘Brewdog’ Watt of his day are strengthened by a piece from Roger Protz in the May 1985 edition. He observed that Bruce had achieved something with which CAMRA was struggling: the Firkin pubs were popular with young, affluent, trendy types — typical lager drinkers, in other words — who were paying above the going rate for pints of bitter. He also noted that, though Bruce’s beer wasn’t ‘real ale’ in the technical sense (he used a ‘light blanket’ of CO2), nor was it utterly disgusting. How confusing!

In another issue, Protz — something of a controversial reformer — argued that maybe it might be worth considering serving cask ale a little cooler to give it half a chance to compete with lager. Furious letters ensued: it would be too little too late, argued one lobby; ‘Heresy!’ cried the other.

There were also some complicated manoeuvrings required to explain CAMRA’s position on SIBA (then the Small Independent Brewers’ Society). Though both organisations were ‘fellow travelers’, in a sense, SIBA’s members were not all ‘real ale’ producers. ‘We are trying to produce good beer,’ said SIBA’s chairman, Paul Soden, in May 1987. CAMRGB? Not quite: ‘Most of us produce non-chemical, non-keg, 100-per-cent malt brews.’ (Our emphasis.)

If he was making the same point today, he’d have to drop  the phrase ‘non-keg’.

Reading old issues of WB is how we’re rewarding ourselves for finishing the first draft of what is still called Brew Britannia. We know how to party. Woo.

Categories
Beer history

Not a Good Beer Guide but a Great Source

Copies of the Good Beer Guide.

We’ve never been convinced of the benefits of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide as a tool for finding the best pubs, and certainly not, in recent years, for finding the best beer. What we have come to realise, though, is its value as a source of historical information.

Our current project started with a 1978 edition of the Guide Bailey’s parents bought in a charity shop for 25p; we then bought a few more old editions, at exorbitant prices; before Boak’s uncle lent us well-used copies of the first five; and, finally, Ed Wray sent us a box containing nearly every GBG from the late seventies until 2006.

Quite apart from the pure data — numbers of breweries and beers, information on each brewery’s cask beers and any notable specialties — there are pages of editorial material which give a good indication of what was on the minds of beer geeks in any given year. The coming of ‘world beer’, beer tasting, nitro-keg and gastropubs are all recorded in short blog-post like articles. Anxieties over women in beer and the Campaign’s public image are played out.

Even the cover designs are telling — from Victoriana to twenty-first century cultural diversity, via idealised country pubs and real fires.

A schism over whether the 1989 Beer Orders were a good or bad thing rears its head: one edition says they are ‘universally popular’ while, the following year, they are described as disastrous.

Time and again, advances are heralded (new breweries, increasing sales of real ale) only to be undercut with a warning: beer and pubs are in trouble, so this is no time for complacency, comrades!

And here’s one small but interesting point of language: in the nineties, the GBG used the term ‘craft brewer’ frequently, without agonies over its definition.

We’ll be buying a copy this year, but will lay it down to mature.

Categories
Beer history Blogging and writing real ale Somerset

More Dregs from the Drip Tray

Truman's London Stout.

These are a few bits and pieces that didn’t warrant a blog post of their own.

  • Mini book review: Beers of Britain by Warren Knock and Conal Gregory (1975). This oddity was recommended by Michael ‘Beer Hunter’ Jackson in the intro to his book The English Pub in 1976. A slim paperback, it takes the odd approach of reviewing pubs by region in prose, rather than, Good Beer Guide style, with alphabetical entries. Worth reading for (a) an informed but view that isn’t CAMRA propaganda; (b) to find out what beer in your town was like forty years ago; and (c) for the occasional nugget, e.g. St Austell didn’t pasteurise their keg bitter in the seventies. A little dry for our tastes, though.
  • An account of election time in the eighteen-thirties, from Recollections of Old Taunton by Edward Goldsworth (1883): ‘The elections in Taunton were a disgrace to all England. The first candidate’s arrival was made known by several hogsheads of beer being rolled on the Parade. It was then drawn off in buckets, pitchers, and jugs, and most of it consumed on the spot; the effect of which was soon both audible and visible, by singing, shouting, swearing, and fighting among the men, and screaming, cap-tearing and hair-pulling by the women… The second candidate would do as the first, and in addition would issue tickets for obtaining beer at public houses…’ As a result, when asked by the Poll Clerk how he had decided who to vote for, a local called Simon Duffer replied: ‘I hear they gives away the most beer.’
  • We were pondering the ages of CAMRA chairs in the early days. We don’t know how old Chris Holmes or James Lynch were The first, Michael Hardman, was 25 when he took the job in 1971. Christopher Hutt (1973) was 26. Gordon Massey (1974) was 27. Chris Holmes (1975) was 30. Chris Bruton (1976) was 31. James Lynch (1978) was 32. Joe Goodwin (1979) was 31. Tim Amsden (1980) was 29. When did CAMRA last have a chair under the age of 35? It would take a pretty ambitious character to pull it off today. (UPDATED after correspondence with James Lynch, July 2013, and further research.)
  • You all saw this long post we wrote on West Country brewers Starkey, Knight & Ford, didn’t you? Good. Just checking.
  • We’ve been posting some things which are too short to blog but too long to Tweet over on Facebook, by the way.
Categories
Beer history Beer styles real ale

Month of Mild: Origins

Make Mine Real Mild -- CAMRA, c.1980.

For the last thirty-six years (with gaps) May has been the Campaign for Real Ale’s ‘Mild Month‘. This sub-campaign began life as an attempt to change CAMRA’s image, as much as to save and celebrate an endangered type of beer.

It began in December 1974 when a letter from Tim Beswick appeared in What’s Brewing making the point that mild wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. This prompted a thoughtful article by David Hall, of CAMRA’s South Manchester branch, in the January 1975 edition, in which he considered why this might be the case and what should be done about it. Members were blinkered, he said, and, in London especially, should stop demanding new and interesting beers while overlooking what was on their doorstep. ‘To those trying an unfamiliar brew,’ he went on, ‘and to those organising future beer exhibitions… the message must be don’t neglect the mild.’

It can’t have helped, he also pointed out, that CAMRA had tended to obsess over the decreasing original gravities (OG) of beer. Celebrating the relative potency of, say, Fuller’s ESB, and using the ever-dwindling alcohol content of keg bitter as a stick with which to beat the Big Six, sent the message that only strong beer was good beer.

Joe Goodwin, who became CAMRA Chairman, and sadly died in 1980 at the age of 31.
Joe Goodwin, who became CAMRA Chairman, and sadly died in 1980 at the age of 31.

Gears ground and the conversation continued until, in January 1977, this announcement appeared in What’s Brewing, echoing the point above.

CAMRA is to launch a determined effort to promote mild ale… Joe Goodwin, the NE [National Executive] member responsible for organising the venture, told What’s Brewing: ‘CAMRA exists to preserve choice. Since mild ales represent a significant portion of the range of real ales available in this country and since several milds are under threat of extinction, this has become a vital national campaign… As a campaign, we’re in danger of becoming too frequently associated with the promotion of over-priced, high-gravity beers. It’s about time we did something positive to change that image.’

That’s interesting for a couple of reasons. First, that ‘over-priced, high-gravity’ accusation is something now applied to ‘craft beer’; and, secondly, because it also represents a sign of CAMRA’s often-criticised drift into the ‘responsible drinking’ camp.

Has Mild Month been effective? Perhaps in preserving mild as a seasonal special, but there are relatively few that are brewed year-round, and those that are can be hard to find. As one veteran brewer said to us: ‘Breweries aren’t museums, but all good products ought to have a place.’

Categories
Blogging and writing

The Challenge of Objectivity

Detail from a Watneys Red Beer Mat.

As we start lining up interviews with the current generation of British brewers, rather than those in retirement, we find ourselves reflecting on what we can do to make sure our book remains objective. We’re interested in them because they’re part of a bigger story, not because we think they’re awesome. What we don’t want to do is parrot their PR, puff them up, or get drawn into fawning. (Under an awning..?) There’s plenty of that about already.

We’ve already had our objectivity tested a couple of times. One of the things we are determined to avoid is merely repeating the established CAMRA mythology — ‘we saved beer’ — which has been polished to a sheen with years of repetition, but it’s hard when you speak to founder members and early activists not to get swept up in the excitement of it all. That’s especially true when they are nice fellers, and you’re sharing a pint.

What’s working so far, we think, is asking challenging questions, without malice, and as politely as possible.

It is also helpful to speak to ‘the enemy’. A chap who worked in PR for a big brewery in the seventies was very helpful in giving an alternative view of CAMRA in its heyday. We’ve also managed to dig out a few contemporary articles which set out how the Big Six felt about CAMRA at the time. (They didn’t like it.) It’s a shame that we missed the chance to grill E.C. ‘Ted’ Handel, head of PR at Watney’s in the early seventies, though.

What we need to do, for balance, is find the modern equivalent of Mr Handel — someone from AB-Inbev or Diageo perhaps — and ask them what they think of CAMRA and the current craft beer boom. But what would be in it for them?