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Beer history breweries featuredposts opinion

The Secrets of Doom Bar’s Success

This post was made possible by the support of Patreon subscribers like  Nick Moyle and Sue Hart whose encouragement justified us spending several days of our free time researching and writing. If you like this, and want more, please do consider signing up, or just buy us a pint.

How did a beer born on an industrial estate in Cornwall in 1995 become a ubiquitous national brand in just 20 years? And what about it inspires such loyalty, and such disdain?

A few incidents made us really start thinking about Sharp’s Doom Bar.

The first was a couple of years ago on a research trip to Manchester, having travelled all the way from Penzance, when we walked into a pub – we can’t recall which one – to find two cask ales on offer: St Austell Tribute, and Doom Bar.

The second was at a pub in Newlyn, just along the coast from Penzance, where we met two exhausted cyclists who’d just complete the John O’Groats to Land’s End run. They wanted one last beer before beginning the long journey home to the Home Counties. When we got talking to them, one of them eventually said to us: “You’re into your ales, then? I’ll tell you what’s a good one – Doom Bar. Do you know it?”

People love this beer. They really, genuinely, unaffectedly find great pleasure in drinking it.

Sales statistics support that: from somewhere around 12 million pints per year in 2009, to 24m in 2010, to 43m by 2016, Doom Bar shifts units.

So what is, or has been, Doom Bar’s secret? And is there something there other brands might imitate?

Categories
bottled beer breweries buying beer

Doom Bar and the Question of Origin

It’s official: thanks to Lucy Britner at Just Drinks we now know that Sharp’s Doom Bar — the bottled stuff, at least — has been being brewed outside Cornwall since 2013.

From the moment Molson-Coors bought out Sharp’s in 2011 people down here in Cornwall have been wondering how long it would be before production moved to Burton-upon-Trent. Others assumed it had already happened and that there was slyness afoot. One local source even told us they’d heard a Sharp’s brewer dropping big hints about it last year.

Now the cat’s out of the bag, what does it mean?

In a part of the world where the act of buying local is highly politicised it might create opportunities for other Cornish brewers to supply restaurants, supermarkets, delicatessens and bars which have, until now, been happy with bottled Doom Bar.

In reality, though, we suspect it will take months for most people to clock this news and, even then, many won’t care — it’s a popular beer which presumably sells to the trade at a competitive price and it’s still Cornish-ish, right?

But if we ran a business and had for the last two years been buying those bottles on the understanding that the beer was Cornish-made — and probably pitching it to our customers as such — we’d be pretty annoyed.

We came to this story via the Western Morning News and are grateful to Kev Head for pointing us to the original source.

Update 01/07/2015

We asked Sharp’s the following question on Twitter but have yet to get a reply despite prodding:

Update 16 December 2018

We’ve now written a more substantial piece about the history of Doom Bar.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture real ale

We need to talk about Greene King IPA

The sign outside a Greene King pub in London.

For a beer many people consider bland and over-exposed, Greene King IPA doesn’t half get talked about a lot. To us, it’s the cask ale equivalent of Budweiser — brewed to be nearly flavourless, not too intoxicating and uncontroversial. It was, in fact, for that reason that it was the first cask ale that Bailey got the taste for, many years ago.

Zak Avery, Paul Garrard and others stick up for it, however, arguing that it is subtle rather than bland, and that it suffers because it is often sold in pubs which don’t know how to look after it. The latter is certainly true, and also applies to, e.g., London Pride when not served in a Fuller’s pub.

Zak suggests that we and others who find GK IPA boring need to recalibrate our tastebuds. We know what he means — a pint of our usual after a fortnight in Spain last year tasted like an extreme hop-monster — but can’t agree that GK IPA is an unfairly neglected classic. If faced with a choice between GK IPA and a cold Cruzcampo, we’d take the latter every time, and that’s saying something.

We recently described GK IPA, rather than ‘craft keg’, as the thin end of the wedge in the battle against crap beer: it’s got more in common with John Smith’s smooth keg ales than it has, say, an exciting brown bitter like Harvey’s Sussex Best.

Which is not to say that people who enjoy it are wrong to do so, or that they’re not really enjoying it, just that it would be a shame if that was as far as they got. It’s like upgrading from Dairylea to mild cheddar and thinking you’re eating ‘proper cheese’. (That sounds snobbish but we can’t find any other way to express this — and beer and cheese aren’t things you need to be rich or Eton-educated to enjoy.)

What’s most frustrating, as Zak also points out, is that Greene King make some interesting beers, but their flagship brew just happens to be their worst.

Another beer which we’re beginning to think about the same way is Sharp’s Doom Bar. It’s hugely popular but, in our experience, often disappointing. We had a great pint of it a couple of years back but, since then, have always been let down by its dusty cardboard flavours and believe us, we keep trying. Recently, we had a pint alongside one each of St Austell HSD and Marston’s Pedigree, and Doom Bar lost. (But now we need to do that taste test blind.)

UPDATE (16/12/2011): we had another good pint of Doom Bar last night — bright, fruity and very alive. Still not a great hit rate but we’re not writing it off yet.