Beer brands have different meanings in different contexts. Especially old ones like Bass which have had time to evolve and mutate.
Down here in Bristol, Bass isn’t a rarity. At least not if you get away from the city centre, and swerve the destination craft beer and real ale pubs.
On our ‘Every Pub in Bristol’ mission (we’ve reached number 308 for those keeping track) we often come across cask Bass in down-to-earth pubs on the way out of town.
When we say ‘down-to-earth’ what do we mean? Not ‘rough’, that problematic term, but perhaps a little run down, and certainly not gentrified.
They often serve their Bass from mirrored electric pumps installed at least 50 years ago, as at The Sandringham and The Avon Packet. And they serve it completely, ritually flat.
In general, we often get the sense that Bass is on offer through inertia rather than choice. After all, who’d want to take the risk of removing Bass knowing how badly that might go down with the regulars?
We even have a case study in The Swan With Two Necks. For a long time it was a Bass pub, and still has the logo on the windows. But in late 2019 the new landlord, Jamie, ditched the Bass as he took the pub gently but surely upmarket. And the regulars were furious.
A few years on, some of them have returned to the pub, won over by Jamie’s successor, Elmer, after he went on a charm offensive and added Timothy Taylor Boltmaker as a replacement for Bass on the bar.
Another nearby Bass pub, The Crown, is due to reopen shortly under new management, its previous owners having retired. Its cask Bass was £1.50 a pint for years until the inevitable price increase happened and it went up to £2 a pint.
Will the revived Crown have Bass at all? The locals and former regulars seem keen to know.
Meanwhile, across a small park from The Crown, towards earthy Old Market – look, we’re not going to explain ‘earthy’ – is The Coach & Horses. When we visited recently we found cask Bass on offer alongside Guinness, with hurling on the TV and Irish flags everywhere.
The Bass is apparently a new addition, this pub also having come under new management recently, and apparently lost some of its Irish character in the process. (Which makes us wonder how Irish it must have been before.)
The point is, Bass in this part of town represents the Old Ways – an aspect of a Bristol that’s gone, or very nearly.
It’s the same story out in the neighbourhoods where Bass has about the same status as tins of Natch cider.
In other parts of the country, this doesn’t always seem to be how Bass is viewed. In fact, if you’d asked us to describe a typical Bass drinker a few years ago, we’d have described someone fairly well to do, and at least a little conservative.
Perhaps that’s because of its particular association in the collective consciousness of British beer geeks with The White Horse in Parsons Green, West London. That pub was also known as the Sloaney Pony in reference to its posh clientele and posh location.
Or maybe it’s the lingering sense that Bass is a premium product, which is what made it so popular in the West Country a century and more ago.
Check out Ian Thurman’s regularly updated spreadsheet to find your local Bass pub.
4 replies on “The class status of Bass in Bristol pubs”
Thinking through some of the pubs that have an Irish character there is a correlation with Bass being available. Similarly an abundance of wood and little natural light is another feature, but these tend to be in areas with a large Irish population. What I’m trying to say is that Guinness memorabilia and assorted knick knacks tends to be found in Irish theme pubs.
Gareth
I wonder whether flat Bass is originally
a particularly Bristol thing or the survival of a wider tradition. I have heard a number of people during my life say that Bass should not be served with a head. swan neck taps and shower sparklers in my memory only started to appear in the Midlands in the 90s and I don’t believe autovacs were ever used here. You did have small metal sparklers before this but they didn’t produce a tight head.
In Malt and Brewing Science, Vol. 2 (Hough et al, 811) it is stated that “The foaming characteristics of draught beer show local variation. Those of Burton-on-Trent traditionally have no foam but in the North-East a rich creamy foam that overflows the glass is expected.”
This is a really interesting thought, Gavin. And that’s a great quote. We will investigate!
I do think though that the particular lack of any foam on beer that you describe in certain Bristol pubs is peculiar to Bristol, although it may be a survivor of a wider southern manner.
In the West Midlands my memory was that things were much more variable, although heads on beer tended towards the smaller and there wasn’t the expectation that they would remain to the bottom of the glass. I seem to remember lager often lacking much of a head, what there was soon dissipated after the initial pour, it was one of the reasons I thought ale was more appealing. All this of course is anecdotal, sadly these things go unrecorded on the whole.
I was very interested to see the use of electric dispense in the south though. I have an affection for this form of dispense as when I started drinking in pubs at the end of the 80s. They were still widely used in Bass M&B pubs and pretty much entirely in Banks’s pubs.