News, nuggets and longreads 2 November 2024: The Invisible Ray

Here’s our selection of the best reading about beer and pubs from the past week, including budgets, brewery life and music boxes.

The big story of the week in the UK was the new government’s first budget, delivered by Chancellor Rachel Reeves on Wednesday. The response from the beer and pub industry seems mixed… as it always is, actually.

It’s been some time since a Chancellor made a decisive move in favour of brewing and hospitality. It tends to be tweaks to rates (a 1.7% cut in tax on draught drinks in this case) alongside a bunch of broader changes that affect pubs and breweries in their roles as employers. Specifically, in this case, an increase in employers’ national insurance contributions and an increase in the national minimum wage. On that, The British Institute of Innkeeping (BII) says it “will have a huge impact on [pubs’] profitability and threaten their existence”.

As we’ve said before, until it becomes politically acceptable, or profitable, for governing parties to give the sector special treatment – until “Save our pubs!” becomes a bigger priority for the public than “Save our NHS!” – this is not likely to change.

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Every now and then a piece comes along that makes you think “Why hasn’t someone written this before?” Will Ziebell’s latest article for The Crafty Pint is about what it’s like to work at a brewery that is struggling or collapsing:

“It was a good brand and had legs to be something different. And they just cooked it.”… That’s how Cassie… felt after the brewery she worked at closed down. After all, there had been plenty of high marks: great beer; growing popularity; expansions; fun beer launches and collabs; her colleagues’ phenomenal passion and all they’d achieved… Yet it all went wrong, and Cassie finds it hard to see anyone to blame beyond the owners… They’d overseen an expensive expansion that didn’t make sense. They’d allowed debts to mount. They refused to pay some suppliers and placed mates in roles for which they weren’t qualified. They’d never bothered with HR, feeling they were best placed to look after staff, and rarely filled roles managers told them time and time again were needed. Whenever staff left, they’d treat it like a betrayal; how dare they look for greener pastures?

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How do you read this piece about The Lamb by David Jesudason and not want to go there at once to admire the snob screens, drink a pint of ale, and listen to the Polyphon?

I’m here to see the Polyphon, a Victorian music box, which fills the air with a tinkling tune which feels to me contradictorily both innocent and sinister when Ralph winds it up. It used to be operated by coin – a token – which was given to you if you made a donation, but now it only works this way… “If it’s a busy Friday night it doesn’t go down [well],” says [general manager] Ralph [Parham], “but Saturday afternoon if people are interested we give it a little go when it comes up in conversations.”… Ralph shows me about 20 or 30 different tracks in a cupboard. These are giant metal discs with punched holes… But it’s the snob screens in the Lamb that are the biggest hint to its prejudiced past when middle class drinkers wanted to shut out others from their view… Ralph finds it amusing that as a gay person he’s living and working among all this archaic segregationana.

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We enjoyed Jane Stuart’s ramble around the pubs of Preston. It’s not a town we know but it’s clear there’s plenty of interest there for a beer drinker, from old pubs to craft beer bars:

I was here today to meet up with pals from the Friends of Highgate Brewery… I used to live within sniffing distance of Highgate Brewery in Walsall back in the day. The brewery once had several pubs dotted around the area. And of course it was famed for its lush Dark Mild. The Friends of Highgate Brewery meet up every month and, when I joined them back in 2008, we’d meet every other month in the brewery itself, where we’d pay a nominal fee on the way in for some raffle tickets and basically drink as much beer as we liked for a couple of hours. Those were the halcyon days! The raffles are famous for having some, erm, interesting prizes. My favourite was a unicorn horn for cats. Nowadays, FOHB still meet up monthly in the pubs of Walsall and continue to run social trips to breweries and beer towns.

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The SIBA report into consumer perceptions of brewery ownership and independence continues to generate conversation, either directly or via responses to Katie Mather’s article about it in The Guardian.

For starters, Pete Brown has an interesting take focused on marketing:

Well, the funny thing is that in all the market research those big brewers do, when they ask people what source of information they trust most, the top answer is always “word of mouth.” They spend millions trying to replicate the kinds of conversations that happen in pubs up and down the country every day.

The Pub Curmudgeon doesn’t think that drinkers care:

There’s a lot to be said for transparency, but the question has to be asked to what extent this is something that drinkers class as important. They may say in opinion surveys that they prefer beer from small independent breweries to that made by giant corporations, but their revealed preference often indicates otherwise. All they want at the end of the day is a decent pint.

And Katie Mather herself has a follow up piece on Substack:

I saw time and time again that people were frustrated about the subject, because they, in their own words, didn’t care about it. In one instance, a reader commented four times to lament that time was being spent contemplating a subject “only manbuns care about”… But this is something I think we, as drinkers, have gotten wrong. It does matter. If it didn’t, why would big breweries be clinging to the term [craft beer] long after acquiring the branding rights?

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Finally, from BlueSky, another little nugget of news…

I'm thrilled to discover that Prize Old Ale has been brewed again, and the 2024 version is being launched in the coming weeks www.darkstarbrewing.co.uk/products/pri…

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— Martyn Cornell (@thezythophile.bsky.social) October 31, 2024 at 12:00 AM

For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s (extra long edition) from Thursday.