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Blogging and writing

Book Review: Craft Beer World

Detail of Mark Dredge's book Craft Beer World.

The market for lists of ‘beers to drink before you die’ is crowded — are there reasons to choose Mark ‘Pencil and Spoon’ Dredge’s offer over any other?

If you’re just starting to take an interest in beer, it’s useful to have a more experienced friend who can point you in the right direction until you start to form your own opinions. If that friend happens to have similar tastes to you then all the better. If you’re a real ale drinker who wants to explore, then Roger Protz has you covered; if you are fundamentally turned off by the very idea of real ale culture, then Dredge is your man.

Some people will find this book annoying. They’ll roll their eyes at suggestions America is the beating heart of craft beer, and that hops ‘only really got exciting in the 1970s’ when American brewers worked out how to get the best from them. They’ll be rubbed the wrong way by food and drink pairing suggestions, and by the focus on big beers over everyday ‘drinkers’. They are not the market for this book and probably shouldn’t read it for the sake of their blood pressure. Dredge has, and has always had, a distinct voice, loved by some, sneered at by others, but certainly not ‘vanilla’. Read his blog before you buy the book and you’ll know what to expect.

Having said that, from our perspective, there is probably not enough Dredge in the book. There are photos of beer labels and bottles, but not many of him and his drinking buddies on their exciting sounding travels. (Jamie Oliver would not miss this trick…) Occasionally, he sets the scene for when and where a particular beer was consumed —  the entry on Crate Brewery Lager, for example — and we’d have liked more.

Even though we’re got our own opinions on beer, and no longer need the ‘beginner’s guide’ asides, we did get something out of this book, as we’ve tried very few of the beers Dredge recommends. We won’t be carrying it round with us everywhere we go, as we did with our first Michael Jackson pocket guide, but we’ve made mental notes of a few brews and will keep an eye out for them on our travels.

We were also interested in his customised style classification system — descriptive rather than prescriptive — which acknowledges the emergence of, for example, ‘pale and hoppy session beer’ and ‘Pacific pale ale’ as recognisable categories. IPA is at the centre of his view of ‘craft beer’ and so almost every variation thereon — e.g. ‘Belgian IPA’ — gets its own sub-style. This is an honest reflection of what’s going on, like it or not, and makes sense to us.

If there is a bouncy twenty-something in your life who is just beginning to take an interest in beer, this might be the perfect birthday or Christmas present.

Disclosure: we were sent a free copy of this book by the publishers, Dog’n’Bone, and this blog gets a mention in the ‘learn more’ section at the back.

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Beer history

Starkey, Knight & Ford

What happened to the once powerful West Country brewers Starkey, Knight & Ford offers a snapshot of the story of British beer in the century before the ‘real ale revolution’: small local brewers acquired their rivals and grew until, when they were nice and fat, even bigger predators appeared to swallow them whole.

Starkey, Knight & Ford horse trademark on a former pub in Bridgwater.

Emerging

In 1840, George Knight, a 38-year-old maltster of Bridgwater, Somerset, decided to cut out the middle-men and begin brewing himself. At around the same time, at North Petherton, a village between Bridgwater and Taunton, Thomas Starkey was semi-retired from farming, malting and brewing, and preparing to hand (or at least sell) the business to his 31-year-old son, also called Thomas.

When he took on the company after 1845, Thomas Jr had expansion plans and soon bought up another brewery in Taunton. He left Bridgwater alone, however, and, for forty years, Starkey’s and Knight’s each had their own turf and stuck to it.

Starkey, Knight & Ford trademark: prancing horse.

In 1885, George Knight died, and his sons, George Jr and Henry, took over. Local brewery historian David Williams has suggested that it was at about this time that the famous galloping or prancing horse trademark appeared**, beginning its life as a stag and replacing a rather obvious image of an armoured knight. (A friend of ours once described it as the happiest horse she’d ever seen.)

Meanwhile, Thomas Starkey finally turned his attention to Bridgwater. Though Somerset is best-known as an agricultural centre, Bridgwater is an industrial town. It had a small but busy port, crammed with timber ships from Russia, Finland, Canada, Ireland, and elsewhere; iron foundries; and brick and tile works. There were plenty of dry throats in need of ale.

Brewery workers with beer barrels and hops on a carnival cart.
Bridgwater brewery workers c.1895 on a carnival cart called, we think, ‘Somerset Beer, English hops’.

In November 1887, through some wheeling and dealing, the two companies merged, creating Starkey, Knight & Co. Ltd, with an estate of thirty pubs. With their capital combined, they were able to build a state-of-the-art new brewery at Northgate in Bridgwater. Wilfred J. Hurley, who worked for the company from 1921 until 1966, and who knew the brewery buildings well, speculated in his short memoir of 1981 that the old Knight buildings were retained: ‘Certainly the part which adjoined the road was much older than the main brewery.’

The expansion didn’t stop there. In 1895, they took over yet another brewery, Ford’s of Tiverton, and gained another forty pubs. It was a prestigious name and a smart acquisition as this from the Brewing Trade Review, 1 March 1895, makes clear:

The business was founded by Mr. Thomas Ford in 1852, when he only employed one workman and kept one cart. The brewery is now the largest west of Bristol. It covers several acres and is lit by electric light. There are branches and agencies at Plymouth, Sidmouth, Exeter, Torquay, Southmolton, and Truro.

And so Starkey, Knight & Ford was born. Though the company continued to acquire small family breweries across the region, this was the last new partnership, and the last change of name. At least for a while.

Unapproachable

1901advert

For the next sixty-odd years, S.K. & F., as the company sometimes styled itself, did quite well. In 1910, Thomas Starkey, 70-years-old, blind and unwell, retired, handing over the hot seat to Harry Banes Walker, who Wilfred Hurley recalled as ‘a good boss and sportsman’. He was a keen horseman and sometimes rode to the Bridgwater brewery in the years before the war. He was also known for one peculiar habit: carrying a half-packet of his preferred brand of toilet paper in an inside pocket of his suit.

S.K. & F. had pubs from Cornwall to Wales and the quality of the beer it produced seems to have been generally acknowledged, though, of course, contemporary PR exercises muddy the water, and we can’t know for sure. At any rate, in 1912, at a dinner for employees, Tom Pook, manager of the North Devon district, quoted ‘old’ Mr Starkey: ‘Do not ever forget the name of Starkey, Knight and Ford outside a house [pub] is a guarantee of a good article to be sold within… I have always made that my one aim and one object, whilst I have been in business — that the public shall have an article that they can always appreciate and always approve of.’ (North Devon Journal, 1 February 1912.)

After World War I, from 1920 onward, the brewery won a string of industry prizes, and began to describe itself in advertisements as ‘medal-winning’ or ‘prize-winning’. The one-word slogan ‘Unapproachable’ had been in use since at least 1919 and, in this period, the brewery seemed to live up to it.

It might have helped that Old Vatted (‘Old Fathead’) was being bought in from a Scottish brewery and that bottled S. K. Ale was pepped up with the secret addition of Bass, sent from Burton to the West Country for bottling and distribution. (More gossip from Wilfred Hurley’s memoir.) The Taunton brewery, where only mineral water was produced after about 1906, had a spring particularly rich in gypsum, and that water was (as we understand it) blended with ‘town water’ at Bridgwater and Tiverton to give it a Burton-like quality.

In World War II, like many other breweries, S.K. & F. was required to ‘make the beer go further’ which was achieved by restricting its strength (watering it down), and reducing the range, dropping BB (bitter), and brewing only XX (mild) and BA (best bitter). The war also prompted an early example of the kind of ‘local is best’ rhetoric we’re now used to: whereas in the late nineteen-thirties, Starkey’s had relied on Californian malt, as well as hops from Oregon and Czechoslovakia, the war had forced them to get used to using only English barley and hops, and they made a firm commitment to continue to do so.

Running out of Steam

A dead rat was found floating in a beer vat at Messrs. Starkey, Knight and Ford’s Tiverton brewery on Sunday morning… Yesterday, watched by Customs and Excise officials, 1,600 gallons of beer went down the drain.

Western Morning News, 1 June 1948.

blackhorse

The company seemed to survived the war largely unscathed and continued to announce impressive profits. It made another big acquisition in 1957, taking over the Burnham [on Sea] Brewery run by the Holt family, and bumping its estate of pubs up to around 400. It also launched ‘trendy’ new beers in 1958 – a draught IPA and bottled ‘Black Horse’.

Then, in September 1959, something unusual happened: the company announced a decline in profits and had to make apologies to its shareholders, blaming poor weather in the summer of that year for declining sales, and promising to make cuts to fund investments in new technology, such as a new bottling line at Tiverton. Reading between the lines, S.K. & F. was struggling to keep up, and was vulnerable. Its empire stretched from across the West Country, and ‘Starkey’s’ was a household name in the region, but it simply didn’t have what it took to ‘go national’. The gap between big and small players was widening with alarming speed.

So, in January 1960, the directors of Starkey’s signed a pact with national brewing giant Whitbread.

(1) Whitbreads with a view to a closer association between Whitbreads and Starkeys and with the object of increasing the trading profits of both companies have agreed to give Starkeys such technical commercial financial and other advice and assistance as they are able and which Starkeys may from time to time require.

(2) Whitbreads are brewers of (inter alia) a stout known as and marketed under the name of Mackeson Stout… and Starkey’s have agreed in consideration of the services to be provided by Whitbreads as aforesaid and of the provisions herein contained for the brewing by Starkeys of ale for Whitbreads to offer Mackeson for sale in Starkey’s licensed premises…

The deal was that Starkey’s would brew Whitbread’s ‘Best Ale’ to supply Whitbread pubs in the West Country, and sell Mackeson’s in their own pubs, while Whitbread gave them a much-needed cash injection and helped them to modernise. We’re not lawyers but, honestly, we’d have been wary of signing a contract that uses vague terms like ‘reasonably’ as much as this one does. It’s blindingly obvious, with hindsight, that Starkey’s didn’t have much to bargain with in this arrangement, whereas Whitbread could choose to demand more and give less almost as they saw fit.

By October 1962, the companies had agreed to merge, though Starkey’s board, for so long the predators in the West Country brewing scene, must have been aware that a small player merges with a big one in the sense that an insect merges with the sole of someone’s shoe. The letter from the Chairman to shareholders has a rather mournful tone and makes clear that Starkey’s hand has been forced: Whitbread had been quietly acquiring shares in S.K. & F. since 1959; labour and building costs were unmanageable without Whitbread’s investment; and, anyway, a small company could no longer hope to compete in the face of the trend towards ‘larger units in order to obtain the advantages of the rationalisation of  distribution and sales’.

Nonetheless, carefully crafted press releases and internal staff memos emphasised the commercial opportunities which would be available to both parties, and, crucially, that S.K. & F. would retain its identity.

When this offer is accepted Starkey, Knight & Ford will retain their identity as a company, and will continue to brew and bottle certain Whitbread beers in addition to their own… Whitbread’s will naturally look after the interests of the staff and employees of both companies.

And yet, in the following month, the Northgate Brewery in Bridgwater was closed as operations were concentrated in Tiverton. The building stood empty until 1964 when it was finally demolished. Bridgwater no longer had a brewery.

placard1969

And Whitbread kept pushing. Inevitably, perhaps, S.K. & F. branded beers began to pop out of existence – who would drink Starkey’s ‘Starkeg’, advertised in a small advert in the back pages of local newspapers, when they could have Whitbread’s nationally advertised alternative? The logos began to appear side-by-side, Starkey’s name overshadowed by Whitbread’s, until, at last, in 1970, the prancing horse was taken to the knackers’ yard for good. Whitbread at first proposed renaming S.K. & F. simply ‘Whitbread’, but this was rejected by the Registrar of Companies. Instead, they chose Whitbread Devon. From 1 October 1970, Starkey, Knight & Ford ceased to exist.

More than forty years later, there are few reminders of even mighty Whitbread, let alone S.K & F. If you find yourself traveling through Somerset and Devon, however, keep your eyes peeled for the sign of the black horse, which is still to be seen, wrought in iron or carved in stone, prancing across the faces of buildings here and there.

Notes

** 21/03/2014 Writing in the Winter 2014 edition of the newsletter of the Brewery History Society, David Dines pointed out that a showcard for Ford’s of Tiverton, auctioned in April 2012, showed the black horse logo, so it clearly pre-dated the formation of SK&F.

Sources

  • Records of Starkey, Knight & Ford and Whitbread; clippings; transcripts; labels; and letters, held at the Somerset Heritage Centre.
  • A history of S.K. & F compiled by Nick Redman, Whitbread Archivist, in 1991.
  • A history of S.K. & F which appeared in the Whitbread staff magazine in January 1964.
  • Brewing Industry: A Guide to Historical Records, edited by L. M. Richmond and Alison Turton, 1990.
  • Various local newspapers.
  • Birth records at Ancestry.co.uk.
Categories
Beer history Generalisations about beer culture real ale

A Real Obsession With Authenticity

Real Burgers sign.

Though the Campaign for Real Ale weren’t the first to talk about ‘real’ beer, their enormous success in the mid-seventies did popularise the term and, before long, a whole range of other consumer products were having their ‘realness’ assessed.

The very first edition of What’s Brewing contained an exposé of a pub which was pretending to serve beer direct from a barrel on the bar while actually pumping it from a pressurised container in the basement, and it didn’t take long before those were known as ‘fake’, ‘false’ or ‘bogus’ barrels. ‘Fake handpumps’ became a similar source of irritation.

In 1974, Michael Hardman went mad with ‘real’ in an article about the Cambridge Beer Festival for What’s Brewing:

The whole event had an atmosphere of reality. The beer was real. The food was real (bread and cheese). The occasional bursts of music were real. And, most important of all, the people were real. There was no synthetic beer, no processed food, no piped music… typical of the events which big business tries to push on the gullible public of England.

Real people!? This is surely an expression of Phildickian paranoia from a time when people imagined we’d soon be eating flavoured vitamin pills for dinner, confusing androids with humans and listening to nothing but Switched on Bach.

Real fire from the cover of Good Beer Guide 1984.Before long, ‘real lager’ (German or Czech) was being described as the alternative to the ‘ersatz’ license-brewed variety. In 1978, CAMRA voiced its support for CAMREB — the Campaign for Real Wholemeal Bread. The 1983 Good Beer Guide mentions ‘”real” bottled beers’ and includes an article entitled ‘Real Cheese Please’. The 1984 edition (detail from cover, right) contained an article about ‘real fire’ heating as, for the first time, the presence of a suitably authentic blazing hearth was indicated in pub listings.

In the last forty years, CAMRA’s approach has been imitated by various other campaigns, giving us real education, real pet food, real books, real gravy, real milk, real farming, real beauty…

That last, of course, was a marketing campaign by cosmetics company. Hmm. Maybe we need an overarching Campaign for Real Realness, perhaps with a technical committee, to guard against ‘fake real‘?

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Beer history pubs

Pubs as Alien Territory

Dominoes in the pub, 1940.
Men playing dominoes in the pub, LIFE, 1940.

Reading old editions of American magazine LIFE on Google Books, we were delighted by the various attempts to explain Britain to Americans, especially when those articles touched on the pub. Here are a few bits and pieces, but you ought to check out the original scans for the wonderful photographs that accompany them.

Robert Barlow Neve is the most self-respecting, self-satisfied man on earth — an Englishman… He goes to the pub on Sunday night for a beer and a chat. He likes his fellow men and, unlike the Frenchman, he gives his fellow men the same respect he demands from them… [PHOTO CAPTION] ‘Mild and bitter’ ale from mug quenches all England’s thirst. Neve takes it at the more refined Saloon Bar, not workingman’s Public Bar. Taps are for expensive, mild and bitter ale.

24 April 1939, ‘An English family is self-satisfied

What was on the ‘expensive’ tap? Presumably not an imported Scandinavian double IPA with Himalayan vanilla.

England’s public house or ‘pub’ is more than a counterpart of the US saloon. It is every man’s club — a meeting place for rich and poor, high and low. Next to the Church it does more than any other institution to solidify English life. Most Englishmen have their favorite pubs and there, besides their tastes for alcohol, they liberally indulge their inclination for conversation. Talk in pubs comes closer to reflecting English thought than all the editorials in London.

3 June 1940, ‘Backbone of England is Public-House Bar

With local elections in a couple of days, politicians would do well to bear that last point in mind.

The Bath House pub in Dean Street takes a righteous attitude of censure toward teetotalers. A sign over the bar reads, ‘You don’t undress when you come to this Bath House. So don’t drink water.’ At the same time Vic, the publican, would frown on any guest who misjudged his capacity. At both dinnertime (noon) and supper the people from nearby offices drink mild and bitter ale as they wait for a seat at the small wooden tables or on an old-fashioned stool at the food bar. While they wait, Harry Leon, composer of popular songs, pounds the upright piano in the corner and another customer sings… At the food bar Vic or his wife, Mrs Ruffell, ladles out soup, bread and butter (not margarine), rabbit, roast beef or ham (not Spam), potatoes and cabbage or fresh crisp lettuce with a tomato, and follows with a hot dessert of jam roll or suet pudding or not too biting cheese. The bill 2/6 (50c).

8 November 1943, ‘Life Among the Ruins

‘Not too biting’ — fairly bland?

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.’