Categories
Beer history

Geeky bubble, overpriced beer

Sign advertising real ale in London, 2007.

People sometimes criticise ‘craft beer’ for being a bubble or niche; for being the preserve of a small group of geeks, obsessed with obscure, strong beers; paying outrageous prices for them in trendy, specialist outlets; and not interested in ‘normal’ drinking in their local. Now, why does that sound familiar?

…the Fox in Hermitage… [boasts] a battery of beer pumps that would keep a CAMRA-man boring away for hours… Three brews from Courages, Lowenbrau lager on draught, Worthington, Morlands and even John Smith’s Yorkshire bitter at 36p a pint. That’s just a sample and I’d not even heard of some of the bottled varieties… The pints in the White Horse — a less pretentious and more typical village pub — are from Morlands. Better kept in my opinion than at beerarama down the road, and only 29p for bitter in the public, as against 34p in the saloon in the Fox.

The Daily Express, 6 August 1978.

The Goose and Firkin found a ready market, predominantly young, affluent and mobile with most customers coming from outside the area. The Campaign for Real Ale called the pub ‘too crowded, too noisy and too expensive’. Prices were certainly aimed at the top end of the market, with beers such as Mind Bender and Knee Trembler made at much stronger levels than most national brands.

The Financial Times, 24 February, 1982.

Only 33 per cent of those questioned had heard of CAMRA… and 70 per cent said they would not go out of their way to find a pint of ‘real ale.’

NOP Market Research: The British Pub 1977, as reported in the FT, 29 July 1977.

The Campaign for Real Ale… achieved considerable publicity and was largely responsible for forcing the brewers to re-think their marketing strategies. However, of the 78 per cent of beer sales classified as draught, only about 14 per cent is accounted for by ‘real ale’. This share is likely to be maintained but it is not expected to expand greatly.

The Financial Times, 21 March 1979.

In the Shires Bar opposite Platform Six at London’s St Pancras Station, yesterday, groups of earnest young men sipped their pints with the assurance of wine tasters… There were nods of approval for the full bodied Sam Smith Old Brewery Bitter, and murmurs of delight at the nutty flavour of the Ruddles County beer… In one corner sat four young men sipping foaming pints. They were members of CAMRA… and prove their dedication by travelling three nights a week from Fulham in South West London — four miles away. One of them, 22-year-old accountant Michael Morris, said: ‘This place beats any of our local pubs.’

The Daily Express, 03 April 1978.

The real ale champs launched a bitter attack on greedy pub landlords yesterday — and ended up over a barrel themselves… The Campaign for Real Ale slammed pubs that cashed in on the craze then admitted that its own London pub charged at least 10p too much for an extra-strong brew.. the beer that caught CAMRA’s experts on the hop was the 70p-a-pint Theakston’s Old Peculier served up at the Nag’s Head in Hampstead… But landlord Steve Ellis was quick to scotch claims that he was profiteering… “We have to buy Old Peculier through an agency and it costs us a lot,” he said… [Roger] Protz said several pubs in Central London had been barred from the guide for cashing in on the real ale revival… One Whitehall pub charged 51p for a pint of Ruddles County and another in the West End sold Fuller’s London Pride for 44p. Both beers cost up to 9p less elsewhere, said Mr Protz.

The Daily Mirror, 18 April 1979.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Craft Fish Guts

Sturgeon by David Torcivia, from Flickr under a Creative Commons License.
There was a bit of a to-do the other week when a UK TV show about food production suggested that isinglass finings represented some kind of ‘dark side’ of the brewing industry. (We didn’t see it — we gathered this from the miniature Twitter storm that ensued.) Isinglass is made from the swim bladders of fish, so we’ll acknowledge that there is a certain ‘ick’ factor, but it’s been used in British brewing for a long time and isn’t something we have any problem with at all.

This 1978 article from CAMRA’s What’s Brewing, however, suggests that not only is isinglass harmless, but that brewers could be going a little further and making it part of their ‘craft’ schtick:

On the first floor of Godson’s Brewery… head brewer Rob Adams takes what looks like a large flat sea shell from a sideboard drawer… It is the dried bladder of a sturgeon fish… Mr Adams makes his own finings from sturgeon bladders, bought at £7 a pound and mixed with water in a large plastic dustbin.

Do any brewers these days make their own isinglass from scratch? And would a really ‘crafty’ brewery perhaps go a step further and have a saltwater pond full of fish in the back yard…?

Ian Mackey, author of this very useful book, has very kindly provided us with a treasure trove of useful clippings from this period, so expect a few more nuggets in weeks to come.

Picture by David Torcivia, from Flickr, under a Creative Commons License.

Categories
Blogging and writing

Previously on Boak and Bailey’s Beer Blog

BBC test card.

We’re having a couple of days off blogging because of annoying real life deadlines and commitments so, in the meantime, here are a few things you might have missed from the last month or two.

CAMRA et al

Places

Beer and brewing

Miscellaneous ponderingsand silliness

See you on the other side….

Categories
Beer history Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Barmaid as Sex Object

Detail from the cover of London Pub Guide, 1968.
Detail from the cover of London Pub Guide, 1968.

In, we think, around 1970, Cyril Hughes entered and won a competition in left-wing magazine The New Statesman. His contribution was this couplet:

Not turning taps, but pulling pumps,
Gives barmaids splendid busts and rumps.

It is very much a product of the era when sexy barmaids were a marketing asset, and entered the beer geek’s arsenal of ‘beer quotations’ fairly promptly.

Beric Watson, first publisher of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide, made it the basis of his preface to a 1971 book called Hand-Pulled Beer and Buxom Barmaids; Christopher Hutt quoted it in his The Death of the English Pub (1973); as did Richard Boston; and Michael Jackson, too. It was generally used as an illustration of the all round earthy splendidness of traditional draught beer, as opposed to the sterile coldness of big brewery keg.

In 1975, The Daily Mirror quoted Watson as a representative of CAMRA saying: “Pulling pints develops the chest muscles… Girls who serve beer from a pump are going to wind up with better bosoms than those who press a button or throw a switch.” The response from Watney Mann? “We can produce barmaids any time with busts of more than 38 inches–without them ever having pulled a pump.”(ADDED 17/10/2012.)

Michael Jackson expanded further upon the subject in 1976:

…there are two basic types of barmaid: surrogate mothers and surrogate bedmates. The types are quite distinct, though the pub-goer who drinks too much may eventually confuse them, especially if the barmaid in question is of the buxom mould characteristic to her occupation. Not only does beer inflame lust if taken to excess: heavy-beer drinkers are often male-chauvinists. In the days when Nice Girls Didn’t, it was popularly thought that barmaids did… Now that Nice Girls are out of style, so are blousy barmaids. Happily, there are still a few pubs which bulge with anachronisms.

The English Pub

Michael! Eew! (And let’s not bring Freud to bear on those opening lines…) It does seem to be true, however, that the role of barmaid was, in the nineteenth century, not so far removed from that of a sex worker, specifically a clip joint hostess:

Barmaids are a seductive study — a charming institution. Barmaids are born, otherwise they fail… B begins barmaid and B begins beautiful, but it does not therefore follow that all barmaids are beautiful — some are even plain… See the custom a good barmaid attracts!… how clever she is, and what a talanet she shows in making these swells provide her with… chains, rings, brooches, lockets and bracelets… what jealousies and heartburnings she causes among the golden youth by her guileless indecision in the matter of “Sundays out!”.

Fife Herald, 15 February 1872.

Do women working behind bars still feel the gaze of horny, half-legless customers? Probably, but less often, and it’s no doubt more discreetly done. Are they still expected to flirt? If so, then it’s more often couched these days in terms of ‘providing a welcome’, and male bar staff are expected to perform, too. Do publicans still hire  bar staff based on how they look? We suspect that the answer is yes, sometimes, but that having the right hairstyle might have become more important than large breasts.

Pete Brown’s appreciation of a barmaid in Wales suggests that in some places, however, the idea of the ‘sexy barmaid’ lives on, and that where it does, male customers, and male beer writers, are still paying attention.

Categories
Beer history

Hitchhiker’s Guides to the Beerosphere

Inn guides, whether sponsored or not, have long been a feature of the British way of life — part of the fabric you might almost say. But they have tended to concentrate more on the places which find themselves on calendars and Christmas cards and not at all on the pubs which are the warp and woof of the brewers’ investment.

Derek Cooper, The Beverage Report, 1970.

The very first edition of CAMRA’s newsletter, What’s Brewing, from June 1972, contained an important statement of intent: work had begun on a guide to pubs which would focus solely on ‘the merit of their ale’ without regard to ‘Historic value, trendiness, outside surroundings or other such criteria’. It was to be called ‘the List’ and, as we would say these days, was to be ‘crowd-sourced’ — that is, collated from the recommendations of members all over the country.

In addition to their focus on food, music, go-go dancers and architecture, rather than beer, previous pub guides also had other flaws.

  • Geographical coverage. Egon Ronay’s pub guides, from 1963 (as far as we can tell), tended to focus on London; as, of course, did Green and White’s guides to London Pubs from 1965. Even when Ronay went national, London got far more than its fair share.
  • Method. Derek Cooper mocks the ‘specially trained team’ who surveyed c.1,000 pubs on Ronay’s behalf: what made them qualified to judge? This review of the 1983 edition questions how they chose which pubs to consider and whether they had enough data to work from, having visited too few.

CAMRA’s List emerged as the Good Beer Guide — a stapled, 18 page leaflet — and, eventually, in 1974, became a 96-page printed and bound book, with the help of the printing arm of board-game manufacturer Waddington’s. (Beric Watson, the firm’s Managing Director, was a ‘traditional draught’ drinker himself and had, in fact, published the unfortunately titled Hand-Pulled Beer and Buxom Barmaids, a guide to pubs in Leeds, c.1971.)

The first  run of 30,000 copies of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide (GBG) sold out within six months of its publication in April 1974, despite (or because of, Brewdog-style…?) some headline-grabbing controversy over its suggestion that Watney’s should be avoided ‘like the plague’, censored by the printers at the last minute, and amended to read ‘at all costs’.

It seems, pretty instantly, to have become an institution — the perfect Christmas present for a beer-loving relative, a nice fit for the glove box of the car. By the time the second edition went to print, however, the realisation had dawned that pubs could come out of the Guide as well as go in, and some landlords sulked, just as they do today.

The 1976 edition of Ronay, while it still makes plenty of mention of food, looks to us like a blatant attempt to imitate the look and tone of the GBG. The simply-titled Pub Guide includes an entire page on ‘Real ale versus keg’, somehow managing to explain the whole ‘controversy’ and the success of ‘persistent comsumer pressure’ in preserving cask ale, without mentioning CAMRA. The term ‘real ale’ is scattered throughout, marked against those pubs offering it, though without quite going as far as to use it as a benchmark for quality.

These days, Des de Moor’s CAMRA Guide to London’s Best Beer, Pubs & Bars and Will Hawkes’ Craft Beer London iOS app represent something of a return to Ronay’s approach — geographically specific, and ‘curated’, with no real pretence of democracy — but retain the GBG’s relentless focus on beer above all else. Meanwhile, ‘user-generated’ pub review websites offer the opposite: access to the unedited reactions of thousands of pub-goers, each offering a rating based on their mood, the state of the toilets, whether their dog got a bowl of water, and, just occasionally, the quality of the beer, averaged out to a more-or-less meaningful number.

Forty editions later, the GBG, slap-bang in the middle between those two approaches, keeps coming out, and keeps selling.