Categories
Beer history beer in fiction / tv pubs

Lovely, lovely ale, mainstay of the North

Laurence Harvey in the pub in the film of Room at the Top.

John Braine’s 1957 ‘angry young man’ novel Room at the Top isn’t as fashionable now as once it was. We took our copy down from the shelf looking for examples of the word ‘ale’ being used in preference to ‘beer’ up north and realised just how much the book relies on pubs and drinking to make (rather heavy-handed) points about social mobility and class.

For example, when  the ruthlessly social climbing working class orphan, Joe Lampton, returns to his generically northern home town of Dufton for Christmas, he goes to the pub with Charles, a childhood friend.

The Siege Gun was our local; it stood on top of a little hill overlooking a wilderness of allotments and hen-runs. It was about half an hour’s walk from Oak Crescent; for some reason it was the only respectable pub in Dufton. The others weren’t exactly low, but even in their Best Rooms you were likely to see the overalled and sweaty. The landlord at the Siege Gun, a sour old ex-regular, discouraged anyone entering the Best Room without a collar and tie.

But he’s been spoiled by his time in upmarket Warley: “It was too small, too dingy, too working-class; four months in Warley had given me a fixed taste for either the roadhouse or the authentic country pub.”

Even Charles, who is planning to move to London, is fed-up of the Siege Gun:

Do you know, when I come into this pub, I don’t even have to order? They automatically issue a pint of wallop. And if I come in with someone else I point at them and nod twice if it’s bitter… Lovely, lovely ale… the mainstay of the industrial North, the bulwark of the British Constitution. If the Dufton pubs closed for just one day, there wouldn’t be a virgin or an unbroken window left by ten o’clock.

Graham Lees, one of the four founder members of CAMRA, apparently urged the use of the ‘ale’ in the name because it was a good, solid northern word, unlike the effete, southern ‘beer’.

Categories
Beer history london pubs

Pubs are one thing, beer another

Detail from the cover of Len Deighton's London Dossier, 1967.

Books about pubs from the pre-CAMRA era rarely give beer more than a passing mention.

Richard Keverne’s Tales of Old Inns (1939; rev. 1951) is really about architecture, and inns are not necessarily pubs, but, still, it seems odd that not once (as far as we have been able to see) is beer mentioned in its 160 pages.

Hunter Davies The New London Spy (1966) covers pubs at length, but with an emphasis on atmosphere, decor and food. It includes only one comment on beer:

The amazing thing about the popularity of the French [the York Minster, Dean Street], is its badness as a pub qua pub. There are no pint glasses, for instance, and your unsuspecting customer asking for a pint is simply served with a half, without explanation, and you can only get Watney’s Red Barrel in the way of beer.

The chapter on ‘Drink’ by Adrian Bailey in Len Deighton’s London Dossier (1967) offers a lengthy passage on the wonders of bitter and beer ‘from the wood’ but, when it comes to recommending pubs, beer doesn’t seem to be a particular draw. The Olde Wine Shades is listed because of its ‘Rich ruby port and thin, pale sherry, burgundies and clarets’; the Admiral Codrington in Mossop Street, Chelsea, ‘keeps more than a hundred different whiskies’; while the Chelsea Potter in the King’s Road has ‘the largest variety of aperitifs and spirits in London’. The greatest development of recent times, the author explains, is the availability in pubs of wine by the glass, in defiance of brewers who would ‘rather have them sell beer’.

Martin Green and Tony White, in their Guide to London Pubs (1968) mention beer but their listings for pubs (from the few we’ve been able to see here — still hunting a copy of our own) suggest that music, atmosphere and novelty value (Go Go cages!) are far more important considerations.

We suspect it is only with the arrival on the scene of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide in the 1970s that we began to see the popularisation of the idea that a pub can only really be great  if it has great beer.

This is yet more thinking aloud from us. Feel free to disagree as you would in a pub debate, while sipping your aperitif, glass of wine or whisky.

Categories
Beer history marketing

Sexism in beer: it used to be a lot worse

We wholeheartedly agree with Melissa Cole’s call for an end to sexist imagery in beer branding, but nonetheless take heart from how far we’ve come in the last forty years. Consider this, for example, from a full-page ad from Whitbread in the Daily Express in 1968.

How to choose you beer and chat-up our barmaids

We realise we’re addressing a limited audience.

Only the young, the the abstemious and the foreign tourist, at a guess.

For certainly our regulars need no help in getting familiar with our beers. Or our barmaids.

Though, on the face of it, the choice is just a little bewildering. On average, where you see the Whitbread sign, you can choose from twenty different beers.

Served by Britain’s most gorgeous barmaids. (We have annual beauty contests to keep the standard up.)

So now, with our little bit of chat about our beers, we’re also giving a few tips on how to chat-up our birds.

We’d hate to think some tourists come all the way to Britain and miss the most attractive scenery.

Whitbread for Choice

Categories
Beer history real ale

Moaning about Beer Culture: History Repeating

“I like Double Diamond, and Worthington E, and Younger’s Tartan and Watney’s Red, and Whitbread Tankard…You seem determined to inflict on beer drinkers the snobbery that has always bedevilled the casual enjoyment of wine.” Letter to the editor, R.G. Oliver, The Guardian, 01/11/1973

“Already gone are the long benches and white scrubbed tables. Gone is the oak bar polished with loving care, the sawdust, brazen spittoons and ruddy faced landlord who would quaff a quart in a couple of draughts. This pleasant scene has now been replaced by the ‘contemporary’ setting. Plate glass, chromium fittings, air-conditioning and taped background music is the order of the day, and the anaemic pinstripe-trousered barman in his impeccable white coat clinically serves a pint by pressing the button of a gleaming automatic machine which dispenses a liquid that is a travesty of brewing.” Letter to the editor, D. Gordon, The Financial Times, 14/12/1963

“Pubs have long since ceased to be places where working men went to get away from their slatternly wives and squabbling children — the New Pub is not only for all the family but particularly for the young, free ‘teens and twenties’, those as yet unburdened by H.P. agreements and small babies.” Derek Cooper, The Beverage Report, 1970.

“At times it has seemed Camra’s sole interest was means of dispense. It has been said that some members would drink castor oil if it came from a hand pump, and would reject nectar if it had no more than looked at carbon dioxide. Naturally they are at liberty to entertain whatever notions, and carry whatever motions, they like, but they have often denied themselves excellent beer in the process.” Richard Boston, Beer and Skittles, 1976

Sadly, we failed to find a nice, neat single quotation neatly summarising the endless debate about how to define ‘draught beer’….

 

 

Categories
Beer history real ale

Beer Geekery Inflation

Reading about the early days of beer-geekery in Britain has made us think about how spoiled we’ve become. Here’s an off-the-cuff attempt at charting, in the most general terms, the increasingly demanding nature of the British beer obsessive over the last forty years.

1971

Any bitter other than Watney’s (“’Grotney’s’ more like!”), ideally from a family brewer. (Keg not preferred but not completely taboo if ‘well flavoured’.)

1976

At least one cask-conditioned bitter (CCB), ideally from a family brewer. Sought-after Greene King, Ruddles County, Shepherd Neame or Thwaites a bonus.

1981

At least two CCBs, ideally from a family brewer. Sought-after Greene King, Ruddles County, Shepherd Neame or Thwaites ideal; microbrewery beer an exciting treat; but something from the local brewer will do.

1986

At least three CCBs, including one from a ‘microbrewery’ or at least from another county.

1991

Four CCBs, one golden, and perhaps a stout or mild.

1996

A range of, say, six cask-conditioned ales of various colours and strengths, from different breweries; and a Czech lager or Belgian beer.

2001

Several well-kept cask-conditioned ales of various colours and strengths, from different breweries; a range of foreign beer; Hoegaarden.

2006

Several well-kept cask-conditioned ales of various colours and strengths, mostly from small, obscure breweries; a range of foreign beer, including some rarities and some from the US.

2011

Four or five very well-kept cask ales including no more than one ‘boring brown bitter’, none of the ‘usual suspects’ and certainly NO GREENE KING! A huge range of bottles, ideally almost all rare, many sour or experimental; some canned beer; draught beer from the US, Germany, Czech Republic, Belgium, Scandinavia. Presence of beer from multinationals an irritation.

Is it sad that we no longer feel excited by the sight of a single, unexpected handpump in a pub, as we would have done forty years ago? Or is it sadder that we ever got to that miserable state of affairs in the first place?