Categories
Beer history

Tooled Up Froth Blowers, RALF and the Ring

Not the real RALF logo.
Not the real RALF logo…

When we wrote about the Ancient Order of Froth Blowers, we knew they were relatively well known, but didn’t know they’d been immortalised in animation. Our favourite discovery, however, has been that the AOFB was used as a cover by ‘Wild Geese’ mercenaries who turned up to support a 1981 coup in the Seychelles wearing blazers embroidered with the Order’s logo, and with their bags stuffed with guns.

That Froth Blowers post also led a chap called Bert to tip us off to the existence of the militant Real Ale Liberation Front (RALF), founded by pub landlord and CAMRA member Nick Winnington in Weymouth in c.1977, with the aim of carrying out small acts of sabotage against keg beer and the big brewers. There was more than one member, and there were some stickers, but that’s all we know. We’ve emailed Nick (with Bob Arnott’s help) and await more information.

Finally, our new favourite book(s), Green and White’s Evening Standard Guide to London Pubs (1973), gives us this:

Another organization concerned with pubs and beer is ‘the Ring.’ This is a loosely knit group of mature students of the pub scene. They meet once a month for a determined pub crawl, obliged to visit ten or eleven pre-selected pubs. Masonic rituals prevail; you buy drinks in groups of three or four in strict rotation; and when the leader has finished his half pint, he shouts ‘Ring out!’, at which you must drain your glass and leave the pub… Men are known collectively as Hector, and ladies — though not normally accepted — as Morag.

Can anyone confirm the existence of the Ring? Or is this just it’s-a-mad-world journalistic bullshit?

Categories
Beer history

That Stout Yeoman of the Bar Nonsense


Researching the SPBW and the early days of CAMRA, we’ve come across a few examples of what struck us as the same mock-pompous language so ridiculed by Viz in their ‘Real Ale Twats’ comic strip (“A flagon of your finest ale, stout yeoman of the bar, if you would be so very good”, and so on). Arguably, the use of an antiquated word like ‘ale’ in CAMRA’s name is one very notable example.

We were delighted, therefore, to come across this passage in Martin Green and Tony White’s Guide to London Pubs (the 1968 edition of the book mentioned here), which acknowledges and discusses the phenomenon:

Foreign visitors may be puzzled by a form of pub ‘dialect’ spoken mainly by regulars in Chelsea, West End and City pubs but also in the Saloon Bars of pubs in outlying areas. This dialect is an odd blend of pomposity and facetiousness which passes for wit and, as far as can be worked out, makes the speaker feel like some sort of posed, 18th-century Dr Johnson figure…

A speaker of this dialect will always use more and longer words than are necessary. For instance, instead of saying: ‘Shall we go to the pub?’ he’ll say: ‘Shall we repair to a hostelry?’ Instead of ‘Shall we have a drink?’ he’ll say: ‘Shall we partake of liquid refreshment?’… He will also go in for heavy gallantry; he won’t ask you how your wife is but ‘How’s your charming lady wife?’

Is this resort to overblown cliche an inevitable response to the antiquity (or mock antiquity) of many English pubs? And is the kind of froth blower who prefers to ‘quaff traditional draught‘ perhaps more likely also to enjoy speaking traditional nonsense?

Categories
Beer history Blogging and writing

Pinning down the Big Six

Window with the Bass logo, Kennington, South London.

We’ve been grappling with a problem this weekend: commentary on the British beer industry makes frequent reference to the Big Six, a set of colossal brewing companies emerging from the takeover mania of the nineteen-fifties and sixties. Sometimes, though, it’s the Big Five, the Big Seven, or even the Big Eight; and the companies making up the Big Six in 1960 merge with others, grow and change names, which makes it hard to keep track.

In trying to tell a story, this is a pain.

Should we explain every name change as it happens, possibly confusing the reader and slowing down the narrative? Rely on footnotes? Or, as we’ve seen people do when writing about, say, the Royal Air Force, or Archibald ‘Cary Grant’ Leach, refer to them throughout by one name for the sake of clarity at the expense of accuracy? (With an explanatory note, of course.) We’re inclined towards the latter approach, but still thinking.

Anyway, for your information, in the oh-so-2002 Schott’s Miscellany style, here’s our best attempt to explain the Big Six.

UPDATED: Tandleman highlighted that we’d picked a bad source for our 1960 list, so we’ve found a better one from 1959 and changed the first section below.

UPDATED AGAIN: based on Martyn’s suggestions below. (We’ll also try to identify newspaper sources for each of the mergers/changes.)

The Big Six in 1959#
Ind Coope and Taylor Walker, Watney Mann, Courage and Barclay, Bass Ratcliffe Gretton, Whitbread, Scottish Brewers.
 
Brewery mergers/takeovers 1960-67
Courage Barclay + Simonds = Courage Barclay & Simonds (1960)
Scottish Brewers + Newcastle Breweries = Scottish and Newcastle (1960)
Bass + Mitchells & Butlers = Bass Mitchells & Butlers (1961)
Ind Coope/Taylor Walker + Ansells+Tetley Walker = Ind Coope Tetley Ansell (1961)
Ind Coope Tetley Ansell = Allied Breweries (1963)
Charrington United + Bass Mitchells & Butlers = Bass Charrington (1967)
 
The Big Six in 1967##
Bass Charrington, Allied Breweries, Whitbread, Watney Mann, Scottish and Newcastle, Courage Barclay & Simonds.
 
Brewery mergers/takeovers/name changes after 1967
Courage Barclay & Simonds = Courage (1970)
Watney Mann + Truman Hanbury & Buxton (owned by Grand Metropolitan Hotels) = Watney Mann & Truman (part of Grand Metropolitan) (1973)
Allied + J. Lyons = Allied Lyons (1978)
Bass Charrington = Bass (1983)
 
The Big Six in 1989###
Allied, Bass, Courage, Grand Metropolitan, Scottish & Newcastle, Whitbread.
 
The Big Seven
As above, but with Guinness.
 
  • # ‘Towards Larger Units in the Brewery Trade’, The Times, 19 February 1960, p.17. ‘What the Brewery Merger Means’, The Financial Times, 4 June 1959, p.11.
  • ## Beer: a report on the supply of beer, Monopolies Commission, 1969, table IV, p.5.
  • ### The Suppply of Beer, Monopolies and Mergers Commission, March 1989, Appendix 2.3, p.238.
Categories
Beer history

October Beer

Original illustration of three gentlemen drinking.

ALL ye who would drink,
And yet stop on the brink
Of the chasm ‘twixt drunk and sober,
Throw out to the slums
All your brandies and Rums
And stick fast to good honest October!
Your Frenchman is vain
Of his frothy Champagne–
Of his Burgundy and his Bordeaux, Sirs!
A staggering pot
Of October, I wot,
Would soon send all the lot down below, Sirs!
Your Clarets and Hocks,
And your sour German bocks,
May all be very well when you’re ill, Sirs!
But I venture to think,
That old JOHNNY BULL’s drink
Is the brave old October-brew, Sirs!
Where find you for muscle,
Or pluck in a tussle,
A man who with BULL is compeer, Sirs?
And if you’d know why–
‘Tis because when he’s dry,
He’s content with a draught of good Beer, Sirs!

Punch, or the London Charivari, October 20, 1877, p.169.

Categories
Beer history beer reviews Beer styles

Stout as Spacetime Anomaly

Cask of St Austell 1913 Original Stout

One of the problems with brewing at home is that formulating a recipe stimulates the imagination, and the ingredients smell delicious, so that you want to drink the beer the minute it goes into the fermentor. By the end of Thursday, having brewed to a 1912 St Austell recipe, all we could think about was drinking a pint of black, rummy, treacley stout. Guinness aside, however, Penzance is a stout-free zone. It’s also short on porters, dark mild… in fact, anything beyond brown is hard to find.

But, as luck would have it, we couldn’t have aligned our brewing and drinking agendas any better this week: a Tweet brough to our attention that Roger Ryman’s own recreation of a 1913 recipe (5.2%, £2.75 pint) would be available at Docktoberfest, a festival at the Dock Inn in Penzance. We legged it down and wasted no time reviewing the beer list: “1913 Stout, please!”

In a straight-sided pint glass, with a loose, long-lasting, off-white head, it looks as if it might have been snatched straight from a pre-war sepia photograph. There’s a whiff of balsamic vinegar, red wine and very rich espresso. The taste was multi-layered and complex, mouth-coatingly oily, with rolling waves of intense flavour where Guinness just has a big watery nothing. Sweet and a touch sour; burnt-bitter and prunes-in-syrup fruity; and, finally, like licking treacle from a spoon. It reminded us most of Fuller’s London Porter, which also uses brown malt, and is one of the few beers we’d make multiple changes on public transport to get at.

We liked it.

In conclusion, our thesis, which requires more investigation, is now that brown malt, dark sugars and one hundred years of history add vital extra dimensions to a stout. Our own 1912 stout, which is fermenting furiously, might help us confirm or deny that suspicion.

Picture nicked from the Dock Inn Twitter feed.