Young’s was an important London brewery, and remains an important London brand, but it might be losing its place in the city’s language.
Back in the 1970s, Young’s, under the leadership of John Young, was a holdout against keg beer and its beers were championed by the Campaign for Real Ale. It even had its own fan club.
But when we first started blogging about beer, in 2007, things weren’t going so well.
The beer, people said, had been declining in quality for years, and wasn’t what it used to be in those early days of CAMRA.
In 2006, Young’s had sold a majority stake to Charles Wells, John Young died, and the Ram Brewery in Wandsworth closed. Production moved to Bedford.
In the decade that followed, Charles Wells bought out Young & Co and the brewing brand and pub company became totally separate entities, though Young’s branded beer was still generally found in Young’s branded pubs.
What surprised us was the persistent fondness for the brand in London, and especially in South West London.
People really didn’t seem to care where it was brewed, or whether it was any good, as long as they could still buy a pint of ‘Ordinary’ (bitter), a pint of ‘Spesh’ (Special, the best bitter), and perhaps a bottle of ‘Ram’ (Ram Rod bottled strong ale).
Practical linguistics
That traditional insider vocabulary has always delighted us, and its persistence was a sign that Young’s fandom was clinging on as an idea and a sort of subculture.
Back in about 2013 we tried to order “Half a pint of Special in a pint glass and a bottle of Ram Rod, please,” only for the teenager behind the bar to reply, witheringly, “I do know what a Ram’n’Spesh is.”
At a Young’s pub in Wandsworth in 2022, with the pandemic still distorting the pub going experience, we were delighted to find Ram’n’Spesh as an option in the Young’s app we used to order beer to our table.
And even in Bristol, at The Highbury Vaults, we still seem to be able to order Ordinary and get a pint of Young’s Bitter – despite the fact it’s been renamed London Original.
But there are worrying signs.
A pint of what?
In more than one pub on recent trips to London we’ve found that the secret language of Young’s no longer works.
At The Lamb in Leadenhall Market, for example, asking for Ordinary baffled the bar staff. Asking for Ram Rod confused them, too.
Perhaps that’s because these days it’s less a pub for City clerks from the Surrey Side and more of an Instagram-worthy tourist attraction.
Or maybe Carlsberg-Marston’s, which owns the brewing brand, has started to enforce brand discipline.
Starbuck’s coffee shop staff are supposedly to repeat your order back in the correct brand language:
“A small black coffee, please.”
“A tall Americano?”
Something like that, perhaps.
After all, when you’re spending money marketing London Original you sure as hell want people to call it that, and ask for it by name.
And while ‘Ordinary’ strikes us rather a lovely bit of self-deprecating understatement, it’s perhaps not where you’d start if you’re naming a beer to stand out in the crowded market of 2024.
What’s your experience?
Have you successfully ordered a pint of Ordinary recently?
Or, on the flipside, encountered a member of bar staff who didn’t know what you were talking about?
We’ll keep testing the water when we’re in Young’s pubs, asking for Ordinary, and seeing what we get.
Another year begins and, once again, things feel uncertain and unsettled for pubs, breweries and beer drinkers.
For most of 2020/21 there was a sense that if businesses could survive the worst of COVID-19, and make it out the other side, things would get better.
There was evidence of pent-up demand. Consumers were keen to get out and about and had perhaps learned not to take hospitality for granted.
Government grants and loans, though inevitably regarded as miserly by those on the receiving end, helped keep businesses afloat and even to invest in improvements.
Others were given the nudge they needed to develop online sales and delivery capability.
Then 2022 happened, with a whole new set of challenges on top of a lingering long-tail of pandemic-related problems.
It’s no wonder we’re entering 2023 with people saying things like “I have a generalised bad feeling about what 2023 will bring to the small and independent brewing sector”.
We’re not completely pessimistic – more on that later – but it’s certainly worth facing the facts head on and sitting with them a bit.
We’re not used to breweries closing
In 2022, especially towards the end of the year, a number of UK breweries closed. Steve Dunkley has taken on the administrative job of maintaining a log. At the time of writing, he lists more than 80 closures, including:
Box Steam
Exe Valley
Leeds Brewery
Newtown Park
Twisted Wheel
The Wild Beer Co
It feels mean to say what’s going to come next but if we’re not here to be honest, what’s the point?
The breweries above were known to us but many of the others that have closed so far were relatively obscure and/or second-ranking.
We’d never heard of most of them, and we do pay attention somewhat. Those we did know weren’t necessarily highly regarded, or “hyped” if you prefer.
That’s not to say they were bad, only that they were no doubt already having to work harder to stay afloat without word-of-mouth and national profile.
Kelham Island is an interesting example. It closed and was then saved by Thornbridge. Kelham Island is a beloved brand with plenty of clout behind it; and Thornbridge is clearly not struggling if it felt able to make this move.
And we’ll never get any brewer to say this on record but surely there’s a certain sense of relief that comes with a thinning out of the field, at last.
“There are too many breweries” has been a constant refrain for the past decade and we’ve heard plenty of off-the-record complaints about undercutting and amateurism.
There’s a general expectation that more closures will be announced in January, when breweries tot up their Christmas take and decide whether slogging on is worth it.
Each individual closure is, of course, sad. Jobs gone. Someone’s dream shattered.
But if we try to float above all that, aloof and objective, if 2023 ends with half the number of breweries in the UK, that’s still more beer than we’ll ever get round to drinking. And certainly more than there was in 1984.
Watch out for…
brewery closures to be announced in January 2023
the number of breweries listed in CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide in autumn 2023
When were pubs ever not under threat?
Earlier this year CAMRA published statistics on pub closures during 2021. The numbers aren’t entirely dismal and this table in particular might suggest reasons for cautious optimism:
Region
Net change
East Midlands
+4
East of England
-3
Greater London
+14
North East
-1
North West
-11
South East
+3
South West
+1
West Midlands
0
Yorkshire and the Humber
+36
Long-term closures July-December 2021 based on data from whatpub.com
Stats from the Office for National Statistics published a few weeks ago were similarly uncooperative in the decline-and-fall narrative:
“There are 1.6% more high street pubs and bars since the first Covid lockdown… The data, which tracked the percentage change in the number of establishments between March 2020 and March 2022, was conducted by the Ordnance Survey and the BBC. The Ordnance Survey data found 700 more pubs and bars were operating after the pandemic.”
But even if you take these figures at face value (and not everyone does) things feel very different in January 2023 than they did in March 2022. Increased fuel bills are just now beginning to bite both drinkers and drinking establishments.
And many pubs will have been hanging on for the combined World Cup, Christmas and New Year take before deciding on their future.
There’s no doubt it’s going to be tough. But perhaps a combination of tactical closures – shutting early if it’s quiet, going into hibernation – and temporary adaptations to the offer can help fundamentally healthy pub businesses weather this, like they weathered COVID.
We’ve also provided a couple of hefty updates, in 2015 and 2018, covering notable developments on the scene.
All of which is to say, we think we’ve been watching pretty closely, and thinking about the mood as much as the facts.
In a nutshell, we think pubs feel at marginally less risk now than a decade ago, but brewing feels deflated and tarnished.
Accepting that the plural of anecdote is not data, and so on and so forth, anecdotes are helpful when it comes to checking the vibe. In Bristol, it feels as if pubs are back – at least in the city centre, and more affluent suburbs.
The reopening in November of The Kings Head near Temple Meads under the stewardship of Good Chemistry is perhaps a sign of a fundamental shift. It’s a proper pubby pub with a low-key craft beer offer and has been constantly busy. And they’re not daft; they wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t good business.
Micropubs might be an evolutionary dead end, the jury’s still out, and of course they’re not all wonderful. But those that work really work. In our old neighbourhood on the other side of Bristol, The Drapers Arms, now seven years old, has become a fixture of the community, varying from full to uncomfortably crowded on our recent visits.
Further afield, in London and Sheffield, we keep finding ourselves unable to get into, or find seats in, pubs that have any kind of reputation.
If a pint of beer has become a luxury, perhaps it’s at least a relatively affordable one. And if what your soul needs is to be out with friends, even £5 pints are a cheaper way to achieve that than a £60-a-head restaurant dinner.
Brewing is different and perhaps the feeling there is tied to the rise and fall of BrewDog, and the other members of the United Craft Brewers:
When Robin Davies stumbled across a mention of Godson’s Brewery in one of our blog posts, he got in touch to tell us he worked there as a young man.
Godson’s was founded by Patrick Fitzpatrick in East London, in 1977. We’ve previously described him as “the original Hackney hipster brewer” and interviewed Fitzpatrick for our 2014 book Brew Britannia: the strange rebirth of British beer.
Now, we have another angle on the same story – not from the boss’s perspective but from someone who really got their hands dirty. Here, in his own words, are Robin’s memories.
* * *
It was the early 1980s when I left school which was just up the road from the brewery.
I’d messed about my whole time at secondary school and came out with next to nothing other than having learnt how to swear, fight and play drums – all useful stuff in the East End right?
Even though they were plentiful at the time I’d no idea how I was gonna get a job.
A mate of my brother in law said that he knew or had met Patrick Fitzpatrick, the Godson’s owner, and that he’d put in a word for me if I fancied it. After bumming around for a few months I was just about ready to work so why not?
I wasn’t really expecting anything to happen but I said “Yeah, if he’ll have me I’ll give it a go” As if by magic, a couple of days later, I was off to meet the main man.
On meeting Patrick he seemed like a nice bloke, and indeed he was, always friendly, sometimes firm, made the odd joke or two, a decent boss and I guess he thought I was OK because he offered me the job.
Dogsbody? No, not really, but I did do a bit of everything from making tea to cleaning out the mash tun, all for the sum of 80 quid a week, and I loved it.
I got up early every day and couldn’t get there quick enough. I loved the work, I loved the smell of the place, which in the beginning had the effect of making me feel slightly drunk.
It was great and I was learning loads, the whole brewing process from start to finish. I watched and soaked everything up like a sponge. I soaked up the odd glass of the brewery’s finest, too, and after a hot day’s work it tasted amazing.
It was a very small team at Godsons. There was Patrick, of course. Chris and Lorraine, I think their names were in the office. There were the two dray men, tough old East Enders that I’m pretty sure were both called Roy. The older one appeared to hate my guts from the off and talked to me like dirt but I could just about handle it and every now and then I got the guts to tell him where to go.
From time to time Patrick’s brother Finnian would show up. If I remember rightly, he would normally be out and about trying his hardest to sell the various ales. A real nice bloke that used to brighten the place up whenever he returned to the brewery. Always a big smile on his face.
Once or twice my least favourite of the brothers would turn up for a bit of work when he had nothing better to do.
About a year before I left we got a new brewer who also happened to be called Robin, again a real nice bloke who I was more than happy to work with. I often wonder what he’s up to but he was a smart bloke so he’s probably retired and living in luxury somewhere. I hope so anyway.
Robin picked up the workings of the brewery pretty quickly and soon I think we were teaching each other a thing or two.
One time Robin went on holiday which left me doing the lot. I did the week’s brew completely alone from start to finish, plus all my usual work. This all went perfectly and I was left feeling pretty proud of myself – had I really learnt all this from nothing? I decided to call myself the assistant brewer and if I felt like impressing someone I’d say I was a brewer. No one else ever called me that but to be fair I got a few compliments. Happy days!
How did it all end?
I worked as hard as I could for the place, and at times felt I was running myself into the ground, so I did the inevitable and asked for a pay rise. My 80 quid was no longer going very far at all so I had to go for it.
A week or so later, Patrick called me into the office and said that he’d had a good think about it; he would give me a raise; and at this stage he considered the raise to be a substantial one.
I was excited so didn’t even ask how much but instead just carried on as normal and waited until Friday for my new super-massive pay packet.
Come Friday, I opened up my little brown envelope to find an extra fiver inside.
Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy. Being young and stroppy, I decided there and then that this would be the last day at the brewery. Not the way to leave a job, especially one I loved, but it seemed like the thing to do.
Sadly, some months later, I heard that things had gone south and the brewery was toast. I didn’t know the full story of what had gone wrong but I felt quite sad for the place and maybe a little angry towards Patrick for allowing Godson’s to fail, though I’m sure it wasn’t his fault.
I can’t actually remember how long I was there myself but it must have been around three years.
If anyone out there gets the chance to work at one of these little breweries, grab it, you’ll love it. It can be hard work but there’s something special about it!
These are Robin’s words with some edits for style and clarity.
If you want to learn more about Godson’s check out our book Brew Britannia.
And if you worked at a brewery at any time in the past 60 years, please write something down and, ideally, publish it somewhere.
Bristol is good at German-style wheat beer, it turns out – we’ve had three this year that might be beer-of-the-year contenders.
It makes sense, we suppose. When we think of the defining Bristol style, what pops into our heads is slightly hazy, soft-edged, fruity, barely-bitter pale ale.
BBF’s version, available in 440ml cans, actually pours stubbornly clear, or at least only faintly hazy. It has vanilla in the aroma and, of course, a bunch of banana. At 5%, it’s not as strong as the Schneider original – or, indeed, as most standard German wheat beers.
We liked it so much we bought a box of 12 to drink at home. Perhaps others don’t share our enthusiasm, though, because it was discounted to £25.60 – about £2 per tin. At present, they don’t have any in stock.
A bigger surprise, perhaps, was Left Handed Giant’s take. We say it’s a surprise because we don’t always click with LHG beers, which often sound and look better than they taste.
LHG Hefeweizen is another 5%-er and, we gather, is regularly available at their colossal, rather impressive brewpub-taproom at Finzel’s Reach, on the site of the old Courage brewery.
We found it on draught at The Swan With Two Necks and Ray (the bigger wheat beer fan of the two of us anyway) loved it so much he stuck on it for the entire session.
Our notes say ‘pretty convincing… less banana, more strawberry’. The point is, though, that it isn’t a ‘twist’ on the style; it doesn’t have fruit, or unusual hops, or breakfast cereal. It’s a straight-up, honest beer.
The same might be said for Good Chemistry’s punningly-named Weiss City, also with an ABV of 5% (was there a memo?), and on draught at their taproom the last couple of times we’ve been.
To underline the point we made at the start of this post, here’s how it looks alongside their session IPA, Kokomo Weekday, which is at the back:
We’re not sure we’d know it wasn’t an authentic German product if we were served it blind, in appropriate glassware.
That is a problem, of course: all the examples above were served in standard UK pint glasses, with little room for the customary meringue-whip head.
Perhaps at some point we’ll re-run the wheat beer taste-off we did a few years ago from which we concluded…
German wheat beer is more subtle than we had realised — an end-of-level-boss technical challenge for brewers. Too much of those characteristic aromas and flavours and it tips over into caricature, or just becomes sickly. Despite looking dirty, it actually needs to be really clean to work: acidity knocks it right off course, and there’s no room for funk or earthiness. The carbonation has to be exactly calibrated, too, or the beer simply flops: bubbles are body.
It feels as if perhaps things have moved along since then. But until we drink these Bristol beers alongside, say, Franziskaner (bang at the centre of the style in our minds) then it’s hard to say for sure.
The BBC has released a podcast series, The Good Ship BrewDog, which over the course of six episodes tackles everything from the bro culture at HQ to allegations of bullying and harassment.
This got us talking about BrewDog – what’s their status in the beer world in 2022? And why haven’t we felt moved to boycott them, or remove their bar from our Bristol pub guide?
It turns out we don’t have a neat party line on this and so, for the first time in a while, we thought we’d share something like the raw text of our debate.
Jess
My first question is why exactly the BBC is going into this level of detail about the running of one particular business. There’s some shocking stuff in the podcast but lots of it also just sounds like how a lot of businesses are run.
Ray
I guess it’s partly that it’s a BBC Scotland production. BrewDog is prominent in the UK and worldwide but in Scotland it’s a really significant business. But, yes, I agree that this does feel a bit unusual. Especially when you get five minutes dedicated to James Watts’s annoying ‘Imperial March’ door jingle.
Jess
Yeah, what’s the point there?
Ray
That he’s an autocrat who imposes his will, not a cool team player, I think. The serious stuff is serious, though. The story about the employee being refused a promotion because they thought she might be planning to have a baby–
Jess
Terrible. As in, the very basics of running a proper, compliant business. Amateurish.
Ray
But they’d say – the documentary says this – that it’s just part of “cutting through the red tape”.
Jess
That’s where that whole anti-red-tape populism gets you: discrimination against women and minorities in the name of “just getting it done”.
Ray
So, why don’t we boycott them? I know a lot of our peers are of the view that enough is enough, cut off the supply of cash, stop buying their stuff.
Jess
I definitely think it’s time for the supply of free PR to be cut off, but that’s kind of happened, hasn’t it? When we wrote our chapter on BrewDog in Brew Britannia we felt quite out of step because it was pretty negative.
Ray
It was objective! But it probably did tell a more negative, questioning version of their origin story than was usual at that time. A lot of the same themes as in the documentary: they weren’t poor, they weren’t original, and they lied all the time. Some people were a bit irritated at us for being critical of BrewDog at all.
Jess
Until a couple of years later when, suddenly, we weren’t critical enough! The thing is, I would still rather have more BrewDogs than Heinekens in the market.
Ray
That’s a thing that comes across well in the podcast. There’s a clip of Pete Brown talking about how well the beers did in a blind-tasting back in 2007 or 2009 or whenever it was and it really reminded me how exciting Punk IPA tasted.
Jess
Still does. I’ll die on this hill. It’s a good beer, and consistently good. I’m always happy to drink it.
Ray
So, we don’t boycott them because, first, their influence has been, on balance, positive; and secondly, because the beer is good. Doesn’t sound super convincing.
Jess
In my day job [charity finance] I spend a lot of time thinking about environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing and reporting and it’s always a bit more complicated than “just divest”. You look at a range of things a business does. And individual things that they do badly might not be enough to make you withdraw support. Without in any way condoning James Watts’s behaviour, if BrewDog is genuinely doing the right things on the environment, you might say that gives them credit in the bank. I’m fascinated by their B Corp status.
Ray
Do you think B Corp might be forced to withdraw their endorsement of BrewDog?
Jess
I doubt it. They must have this with a lot of the businesses they work with. It’s about points and thresholds. And it’s been a standard line of attack from the right, and from lobby groups, to try to discredit things like Fair Trade.
Ray
We’ve found one exception, or one bad actor, so the whole thing is pointless!
Jess
Exactly. I’d rather have a system that’s imperfect but moves things forward, or shifts the window, than nothing at all.
One of the first cracks in BrewDogs moral armour was its partnership with Tesco more than a decade ago. This is a dedicated, permanent display in a branch of Sainsbury’s in June 2022.
Ray
I do struggle with the hypocrisy issue. I don’t really care about companies selling out or selling up – we sort of know that’s the plan, or at least an option, for any serious growth-focused business. But BrewDog has been so insistent on the importance of independence, even after, it turns out, they were actively trying to arrange a sale to Heineken. That is a recurring theme of the podcast: that James Watt will say or do anything to move the business forward.
Jess
The podcast makes it sound as if he’s entered into a Faustian pact with the venture capitalists which is driving a lot of that.
Ray
Back to boycotting, though–
Jess
Who else do we boycott? I try to buy from businesses I think are good, and making a positive contribution. I said I’d rather have more BrewDogs than Heinekens but I’d also rather have more Good Chemistrys than BrewDogs. But we live in the world we live in. We still use Amazon occasionally despite my best efforts. We still shop in the supermarket.
Ray
As it happens, we’ve haven’t been to BrewDog’s bar in Bristol for ages because–
Jess
Partly because we’re trying to support more local companies that we think are making a more positive contribution. But also – It’s always too busy!
Ray
This was a point Martyn Cornell made on Twitter…
The people of Dublin are taking the allegations against BrewDog very seriously … pic.twitter.com/lX1OY3OJCA
…and despite the BBC coverage, despite the total disdain among beer geeks, the shine has not gone off the brand out in the real world.
Jess
Bloody hell, people love BrewDog on LinkedIn. I see James Watt is going to be on Steven Bartlett’s podcast soon.
Ray
He’ll have anyone on – Jordan Peterson!
Jess
Yeah, that bro-y capitalism thing still seems, unfortunately, to have further to run and that’s what puts me off BrewDog the most. That said, I just can’t see a positive in BrewDog crashing and burning. It’s not just about the loss of jobs. It’s the fact that the company is still doing some things that are positive. In particular, the environmental thing. Yes, it’s true to point to flights to Las Vegas as a problem, that hypocrisy again, but if you manage to create an enormous manufacturing plant that is genuinely carbon neutral, that is an impressive feat.
Ray
I guess you might say the important thing is to keep talking critically about BrewDog in particular, and ethics across the industry as whole.
Jess
Especially with people who aren’t totally immersed in the beer world, but are interested.
Ray
Blimey, like religious obsessives, knocking on people’s doors: “Can I share the bad news with you today?”
Jess
Ha ha, no, but just maybe gently correcting the narrative when you see it on social media or it comes up in conversation. BrewDog should not be a go-to example of how to run a business. James Watt should not be an aspirational business-bro pinup.
Ray
And there’s a lesson for drinkers, too – don’t hero worship these people. Don’t be a ‘fan’. You’re just setting yourself up to be let down.
Jess
But having said all that, I’m going to reserve the right to pop into a BrewDog bar every now and then if I feel like it, and to buy a can of Punk if it’s the best option available.
The Good Ship BrewDog is available on all major podcasting platforms and via BBC Sounds in the UK.
