Categories
Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Is Brewing a Gentlemanly Profession?

1935 Whitbread IPA advertisement.

There is, it seems, an unwritten rule that says breweries are not supposed to criticise each other, perhaps because they feel under attack from so many directions — the public health lobby, HM Treasury, raters/bloggers/writers — or simply because, in the loosest sense, they work together, and have to get along at festivals and industry events.

And yet the internet, and Twitter especially, is full of oblique, bitter digs at entire schools of brewing (boring ‘twiggy’ bitter or, on the other hand, ‘awesome’ craft beer’) or at specific ‘overrated’ competitors, often using extremely easy-to-decipher coded references. In person, and off the record, the criticism is often much more direct.

When Brewdog broke ranks back in January 2012, they made themselves very unpopular (and apparently fair game?), but weren’t they really just saying publicly what all brewers think privately? That their beer is best and everyone else is doing it a bit wrong?

Categories
opinion pubs

The Wrong Type of Income

landlord_whitbread_1953

We have been thinking a lot about pub companies recently, not least because of the Fair Deal for Your Local campaign. We still don’t understand enough about the details of the business model to have a strong opinion on its rights and wrongs, but one thing has been puzzling us: why do pubcos bother selling beer?

Why do they bother maintaining a buying-sales-distribution network when they could just make money from renting at market rates to people who want to run a genuine freehouse?

We wonder if the answer is tax.

At present, our tax system distinguishes between trading income and letting income, with the former qualifying for many more ‘reliefs’ (tax breaks). This is because trading is seen to be generating ‘economic activity’ while letting and passively holding investments is not. So, from the pubcos’ perspective, rental is probably ‘the wrong type’ of income.

Can anyone who works in the industry, or at Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, confirm our deny our hunch?

Categories
opinion

After Craft Beer, Craft Cider

Coates's Cider mat -- detail.

We’ve often wondered what might replace ‘craft beer’ in the affections of the trend-chasing young folk. and, though there is now ‘craft gin’, and we’ve joked about when we can expect ‘craft mead’, it was always cider which looked most likely to lure their attention. And it looks as if that change is underway.

Let’s look at the omens.

Attempting to trace the progress of this trend it looks very similar to what’s happened in beer, with some slight differences in timing:

  1. 1950: a working person’s day-to-day drink.
  2. 1965: a commercial commodity dominated by national brands.
  3. 1970s: rediscovered by the middle-classes in its ‘real’ form.
  4. 2000s: ‘premiumised’ by big producers. (Magner’s.)

Next? Perhaps ‘craft’ connoisseurism, experimentation and ‘extremifying’; yeast experiments, barrel-aging and new ‘styles’; craft keg’? We certainly look forward to trying a blackened, imperialised scrumpy… (Someone who knows about cider will no doubt tell us all of this is already happening.)

We’ve been saying for ages that certain lambic beers share flavours with the more rough-and-ready ciders — ‘barnyard’, ‘horse blanket’, ‘old wellies’, etc.. — and it won’t be much of a leap from beer to cider for those who’ve trained their tastebuds on hip ‘sours’ from breweries such as Brodie’s.

For now, at least, cider also has another great appeal: it isn’t taxed as heavily as beer and is therefore cheaper.

Don’t worry — this won’t be becoming Boak and Bailey’s Cider Blog, but then we wouldn’t be surprised to see a rash of them soon.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Into Beer Before It Was Cool

Harry Palmer in the supermarket.
‘Champignons? Nothing but the best for our Palmer.’

Supermarkets are sometimes seen as a threat to pubs, usually on the grounds of price — pubs, the argument goes, can’t compete when punters can buy 12 cans for the price of two pints of draught beer.

But supermarkets don’t only challenge pubs on price: they have also tended, during the last twenty or so years, to be ‘ahead of the curve’, offering a greater variety or more interesting beers than most pubs.

A few years ago, even living in London, our local pubs offered London Pride, Spitfire, Hoegaarden and perhaps a handful of other bog-standard brands. In the supermarket, at the same time, we could buy Vienna Lager, Kölsch, wheat beer and fruit beer from Meantime; German wheat beers; Czech and German lagers; a variety of Belgian beers; and British ales from Cornwall to Cumbria. That they were cheaper was an added bonus — it was choice and quality that drew us in.

They spotted a trend before it blew up and, at the same time, contributed to its blowing up. Now, it seems to us, supermarkets have withdrawn from the game somewhat, with reduced ranges, and less adventurous purchasing strategies in recent years.

Here’s what we think is happening: supermarkets are very adept at spotting a trend while it’s still possible to enter the market without a huge investment. Once everyone gets interested, like the classic hipster who was into X before it was cool, they move on.

Categories
Beer history opinion

Pub Tenants in Revolt

Watneys barrel.Serious discussions are underway about state intervention in the pub company (‘pubco’) business model, and pubco tenant landlords are organised and on the move with the Fair Deal for Your Local Campaign.

Forty years on, what we are actually seeing is the final phase of a slow motion response to the 1969 Monopolies Commission report on the brewing industry, and the 1972 Erroll report into pub licensing, and the Fair Deal campaign is a continuation of a battle publicans have been fighting for years.

Back in the seventies, it was the big breweries from which the pubcos evolved which bore the brunt of similar protests, and Watney’s had particular difficulties. When, in 1970, they attempted to replaced eighty tenant publicans with pub managers, the National Federation of Licensed Victuallers (NFLV) — the pub tenants union, in effect — called for its members to boycott Watney’s products wherever possible. Hotels, bars and freehouses stopped taking Red Barrel and the story of the plucky underdogs made headlines. Eventually, though they weren’t able to prevent the rise of the managed house, the NFLV did win compensation for the tenants in question, and improved terms for those taking on tenancies thereafter.

That wasn’t the only kind of protest, though, and this kind of showboating was particularly emotive:

Mr Jim Lewis recently had a wake at his pub, the Bridge Inn, near the hamlet of Skenfrith, Monmouthshire… The guests’ merriment could be traced to a real sense of loss, for the wake was for the pub itself… Whitbread and Company, the brewers who owned the pub and the two others within a radius of about two miles, had decided to withdraw the license… (The Times on 12 June 1971.)

Mock funerals and wakes are still happening, of course, as at the Black Lion in Kilburn, North West London, only last week.

We’re still learning about Erroll, and we’ve barely begun our reading on the tremendously complicated consequences of the Beer Orders of 1989, so we’re cautious to opine, but what does seem likely is that if pubcos sulk and withdraw from the market, and the model collapses, it might take twenty years for things to settle down again. In the meantime, the change would be painful for almost everyone, but perhaps worth it in the long run.