Categories
pubs

The Problem With Tasters

We’ve never been keen on asking for tasters, mostly because of we have a powerful aversion to making nuisances of ourselves, though we do understand all the arguments in favour of the practice. On our recent trip to London, however, we saw a kind of worst-case scenario played out, which only increased our antipathy.

A solo barman on a quiet afternoon was approached by a party of five, all of who wanted to taste everything before making a choice. Way more than a pint of (expensive) beer was given away while a queue of thirsty punters grew and grew, getting more impatient with every further request the party of tasters made: “Can you tell us which hops are the Kernel again? And what was that first one? Kelly, you should taste that first one Dave and I tried before you choose.”

We can’t see any way the barman could have wriggled out of this situation. Saying “Right, you’ve had enough tastes, now just choose!” would have seemed rude. He might, perhaps, have suggested serving a couple of other customers while they decided, but then what if we’d started asking to taste everything, too? The traditional publican’s response would be a passive-aggressive sign: “POLITE NOTICE: it would be appreciated if customers could refrain from asking for excessive numbers of tasters at busy times”.

Tasters work well when customers are suitably cooperative and community-minded — that is, when they have a couple of tasters rather than ten; and when they pay attention to how busy the bar is — but then that’s true of lots of aspects of pub culture.

Actually, come to think of it, maybe we should have made this is a You’re the Landlord scenario? How would you have handled it if you were behind the bar?

Categories
beer in fiction / tv pubs

The Pub at the Edge of the World

Dramatic Sky! (in St Kilda) by Gajtalbot From Flickr Creative Commons.

We’ve developed the bad habit of annotating films as we watch them, both of us with mobile devices in front of the TV reading different bits of Wikipedia. (“Huh, fancy that — Basil Rathbone was an intelligence agent in World War I and once disguised himself as a tree to get near to the enemy lines.”)

Last week, Film 4 showed Michael Powell’s first real feature film, The Edge of the World (1937), set on a fictional archipelago beyond the Outer Hebrides. That led us to look up St Kilda and the story of its evacuation in 1930. Of course what leapt out to us was the mention of ‘the Puff Inn’, which must be the most remote licensed premises in Britain.

The Puff Inn isn’t really called the Puff Inn. In fact, it’s not really a pub and that’s official. It’s a stormproof shed where the military personnel who are now the islands’ only residents can go to drink and eat. Someone ought to write a book about the influence of the British armed forces on beer culture. Where they go, beer goes, it seems.

Its decor hints at ‘pubbiness’, and there is beer, but tourists who’ve made the journey across the open sea to visit the National Trust-owned islands shouldn’t expect a ploughmans and a pint of mild.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, near us, there are several pubs on the far less remote and much balmier Isles of Scilly, the residents of which seem to relish their reputation as “2000 alcoholics clinging to a rock”.

The film was great, by the way, despite the typical 1930s all-purpose RADA Irish/Scottish/Welsh lilting accents.

Picture by Gajtalbot, via Flickr Creative Commons.

 

Categories
pubs

Wretched hives of scum and villainy

Illustration by Andrew Young for the Beverage Report by Derek Cooper.

Derek Cooper’s The Beverage Report (1970) has an entire chapter dedicated to detailing the various ways those working behind the bar can rip-off their employers and customers; how landlords can rip-off the brewery and customers; how draymen can rip-off landlords and the brewery; and even how customers, given half a chance, can rip-off the bar staff, the landlord and the brewery.

Here’s one example:

A barman of some experience told me: “Say you’ve only got one bar and one cash register. Right! You take an order for a round of drinks, it may come to 8s 6d. The customer gives you a pound. Now two simple fiddles are workable here. Either you decided to cheat the till of cheat the customer. If you’re going to cheat the till you have to be careful. You mustn’t let the customer see you ringing up less than 8s 6d. So you may ring up 6d, almost instantaneously correct yourself openly — you say something like ‘Oh, I’m going mad — that was 8s 6d wasn’t it’ and then you ring up 3s 6d. See what I’m driving at? He’s rung up only 3s 6d so he can pocket 5s 0d. The customer gets the right change, the till gets the right change and he gets the difference.”

The bar staff interviewed reported that they especially prized the kind of customers who didn’t count their change, thus marking themselves out as well-off and careless. You won’t be surprised to hear, though, that they also claimed to reserve their nastiest tricks for the rudest and most annoying characters.

Of course, it goes both ways. Cooper has several stories of pubs being cleaned out by light-fingered customers, and we once saw with our own eyes a three man team pull a perfect short change con with distractions in the Pembury Tavern about five years ago.

The moral? No-one on either side of the bar should trust anyone or relax, even for a moment. Er, wait, that can’t be right…

Fantastic period illustration by Andrew Young scanned from our copy of  The Beverage Report.

Categories
marketing

Don’t Say ‘Local’: Name the Farm

In a recent discussion about the design of restaurant menus with an expert, we were interested to hear that using such sweeping terms as ‘local beef’ is now considered a real no-no. Does local mean it was reared in a nearby field? In the same county? Or does it mean it was reared in Argentina but processed on an industrial estate no more than one hundred miles away?

The smart thing these days, apparently, is to be super-specific: ‘Beef from Red Ruby Devon cows reared by Bob Johnson at West Dunham’.

Most people don’t know what a Red Ruby Devon cow is. They’ve never heard of Bob Johnson or West Dunham. For all they know, Bob could be utterly incompetent, West Dunham a total hole, and his cows diseased bags-of-bones. Nonetheless, the idea is that customers will feel the restaurant is hiding nothing, that it is proud of its ingredients and has a relationship with its supplier. A warm glow will ensue.

The same principle probably applies to beer labelling. We cringe at ‘made with the choicest hops and finest malt’ and its only slightly better, trendier cousin ‘crafted with citrus hops’. Those are evasive, sneaky descriptors with little real content.

‘Made with 2012 West Dunham hops, grown by Bob Johnson in Devon, and Snodsbury malted barley from Timpkins of Steeple Bumpleigh’ is far better. Even a punter to whom specific hop and malt varieties mean nothing will gain a sense of transparency from a description like that. It makes local mean something.

Categories
marketing

Sponsored by One Green Lager or the Other

Carlsberg and Heineken logos side by side.

When someone asked us this week to remind them of the official beer of the London Olympics, we couldn’t remember. “One of the lagers that comes in green tins,” we said. “Carslberg, we think. Yeah, that’s it, Carlsberg.”

Having checked, it turns out its Heineken, the Dutch one.

Or is it Danish? No, it’s Carslberg that’s Danish. The one that sponsored Euro 2012 last month. Or was that Heineken as well?

It wasn’t Grolsch or Becks, was it?

They should toss a coin and let the winner keep green, or maybe play a football match for it.