Categories
Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Are We Being ‘Had’?

The price of beer — the subject that won’t go away — flared up again this week. Two sides of the argument were expressed eloquently by Phil (are we’re being swindled?) and Grace (don’t judge me for paying £4 a half), prompting the following thoughts.

On the one hand…
1. There’s nothing wrong with questioning the price of a product.
2. There’s nothing wrong with questioning who, if anyone, is bumping up the price and how.
3. There’s certainly nothing wrong with refusing to buy a product or service because you think it’s overpriced.

But, on the other…
4. How people choose to spend their money is their business.
5. Market economics apply to beer: if it’s actually overpriced, i.e. priced beyond what people are willing to pay, it won’t sell. (But Brewdog’s bars, the Euston Tap, and the Craft Beer Co., et al, do seem to be busy…)
6. In a bar or pub, your money doesn’t buy a volume of liquid: it buys staff training, ambience, glassware, music licenses… do you think those are good value?
7. In the specific case of Brewdog, your money is probably also paying for the rapid expansion of their bar chain across the UK. Some people might consider that a subsidy worth paying; others will feel horrified.

Yesterday, we had a strong urge to go for a ‘posh beer’, just like we occasionally want a ‘posh meal’. Those occasional posh  beers are part of a mixed diet of homebrew (practically free), supermarket beer (cheap) and cask ale in the pub (£2.60-3.40 a pint, generally). We were conscious of the price — £6.75 for a bottle of Great Divide Yeti, for example, did cause us to raise our eyebrows — but made an informed decision to indulge ourselves. The price was on prominent display, we were under no pressure, and there was a ‘cheap’ option — lager at £3 a pint.

We’re also conscious that the Hand Bar in Falmouth is out on a limb, selling this type of beer further west than anyone else, in a market otherwise dominated by Skinner’s, St Austell and Sharp’s. We don’t get the impression the owner of the bar is getting rich off this; we wonder if he’s even making a living.

So, in conclusion, we don’t think we were being had — we were choosing to take part in a transaction, with our eyes open.

Categories
opinion

Stimulus from the World of Wine

Close up of The Thinker

We recently asked people to recommend books which weren’t about beer but which could help us better understand beer, prompted by reminders from Knut and Alan that books on other topics do actually exist and can be all the more illuminating for their distance from The Obsession.

Gareth, who writes the Beer Advice blog, and has a background in wine retailing, suggested Questions of Taste: the Philosophy of Wine (Ed. Barry C. Smith, 2007), a collection of essays exploring what it really means to ‘taste’ wine. Is it possible to taste objectively? Which qualities are an essential part of the wine and which are projected by the taster? Are some wines really better than others in an objective sense? And so on.

If you’re allergic to the merest whiff of pretension, you won’t enjoy it, but, so far, like Johnny Five in search of input, we’re finding it very thought-provoking, and are already itching to write posts based on ideas therein.

Here’s one example from the essay ‘The Power of Tastes: Reconciling Science and Subjectivity’ by Ophelia Deroy:

Am I objective when I say that this wine tastes like ripe pineapple, or do I just indulge in association of memories, condemned to remain purely personal? Do I try to find rare tastes or fine adjectives to conform to a social ritual, in an arbitrary and perhaps pretentious way? But, even if socially codified, do these practices and ways of talking about wine transform the experience we have of it?

This set of all kinds of fireworks in our brains. We’ve certainly found ourselves thinking: “We can’t just call this beer hoppy — people won’t approve,” and so sipped, sniffed, struggled, trying to unlock a particular elusive aroma or flavour; and we recently saw a novice beer reviewer (one with a provocative sense of hubris) shot down for the lack of finesse in his tasting notes — for not going deep enough.

What if those elusive flavours just aren’t there? Or the label we’re putting on them only makes sense to us because we’re recalling a particular mango, of a particular variety, at a specific point of ripeness, that we ate at a particular time in a particular place?

Other recommendations — the further removed from beer the better — very welcome! Picture from Flickr Creative Commons.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture marketing The Session

Session #63 — the Beer Moment

A busy pub.

This month’s Session is hosted by Pete Brown.

‘The beer moment’ is a key idea in a lot of beer marketing: if you can’t sell the liquid in the glass, and are no longer allowed to imply that beer is good for you, or makes you more attractive, you can at least sell the camaraderie that it brings.

German TV ads for beer merge into one blurred composite in our minds: “good friends, good times, good beer”; chisel-jawed men in expensive shirts laughing as they raise delicate glasses of creamy-headed pilsner to their lips; golden liquid erupting in showers across the screen as something that sounds like the Top Gun anthem begins to play…

But that fakery doesn’t mean ‘the moment’ doesn’t exist. In reality, it might be quiet — a newspaper in the pub at lunchtime on a midweek day off — or messy — one beer too many with friends, speaking your mind and laughing too loudly, sheltered together from the storm. (Quite a few of our ‘memorable beers‘ posts from last month were really about time and place.)

One thing is certain: in Britain, ‘Do you fancy a pint?’ means a whole lot more than ‘Would you like to consume a specific volume of liquid?’.

Categories
breweries design

More Visuals: Beer Family Trees?

Extract from the Thornbridge Family Tree
Detail from the Thornbridge Family Tree (PDF link below)

After the more theoretical graphs and charts of the last couple of days (which required all our reserves of bullshit to navigate), today’s experiment is in an altogether woolier mode.

Pete Frame is rightly revered for his Rock Family Trees — vast, sprawling, beautifully hand-scripted charts showing the movement of bass, keytar and Moog players from one band to another, or within particular ‘movements’. This approach doesn’t just work for bands, though — Frame also used it to map the Monty Python crew, hangers on and chums.

Inspired by his approach, we’ve come up with a chart showing the comings and goings of brewers at Thornbridge (PDF, 76kb) and its place in British craft brewing in the last seven years. Is it helpful? Does it help makes sense of the connections between breweries? We think it does, actually — it highlights Italian and Antipodean connections; and not entirely surprising links between Meantime Brewing, Marble, Dark Star, Brewdog and Thornbridge.

But now we’d really like to see an even bigger version covering more breweries. (Narrated by the late John Peel.)

Notes

  1. We chose Thornbridge because they seem to have a revolving door, with people coming and going as often as members of Morrissey’s backing band and
  2. because they’re fairly open about who’s arrived and who’s leaving.
  3. With only their blog, press releases and Wikipedia for reference, we’ve probably made some mistakes — sorry in advance! We’re happy to fix them, but it’s the approach we’re really testing here.
  4. If you work at any of the breweries pictured, you’re probably feeling weirded out right now. Sorry. If it’s any comfort, at least you know how Peter Hook felt when he saw this.
  5. Updates: 09:45, 03/05/2012 — added James Kemp; changed David Pickering qualifications to mention Heriot-Watt; corrected spelling of ‘Heriot-Watt’.
Categories
Beer history design

Or How About Sparklines for Data?

Sparklines for Whitbread beer production 1902 to 1914

The graphic above shows Ron Pattinson’s Whitbread production data from 1902 too 1914 plotted as ‘sparklines’ using Excel 2010’s built-in function.

Sparklines are small line graphs without scales or labels designed to give a quick visual impression of a trend over time. They’re another Edward Tufte innovation and he apparently describes them as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics” — graphs that can be used like elements of type, without the need for plates or “See Fig. 12”.

But is the above graphic illuminating? More so than yesterday’s slopegraph, perhaps, but probably not as much as the traditional line graph below.

Whitbread production 1902 to 1914 as a line graph

Next: the Rock Family Trees approach to understanding the relationships between British breweries.