Categories
Beer history Generalisations about beer culture

How to grow a beer consumer group

Chart showing growth in membership of beer consumer groups.

The chart above shows membership numbers for the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA, from 1971), the Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood (SPBW, from 1963) and the Campaign for Really Good Beer (CAMRGB, from 2011). It’s based on actual data for the first ten years of the life of the SPBW and CAMRA, as given in newspaper articles, and for the first year of CAMRGB. The red dotted line projects CAMRGB’s membership on a linear course, assuming it continues to grow.

You’ll note that CAMRA wins, so far.

If CAMRGB wants to avoid being an SPBW and instead emulate CAMRA’s early success (which it might not) what do its leaders need to do?

1. Avoid vague objectives and changes of course. The SPBW took an initially hardline stance — wooden casks! — which it then watered down. Their stance was never clearly articulated. When pushed, their president would admit that he wasn’t that fussy about beer.

2. Keep it simple. CAMRA started out as a campaign for good beer and against bad beer, with no clearer definition than that. The focus on cask beer emerged towards the second year after the founders visited some pub cellars and asked a few questions. It was dogmatic, yes, but it was an objective that could be expressed in a single sentence.

3. Get some journalists on board. Three of CAMRA’s founders were journalists and more came on board in the first couple of years. They knew how to write great press releases, grab attention and had contacts in the right places.

4. Democratise and minimise the cult of personality. CAMRA’s founders are still occasionally wheeled out even today, but Michael Hardman handed over his role as Chair in 1973, only two years after getting the ball rolling. There was a healthy turnover of committee members from then on, keeping things fresh.

5. Get a corporate sponsor. CAMRA had some solid support from John Young of Young’s brewery, and then later from other regional brewers. Their patronage put money in the campaign pot and gave CAMRA officials time to devote to the campaign. If Brewdog could be trusted to take a back seat, they might be good partners, or perhaps the quietly massive Meantime? UPDATED 18:10 7/9/2012.

6. Be ambitious in engaging the consumer. CAMRA began publishing a newsletter (What’s Brewing) in 1972; the Good Beer Guide in 1974, when the Campaign was only three years old; and launched their first national beer festival in 1975. The SPBW engaged government and annoyed brewers, but did little to talk to drinkers.

7. Be lucky and seize opportunities. There was a buzz about beer in the mid-seventies which CAMRA latched on to. Their big bump in membership c.1973 coincides with the publication of several books on beer and pubs and the launch of Richard Boston’s column in the Guardian. Mind you, there’s a bit of a buzz about beer now…

8. Support regional activism, don’t get sucked into London. The SPBW has regional branches and little central control, but the bulk of its activity was London-based. City of London based, in fact. CAMRA, being founded in the North West, by northerners, and with its first regional branch being founded in Yorkshire in 1972, was much more in touch with life outside the capital from the off. London CAMRA is just another (big) regional branch.

Disclaimers: we’re still members of CAMRA but haven’t yet taken the leap to join CAMRGB, though we watch its progress with interest. It currently has c.500 members and c.2500 followers on Twitter. It is still free to join but accepts donations.

Categories
Beer history

The CAMRA beard stereotype

A good question from Barm on Twitter yesterday:

1974: a report on beer strength in The Guardian from 2 April makes pointed reference to Michael Hardman as ‘the bearded 27-year-old journalist who founded CAMRA’.

1979: famous beard-wearer David Bellamy opens the Great British Beer Festival and The Guardian coverage makes much of the number of beards in attendance, with a CAMRA spokesman clarifying that, contrary to appearances, the clean-shaven are welcome. The Daily Mirror report from Alexandra Palace says ‘the connoisseurs imbibed through their beards — there was enough facial hair to stuff a thousand tap-room stools’. (The stereotype is developing, but there are actual people with actual beards being referred to here.)

1982: The Guardian’s coverage of the launch of The Good Beer Guide mentions ‘people with belly laughs and bushy beards’. (The stereotype now in the abstract, fully developed, and sounds rather like a mythical, Falstaffian Lord of the Beers.)

Based on what we’ve found so far, we reckon GBBF 1979 is to blame. More alternate history: perhaps if Johnny Morris had opened it instead of Bellamy, the stereotype would be that all CAMRA members wear zoo-keeper’s hats?

Categories
Beer history Blogging and writing

Before beer blogging, there was Boston on Beer

Detail from a poor-quality scan of Richard Boston portrait in the Guardian.

Richard Boston’s first weekly Boston on Beer column appeared in The Guardian on 11 August 1973. In an article marking its first anniversary (6 July 1974) he said a few things that might chime with beer bloggers.

This column has been going for nearly a year, and whereas when I started I thought I had enough material for about three weeks, having now written some 50,000 words I have enough to keep me going indefinitely.

He  also describes tottering stacks of ‘notes and rough drafts for articles on subjects ranging from canal-side pubs to beer glasses (why they have handles and dimples in the south and are clear and straight-sided in the north), as well as the results of the search for the best Gents’ and ‘amazing revelations about the awfulness of American beer’.

Every week, he came up with something to say, even if the occasional column seemed rather contrived under the pressure of a deadline.

Thirty years later (Guardian, 23 March 1989) he recalled the column’s success: ‘I had never heard of Camra… but just mentioning them in the Guardian and giving their address caused a surge in their membership so great that they had to take on extra staff in order to cope.’ This seems to be true: when his column went to print, CAMRA had c.2700 members; by September, it was approaching c.5000, by our reckoning.

In the same piece, he recalls why the column ended in 1975: ‘I became bored of the sound of my own voice going on about beer and pubs.’ Hmm. We know that feeling.

We’re ashamed to say we’d never read Richard Boston until Des de Moor told us about Beer and Skittles (1976), a book adapted from the Guardian columns. You can get a copy fairly cheaply through Amazon, or read the original columns in the online archive of The Guardian if your local library provides access.

See also: Orwell’s Beer Blog and this strange nineteenth century exercise in proto-blogging.

Categories
Beer history opinion

Alternate History

Last night, we got a bit counter-factual and asked ourselves this: if the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) had never appeared on the scene, where would British beer be now?

Maybe, without CAMRA, we’d have got new breweries and better beer anyway, eventually, through some other mechanism.

Maybe ‘craft keg’ was historically inevitable.

Maybe, even if it had died out, cask-conditioning would been revived later, and been as trendy as barrel-ageing and pseudo-historic recipes.

Our guess: the SPBW would have seen a massive rise in members after the Alexandra Palace Beer Festival picket of 1972, at which CAMRA stole the limelight, and of which more another time. The founders of the SPBW would have stepped aside to make way for more serious-minded campaigners, including some of those we now associate with CAMRA. The SPBW, with a decade’s worth of baggage (ridicule) would never have gained as many members as CAMRA (thirty thousand by 1975!), and might have been less slick, but it would have achieved some of the same things, i.e. encouraging new breweries to open and established breweries to resume production of cask beer.

Conclusion: CAMRA didn’t create the demand for better beer, but channelled and expressed it brilliantly in those early years. It gave a voice to a great mass of people who wanted something other than bad keg bitter.

If you have thoughts on what might prove to be an emotive question, feel free to express them below in the contemplative tone of a university professor who has eaten well, drunk a little port, and is feeling a little drowsy in front of an open fire. (In other words, no shouting, please.)

UPDATE: Tom Stainer at CAMRA HQ has reminded us that there’s a long article by Martyn Cornell in What’s Brewing, May 2011, on exactly this subject. It’s an interesting read for those who can get through the login.

Categories
opinion

The Permanent Technicolor Beer Festival

Horse-drawn Thwaites dray at the Great British Beer Festival.

It’s taken us a couple of weeks to think through our reaction to CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival. We don’t go every year because we haven’t always enjoyed it enough, frankly, to push us into making the effort, but then sometimes we do. This year, we got tickets for the trade session (gratis, free, and for nothing) and, as we were in London for the Olympics decided to give it another go.

The venue, Olympia, was a vast improvement on the vast hangar-like Earl’s Court of previous years; there were some very exciting beers on offer (Greene King 5X); all the volunteers we dealt with were lovely, especially the rebel who’d ditched his mandatory Hobgoblin T-shirt; and it was nice to bump into beery people we’d only previously met online.

But… on the whole, what did it offer that we couldn’t get on a pub crawl in London? Or even in East London? Yes, there were some specific rare beers, but we’re not much into ‘ticking’, and, anyway, every pub we went into in the course of a fortnight had wonderful beers we’d never tried before.

These days, and long may it last, London is a year-round, permanent beer festival, so why endure queues, grubby festival glasses, deposit schemes, hours spent leaning against pillars for want of a seat, and the constant clattering of Betty Stogs’ marching band?

Here’s a contrary view from Tandleman.