carlsberg Archives - Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

News, nuggets and longreads 18 May 2019: ratings, lager, and lager ratings

Here’s everything that struck as particularly interesting in writing about beer and pubs in the past week, from Carlsberg to Cambridge.

First, some news: those Redchurch rumblings from the other week are now confirmed – the brewery went into administration and is now under new ownership. This has prompted an interesting discussion about crowdfunding:

I’m afraid the shareholders are the unfortunate casualty of the old company going under.….However with our new investor and MD we have managed to retain all Harlow staff and look forward to a better, brighter future.

— Redchurch Brewery (@RedchurchBrewer) May 14, 2019

More news: it’s intriguing to hear that Curious is expanding. It’s a brewery you don’t hear talked about much by geeks like us – in fact, we’re not sure we’ve ever tried the beer – but it does turn up in a surprising number of pubs and restaurants.

Continue reading “News, nuggets and longreads 18 May 2019: ratings, lager, and lager ratings”

News, nuggets and longreads 20 April 2019: Pub Crawling, Carlsberg, Craftonia

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that caught our attention in the past week, from Leeds to low alcohol beer.

For the Guardian Dave Simpson writes about the development of the post-punk scene in Leeds in the late 1970s, which took place in pubs, with the Yorkshire Ripper as a dark background presence:

Today, with its wood and tiles and punk soundtrack, [the Fenton] is almost as it was; Gill observes that the jukebox has moved rooms. “Pre-mobile phones, you’d have to go where you knew people would be,” Mekons singer Tom Greenhalgh explains, remembering “intense political debates and insane hedonism”, and legendary scene characters such as Barry the Badge. “A huge gay guy covered in badges from Armley Socialist Worker’s party. He was rock-hard, but then he could just grab you, snog you and stick his tongue down your throat.”

Roger Protz has been writing about lager in Britain for 40 years so his commentary on where the new ‘Danish Pilsner’ Carlsberg has just launched in the UK fits in was bound to be interesting. Where others have been cautiously positive, Mr Protz essentially dismisses the beer as more the same:

I was asked for my views by Carlsberg’s London-based PR company, who sent me some samples. The bottled version said it was brewed in the UK – presumably this means the Northampton factory – while the can says “brewed in the EU”. I said this made a mockery of the new beer being called “Danish Pilsner”… I added that 3.8 per cent ABV was too low to merit being called Pilsner: the classic Pilsner Urquell is 4.4 per cent and all claims to be a Pilsner should be judged against it. I found the Carlsberg beer to be thin and lacking in aroma and flavour.

A footnote from us: we were asked to take part in market research by Heineken earlier this week, which leads us to suspect some similar post-Camden reinvention is in the pipeline there, too.

Continue reading “News, nuggets and longreads 20 April 2019: Pub Crawling, Carlsberg, Craftonia”

A Brutalist Brewery: Arup and Carlsberg in Northampton, 1974

The March 1974 edition of the Arup Journal is an amazing artefact, offering a blow-by-blow breakdown of the design and construction of Carlsberg’s state of the art Danish brewery in Northampton.

You can read the full magazine here in PDF form, and it’s a lovely thing in its own right – all white space and sans serif, as stylish as the buildings it depicts.

Arup Journal, March 1974, cover.

Arup is an architecture firm founded in 1946 by Ove Arup, born in Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK to Danish parents in 1895, and educated in Denmark. Though he died in 1988 the company lives on, its name a byword for modernism.

In 1970, Arup was commissioned by Carlsberg Brewery Ltd to design a new plant in Northampton in the English Midlands, just as the lager boom was beginning to bite. The cost of the project was £15 million; Carlsberg supplied the brewery equipment and defined the necessities of the space according to production need; and Arup commissioned Danish architect Knud Munk to produce a design that would “express the best in modern Danish architecture”.

As well as lots of detail in the text the magazine also includes process charts…

Process chart of lager brewing at Carlsberg.

…interior shots…

A control panel at the brewery.

…and lots of dramatic black-and-white photography of the brewery building at various stages of construction, set in the flat landscape against dramatic skies…

The exterior of the brewery. — CREDIT: Colin Westwood.

…which are either awe-inspiring or grim depending on your point of view.

It’s fascinating to think of this hulk appearing, with attendant talk of efficiency and automation, at just the exact moment the Campaign for Real Ale was taking off. This is about as far from all that imagery of wooden casks, old inns and pewter tankards as you can get.

And the emphasis throughout on the Danishness of the project – Danish brewers, Danish architect, officially opened by the Queen of Denmark – while canny in terms of underlining the authenticity of the product was also at odds with the growing sense that Local was somehow a sacred virtue.

We’ve been researching this building and Carlsberg’s arrival in the UK on and off for years and this showed up in one of our periodic check-ins. There are times we worry about the state of corporate archives and others when we feel like we’re living in the best possible age, with digitising getting cheaper and companies realising the value of their own history.

Can Tatty Old Lager Brands Be Fixed?

We got an email from someone at a public relations firm asking as to share our thoughts about a lager brand they’re working with.

We said no because, frankly, what’s in it for us? But we had to admit, the questions were thought-provoking, especially one about how the lager in question could be made to ‘seem more premium’.

Note that word seem: presumably, any change in the way the product is manufactured is out of the question – this is an exercise in presentation.

In the days when brewers could conceal the strength, composition and origin of their lagers, implying ‘premium-ness’ was a lot easier: foil, embossing, heraldry, and the name of a foreign country on the label.

Increasingly, however, punters want to know why you’re charging them extra for a product, and have a right to know. Tesco’s ‘Finest’ pasta, for example, isn’t just in a fancy-looking packet – the blurb makes clear that it was cut with bronze dies (apparently that’s better) and is packaged by a particular family firm in Italy.

If you really can’t come up with a story like that – if you’ve spent decades streamlining any romance out of the process to compete on cost, and don’t want to launch a genuinely decent sub-brand for the sake of the ‘halo effect’ – what options are left? Complete transparency –embracing the fact that your product is made in Britain, despite its livery – seems to us to be the only available route.

As we’ve learned while researching the career of early microbrewer Bill Urquhart, Carlsberg has been produced in Northampton since the early nineteen-seventies. If we were Carlsberg, we’d hire the bloke who made this to produce a beautiful film about the building of the then state-of-the-art brewery, and its grand opening by Princess Benedikte of Denmark. We’d get twinkly-eyed retired brewers and ex-pat Danish technical experts who came over with the plant to talk about their work together. Carlsberg, as we in the UK know it, is Danish, but also British – and has been for forty years.

Telling that story won’t make the beer taste better, but being honest about it might make the brand more likeable, which is half the battle.

The PR firm who approached us aren’t working with Carlsberg, unfortunately, so they’re screwed.

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