Tag: fuller’s

london

Searching for pubs in strange towns

Post author By Jess
Post date 18th September 2024
4 Comments on Searching for pubs in strange towns

How do you find a pub via Google that is most likely to meet your specific requirements, in a particular moment?

We were roaming around South East London over the weekend, an area that neither of us know very well, for somewhat psychogeographical reasons. After a few hours, some of it in surprising September sunshine, we decided it was time for a pint.

Ray got out his phone and instinctively Googled “micropub near me”. I thought this was an interesting approach but not one that I usually take.

On the way to the most promising option from his search results, we discussed this.

When Ray is looking for a pub, he says, he wants something that (a) has good beer and (b) is characterful and not corporate.

And these days, in his mind, a micropub is likely to deliver that.

I agree on (a) but not necessarily on (b). I want to be able to relax and enjoy my beer and the difficulty with “characterful” is that it can mean different things.

Maybe it will be the friendliest local you’ve ever been in. Or perhaps it’ll be a weird dump full of silent, glowering men.

Micropubs in particular run the whole gamut of the pub experience and the term increasingly covers a range of different establishments.

We’ve written about them a lot over the years, including in 20th Century Pub, in this blog post from last year about the Dodo, and in this long piece about beer culture from earlier this year.

Our theory is that there can be, and probably is, a micropub for everyone.

That doesn’t necessarily help you if you are in a specific place looking for somewhere to drink.

Usually reading a few reviews then helps to narrow it down (we wrote about this ages ago) and gives a reasonable idea of what you might be walking into. But it’s fair to say my appetite for risk in this game is lower than Ray’s.

It made me reflect on how I usually look for pubs if I’m on my own.

My usual approach is to Google specifically the name of a regional brewer, such as St Austell in Cornwall. I’ll then go to one of their houses. And more often than not it will be quite bland and corporate.

But if I’m on my own, I prioritise beer quality and safety over the risk-reward gamble of a characterful pub.

As we were together, we did a bit of both this weekend. Through Ray’s approach we discovered the excellent Plum Tree Beer Shop in Plumstead. (It’s not obscure, the local CAMRA lot love it.)

The Queen’s Head, Brook Green, London.

My approach, on the other hand, took us to some cute backstreet Fuller’s pubs in the Hammersmith area. They all had excellent London Pride and felt like hidden gems.

On Monday, we decided to try a third approach – one that we tend to resist. That is, buying a guide book and taking someone else’s recommendation.

The latest edition of Des De Moor’s Londons Best Beer Pubs and Bars directed us to a pub not so far from my dad’s house in East London.

Would we have found The Angel of Bow on our own? Maybe, eventually, but Des’s write-up convinced us to go out of our way on the way home after work.

And we found a quirky pub with an excellent selection of beers on cask, keg and in bottles.

The kind of range, in fact, that would have sent us half across London a decade or so ago.

Tags fuller's, micropubs

marketing

Fuller’s in the 1970s: funky but chic

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 12th February 2022
9 Comments on Fuller’s in the 1970s: funky but chic

We’ve been fascinated by Fuller’s branding in the 1970s for some time. If you’ve got a taste for retro design, it’s bound to catch your eye.

This photograph was perhaps when the sheer Life on Mars beauty of it all first really struck us.

The Anchor & Hope, London E5, in 1982. SOURCE: Terry Gilley/Flickr.

As we’ve acquired ephemera over the years, thanks to donations from people like Steve Williams (thanks again, Steve!) and our own finds on Ebay, we’ve started to love it all the more.

‘A Guide to the Fuller Pint’, April 1975.

The interior of ‘A Guide to the Fuller Pint’, 1975.

A Fuller’s beer mat from the mid-1970s.

A London Pride beer mat from the mid-1970s.

A Fuller’s promotional T-shirt from the 1970s.

There are a few obvious defining characteristics of the brand identity from this period.

First, there’s the typography.

We can’t identify a specific font used for the logo but it’s something like Formula (published in 1970) but condensed, with a shadow. Our guess is that it was hand-drawn, inspired by Formula, Caslon Rounded, Bowery and other hip, soft-edged fonts from the late 1960s.

Secondary text is often in a sans serif font that looks to us like Univers or some derivative.

Then there are the colours: what could be more seventies than orange, brown and yellow? (Maybe they could have got avocado in there somewhere if they’d really tried.)

It feels very clearly like an attempt to modernise the brewery’s image, at a time when it was considering ditching cask ale altogether and going all keg. The bosses at Fuller’s wanted a bit of that Watney’s and Whitbread action – to be part of the world of Bird’s Nest pubs and the Chelsea Drugstore. (See 20th Century Pub, chapter five, for more on that.)

What we can’t quite work out is when this branding applied. This beer mat was, we guess, produced very early in the 1970s at around the time this new beer was launched.

An ESB beer mat from, we think, c.1971.

It uses different type and a different logo but the colours are already in place.

By 1974, at the latest, the rounded logo was appearing on packaging and point of sale material, as in this image taken from the brewery’s official history published in 1995.

SOURCE: London Pride, Andrew Langley, 1995.

At the other end of the decade we find some more traditional serif fonts creeping back in, along with a trendy ‘swash’ style that you might recognise from the cover of LPs and paperbacks from the period.

A Fuller’s pub guide from c.1979.

This London Pride beer mat is of a similar vintage and is certainly starting to look more ‘real ale’ and hinting towards the 1980s. London Pride is in Souvenir Bold, or similar.

London Pride beer mat c.1979.

This leaflet is an update of the yellow wonder above, from c.1979/80, and showcases a new slogan: ‘For a taste of tradition’. The rounded logo is still there, along with the Ford Capri go-faster stripes, but beginning to look a bit dated. The illustrations in the leaflet are all brown and beige, folksy rather than mod.

Fuller’s pub guide from c.1979.

By the end of the 1970s, Fuller’s had been embraced by, and was embracing, the Campaign for Real Ale and the culture that went with it. Its modern-style pubs were being Victorianised and it wouldn’t be long before those big enamel and brass pump-clips would arrive on the scene.

As if that brief attempt to be trendy never happened.

Tags 1970s, design, fuller's

Generalisations about beer culture real ale

Perfect Pride and the fear of the shred

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 5th July 2019
8 Comments on Perfect Pride and the fear of the shred

Last night at our local, The Drapers Arms, we enjoyed perfect London Pride: solid foam, dry bitterness, a subtle note of leafy green, wrapped in marmalade, with a lantern glow.

Delightful as this was, it also triggered a sense of frustration, because lots of people won’t believe us, because they don’t believe that Pride can be that good, because they’ve never had a pint that isn’t half-dead.

The thing about beer, and cask ale especially, is that all the subtle variables make recommending or endorsing any particular product a risky business.

It’s as if you’ve told people about a great song…

…and then when they try to act on your advice and listen to it they get, nine times out of ten, the shred:

Or like giving a film five stars but the only version on the market is the studio cut, pan-and-scan, VHS-transfer with burned in Dutch subtitles.

That’s why these days we tend to talk about specific pints or encounters rather than saying “Pride is a great beer” or “Tribute is fantastic”.

Or, alternatively, give mild endorsements with multiple caveats.

The best you can hope for, really, is that a beer will more often be good than bad when people encounter it in the wild.

A footnote: The Drapers had Pride’s beer miles listed as 6,120. It’s not as if it’s being brewed in Japan in the wake of the takeover, of course, but ownership matters.

Tags fuller's, london pride

beer reviews Beer styles

BWOASA: Fuller’s comes through

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 8th April 2019
5 Comments on BWOASA: Fuller’s comes through

Fuller's barley wine.

After our depth-testing was a bit of a failure last week, we were starting to get really worried: was this going to be a month of posts about the absence of barley wine, old ale and strong ale?

Then we realised there was at least one safe bet: Fuller’s.

The Old Fish Market isn’t a pub we’re mad keen on, tending to the businesslike in terms of atmosphere, though it does the job from time to time when we want a fix of one of our favourite London breweries.

Crucially, we also know it carries both Golden Pride and 1845 in bottles, and so on Friday night, before Ray caught a train to London, in we went for a bottle of each, with a chaser of ESB.

We don’t drink Golden Pride often, perhaps once every couple of years. There’s a lingering sense in our minds that it’s a bit… trashy, maybe? It’s not bottle-conditioned, it’s less complex than some other Fuller’s strong ales, and has a less interesting backstory. Which is why a mission like this is helpful in focusing the mind: it’s a great beer, and we’re lucky it still exists.

Copper-coloured and jewel-like, it delivered everything we expect from the ideal barley wine: sweetness, fruitiness, richness. Sherry, fruitcake, dates and prunes. Golden syrup, honey and brown sugar. An avalanche of marmalade.

Again, we found ourselves wondering where the boundary between this type of beer and old-school double IPA might lie. Perhaps side-by-side the distinction would be clearer.

Anyway, yes, here it is – the official standard reference barley wine, against which others should be judged.

* * *

We used to love 1845, the classic bottle-conditioned strong ale, but apparently we’ve grown apart.

Perhaps it was the close comparison to Golden Pride but, even at 6.3%, it seemed thin, harsh and unpleasantly earthy. As it warmed up, it gained some weight, and the bitterness fell back into something like balance, but it lacked fruitiness.

Its main effect was to make us really, really want a pint of ESB.

* * *

We’re lucky to have ESB, too. At its best – and on Friday, it was at its best – it’s a beer that brings the depth and density of a nip-bottle-sipper into the pub pint glass.

Even after drinking Golden Pride at 8.5%, ESB at 5.5 tasted chewy, charming and luscious. You know the flavours but, just in case: marmalade, fruitcake, mild spice, cherry and orange zest. Hot cross buns perhaps sums it up.

Maybe this is why we don’t drink Golden Pride more often – because ESB provides 80% of the pleasure with far less boozy intensity, while still feeling like a special treat.

* * *

We floated out of the OFM quite happy, feeling that we were finally on the right track.

Tags barley wine, barleywine2019, bristol, bwoasa, fuller's

london opinion

Feelings about Fuller’s

On Friday it was announced that Asahi had acquired the brewing wing of Fuller’s, subject to rubber-stamping, and we felt, frankly, gutted.

Jess, being a Londoner, took it especially hard, though not, perhaps, as hard as the person who runs the London Historians Twitter account:

For Fuck's sake Fuller's. What's wrong with you?

With a few days to absorb and reflect we’re still feeling disappointed, despite commentary from those who argue that Asahi aren’t the worst, that it’s a vote of confidence of cask, and so on. It still feels as if someone you thought was a pal has betrayed you.

We know this is completely irrational, business is gonna business, and so on and so forth, but we kidded ourselves (or were seduced into?) thinking Fuller’s was a bit different.

Of course the signs were all there (the lack of respect for Chiswick Bitter, for example, in favour of anything they could slap SESSION IPA on) but there were positive indicators too – surely if they were going to sell up they’d have done it in 1963, or 1982, or… And why the interest in old recipes, in collaborations and so on, if there wasn’t some kind of sentimental attachment to the idea of the family business, heritage and beer?

Oddly, when the news broke, we were eating breakfast in a Fuller’s hotel-pub, and it seemed that the staff were as bewildered as us. As customers asked them for their views, they politely muttered, “We don’t know much about it, I’m afraid.” They appeared to be reading news websites and social media to work out what was going on in the company they work for.

We made a point of going into a couple more Fuller’s pubs over the course of the weekend, like mourners clutching at memories of the recently deceased. The beer tasted as good as ever – better, in fact, especially the stuff badged as Dark Star and Gale’s. Again, staff seemed on edge, in one case openly snapping at a beer bore who insisted on lecturing them about Asahi and how the takeover would ruin the beer.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that this was being talked about in several pubs we visited, including one non-Fuller’s pub, all of them, we’d have said, ‘outside the bubble’. People have heard of Fuller’s and were interested in this news, which got covered heavily in the mainstream press.

From a couple of sources, it became clear the brewing staff were in shock, too. Head brewer Georgina Young:

Here’s what one Fuller’s employee said to us in a private message on Saturday:

I wish I knew more – we all found out yesterday… It’s a rational business decision but a devastating one for beer. If we are not independent, what’s the point? What do we still represent? All this stuff about brands and growth is pretty meaningless to Fuller’s customers who will just be pissed off.

Maybe this will not damage the beer in the long run, who knows. We’re aware it’s a controversial view but we’ve been really enjoying Young’s recently, ironically in lots of Young’s-branded pubs where the average punter probably doesn’t realise the brands and the pubs parted company years ago. We’d certainly be quite happy to walk into pubs and find cask ESB alongside Pilsner Urquell. (And Frontier Craft Lager hurled into the skip of history.)

What we do worry about is those hidden gems – the non-flagship backstreet pubs in West London where grey paint and fake ghost signs have yet to take hold, and which still feel vaguely like boozers. They’re either going to get trashed, or ditched, aren’t they?

And we worry about whether this means Fuller’s, as a brewery, will stagnate. What will motivate disenfranchised staff to try new things, or throw themselves into reviving old recipes? It’s been hard to find London Porter in any format for a couple of years – will this finally kill it off for good, along with poor old Chiswick? Look at Meantime: the quality or the core beer may be good, but the breadth of the offer is now distressingly bland.

All that’s kept us going into Fuller’s flagship plasticky, faux-posh corporate pubs for the past decade is the beer. We go to the Old Fish Market in Bristol because we crave that distinctive yeast character once in a while, not for the branded coffee and gin experience in surroundings that resemble a hotel lobby.

We don’t know how this will turn out. We’re not going to boycott Fuller’s. We’re not ‘butthurt’. But something in the relationship has changed, and we will probably end up drinking less Fuller’s beer without thinking much about it.

Tags fuller's, takeovers