Tag: politics

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opinion pubs real ale

How ‘conservative coded’ is cask ale?

A quiet pub bedecked with English and British flags.

Is cask ale right wing, left wing, both, or neither? Is cask, in American terms, ‘conservative coded’? It’s complicated.

Last week a row blew up when an industry body concerned with cask ale announced plans to promote its newest campaign on the right wing GB News channel.

The controversy was more intense, perhaps, because this happened in a week when even GB News seemed to concede that some of its presenters had gone too far.

Observing this news from across the Atlantic, American drinks writer Dave Infante asked for context via social network BlueSky:

any british drinkers on here that could weigh in on how ‘conservative’ cask ale is coded in the uk?

Travelling on a bus across Somerset, we did our best to answer in a series of quick replies.

But, actually, this feels like a topic worth digging into in more detail, and now we’ve had more time to reflect.

What do you mean by ‘cask ale’?

Literally, cask ale refers to a method of dispense, as explored in-depth by Des de Moor in his most recent book.

But here, we’re talking about its place in British culture. What it means, or signifies.

For many people, cask ale is synonymous with brown bitter, produced by companies hundreds of years old, such as Arkell’s or Shepherd Neame.

It’s horse brasses, Inspector Morse, dimple mugs, shire horses, blazers with badges, regimental ties, red trousers, vintage cars, cricket, golf, Alan Partridge with his big fat shot of Director’s.

A pint of your finest foaming, if you please, stout yeoman of the bar.

This version, or view, of cask ale is distinctly ‘conservative coded’, for one particular idea of what conservatism means.

What do you mean by ‘conservative’?

In Britain, as in the US, conservatism is fractured.

The Conservative Party, AKA the Tories, was for many years the party of the landed gentry, the military and the Church.

They were literally conservative, as in, resistant to social change, and supportive of existing social hierarchies.

Then, in the late 20th century, the Conservatives pivoted under Margaret Thatcher to a more radical form of conservatism.

It prioritised deregulation, low taxes and free market economics, with less emphasis on social class and tradition.

Especially if it got in the way of growth.

You might almost categorise these two factions as (a) cask ale Tories and (b) lager lout Thatcherites.

The latter group, to deal again in broad stereotypes, were less about shire horses and tweed, more Porsches and pinstripes.

There’s no doubt that the late John Young of London brewery Young & Co was a conservative.

Indeed, it’s been suggested he was somewhat further to the right than that gentle word might suggest.

He was also a dogged traditionalist who clung to cask ale throughout the 1970s, arguably playing a large part in saving it.

Then, on the other hand, you might look at the families behind Watneys, Whitbread and the rest of the Big Six.

While supporting the Conservative Party, they were entirely unsentimental about cask ale.

In pushing keg bitter, then lager, throughout the post-war period, they were regarded as the enemies of cask ale.

It was in that context that the script got flipped and cask ale became an element of the counterculture.

An old photo of people marching with a brass band.
CAMRA marches against the closure of the Joules brewery at Stone, 3 November, 1973, with CAMRA chairman Christopher Hutt at dead centre.

Cask ale as a radical cause

Whether the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) was left or right wing was something we researched in depth a decade ago while writing Brew Britannia.

Early members of the campaign included “everyone from National Front members to Maoists”, as one interviewee told us.

People who wanted to preserve tradition and turn back the clock found themselves campaigning alongside those who wanted to give Tory brewery owners bloody noses and champion ‘small is beautiful’ principles.

Broadly speaking, though, CAMRA was about challenging powerful capitalist interests (Watneys) and was sometimes talked about as a sort of beer drinker’s trade union.

It seems to us that many of the newer generation of microbrewers shared this rebellious, challenger mindset, even if their owners’ personal politics varied widely.

In the 21st Century

As we keep saying, cask ale’s political image is complicated, and only got more so in recent years.

As ‘craft beer’ arrived in the UK, cask ale came to be regarded by some as a relic, and CAMRA as an obstruction.

Self-declared rebels and revolutionaries like BrewDog (we know, we know – check out chapter 14 of Brew Britannia) made keg beer their cause.

For a stretch there, that meant even small scale cask ale was perhaps regarded as ‘conservative coded’.

Even though BrewDog, Camden and other successful keg-focused UK craft breweries proved to be the most purely capitalistic of the lot.

And much to the irritation of radically-minded cask ale brewers, especially in the North of England.

But in these days of the supposed culture war ‘conservative’ isn’t just about your attitude to economics. It’s also about your stance on feminism, gender, racism, Brexit, vaccination…

Nigel Farage, the most prominent champion of Brexit, made pints of cask ale part of his personal image, and the preservation of the crown-stamped pint glass a key talking point of the ‘Leave’ campaign.

As beer writers are fond of pointing out, cask ale is uniquely British (terms and conditions may apply) and so lends itself to nationalist posturing.

Cask ale is also associated with ‘proper pubs’. For many, a proper pub is the very dream and ideal. For others, it’s an idea loaded with danger signs: doesn’t it just mean white, male and possibly, or probably, racist?

CAMRA has also struggled to convincingly counter suggestions that racism and sexism are baked into its culture – though perhaps headway is finally being made on that front, at the cost of alienating members who liked that.

One final test

If you were writing a fictional character who is a conservative (right wing) what would you have them drink?

Depending on the flavour of their conservatism, it might be Champagne, wine, port or brandy.

If they’re a filthy rich City type, they might go for the most expensive lager on the bar – or a keg IPA, these days.

But in most instances, it would be a pint of cask ale, right?

That’s certainly what Conservative Party politicians like to be photographed holding, even when they don’t drink.

Look, we know it’s almost a decade old, but do give Brew Britannia a read. It goes into much of the above in plenty of detail and should help you work out your own answer to this complex question.

Categories
opinion

The strange case of the 40 litre limit

Casks in a pub yard.
There’s been a bit of debate in the wake of last week’s Budget: was the Government’s decision to set a 40 litre eligibility threshold for ‘draught relief’ a sinister plot, or evidence of carelessness?

Though we’re by no means experts on the workings of Treasury and Number 11 Downing Street, between us, we have accumulated a bit of experience in this area.

During our time as civil servants, we were both involved in spending reviews and Budgets; Jess has been on teams auditing HMRC; and Ray spent the past three years writing about tax, including editing technical reports on budgets and fiscal statements.

With all that in mind, we reckon this is more cock-up than conspiracy but driven, in part, by biases built into the system.

First, in our experience, Treasury officials are by no means all mathematical geniuses and seasoned veterans, as you might imagine. They’re often careerist twentysomethings who studied arts subjects – assertive, confident, but not necessarily focused on detail.

Secondly, the extent to which budgets are put together in a panic shouldn’t be overlooked.

The details of the speech are often being finessed minutes before the Chancellor stands up in the house.

Policies are often announced before they’ve been fully worked up or, conversely, fully worked up but not announced at all, only coming to light when tax nerds read the background paperwork.

And the driver is very often “I need something that sounds generous I can announce – and I need it pronto!” (See also: veteran political adviser Damian McBride’s account of how Small Brewers’ Relief came to be back in 2002.)

Thirdly, we reckon we can guess how the 40 litre threshold was arrived at: someone at Treasury or on the Chancellor’s team asked someone at HMRC to tell them the usual size of a beer keg. 

Based on the fact that the vast majority of beer duty collected in the UK comes from national and multinational suppliers they said, “Well, usually 50 litres, I suppose.”

And how much is in a standard ale cask?

“That’d be a firkin at just over 40 litres. But it’s more complicated than…”

That’ll do, no time for fussing over details, need to get the dogs ready for Rishi’s photoshoot.

Or it’s possible they just Googled it, like most people would, and got directed to Wikipedia.

If they did check these numbers with anyone in the industry, the chances are that they reached out to those with connections to the Government. That is, we’d guess, Conservative-supporting national brewers who ship most of their beer in larger containers.

Again, that’s not a conspiracy, as such, but, if true, shows why government-by-network can cause problems.

A further indication that this wasn’t carefully worked out to the Nth degree is how tentatively the policy has been stated. It’s not due to take effect until 2023 and what was actually announced in the Budget was a consultation.

Cynics will say “Consultations are meaningless – they’ve already made up their minds!” Again, in our experience, that’s not necessarily true.

It’s likely that this policy will be implemented in some form but there is an element here of the Government asking other people to do its homework.

That means it’s well worth lobbying and responding to these consultations.

Under this government we’ve already seen quite a few policies being rethought when the public responds with anything other than delight. They do like to be liked.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 6 June 2020: Black Lives Matter

Beer signs in Ghent.

Here’s everything about beer and pubs that caught our attention in the past week, from #BlackLivesMatter to the mysteries of bitter.

For Good Beer Hunting, beer writer and broadcaster Jamaal Lemon provides a succinct, cutting summary of his experience as a black American, from worrying about how to teach his son to present himself to the world to being the odd man out at craft beer events:

My great-great-grandfather Ernest Barber Sr. was born in Catawba, South Carolina on April 15, 1889. His grandfather was born in 1845, and his grandmother in 1830. They, too, lived, worked, and died in Catawba, but they were born into slavery. Ernest Barber Sr. died in 1976… I was born in January 1979… Slavery in America is only a few generations away from all of us—in my case, its direct reach extends to three years prior to my birth. Most Americans mark their birth year by a TV show they remember, or a popular song. I mark it by how far away slavery was from my body.

Dr. J Nikol Jackson-Beckham has been reflecting on the purpose behind her Craft Beer for All project. Perhaps beer doesn’t feel hugely important at this particular moment, she suggests, but…

it is in the banality of beer that I see its greatest potential to affect positive social change. Systemic anti-black racism is not born of malicious intents, spectacular violence, or complex conspiracies. Rather, it is continuously reproduced in everyday acts of carelessness and comfort, quiet omissions and revisions, and unthinking webs of justification that are woven into the fabric of our daily lives–webs so well made that when malicious and spectacular acts of racist violence are set before us, we swaddle them–excuses drifting from our lips like lullabies. I can think of no better tool, no better place, no better community than craft beer to do the everyday work of unraveling American racism.

At Craft Beer Amethyst, Ruvani urges the US craft beer industry to opt-in to the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and to mean it:

No one is dying in the beer industry. It’s not our fault that ignorant, brutal police officers and other individuals are committing racially motivated murder. What possible relation could this have to our own lack of diversity and inbuilt reluctance to do anything about it? Everything. Absolutely everything… Whether you work in the beer industry or are a regular beer consumer, this is your landscape, your everyday, your home-from-home. This is the world that you inhabit, the world you see as normal, and if that world is not reflective of the wider world at large it becomes easy to forget that other people, different people, exist. If they cease to exist through their absence, then their concerns, needs and ultimately their voices disappear from that landscape and unconscious bias self-perpetuates in their absence.

Continue reading “News, nuggets and longreads 6 June 2020: Black Lives Matter”
Categories
News

News, Nuggets and Longreads 9 March 2019: Politics, Tokenism, Firestarters

The foam on a pint of beer.

Here’s everything on beer and pubs that prompted us to bookmark, favourite or ReTweet in the past week, from US politics to the politics of beer culture.

First, an important and eye-opening post from Craft Beer Amethyst on the subject of tokenism in the world of beer:

Reading Wiper & True’s Vic Helsby in the Independent saying that International Women’s Day risks becoming tokenistic unless diversity and inclusion become a reality in the industry really hit home with me, because I see this as the most important and under-addressed problem in beer and beyond – how to transform the cultural space into a place where we no longer need words like diversity and inclusion because everyone is seen as completely equal and no less or more deserving of special attention? How do we reach a point where we stop talking about women in beer and minorities in beer and just talk about beer?

A bottle of Cloudwater V 10 enveloped in steam.

Now things are a little less raw Will Hawkes has taken a moment to reflect on last week’s Cloudwater beer festival hoo-ha, observing (as did we) that reactions to the threat of the event being cancelled were mixed, and revealing:

On the one hand, there were people who felt understandably aggrieved at having coughed up £60, plus train fares, for an event that didn’t seem to be happening; On the other, there were people who felt the first group were being a bit neggy, and should just, you know, chill… It’s obvious that many people feel craft beer is a community… The problem is that not everyone feels this way. For those whose interaction with beer is less intimate, for those who earn their crust elsewhere, this idea of community can be a problem. After all, who benefits from the notion that a commercial relationship is also a friendship? Breweries, definitely. Pub landlords, Bottle-shop owners, distributors, yup. Drinkers? Only in the most nebulous sense.

Letter from America.

For Bloomberg Joshua Green reports on research into how the politics of American drinkers manifests in their choice of alcoholic drinks:

Democrats will be heavy consumers of cognac and brandy, both favored by African-American drinkers, who overwhelmingly lean left. Mexican beers such as Corona, Tecate, and Modelo Especial are also popular with Democrats, especially those who don’t turn out regularly on Election Day—that is, they’re popular with young people, whose turnout numbers lag behind older groups. And because Heineken drinkers are concentrated in the Northeast—not friendly territory for Republicans—they, too, skew Democratic… Republicans have an entirely different alcoholic profile. “They’re big bourbon drinkers,” [researcher Will] Feltus says…

Betty Bowes

A new source for us, television history website Rediffusion, offers an archive article from the defunct independent broadcaster’s in-house magazine from 1958 by Peter Ling, about Betty Bowes, manager of the studio social club:

In Television House, Betty has to know people. Not always their surnames, perhaps, and probably not their jobs — but she knows a thousand faces, and can fit a Christian name to most of them. Best of all, she knows what they like to drink. Mostly it’s straightforward; the Studios come in thirsty and hot, needing beer; the Fourth Floor splice the mainbrace with something stronger; a Third Floor customer might occasionally ask for a Pimm’s Number One… But the Fifth Floor demands — and usually gets — anything and everything: “I think I know most drinks by now.” Betty Hashes a smile as bright as a new penny. “A ‘Cameraman’s Kick’, for instance —That started with the camera-boys from Wembley; it’s a lager-and-lime, but lots of other people besides cameramen have taken it up now.”

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.

The Guardian saved us the trouble of digging in the archives ourselves this week by resurfacing a piece by Peter Corrigan from 1988, about the drinking culture of Fleet Street:

[The pub] was something more than an extension of the newspaper: for some a home from home, for others an air-lock between the desk and suburbia. A man could get the bends going straight from one to the other. Not all journalists get on with each other, so each office pub would have a few satellites to accommodate political overspills. Most of the Daily Mail staff, for instance, use the Harrow, while others frequent the Mucky Duck, as the White Swan is traditionally known, or the Welsh Harp, which once housed a glum group of Mail men known as the Fingertip Club, because that best described how they were hanging onto their jobs.

But that did remind us of a similar piece from the US, from half a century earlier, by H.L. Mencken, that we’d come across in the back catalogue of the New Yorker:

Between 1899 and 1904 there was only one reporter south of the Mason and Dixon line who did not drink at all, and he was considered insane. In New York, so far as I could make out, there was not even one. On my first Christmas Eve in the newspaper business but two sober persons were to be found in the old Baltimore Herald office, one of them a Seventh Day Adventist office boy in the editorial rooms and the other a superannuated stereotyper who sold lunches to the printers in the composing room. There was a printer on the payroll who was reputed to be a teetotaller—indeed, his singularity gave him the curious nickname of the Moral Element—but Christmas Eve happened to be his night off.

And finally, a short but evocative tale of pub life featuring the late Prodigy front-man Keith Flint:

https://twitter.com/sanglesey/status/1102541475538239488

For more reading check out Stan Hieronymus on Mondays and Alan McLeod on Thursdays.

Categories
beer reviews breweries

Plum Porter: Dividing Opinion

A plum.

We were a bit excited to come across Titanic Plum Porter in the pub last night, a beer many people worship and others despise.

We can’t say we’ve drunk it often enough to form a really solid view on how it is meant to be but have always enjoyed it. The first time we recall encountering it (that is, when we were paying attention) was at the Castle Hotel in Manchester where it struck us a heavy, rich porter with a fruity twist. At the Wellington in Bristol it seemed lighter in both colour and body and more like a British answer to a Belgian kriek or framboise — tart, and dominated by the hot crumble flavours of bruised fruit. Even at five quid a pint (yikes!) we had to stop for a second round.

When we Tweeted about it, acknowledging what we understood to be its mixed reputation, here’s some of what people said in response:

  • “When it’s good, it’s very good; when it’s bad, it’s horrid. Consistency seems dubious.” — @olliedearn
  • “WHAT?! In what world is it divide opinion? Everyone I know loves it.” — @Jon_BOA
  • “My bete noire, was always dubious about it (even though I love other Titanic brews) – perhaps I need to revisit…” — @beertoday
  • “Having lived in Stoke + covered the Potteries beer scene I’d say it’s a good advert (flagship, I dare say!) for local beers, despite flaws.” — @LiamapBarnes

So, pretty balanced, from Ugh! to Wow!

Over the years we’ve seen yet harsher comments, though, some of which struck us as more about Titanic’s place on the scene than about this beer in particular. In general, we find Titanic’s beer rather middling — not bad, not great — but it is nonetheless a major presence in the Midlands and North West, and on supermarket shelves nationwide, and ubiquity breeds contempt. For some time, too, its owner Keith Bott was chairman of increasingly controversial industry body SIBA, so perhaps the beer tastes a bit of politics, the nastiest off-flavour of all.

This made us think about other beers that strike us as fundamentally decent but whose reputations might be similarly weighed down. Copper Dragon Golden Pippin, for example, is a beer we’ve always enjoyed — good value, straightforward, but with a bit more peachy zing than some others in the same category. When we expressed this enthusiasm a while ago, though, there seemed to be a suggestion that we shouldn’t enjoy it because the brewery has engaged in some complicated and newsworthy business practices.

And St Austell Tribute is a beer we’ll always stick up for. At the Nags Head in Walthamstow c.2009 we drank tons of it and found it every bit as good as, almost interchangeable with, the exemplary Timothy Taylor Landlord sold in the same pub. (Further reading: ‘The Landlord Test’.) But these days, even though Tribute is probably  better than its ever been in technical terms, it elicits groans from many enthusiasts. That’s because it’s become one of those beers you find in pubs that aren’t very interested in beer, pushed into the wrong bits of the country by keen sales teams and big distribution deals; and on trains, in hotel bars, under random rocks you pick up deep in the woods, and so on. That in-your-face national presence is not only annoying in its own right but also makes it harder to find a pint that has truly been cared for. But, as a beer, on its own terms… It can still taste great, and interesting with it.

The flipside of all this, of course, is that some mediocre or even bad beers get a free pass because the people that make them are good eggs, or underdogs, or have a good story to tell; or because they’re scarce, so that nobody ever really gets to know them, and is too excited when they do find them in the wild to be objectively critical.

It’s impossible to be objective, obviously, but it’s good to try — to attempt to blank out everything else and have a moment where it’s just you and the beer.