Categories
opinion

Does Beer Need Editing?

Editing beer (illustration).

Who is there to stop a brewer releasing a bad beer? To say, before it reaches the public, that it is simply not good enough?

Depending on your point of view, editors/publishers/record companies/film studios are either parasitic middle men standing between artist and audience, dragging everything towards bland ‘marketability’, and taking ten per cent; or they are heroic gatekeepers protecting the public from a tide of dross and/or pretension.

In larger breweries, there are plenty of mediators — blazer-wearing board members who tut at ‘weird’ beers and marketing people with focus-groups and survey results — and perhaps that is why you rarely see any spectacular misfires from that sector. (Or much that is spectacular at all.)

Perhaps smaller breweries get their ‘editorial’ feedback from third-party middle men such as distributors, bar-owners and retailers: ‘We regret to say that, at this time, your beer is not the kind of product to which we feel we could do justice in a crowded market-place…’ Perhaps the best are capable of being their own toughest critics.

But we suspect vanity usually wins out.

As a consumer, if you want your beer mediated — if you demand that only product polished to a sheen is allowed into pubs and shops — then you might have to accept a compromise to creativity, and to the idea of brewer as ‘auteur’. (‘Great!’ say many.)

If, on the other hand, you want to buy beer direct from a ‘cool’ person whose work is not meddled with by ‘suits’, then, every now and then, you will get something undrinkable.

The occasional Metal Machine Music is the price to pay for the ‘cool’ stuff.

We’re in the process of having our book edited at the moment which is perhaps what brought this to mind.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture

Signs of a Healthy Beer Culture?

Koelsch -- an example of a regional speciality beer.
One example of a regional speciality.

It seems that every week, there is some fresh improvement in the beer scene in Cornwall.

For example, Penzance now has its own home brewing supply shop; the Lamp & Whistle keeps expanding its range of Belgian and keg ‘craft beer’; and a specialist beer shop is to open in Truro in the next month or so.

Over a few pints of St Austell Big Job at Docktoberfest on Friday, we found ourselves pondering these developments, and whether they might fit into a generalised checklist of indicators of a healthy beer culture.

Here’s what we came up with:

1. There is a drinking establishment within walking distance of where you live where you like to spend time, and which serves decent beer.

2. If you are skint, there is an acceptable drinking establishment within walking distance which sells decent beer at ‘bargain’ prices.

3. If you fancy something special, there is a pub or bar within reach on public transport (WRPT) which sells imports and ‘craft beer’.

4. The nearest town/city centre has a range of pubs serving different demographics, and offering between them a range of locally-produced beers alongside national brands.

5. There is a well-established family/regional brewery.

6. There are several breweries founded since 1975.

7. There is at least one brewery founded since 2005.

8. There is a regional speciality — a beer people ‘must drink’ when they visit.

9. There is an independent off licence (‘bottle shop’) WRPT.

10. There is a shop selling home brewing supplies WRPT.

11. There is at least one beer festival in the region.

Perhaps inevitably, there’s an obvious UK-bias in the way we’ve approached this, and in how we’ve worded the list, although we did our best to avoid it. We’ve also used lots of deliberately vague terms — don’t ask us to define ‘decent’! (Or ‘beer culture’…)

With those disclaimers in mind, what have we missed? And how does where you live score?
Categories
opinion real ale

You Can’t Declare Yourself to be Cool

Detail from the cover of Tony [Bennett] Sings the Great Hits of Today (1970)
Detail from the cover of Tony [Bennett] 1970 ‘psychedelic’ album.

We find these and other Tweets from James Clarke at Hook Norton brewery fascinating:

(Mr Clarke is far from being the only brewer we’ve seen noticed making points like this.)

On the one hand, we agree with the sentiment: if it was up to us, in the UK, ‘craft beer’ would be inclusive of regional/family brewers of cask-conditioned beer.

On the other hand, we wonder why he and other well-established and well-respected brewers are even bothering to stake a claim to the term ‘craft’. If they’re confident that they are making good beer, and have survived a hundred years or more in the business, it seems odd that they’re concerned about how they’re described. (Or, rather, how they’re not.)

At any rate, it is counter-productive — is there any clearer sign of being square than insisting you’re hip?

Note: the Tony Bennett album is surprisingly good, though he is said to have hated it…

Categories
bottled beer opinion

Just a Marketing Term

Coronet Pale Ale advertisement, 1950s.

It starts as ‘just a marketing term’, probably describing something that has been around for decades.

Supermarket buyers like the ‘marketing term’, so it becomes a ‘category’.

The ‘category’ begets aisles and articles and awards.

Existing businesses develop ‘strategies’ to get a slice of the ‘category’.

New businesses emerge specialising in it.

Eventually, the ‘category’ is worth £X millions per year and employs X thousand people.

Just a marketing term?

(We’ve been writing about the emergence of ‘premium bottled ales’ in the nineteen-nineties, and reflecting on the comments here.)

Categories
opinion

Beer: Punchline to its Own Joke

whitbread_wembley

One of the great frustrations for those involved in ‘beer education’ (writers, ‘sommeliers’, those who run tasting sessions, and so on) is that it just doesn’t get taken seriously. Here’s ‘A. Drinker’, author of 1934’s A Book About Beer, on that subject:

The names of wines are thought to lend a glamour and glitter to the printed page; but put upon the same page the word BEER and it is as if the comedian had entered and sat on a chair that wasn’t there.

Leeds-based CAMRA veteran Barrie Pepper echoed those sentiments when we spoke to him earlier this year: ‘Beer just isn’t taken seriously… Even in the nineties, I found myself being laughed at when I said I wrote about beer for a living.’

This used to bother us — how come wine gets all the respect? All the ‘philosophy‘ and Oscar-worthy films and broadsheet columns and its own big leather-bound menus in restaurants?

Increasingly, though, we’re beginning to wonder if a sense of humour might not be beer’s great strength. Don’t most of us, if given the choice, prefer to hang out with people who can laugh at themselves? Isn’t approachability a great ‘brand value’?

Making beer needs to be a serious business, and people who think, campaign and write about it should take care to get their facts straight. They just shouldn’t take themselves too seriously, and we should all be grateful that beer remains 99% pomposity-free.

Disclaimer: statistic given above represents best-estimate based; we reserve the right to change our minds tomorrow; and we still don’t have much time for rubbish ‘saucy’ pumpclips.