Categories
Generalisations about beer culture pubs

QUICK ONE: Turning Casuals into Regulars

Detail: a 1970s pub table.

If someone comes into your pub twice you’re missing a trick if you don’t say hello.

We were hanging out with Bailey’s parents recently when his mum told us this story about their pub-going in the 1970s:

The second time we went into The Cobblestones the landlady came over and said, ‘Right, if you’re going to be coming in regularly, I ought to know your names.’ Then a few months later she said, ‘I’ve got something for you,’ and gave Dad a pint glass with a euchre hand on it, and Grandpa a glass with cherries on, because he liked the fruit machines. We drank in there for years.

This seems like such a simple, effective, emotionally manipulative approach. If you see the same face twice, make a formal introduction, and then use those names at every opportunity. Then after, say, three months of regular custom ask if they’d like a loyalty card, or a glass behind the bar, or make some other small gesture — ‘That one’s on the house.’

Lock them into the relationship, like the free sandwich thing at Pret a Manger.

In practice, there are probably all sorts of reasons this doesn’t happen so often these days, not least the fact that it feels ever rarer to actually find the licensee behind the bar. We often ask (because we want permission to take photos or need to ask some questions for one Thing or another) ‘Is this your place, then?’ and we can’t think of many occasions when the answer has been anything other than, ‘No, I’m just the manager.’

In big chains, though, Creating Regulars could be built into staff objectives and the performance management programme… Aaaaaaaaand we’ve depressed ourselves.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture opinion

QUICK ONE: The Problem is Hypocrisy

Illustration: a pint of beer in chalk on a blackboard.

Selling your brewery for fabulous amounts of money to a big multinational isn’t a problem — it’s doing so when you’ve made capital from being opposed to just that kind of thing.

If you had made a point of saying along the way, ‘We would never rule out selling to someone like AB-InBev — we have no beef with Big Beer,’ then it’s unlikely anyone would get annoyed when you did so.

So why didn’t you do that?

It must have been at least partly because you believed you’d gain less publicity and adulation, and sell less beer.

You might have been right to think that, but we suspect not: the other way, you’d gain marks for honesty, and pick up the kind of fans for whom beer isn’t so pungent with politics.

Either way, if you insist independence is important when it benefits you but then decide people who care about it are silly and immature when your situation changes, expect them to be annoyed.

Categories
breweries News

QUICK THOUGHT: Do We Need to Worry More?

Brewery flags on a wall in Burton-upon-Trent.

There’s been the odd brewery closure in the last year, most of which we’ve taken note of without regarding them as HARBINGERS OF DOOM. But maybe we’re being complacent.

Breweries come, and breweries go, but the overall number continues to climb. Now that we live in a country with 1,800 breweries it’s hilarious to read articles from the early 1980s in which people fret about how crowded the microbrewery market was becoming with something like 35 in operation UK-wide.

If a brewery closes every now and then, even if it’s a tragedy for those involved, it’s part of the healthy operation of the market.

But what if you do that thing that people hate and categorise breweries: is the ‘craft’ end of the market (def 2.) in more trouble than the brewing sector as a whole?

We ask because this Tweet from Craig Heap grabbed our attention:

We’d missed the news about Otley. If you’d asked us to name Welsh craft breweries without reference to other sources we’d probably have mentioned the three in that Tweet plus Tiny Rebel (still going strong), which makes this seem rather concerning.

If we could somehow come up with a list of the UK’s Most Definitely Craft Breweries, how many would there be? And what would the attrition rate look like compared to breweries overall? We’ve a sudden creeping feeling that, with closures at one end and takeovers at the other, it might be noticeably worse.

Or maybe we’re just not paying attention to all the old-school microbreweries that are also folding, quietly, in market towns and villages where the neon don’t shine?

Categories
Beer history pubs quotes

QUICK ONE: The Flea and Sawdust School, 1927

The English Public House As It Is, a book by social observer Ernest Selley, was published in 1927. Re-reading it in search of a reference, we spotted a passage that hadn’t previously grabbed our attention.

In it, Selley reports on his visit to The Fellowship Inn, Bellingham, South London (pictured above when we visited in August), where he met someone who was unimpressed with the new style of ‘improved public house’:

Evidently this man is a member of what I once heard described as ‘The Flea and Sawdust School’; one of the type which prefers the stuffy ‘coziness’ of the dirty, ill-ventilated taproom to any of the ‘new fangled’ ideas.

Some ancestor of The Pub Curmudgeon, perhaps? (That’s not us having a go: we suspect he’ll quite like the comparison.)

It’s interesting to us that this lobby, which we associate with a certain wing within CAMRA today, was sufficiently well-developed by the mid-1920s for Selley to say he had ‘met several of these critics’, and for it to deserve a nickname. It was clearly, as they say, ‘a thing’.

The Fellowship Inn when it was new.
The Fellowship Inn in c.1920s. SOURCE: Inside Housing.

Also of note, in the section that immediately follows, is an account of early beer snobbery: Selley records a meeting with a bloke who won’t drink at the local improved pub because ‘the beer is rotten’. Selley says he tried it and found it anything but ‘rotten’. In his view the man was prejudiced because he resented the posher, more expensive pub, even though Selley was sure he would have enjoyed the very same beer served at the more down-to-earth ‘Pig and Whistle’. We can’t say for sure what was really going on — Selley was prejudiced too in his own way, in favour of improved pubs — but this kind of debate about value, quality, and the qualities of a ‘proper pub’ is certainly still going on 90 years later.

Categories
pubs

100 Words: Not an Endorsement

Let’s pop in here for a pint.

Oh, is it good?

Well…

Well what?

Not, good, exactly. Interesting.

What does interesting mean?

There’s always something going on. Some sort of drama.

Oh dear. Is the beer good, though?

Well…. Not good. I mean, it doesn’t taste that nice, but there is something about it.

Sorry, but this sounds terrible.

Oh, yeah, it is, in a way. But we should go in anyway, just for one. It’s brilliant.

Oh, I see — ironic appreciation — ‘So bad it’s good!’.

No, we genuinely like it, we just can’t be sure anyone else will. It’s complicated.