Out with the old

Well, another year draws to a close, which has been very eventful both in the sphere of beer and pubs and the wider world. The idea that we are ever going to return to calmer waters seems like wishful thinking.

During the year, I have made 61 posts on this blog, including this one, the highest figure since Covid. (it’s possible, although unlikely, that I will do another one between today and New Year) I had a particular rush of blood to the head in February and October, with 8 posts in each month. By far the most pageviews were for my post about the pending retirement of Humphrey Smith, which for some reason has attracted more than three times as many as any other. Other popular topics included Fresh Ale (which never seems to have amounted to much), the perennial issue of children in pubs, and the recent one about the implications of using Digital ID for age verification in pubs. I’ve continued to attract a healthy volume of comments, many enlightening and constructive, others unfortunately less so.

I’ve continued to add entries to my Closed Pubs blog, although not at the same rate as in the past few years. As I mentioned last year, the disappearance of the Fullpint news aggregation Twitter account deprived me of a source of material, but to some extent this has been replaced by GB Booze, which also posts pub-related news items. This originated as Southampton Pubs, but subsequently widened its scope, which helps explain why there have been a number of entries from the Southampton area over the course of the year.

One interesting pub that I visited for the first time this year was the Cross Keys, a traditional canalside local in Penkridge, Staffordshire. It’s a congenial pub in its own right, but it has the distinction of still dispensing cask beer through electric metered pumps, something I don’t think I’d experienced in the previous decade. I know this is a lost cause, but I just think this is a preferable system, producing better condition and mouthfeel, and not knocking the stuffing out of the beer, as can all too easily happen with handpumps. Not to mention reliably guaranteeing full measure.

In the summer, I had a holiday in South-West Scotland. This was essentially a sightseeing trip, not a drinking trip, but even so my experience with cask beer fell short of my limited expectations. The worst was in the Good Beer Guide listed Douglas Arms in Dumfries, where in the evening of what had been a sunny but not particularly hot day, I was served a pint of cask that was crystal clear, but absolutely at room temperature. I didn’t take it back, as it would have been pointless, and I’m extremely unlikely to ever go there again. In contrast, I found a very congenial atmosphere in the keg-only Hole I’The Wa’ (pictured), a traditional pub located down an alleyway off Dumfries’ High Street, which was one of my best pub discoveries of the year.

In July, there was a general election and a universally expected change of government, although the incoming Labour administration enjoyed a much larger majority in seats than it did in votes. It is beyond the remit of this blog to stray on to wider political issues, but I predicted at the time that there was likely to be an intensification of the trend towards lifestyle restrictions that had characteristed their predecessors.

It didn’t take long to float a proposal to ban smoking in outdoor drinking areas of licensed premises, something that would have dealt a severe blow to wet-led pubs. After a wave of objections, they abandoned the idea, but the response was not that they thought it was wrong in principle, but that this wasn’t the time to bring it in. Then, health minister Andrew Gwynne, one of my local MPs, stated that pubs should be made to close earlier to address alcohol-related problems in society. He was pretty swiftly slapped down, but again this illustrates their train of thought.

The government confirmed that they were going to press ahead with Rishi Sunak’s plan to introduce a creeping smoking ban that would prevent anyone born after a set date from purchasing tobacco. This is a measure that is not only appallingly illiberal in principle, but would encounter serious practical problems in its application. It would create a two-tier society, discriminate against the young, and over time effectively hand the tobacco trade over to the black market. While the idea had originated in New Zealand, after a change of government in 2023 they dropped it, leaving the UK as trailblazers in this particular form of insanity.

However, a much more immediate threat to the pub trade emerged from Rachel Reeves’ first budget in October. This presented pubs with a quadruple whammy of increased costs and regulation – increasing employers’ national insurance, increasing the minimum wage by well above the rate of inflation, slashing the rate of business rates relief, and giving workers full employment rights from Day 1. Offsetting this with a marginal reduction in draught beer duty was an insulting sop. The worst aspect of this was reducing the threshold for employers’ National Insurance from £9,100 to £5,000, which will hit a sector employing many low-paid and part-time workers particularly hard. So expect to see many more pubs struggling, cutting hours and closing entirely in the New Year.

The tide of beers being reduced to 3.4% ABV to take advantage of a much lower duty rate continued, with John Smith’s Extra Smooth, the country’s biggest ale brand, succumbing in February. However, it now seems to have run out of steam, and presumably all the major brands that people just drink as a matter of routine without giving it much thought have now fallen into line. Plus, as I wrote in October, despite the brewers’ claims that it is responding to a trend towards healthier lifestyles, in reality it is entirely driven by tax considerations, not consumer demand. It is significant that Carlsberg lager continues to be brewed at 3.8% for Wetherspoon’s, who must be its biggest customer by far. And there was perhaps a straw in the wind when Marble Brewery restored the stremgth of their Pint to 3.9%, having cut it late last year.

There was a steady drip-drip of negative news from the Carlsberg-Marston’s conglomerate – abandoning use of the Burton Union system, Carlsberg buying buying out Marston’s remaining minority stake, closing the Wolverhampton brewery and withdrawing a long list of cask ale brands including the once iconic Banks’s Mild. Obviously all of this was a cause for sadness, but a lot of the anger in response to it seemed misplaced. It is simply not realistic to expect a large commercial business to keep brewing systems, plants and beer brands in existence purely out of sentiment.

However, something was salvaged, as Thornbridge brewery managed to obtain one of the Union sets and proceeded to use to it brew both a version of their signature Jaipur IPA, and a dedicated English-style IPA, the latter of which I can confirm was excellent. This illustrates how what may no longer make commercial sense for a large company can attract a following in more of a niche, enthusiast market. Maybe they could also consider brewing a 4.5% Burton-style pale ale that would be a direct replacement for Union Pedigree.

As I mentioned above, my post about Humphrey Smith retiring from Samuel Smith’s Brewery gained by some way the highest number of page views over the year. In theory, this should have happened by the end of this month, but only time will tell to what extent it affects the company’s often eccentric and self-defeating approach. The two issues that need to be urgently addressed are sorting out the endemic problem of recruiting new licensees, and dropping the absurd and counter-productive mobile phone ban. But hopefully change can happen without destroying the pubs’ highly distinctive character. The Guardian recently published a very interesting long-form article looking into the Sam Smith’s empire.

There has been the usual unfathomable merry-go-round of pub openings and closings. The Swan in Holmes Chapel, which briefly reopened in the summer of 2023 but swiftly closed again, has reopened, but the Boar’s Head, in a prominent location on Stockport Market Place, abruptly closed in November of this year, and the highly characterful Queen’s Head remains firmly shut. Several attractive properties in Cheshire, such as the Bird in Hand at Mobberley and the Cheshile Midland in Hale, remain long-term closed.

But, where Sam Smith’s pubs do stay open, they can offer a very congenial and welcoming atmosphere. It was a pleasure to be able to present in November, on behalf of the local CAMRA branch, a Pub of the Month award to the Sun in September in Burnage, Manchester (pictured), where the licensees have worked hard to built a community spirit in area otherwise denuded of traditional pubs. And, the following month, a second award went to the Blue Bell in Levenshulme, the other of the two out of five Sam’s pubs in the branch area that is still open. I wonder if any other CAMRA branch has ever made two such consecutive awards.

During the year, a particularly interesting book that I read was Historic Building Mythbusting by James Wright. In this book, the author, a qualified building archaeologist, debunks many of the common myths that surround historical buildings. One chapter that will be of specific interest to pub-lovers is where he shows that many well-known pubs’ claim to great antiquity rest on very shaky foundations, but there are others, often less-known, whose origins in mediaeval times can be reliably authenticated. He also holes below the waterline the claims of many old pubs that they are built from salvaged ships’ timbers, often taken from the Spanish Armada.

Probably the single most significant point made in the book is debunking the common theory that spiral staircases in mediaeval castles were almost always built with a clockwise rotation to give an advantage to right-handed swordsmen defending them against attackers. This is widely prevalent, and is often found in official sources, but has no verifiable foundation whatsoever.

And what can we expect for 2025? I’m not going to make any predictions, beyond confidently saying that it won’t be uneventful…

Big Brother in the pub

The government have announced that they are going to trial a scheme to allow people to use a form of digital ID held on smartphones for age verification in pubs.

Young people will be able to use government-backed digital ID cards to prove they are old enough to drink alcohol under legal changes to take effect next year. They will be able to sign up to digital ID companies that are certified against Government-set standards for security and reliability and then use the app on their smartphone to prove they are over 18 when visiting pubs, restaurants and shops.

It is part of a wider effort to move more state functions online so that people can prove their identity for everything from paying taxes to opening a bank account using the government-backed app. It will use a “single sign-on”, rather than the two-step identity verification currently needed online, for all government services including applying for benefits.

It will also allow older people to avoid the need for a member of staff to confirm their age when using self-service checkouts.

It is likely to be integrated into supermarkets’ and shops’ check-out scanning systems which will end the delays for customers when they have to call over the attendant to physically confirm they are old enough to buy alcohol – even if they are pensioners.

That sounds all well and good but, despite government denials, it is impossible to avoid the thought that it is being used as a stalking horse for the general introduction of Digital ID. Such a scheme would initially be sold to the population on the grounds that it would make their lives easier.

This has long been a pipe-dream of people of an authoritarian bent, such as Tony Blair. However, many commentators have expressed serious concerns on grounds of government overreach, loss of privacy and social exclusion. These concerns are summed up here by Big Brother Watch. Some may dismiss this as the argument of a tin-foil hatter, but the experience of the Covid Track and Trace app shows these fears to be entirely valid. This was, by definition, a system of government surveillance, and many businesses chose to use it as condition of entry even though that was not a legal requirement.

The period of lockdowns underlined that there was a significant subset of pub licensees who obviously missed their vocation as a prison guard, and were keen to gold-plate every regulation and add some more of their own. If they demanded that all customers check in with a digital ID, it would absolve them of any requirement to carry out age verification and thus make their life easier.

The government have said that use of these IDs would not be mandatory, but would that extend to ensuring that venues did not insist on them as a condition of entry? It seems highly likely that anyone who was either unable to have one due to not having a smartphone, or chose not to on privacy grounds, would end up being treated in various respects as a second-class citizen. Business and government departments prefer not to have to deal with awkward non-conformists.

A further consideration is what happens in the event of a power cut, which seems increasingly likely in the future due to Ed Miliband’s deranged energy policies. If it disabled digital IDs, it would bring society to a halt even more completely than it would at present.

So, while it may seem convenient to simply swipe your phone to get served in the pub or at the self-service checkout, it could be a further step down a very dangerous road. To say that “the innocent have nothing to fear” displays a touchingly naïve faith in the ultimate benevolence of government.

Not getting your oats

As a key plank of their strategy to combat child obesity, the government have announced restrictions on the advertising of so-called “unhealthy” foods, including a ban on TV adverts before the 9 pm watershed, and a complete ban online. A similar policy had been proposed by their predecessors, so I am not making a partisan point here.

Their press release makes extensive use of the meaningless term “junk food”, which can basically be taken to mean “any food items we disapprove of”. Perhaps people were expecting a ban on junk food adverts to apply only to the likes of pizzas, burgers and Wotsits but, unsurprisingly, the net has been drawn much more widely and encompasses many of what would be regarded as normal everyday foodstuffs. It’s rather like the disingenuous claim that Minimum Unit Pricing would only affect “cheap, high-strength alcohol”.

A taste of the scope of the restrictions is given by the except from the policy document shown above. Two particular examples that have received widespread media coverage are porridge and crumpets. Come on, you really didn’t think porridge was an unhealthy food, did you? Even Keir Starmer has been prompted to say that he doesn’t believe porridge is bad for children, but that isn’t going to stop him banning it from being advertised.

In any case, many of the items on the list are things that have no intrinsic appeal to children. You can’t really image a child pestering their parent for some M&S Seafood Linguine, but no, all advertising of ready meals will be banned, regardless of their nutritional content.

Christopher Snowdon has filleted the plans in his usual forensic style and points out that, even on the government’s own figures, they will result in the average child consuming a mere 2.3 calories less per day, which is neither here nor there. So, even taking the most charitable interpretation, it is a very heavy sledgehammer to crack a tiny nut. For some campaigners, though, it does not go far enough, and they object to companies being able to advertise at all if they sell any products that fall foul of the restrictions.

The ban on any form of paid online advertising is arguably far worse than the TV watershed rule, which by definition will only affect large companies. The internet is now integral to daily life, and will form a key part of many companies’ advertising strategy. Items such as cakes, chocolates, yoghurts and cooked meats may not be good for you if eaten in excessive quantities, but they are entirely legitimate products enjoyed by most adult consumers. Yet they are being treated as a “toxic trade” in a similar way to tobacco.

There is a coherent case for restricting advertising that is directly targeted at children, but surely it should be permissible to advertise legal products to adults. Advertising bans tend to result in ossification of the market they cover, with a reduction in competition, choice and innovation. They are bad news for consumers. Plus they will lead to a reduction in revenue for media organisations and could cause some of them financial difficulties.

When I started this blog seventeen years ago, I would have never expected that much of the fire of public health lobby would be diverted from alcohol to food, but that is how it has turned out. But there must be a strong chance of similar restrictions being applied to alcoholic drinks in the coming years. So don’t say you haven’t been warned!

Crying over spilt beer

Hard on the heels of the announcement of the closure of their Wolverhampton brewery, Carlsberg-Marston’s have informed us of their plans to discontinue a large number of mostly cask ales. These including, most strikingly, Banks’s Mild, the cornerstone on which the original Wolverhampton & Dudley company was built, and Bombardier, which maybe fifteen years ago seemed to crop up all over the place in the way that Doom Bar does now, and was even advertised on TV by the late Rik Mayall.

The full list of discontinued beers is:

Cask:
Banks’s Mild
Banks’s Sunbeam
Bombardier
Eagle IPA
Jennings Cumberland Ale
Marston’s Old Empire
Marston’s 61 Deep
Ringwood Boondoggle
Ringwood Old Thumper

Keg:
Mansfield Dark Smooth
Mansfield Original Bitter

However, some of these, including Banks’s Mild, will live on in keg or packaged form, so all is not entirely lost.

The combined company had inherited a sprawling portfolio of often overlapping brands, so some degree of rationalisation was inevitable. In particular, they had Cumberland Ale, Boondoggle, Sunbeam, Hobgoblin Gold and Wainwright Gold which all occupied much the same territory in the beer market. I’m not sure exactly where, but I’m sure I once went in a pub where the entire cask range comprised three beers from that list.

It is understandable that people will feel sadness and disappointment at this news, but a reaction of anger and betrayal seems misplaced. Whether it is pubs, beer brands or breweries, large companies have little room for sentimentality or considerations of “heritage”. People may feel an attachment to pubs or beers that they do not towards brands of chocolate or soap powder, but at the end of the day they are commercial products, not government services.

This applies further down the scale of size too – my local family brewer Robinson’s a few years ago dropped its Hatters Mild, to considerable outcry, and have also ruthlessly culled about a third of their pub estate, including some properties that at one time would have been regarded as jewels in their crown.

No doubt some twerp will pop up in the comments to say “You call yourself the Pub Curmudgeon, but you’re acting as an apologist for the international brewers.” However, all I’m doing is putting across the perhaps unpalatable truth. It has always been thus. If you sell your offspring to the crocodile, you should not be surprised if he ends up devouring some of them. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, at least subsconsciously, some people seem to feel that the British pub and brewing industry should have been frozen in about 1955, and all discontinuation of brands, takeovers and pub and brewery closures should have to go through some form of statutory process.

It also seems ironic that some of the same people who, only a few weeks ago were urging us to drink independent beers whenever possible, are now lamenting the loss of big brewery products which presumably they considered to be inferior. If you won’t stand up for Eagle IPA, don’t be too surprised when its owners stop brewing it. On the other hand, some commentators have said that we should look to the future and concentrate on the wide variety of often excellent cask ales that are still available, rather than getting too upset about the loss of beers than many people didn’t think much of anyway. Boak & Bailey definitely fall into this camp.

It’s important to remember that Carlsberg-Marston’s is now a pure brewing operation under different ownership from the Marston’s pub company. What they produce is entirely dependent on what their customers want to order and, while to some extent they can promote particular products, they can’t dictate whether they appear on bars. If they’re selling less Banks’s Mild, it’s because customers aren’t drinking it and thus pubs aren’t ordering it.

On the other hand, a vertically integrated brewer and pub operator can decide which beers are sold in its pubs, which can provide a cushion against the fickle tides of fashion, while at the same time what appears on their bars is a reflection of the company as a whole. This virtuous circle is broken when the relationship is severed.

To some extent this is a hangover from the 1989 Beer Orders which did much to break the connection between brewer and pub operator, and have continued ever since to exercise a negative influence over the industry.

A recycled mistake

The philosopher George Santayana is reputed to have said “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. And it looks like the Welsh government are planning to test out this maxim in following the example of their Scottish counterparts in trying to go it alone with a recycling scheme for drinks containers.

Last year, the Westminster government gave the go-ahead to the Scottish proposals for a Deposit Return Scheme (DRS), but only on the condition that they excluded glass, confining it to cans and plastic bottles. Rather than proceed with a modified scheme, the Scottish government in something of a fit of pique decided to scrap the whole thing so they would have to await the implementation of a UK-wide scheme later in the decade. I wrote about this here.

The UK government wanted glass removed from the scheme because of internal market concerns. It would in effect create a trade barrier between two parts of the same country, which would be bad for both businesses and consumers. Some of the respondents to my post seemed to fail to grasp this point, but every business operating the scheme would have had to introduce Scotland-specific packaging, so that deposits could only be reclaimed on containers that had paid it in the first place, pay a fee to register for the scheme, and potentially be subject to fines if an insufficient proportion of their containers were returned.

Not surprisingly, many smaller businesses decided that the cost and bureaucracy would not be worth it if they were only selling small quantities in Scotland in the first place. This would have especially affected small producers of alcoholic drinks. We could potentially have ended up with the ridiculous situation of small Scottish brewers refusing to supply Scotland, while being happy to sell beer in the rest of the UK.

Glass already had a much better recycling rate than cans and plastic bottles, and was also the medium overwhelmingly used by smaller producers, so it made a lot of sense to exclude it. Mass-market producers of beers and soft drinks, who used cans and plastic bottles, would have found it much easier and more worthwhile to come within the scheme.

The UK government have committed to introducing a UK-wide deposit return scheme from 2027, which would exclude glass. However, the Welsh government have indicated that they intend to opt out from this and introduce their own scheme that would include glass. So we are likely to see exactly the same issues of smaller producers refusing to supply Wales, and Welsh brewers deciding it is not worthwhile to sell in their home country. Wales only accounts for 5% of the total UK population, so many producers will conclude it isn’t worth the effort and expense. The range of packaged alcoholic drinks available to Welsh consumers will be drastically reduced. In contrast, the UK as a whole, with a population of 68 million, is a market worth making specific provision for.

UK Hospitality have expressed their serious concerns about the plan, and there must be a strong possibility that the story will play out the same way, and the UK government will ultimately refuse to approve the Welsh scheme because of single market concerns. But, of course, after the Senedd elections in 2026, the Welsh political landscape may look very different...

Note that this is not about the desirability of a DRS in principle, but the practicalities of how this particular scheme would actually work and its effect on the markets that it would cover.

Junk food, junk statistics

A shock report in the Guardian highlights claims of the immense cost to the British economy of health problems resulting from poor diets.

The UK’s growing addiction to unhealthy food costs £268bn a year, far outstripping the budget for the whole NHS, the first research into the subject has found. The increased consumption of foods high in fat, salt and sugar or which have been highly processed is having a “devastating” impact on human health and Britain’s finances.

“Far from keeping us well, our current food system, with its undue deference to what is known colloquially as ‘big food’, is making us sick. The costs of trying to manage that sickness are rapidly becoming unpayable,” the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) report says.

The £268bn figure has emerged from the first academic research looking at the cost of Britain’s increasing consumption of food that, according to the government’s system of assessing nutritional quality, is deemed unhealthy.

However, such an astronomical figure immediately raises suspicion that it might be a tad exaggerated, and indeed needs to be taken with a substantial pinch of salt (which of course is bad for you). It also seems to have been subject to considerable inflation, having risen from a claimed £27 billion in 2017 through £98 billion in 2021 to £268 billion now. It also seems a suspiciously exact figure. Why not quote it as £270 billion?

Any figure of costs such as this cannot be taken in isolation, but needs to be compared with something else. The alternative is not doing nothing, but doing something different. In a similar way, figures are often bandied about for the costs to society of using fossil fuels, but fail to consider what the actual result would be from not doing so.

It also commits the frequent sin of public health messaging of failing to acknowledge that people can gain any enjoyment from activities they disapprove of. The fact that people actually enjoy eating burgers and crisps in preference to grilled locusts and steamed kale needs to be considered as a benefit and weighed in the equation.

Christopher Snowdon has looked into this in more depth and reached the unsurprising conclusion that these figures have indeed been plucked out of the air by people with an axe to grind. The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission is not some kind of official body, but a private pressure group run by an individual called Tim Jackson who has a clear anti-capitalist agenda.

In the absence of any firm evidence, Jackson simply assumes that 33% of all long term health conditions in Britain are caused by poor diet because that’s what one study attributed to “metabolic risk”. Metabolic dysfunction is extremely common among the elderly — Jackson says that “70% of adults over 65 suffer from one or more metabolic condition” — and while it is linked to obesity and diet, it is also linked to medication, genes, stress, physical inactivity and other lifestyle factors, as well as old age itself. Jackson ignores the other risk factors and for the purposes of his cost estimate blames every case on “the current food system”.

This makes the maths nice and simple. He takes 70 per cent of what the UK spends on healthcare, social care and disability benefit welfare and divides it by three. This gives him a total of £92 billion in direct costs to the government. He then adds less tangible costs, including “human costs” and lost productivity. “Human costs” depend entirely on whatever arbitrary figure you put on a year of life and are the Get Out of Jail Free card of health economists who want to make it look like personal choices impose a burden on society. Jackson simply nicks the figure of £60 billion from the report commissioned by Tony Blair’s think tank (and paid for by Novo Nordisk) last year.

So, in fact, the figure is entirely made up, and does not deserve to be given any credence. I’m not denying that poor diets do impose some costs on society and the health service, but the real figure is likely to be several orders of magnitude smaller. It is also questionable to what extent this can be addressed through the usual public health playbook of taxes, restrictions and bans. But no doubt it will be gleefully used in future as a stick to beat us with.

And it seems that we are regressing to a medieval worldview where illnesses are blamed on people’s moral failings rather than being attributed to disease and infection.

Bavarian bounty

Last Autumn, there was a bout of excitement on Twitter over the appearance of the Kalea Wiesn-Tragerl ten-pack of Bavarian festival beers as a special offer in Lidl. There was something of a feeding frenzy over trying to get hold of one and, as supplies seemed to be fairly limited, many people were disappointed, including myself.

This year, the same pack made a reappearance, again priced at £24.99 for ten 500ml bottles of beers varying between 5.4% and 6.3% ABV, which is pretty good value, although oddly it was not made available until the middle of October. This time, supplies seemed to be more generous, and I succeeded in getting my hands on one. Having now sampled them all, I thought I would offer some tasting notes.

Boak and Bailey wrote about this pack last year. I’m perhaps rather more enthusiastic about the overall style than they were, but they make the important point that these are beers that very much arise from a particular region and season of the year. Each year, in the early Autumn, towns and cities across Bavaria stage their own folk festival, and the local brewery produces a special beer, stronger than their normal ones, to celebrate. But only the six Munich breweries are allowed to call it “Oktoberfestbier”.

• Bischofshof – Original Festbier (5.4%) BB 14/02/25: Standard mid-gold colour, deep and persistent head, carbonation noticeably less vigorous than some. Relatively crisp flavour, with subdued maltiness and a slight fruity note. One of the better ones, and quite distinctive. Had a more contemporary and stylish label than some of the other more elaborate “Gothic” designs.

• Erl Bräu – Erlkönig Festbier( (6.1%) BB 28/01/25: Pale gold in colour, probably the lightest of the batch, although one of the strongest. Thin but persistent head, vigorous carbonation. Fairly subtle in flavour and not overtly malty, with a dry aftertaste, although a fuller feel developed as it warmed up.

• Ettl Bräu Teisnacher – 1543 Festmärzen (5.4%) BB 03/05/25: This one is labelled as “Naturtrüb”, meaning it still has some yeast in suspension (although not bottle-conditioned). Allowed it plenty of time to settle, and managed to pour with only a mild haze. Dark gold colour, deep head which subsided after a while, but persisted down the glass, strong carbonation. Full, rounded, malty flavour, considerably richer than some of the other beers. I agree with Boak & Bailey that it had “just a dab of welcome rustic character.”

• Falter – Pichelsteiner Festbier (5.9%) BB 28/12/24: Standard golden lager colour, good carbonation but didn’t form a dense head. Characteristic rich, sweetish flavour, with a bit of dry maltiness creeping in later. Good, but not an outstanding example. Possibly a bit lacking in freshness.

• Hofbräu – Oktoberfestbier (6.3%) BB 27/03/25: People may debate the merits of the various Munich Oktoberfestbiers, but surely this is the exemplar of the style. Mid-gold colour, dense, lasting head, vigorous carbonation. Rich, full, malty flavour, but with a distinct dryness there too; not excessively sweet. Splendid stuff!

• Hohenthanner Schlossbrauerei – Märzen Festbier (5.6%) BB 26/03/25: Light copper in colour, more like the traditional Märzen hue. Thin but persistent head, decent carbonation. Sweetish, malty flavour with a hint of caramel.

• Kuchlbauer – Gillamoos Bier (5.6%) BB 01/03/25: Much paler than others, almost Pilsner-pale. Good head formation and vigorous carbonation. Fairly subtle in flavour, less sweet and malty than some. Dry aftertaste. Gillamoos is a folk festival held since 1313 in early September in the town of Abensberg, which is north of Munich and just south of Regensburg.

• Irlbacher Premium – Gauboden Volksfestbier (5.6%) BB 04/07/25: Mid-gold colour, thin but persistent head, good carbonation. Rich flavour, full mouthfeel, but not particularly sweet. Not really the quasi-Pllnsner described by B&B “something like a strong pilsner: pale, powerfully bitter, and our favourite of the bunch”, although still one of the best of the set. One of the latest BB dates.

• Schneider – Festweisse (6.2%) BB 15/03/25: This one differs from the others in being a Hefeweizen, and thus intentionally cloudy. The yeast didn’t come anywhere near settling despite being stood for three weeks. Poured opaque and cloudy, with a thick lasting head and vigorous carbonation. Dark gold colour. Characteristic spicy flavour, with full malt body and a slight alcohol kick. Not, to be honest, one of my favourite beer styles.

• Wildbräu Grafing – Kirtabier (5.7%) BB 03/04/25: Dark gold in colour, which was lighter than I had been expecting from Boak and Bailey’s description. Thin but persistent head, adequate carbonation. Notably sweet and malty flavour, although not heavy; not really lager-like at all. Doesn’t really drink its strength. B&B said: “dark, orangey and syrupy, almost like Spingo Special.”, but this wasn’t really like that at all. It’s paler than the Perlenbacher interpretation. This one had the plainest and simplest label.

I also tried the Perlenbacher Festbier which Lidl were selling at a bargain £1.49 for a 500ml can.

• Perlenbacher – Festbier (5.5%) BB 07/08/25: Dark gold colour, good carbonation and head retention. Malty flavour with little hop character, but a slight “off” note. Probably what you would expect from a cut-price interpretation of a Festbier.

So there you are, ten beers (plus one ersatz knock-off), all basically variations on a theme apart from the Schneider Festweisse. All good beers, and it was interesting to see the differences in flavour and character between them. I’m guessing that most were unpasteurised, hence the shorter shelf-lives, although the Falter was the only one that gave the impression of being a bit stale.

I would certainly buy the pack again if it reappears next year, but it has to be said that Festbiers are an interesting diversion from the core theme of lager, which in general I would expect to be crisper and hoppier. If I had to pick favourites, apart from the Hofbräu, I would choose the Bischofshof and the Irlbacher.

Overall, though, I would say that the Oktoberfest beers from the classic Big 6 Munich breweries are better. And I still have examples of all six of those to drink, bought from the Bottle Stop in Bramhall for a rather higher price per bottle, plus Festbiers from Giesinger and Weihenstephan.

Beat the clock

A central London branch of the O’Neill’s chain has been in the news for imposing a surcharge on drinks prices after 10 pm.

The Soho branch of the Irish-themed pub states on a sign that it operates a “a variable price list” – what that means in reality is that after 10pm, the price it charges for drinks increases.

It is reported that this results in the price of a Brewdog IPA going from £7.40 during the rest of the day to £9.40, while a 500ml bottle of Budweiser goes up from £6.05 to £8.05. Even a tonic water goes up by £1 under the system, with the price rising to £3.15. Drinks purchased in the evening are also served in plastic cups, rather than glass.

This has met with a pretty hostile reaction with consumer rights expert Scott Dixon saying “The hospitality industry needs to rethink their business model instead of inventing new ways to rip people off, there needs to be more transparency.” One commentator even rather hyperbolically declared that it amounted to price gouging and would lead to the extinction of the institution of the pub.

However, provided that it is properly advertised (which reports suggest may not be the case here), is it really any different in principle from pubs offering cheaper prices at slack times, such as “happy hours” or discounts early in the week? Yes, it feels psychologically better to get a discount from what is perceived as the standard price, rather than a surcharge, but the basic concept of varying the price according to the time of day or day of the week is the same.

It is a principle well-established in other markets where pricing of services delivered and consumed immediately is varied according to the time. The most obvious example is peak pricing on the railways, which is directly comparable as the lower price applies most of the time, with a surcharge imposed when it is busy. And it is common, for example, for buffet restaurants to charge several pounds more at weekends for what is exactly the same offer of food.

This practice has been described in some quarters as “surge” or “dynamic” pricing, but that isn’t really accurate. These terms are applied to situations where the price is varied unpredictably in response to the level of demand, such as with the recent furore over Oasis concert tickets. Here, in contrast, the higher price is predictable and announced in advance, and applies to a specific, defined period. The licensing authorities, particularly in Scotland, would take a dim view of any pub that varied prices suddenly and arbitrarily during the course of a single session.

I can’t say I’m very keen on this concept, and I’d think less of any pub that applied it. But time-based pricing is a well-established concept in service businesses, and some of the objections to it seem greatly overdone. Having said that, I’m not sure I’d really be keen on paying £7.40 for a pint of Punk IPA, let alone £9.40.

A morsel for the masses

Well, Budget Day has come and gone, and there has been the usual phenomenon of various unpalatable measures being trailed in advance, and a sigh of relief being breathed when some of them at least are not implemented. There is also usually at least one surprise pulled from the Chancellor’s hat, and this year it was the decision to reduce the rate of duty on draught beer and cider by 1.7%, equating to about 1p on the sale price. The duty on packaged beer and all other alcoholic drinks will increase in line with RPI.

This comes across as a pointless empty gesture that will achieve nothing. Even if pubs see a small reduction in price from their suppliers, in pretty much all cases they will take the entirely understandable decision to slightly widen their margins rather than passing it on to the customer. Virtually no drinkers will see any reduction in the price of a pint over the bar. This was unsurprisingly met with widespread derision, and realistically the optics would have been much better if the rate had simply been frozen. Yet they have the brass neck to shout it from the rooftops as though it is a significant benefit.

Any effect of this will be vastly outweighted by a whole raft of other factors that will increase the costs incurred by pubs. The first is that the 75% discount on business rates that they have enjoyed since the period of lockdowns will be reduced to 40% from April 2025, pending a comprehensive revamp of the system in 2026. This will more than double a pub’s business rates bill. The Morning Advertiser reports that the rates bill for the average pub will increase from £3,938 to £9,451.

The rate of Employer’s National Insurance contributions will be increased from 13.8% to 15%, and the minimum threshold on which they are charged will be reduced from £9,100 to £5,000. This will greatly increase the cost of employing staff, and will hit hospitality, where there are many low-paid and part-time workers, particularly hard. For the very smallest businesses, there will be some relief from raising the exempt band, but the vast majority will still suffer.

Meanwhile, the main adult rate of the National Living Wage is being increased by 6.7%, over three times the rate of inflation, bringing it to £12.21 an hour, while the 18-21 rate will be increased by no less than 11.6% to £10 an hour. Again this will have a particularly severe impact on hospitality due to the profile of their workforce. Some idiot on Twitter opined “why shouldn’t workers be paid a fair wage?”, but you can’t pluck a figure out of the air without any regard to employers’ ability to actually pay it.

On top of this, the government are planning to implement changes in employment law to give workers full rights from Day 1, which will make it much more difficult to dismiss unsatisfactory employees, and make businesses much more reluctant to take anyone on without a proven track record.

One publican reckoned that, to recoup the cost of all these changes, she would need to increase the typical price of a pint by 30p. But then you run into the problem of your customers, who are experiencing similar financial pressures, being unable or unwilling to pay that, resulting in a vicious circle of diminishing returns.

The inevitable result will be that, after the Christmas and New Year period, we will see a rising tide of pub closures, and many of those still standing will be reducing staffing levels, opening hours and food service times. But the joyless wowsers, never missing an opportunity to kick a man when he is down, will still no doubt go ahead with their Dry January campaign.

And, while I have done my best to avoid making wider political points that go beyond the drinks and hospitality industry, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that we are being consigned to four and a half years of Britain being a high tax, low growth and low enterprise economy.

State of independence

“Craft beer” started to become a widely-used concept in the UK around fifteen years ago. But ever since then it has been dogged by the issue of how it is actually defined. Is it the type of beer, the kind of ingredients used, the size of the brewery, the independent status of the brewery, the ethos of the brewery, or some kind of nebulous combination of all these factors?

And then a fly in the ointment appeared, as the major international brewers started to buy up what were perceived as “craft” brands such as Camden and Beavertown. Punters might think that pint of Neck Oil comes from a hip, edgy brewery, but in fact it’s an offshoot of Heineken.

This process was described by a newspaper article as How Big Lager Crushed Britain’s Craft Beer Revolution, but that is something of a misrepresentation of describing an entirely normal business process. In any industry, when a new product category appears on the scene, existing companies will attempt to get a share of the action, either by developing their own competing products or taking over the innovators, and that is exactly what has happened in beer. Sometimes a start-up emerges from the pack to became a major competitor in its own right, as has happened with BrewDog, although I would expect them to also sell out to a major corporate in the fullness of time.

To counter the confusion created by these craft takeovers, SIBA (the Society of Independent Brewers) have launched an initiative to highlight breweries’ independent status, using an Indie Beer badge. It is open to all breweries to use this, not just members of SIBA, provided that they are genuinely independent from the control of larger corporations, and account for no more than 1% of the British beer market, indicating a production level of around 220,000 barrels a year.

There’s a lot to be said for transparency, but the question has to asked to what extent this is something that drinkers class as important. They may say in opinion surveys that they prefer beer from small independent breweries to that made by giant corporations, but their revealed preference often indicates otherwise. All they want at the end of the day is a decent pint. And this is a beer market where the majority of sales are accounted for by UK-brewed versions of international lager brands. This is not to say that people are stupid, just that independence and authenticity are not in practice given a high priority. I’d guess that most of the people to whom it really matters that Neck Oil is brewed by an offshoot of Heineken are already well aware of that fact.

It also needs to be remembered that independent status is not of itself necessarily a mark of quality, and, to be fair, it isn’t really being suggested it is. Over the years, I’ve encountered no shortage of poor products from micro-breweries, and indeed “this tastes like home brew” is a common criticism. On the other hand, while not all of their products may be to your taste, Asahi/Fullers at Chiswick, Greene King at Bury St Edmunds, and Carlsberg-Marstons at Burton and Wolverhampton are all pretty competent brewers who know what they’re doing. Beer isn’t purely a functional product, and people often take into account the wider connotations of a brand when choosing which one to buy, but it takes a certain amount of perversity to deliberately opt for an inferior product purely because it comes from a small company. There will be plenty of items in your house that were supplied by major corporations and which you have bought for practical reasons.

It was noticeable on the day that this campaign was launched that one of the first brewers to use the badge was Timothy Taylor’s, who brew the second best-selling cask ale in the country. They were followed by Arkell’s, Felinfoel and Palmer’s, three of the most conservative family brewers in the country, and known for the (in some people’s eyes) brownness and boringness of their beers. All the remaining family brewers fall comfortably within SIBA’s definition of independence, but no doubt some people will feel a little uncomfortable with this. I ran a Twitter poll showing that 85% of respondents thought they should be included, but 15% didn’t.

POLL: Would you classify long-established family brewers such as Holt’s and Robinson’s as “independent” brewers?

— Pub Curmudgeon 🌸🍻 (@oldmudgie) October 22, 2024

In the early days of the British craft beer movement, many of those who were most committed to it as a kind of ideological crusade saw the family brewers as embodying everything they were opposed to. This attitude has mellowed somewhat in more recent years, and only last week Timothy Taylor’s been promoting a stout made in a collaboration with Northern Monk. But it still persists, and is perhaps particularly prevalent in Greater Manchester, where the four surviving family brewers perhaps have a greater share of tied pubs than anywhere else in the country.

Only the other day, I saw some twerp on Twitter saying “I hate Robinson’s”, and the attitude is exemplified by the response to this column that I wrote for Opening Times five years ago. Some people are going to continue lumping Batham’s and Hook Norton in with “big beer”, and when they see Shepherd Neame using the Indie Beer badge will mutter darkly “this isn’t what it’s supposed to mean!”

And it would be a splendid piece of trolling if Samuel Smith’s, who describe themselves in their publicity as being “a small, independent brewery” also decided to adopt the Indie Beer badge.

A bit of sprucing up

Earlier this month, the Nursery Inn in Heaton Norris, Stockport, reopened after a £250,000 refurbishment by Hydes Brewery. This, which is my local pub, has a splendid unspoilt interior dating from 1939, and was CAMRA’s National Pub of the Year in 2002, one of the very few brewery tied houses ever to win this award. It is also one of the handful of pubs to retain its own bowling green still in active use.

I wrote in 2013 about my experiences of visiting this pub on Sunday lunchtimes over the years. It was once extremely popular but, despite receiving an earlier refurbishment in 2014, for various reasons its fortunes seem to have declined more recently. A couple of years ago, I remember one of the Hydes directors telling a CAMRA meeting that they would have to make major changes to the pub to revive it, but were being held back by planning constraints. Several of those present expressed concern about what this would mean for its historic interior.

However, as a Grade II listed building – and also meriting a three-star entry on CAMRA’s National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors – the scope for structural change was very limited. It seems that what Hydes have done has respected the pub’s fabric, and could best be described as a general refresh and reupholstering, although there may have been more far-reaching changes behind the scenes, such as in the kitchen.

The two photos above show the main lounge and the vault. The lounge retains its wood panelling, bench seating and original stained glass windows, but has acquired some overlarge rectangular tables, although I suppose that is seen as necessary for the food trade.

However, it’s hard to see what difference the changes are going to make to the pub’s fortunes. The pub is in a tucked-away location and thus has no passing trade*, so it depends on a combination of either being a local or attracting customers as a destination for attractions such as food or live music.

The cask ale range has been cut back to Hydes’ three regular paler ales, Original, Hopster and Lowry, and the number of handpumps reduced. Neither of their two milds, Dark Ruby and 1863, are now sold and there appears to be no room to add seasonal beers, which it also sold in the past.

The initial food selection seems to major on variations on a theme of pie, mash and gravy, which is fairly limiting, whereas previously it had an extensive and varied menu. Whether a wider choice will be introduced in future remains to be seen, but I would say an attractive food offer is important to the pub’s appeal.

As the photo of the lounge shows, the pub also to my mind suffers from the presence of a large screen for TV sport in every room. I recognise that sport does bring customers in, but surely in a pub with three large rooms there should be scope for one of them not to have a screen, or for it not to be generally used. As I said in the blogpost, I don’t want to have to check the football fixtures before venturing out to my local pub. It also seems incongruous in the context of the historic interior.

So it remains to be seen whether the changes at the Nursery are going to do enough to bring customers flooding back in.

Meanwhile, a few miles away in Cheadle Hulme, Star Pubs and Bars have recently spent no less than £350,000 on refurbishing the Hesketh, which had been closed for over a year. This is anpther large suburban pub, in this case Edwardian, that once had a bowling green until it was replaced by a car park in the 1970s. I have to say that I hadn’t been in for many years prior to its closure, but I got the impression that it was a mainly food-oriented operation.

It now comes across as a fairly standard contemporary pubco refurbishment, with hard wooden floors, wide open spaces, pastel colours and an abundance of posing tables. This extract from the news story gives a flavour of what it is like.

Meanwhile, the layout will include a new games area with illuminated darts, pool table, HD TV, open fire and high tables and stools; a dining area with wood burner; and a bar with a mix of free standing and new leather button back banquette style seating.

The pub's food menu will feature pub classics such as burgers, fish and chips and grilled steak, gammon and chicken. A home comforts section will include dishes like Steak & Ale Pie, Hunter Chicken and Mac n Cheese. There will also be a choice of 'world favourites' such as Singapore Noodles, Tacos and Chicken Tikka Masala, lighter bites, and a small plates offering with a mix-and-match tapas style way of eating.

The drinks offer will include a range of beers, from Fosters, Amstel and Birra Moretti to Beavertown. There will also be cider, wine, an extensive range of spirits, zero alcohol and soft drinks and fresh coffee.

Nothing particularly objectionable, but on the other hand nothing to make it stand out from many other pubs either. Cheadle Hulme is a prosperous, leafy area with many long-established residents, and I can’t help feeling that the potential clientele might expect something a little more sophisticated, such as might be found in three nearby J. W. Lees pubs, Duttons, the Pointing Dog or the Aviator.

The cask ale offer is Theakston’s Best and Taylor’s Landlord. Some in CAMRA grumbled about the limited choice, but arguably it makes sense to tailor the range to suit the level of trade, and the pint of Theakston’s I had was pretty good. As in many pubs of this kind, there is something of a tension between TV sport and dining.

So, while a tidy sum of money has been invested, it still comes across as a “pub by numbers” without any distinctive USP, and it remains to be seen whether it will prove to be a success in the longer term. Being the only pub for half a mile in any direction is no longer a guarantee of success, if indeed it ever was.

* the concept of “passing trade” refers not only to chance customers happening to pass a pub and thinking they will call in, but passing it on their regular journeys and thus being aware of its existence.

It's no joke

The Sunday Telegraph reports that pub licensees will be turned into “banter cops” under proposed reforms to workers’ rights.

Provisions in the Employment Rights Bill mean equality laws will be updated to make employers liable for staff being offended by “third parties”, such as customers or members of the public. The laws would introduce a legal requirement for companies and public bodies to take “all reasonable steps” to prevent harassment by third parties relating to a “protected characteristic” such as sex, gender reassignment or age.

Some commentators have dismissed this as merely protecting staff from direct harassment, but to a large extent that is already covered by existing legislation. This goes much further to encompass offence called by anything that employees might overhear. Pubs cover a wide spectrum, and many have a distinctly robust and rumbustious atmosphere where there may be plenty of humour and banter that would never be encountered on broadcast media. Some sensitive soul working behind the bar could all too easily take offence at a particular joke and run to the solicitors.

If a particular line of conversation, such as maybe something of a sexually frank nature, or laced with four-letter words, makes people feel uncomfortable, then the correct response should be a word from the licensee to tone it down rather than recourse to the law. But it all depends on the character of that particular establishment. Not every pub is suitable for maiden aunts.

Industry spokesperson Kate Nicholls, who aims to influence policy-makers and thus always has to speak guardedly, sounded a note of caution:

Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality, said that staff in restaurants, bars, pubs and hotels are working in a “social environment” where “there are jokes and people are boisterous”. She said while everyone wants to make sure their staff are protected “we don’t want to be policing our customers’ behaviour”, adding that she is keen to work with ministers to ensure “undue restrictions” are not imposed on customers.

This may in the end not amount to much, but the risk is that one or two high-profile lawsuits will force venues to take a risk-averse approach and try to eliminate that anything that may be offensive to the ear of the listener. Maybe pubs need to take a leaf out of the BBC’s book from 1948 and publish a list of topics that are considered unsuitable for humour. They could consult Humphrey Smith for advice.

“the BBC thought jokes about lavatories, fig leaves and ladies' underwear would be too strong for public consumption… Any references to drink were permissible only ‘in strict moderation’… the BBC also put a ban on suggestive references to dangerous subjects such as honeymoon couples, chambermaids, rabbits, lodgers and commercial travellers. Writers had to avoid vulgar use of words such as ‘basket’.”

It goes well beyond humour and conversational banter to extend to the policing of opinions. Free speech seems to be increasingly becoming a dirty word, and we often see examples of “no-platforming” and violent demonstrations against speakers expressing controversial but entirely legal views. This will mainly affect venues such as theatres and conferences centres, but pubs are not entirely immune, especially if they have meeting rooms that are used to host various events.

What are the chances that some delicate member of staff will raise an objection if they hear such horrendous opinions being expressed as “no woman has a penis”, “Israel has the right to self-defence” or “there is no climate crisis”?

Nobody should have the right to be protected from offence, provided that speech falls within the law. Some environments by their nature are host to a robust discourse, and anyone of a censorious nature should perhaps consider whether they are appropriate places for them to work. If you don’t like blood, don’t work in a butcher’s shop. But there is a genuine risk that, in an effort to live a quiet life and avoid vexatious litigation, this legislation will throw a stifling blanket over free expression.

Undone by progress

In July of this year, Marston’s sold their remaining 40% stake in the Carlsberg-Marston’s brewing joint venture to Carlsberg, ending a long and proud history of the company’s involvement in brewing. Reducing their debt burden was given as a key reason behind this move. Not entirely surprisingly, three months later, Carlsberg announced that they were closing the Wolverhampton brewery that they had acquired from the joint venture, with operations being concentrated at the original Marston’s site at Burton-on-Trent. This was particularly poignant as Wolverhampton was the birthplace of the Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries company that eventually metamorphosed into Marston’s.

The history behind this is somewhat complicated. In 1999, Wolverhampton & Dudley, best known for Banks’s ales, took part in a bitter two-way takeover battle with Marston’s, with each company trying to take over the other. Wolves & Dudley were eventually successful, but only at the cost of taking on a huge burden of debt that was later to prove a millstone around their neck. In 2007, the combined company renamed itself as Marston’s, as that was a much more widely recognised name.

The debt burden was further increased by takeovers of the Jennings, Wychwood and Ringwood breweries, and then in 2017 of the large Eagle Brewery at Bedford, previously owned by Wells & Youngs. By this time, commentators were noting that its level of debt put it in a risky position, and the 2020 Covid lockdown brought the house of cards crashing down. With all pubs closed, the level of brewing activity greatly diminished, and the company’s share price plummeted. The disposal of 60% of the brewing activities to Carlsberg was somewhat in the nature of a fire sale, to prevent the company being overwhelmed by its debt obligations. The sale of the remaining 40% stake four years later only completed the process.

Even before this, it had been widely speculated that one of the two large breweries would have to close sooner or later. I’d assume that the decision was motivated by considerations that Burton, on an edge-of-town site, had more room for expansion, while Wolverhampton, close to the city centre, would fetch more for redevelopment. While the Wolverhampton site is superficially impressive, I went round it on a tour in 2018 and found the actual brewing and fermenting operations surprisingly cramped and haphazard. It wasn’t really a state-of-the-art modern brewery.

Inevitably, the decision was met with a great amount of sadness, but also a certain degree of anger. Labour’s recently-elected West Midlands condemned the decision and urged the company to reconsider.

This is a cultural asset lost because of decisions made on paper - without consideration for the impact on our community. We should be protecting our brewing heritage in Wolverhampton. I'm urging the owners to reconsider.https://t.co/TatIwxo7dn

— Richard Parker (@RichParkerLab) October 10, 2024

However, many of the responses to his tweet suggested he might be better employed concentrating has attention on stopping library closures in Birmingham rather than a brewery closure in Wolverhampton. It’s also noticeable that many of the people decrying the closure are the same who have over the years dismissed the beers produced by the plant as bland, mainstream pap.

Carlsberg are running a commercial business, not a preservation society, and there is limited scope for sentiment. In the fact of declining demand, operating two large ale breweries only 30 miles apart in Staffordshire simply did not make financial sense, and rationalising capacity was inevitable. They may give cause for lament, but I doubt whether over the past sixty years there has ever been a single brewery closure decision that those making it have later regretted in commercial terms. When a pub closes, there is the opportunity for customers to put their money where their mouth is and club together to buy it, but that simply isn’t an option for a large brewery supplying thousands of pubs.

The decline in ale demand is an unfortunate fact of life that companies have to come to terms with. Cask ale is now below 10% of the on-trade beer market, and a year or so ago my local giant Tesco about halved the amount of shelf space devoted to Premium Bottled Ales, slashing the number of lines stocked at the same time. Kent brewer Shepherd Neame recently announced a shift of emphasis from cask to craft in the face of falling sales.

Some may point out that certain smaller breweries and cask-focused pubs are going great guns and increasing sales, but an overall declining market does not affect everyone equally, and the wider picture is pretty clear. The founding members of CAMRA feared that real ale might only survive in a limited, cottage industry form and, fifty years later, that may eventually be coming to pass, as the big operators scale down their involvement and leave it to micros and small family brewers.

The topic of the Wolverhampton closure has also been discussed by Tandleman here.

The 3.4% dilution

I recently spent a few days in Taunton in Somerset. While it’s an interesting place, and a good base for exploring the surrounding area, it has to be said that it’s far from Britain’s best pub town. One that I visited was the Ring of Bells which, for some reason, more than three years after the end of lockdowns, is still operating a policy of table service and card payments only. I asked the waiter what guest ales were available, and he ran through the list. One from Otter sounded promising, so I asked what strength it was. “Oh, 3.4%,” he replied. So I decided to give it a swerve and choose something else. And that illustrates one of the key problems with 3.4% beers, that nobody really wants them.

Just over a year ago, at the beginning of August 2023, the duty on beers of 3.4% ABV or below was more than halved. Since then, predictably, huge swathes of the British beer market that were previously above this figure have seen their strength reduced. This includes Greene King IPA, Ruddles Bitter, Carlsberg lager (outside of Wetherspoon’s) and all four of the leading brands of smooth bitter. However, again predictably, most of the savings seem to have gone to brewers rather than pub operators or drinkers. Drinkers have’t asked for this; it has been entirely driven by tax savings.

Before the First World War, the typical strength of British beer was between 5 and 6%. However, during that conflict, a shortage of barley combined with steep duty increases imposed by Lloyd George brought about a drastic reduction in its strength. For the next four decades at least, Britain had some of the weakest beer in the world. However, in a more sober era, this was generally accepted, and beer was seen more as a gentle lubricant to sociability, or a means of replacing fluid for manual workers, rather than something that would get you drink. As Anthony Avis wrote in his memoir about the history of the British brewing industry, “All the Norwich brewed beers, before and after the last war, were much the same – thin, flat and lifeless; however, they suited, or appeared to suit, the customers.”

There was a significant change in 1959 when, for the first time in many years, beer duty was reduced, and this was the catalyst for a major change in the beer market. In the early 1960s, Mild was still the biggest seller, but from the on Bitter, which was typically stronger and had more character, pulled ahead, and eventually reduced Mild to insignificance.

More, recently, while we may not have been drinking “less but better”, we are certainly drinking “less but a bit stronger”. Most of the best-selling cask ales are now in the 4.0-4.5% ABV range, and the most popular lagers seem to cluster around the 4.5-4.6% mark. The 4.6% Moretti recently overtook the 4.0% Carling as the biggest-selling lager in the UK. There is no spontaneous market trend to favour 3.4% beers.

CAMRA has always had a tendency to sentimentalise low-gravity beers. But the truth is that most of these milds and light bitters were thin, bland and forgettable, and were simply drunk without much thought as part of a routine of social interaction. Nobody much mourns Whitbread West Country Pale Ale, the 1030 OG beer that for many years was the only cask ale in many pubs around the Severn Valley. The limited number that have survived to the present day tend to be the more characterful examples, and many of them are actually over 3.4% anyway.

In the 1950s and 60s, when people just tended to drink the house mild or bitter in a limited range of pubs, a reduction in strength would in general have been grudgingly accepted, as they had nowhere else to go. Even today, the drinkers of products like John Smith’s Smooth are likely to be creatures of habit, and a reduction from 3.6% to 3.4% won’t be enough to make them look elsewhere. Reducing a beer’s strength by only one or two points will make little appreciable difference.

But today’s beer market is much more open and fluid than it was a generation or two ago, and if presented with a range of options drinkers are unlikely to opt for the weakest one. This isn’t because they’re chasing strength for its own sake, but that 3.4% beers are in general a bit lacking. As I wrote about the John Smith’s reduction, “A 3.4% beer can be sort of OK, palatable enough, although it’s unlikely to uproot any trees.”

I recognise that I am not a remotely representative beer drinker. At home, I’m not the kind of person to work his way through a pile of cans while watching TV, and generally I just want the one. While I do buy beers down to around 4.0%, I really wouldn’t want a 3.4 unless it either came as part of a multipack or someone had given it to me.

In the pub, things are slightly different as I’m more likely to have a multi-pint session, and there is also more of a reason to maintain a relatively clear head. I might well choose a 3.4% beer where that strength is appropriate to its traditional character, such as Taylor’s Golden Best or one of the two Sam Smith’s milds. Although it has been (perhaps puzzlingly) kept at 3.5%, the 1863 light mild is often my choice in Hyde’s pubs. However, if presented with a choice of guest or seasonal ales, something that was only 3.4% would be unlikely to pique my interest. Plus there is rarely much, if any, saving on the price.

The conclusion must be that, while a substantial part of the beer market has now been brought down to 3.4%, it is a trend that has been entirely driven by tax considerations, not consumer preference. And is it really a healthy situation where so much of what is on offer is not what drinkers really want?

Chippy about chips

Plans for a new chippy on a North Wales holiday park have met with opposition from the local health board:

Plans for a new chippy have come up against a health board's demands for fruit and veg on the menu. Betsi Cadwaladr health board wants the proposed takeaway in Morfa Bychan, Gwynedd, to sell a "good selection" of fruit and veg. It wants the menu to have less fat, salt and sugar and is worried an increase in fast food outlets is "detrimental" to people's health.

The more junk food was available, the board added, the more likely it was that people would get fat. "Increased access to unhealthy food retail outlets can be associated with increased weight status in the general population and increased obesity and unhealthy eating behaviours among children residing in low-income areas," it said. "While we appreciate this is only one extra takeaway unit, this would still be one additional takeaway than what is currently available."

But the question has to be asked what business is it of theirs anyway? Are they going to go through the complete menus and stock range of every single retail outlet to decide whether they meet with their approval?

It also isn’t made clear whether they want the chippy to also function as a greengrocer’s shop, something completely unheard of in takeaways, or whether they want more fruit and veg to be included on the menu, whether or not customers actually want them. But don’t expect them underwrite any losses incurred from stocking items people don’t want to buy.

It also seems distinctly hypocritical when many NHS facilities have vending machines full of crisps, chocolate bars and fizzy drinks, which presumably are items they disapprove of. Plus, in my experience, many NHS staff do not set a good example of keeping to an ideal weight.

This is yet another example of joyless, po-faced, Puritanical bureaucrats who have no conception of how businesses function trying to dictate how they should operate, and how ordinary people should live their lives, something that seems all too common nowadays.

And don’t mushy peas qualify as vegetables anyway?