Stick to the knitting?

My poll on “Should CAMRA give more recognition to quality non-cask British beers?” has now concluded. There were an impressive 116 responses, broken down as follows:

Yes: 57 (49.1%)
No: 35 (30.2%)
Not sure: 13 (11.2%)
Don’t care: 11 (9.5%)

This subject has been done to death in recent weeks, but it is clear that, from the readers of this blog at least, there is a strong feeling that CAMRA, as the only substantial organised body of beer enthusiasts in the UK, should take less of a “four legs good, two legs bad” view and recognise that there is more to good beer than real ale.

It would be interesting to hear people’s thoughts on exactly how that could be done. To my mind it doesn’t really need a formal change of policy, just a change in tone, giving a few positive mentions to non-real draught and bottled beers in publications and dropping the hackneyed rhetoric about “chemical fizz” and “sealed dustbins” which regrettably you still see from time to time.

I have to say that personally, while I’m not averse to the odd pint of Guinness, Stella or even Carling, and drink relatively little bottle-conditioned beer at home, I find the whole “craft keg” movement something about which I can’t really work up any enthusiasm, although it does have its uses as a means of poking a stick at some unreconstructed attitudes in CAMRA.

Note that I used a third-party polling site for this poll as the Blogger polls seemed to be playing up - it makes a nice little graphic to display the results.