Still not going away

For three successive years I have run a poll asking the same question about people’s view of the smoking ban in pubs and bars. Last year’s results are here, and the latest are shown at the right, with the three-year summary below.

As you can see, there has been a decline from 80% to 74% in the overall proportion supporting some relaxation of the current law, but also a decline in those advocating more extreme measures which would surely be extremely damaging to pubs.

And the fact that nearly three-quarters of respondents do support some degree of relaxation underlines the fact that this issue is not going away any day soon. The smoking ban has ripped the guts out of the British pub trade and created an abiding legacy of bitterness amongst pubgoers, smokers and non-smokers alike. Those supporting complete deregulation remain the biggest single group by some margin.

And it certainly gives the lie to the risible claim from one commenter on here that there has been “a huge groundswell of support for the smoking ban”, something he signally failed to back up with any facts. Indeed, until recently, the annual British Social Attitudes Survey had never shown majority support for the current blanket ban. I’m not sure whether the question is still asked.

If the antismokers are so confident of overwhelming support, why aren’t they willing to allow smoking and non-smoking pubs and let the market decide?

The real craft keg success story

Last Friday the local branch of CAMRA did a pub crawl of the affluent South Manchester suburb of Didsbury. Given its “yuppie” character I thought I would see how many craft keg beers I could spot. However, I didn’t see any apart from Blue Moon (which positions itself as “craft”, but many wouldn’t accept was) and Bath Ales Dark Side Stout, presumably as a substitute for Guinness. As an aside, out of ten people in the party, it was noteworthy that, at 54, I was the youngest.

However, it was interesting that, in at least three pubs, I saw taps for Aspall cider, something that ten years ago would have been unknown. Back then, the only keg ciders you would see in pubs were those produced by the major national producers, Strongbow and Blackthorn, and possibly a few remnants of Woodpecker and Gayemer’s Olde English.

However, since then there has been a dramatic increase in choice, and not just in trendy or upmarket pubs. Wetherspoon’s now offer either Thatcher’s Gold or Stowford Press, produced by Weston’s. Aspall, as mentioned above, is often seen in the more aspirational type of establishment, and I recently spotted Sheppy’s Oakwood alongside it. On my visit to the West Country there were plenty of taps for Cornish Orchards, and even a few for Cornish Rattler with its distinctive and rather cartoon-like snake’s head handle. A photo in Doghouse magazine shows a pub with a tap for Robinson’s Flagon cider, which I have also spotted elsewhere in the Welsh Marches. It’s quite a dramatic change in the marketplace that has largely gone unremarked.

Now, some purists may argue that these products aren’t really “craft”, that they are fairly undemanding, mainstream ciders that just happen to be made by independent regional producers. But, in the US sense, that is how “craft” is defined, and you’re not really going to find many customers with a product that tastes as though it will take the enamel off your teeth. They key point is that these are independently-made ciders that are selling to the ordinary man and woman in the pub, not to self-conscious aficionados.

In the coming years I can see much the same happening for lager, as pubs increasingly go for products from small British independent brewers rather than jaded licence-brewed international brands. But much less so for ales, as cask already offers the innovation and distinctiveness that the more discerning customer looks for. And it has to be said that most British craft lagers are fairly middle-of-the-road in flavour and not extreme or cutting-edge.

What Pub shall we go to?

Last year I did a road test of some of the various pub review sites that are around on the Internet. The conclusion was that, while all of them had their good and bad points, all were substantially lacking in at least one respect and none could be remotely regarded as definitive.

At the time, CAMRA’s own WhatPub? site was still in beta and available to members only, but this week it has finally gone live for the general public. First impressions are pretty good – the search facility is easy to use, it directs you to pubs near the one you have selected, and it gives a reasonable write-up for the Black Swan at Hollins Green which was the pub I used as an example for my initial investigation. There are also decent write-ups for the Crown at Churchill and the Dolphin in Plymouth which I have recently featured on Campaign for Real Pubs.

However, the entry for the Black Swan shows up an obvious problem – patchiness of coverage – as four of the five nearby pubs highlighted don’t have a picture, and if you change the selection criteria to include pubs not serving real ale two are also doubled up with slightly different names. Some areas, including my own, are very good (try browsing the coverage for Stockport) but others are rather lacking. This is obviously something that can be rectified given time, but it doesn’t give a very good initial impression.

The site also by default only searches pubs that offer real ale, and even if you change the search criteria it doesn’t given much information about keg pubs. In a sense this is what you would expect from something produced by CAMRA, but on the other hand it does limit its wider appeal and it has to be recognised that some people may be searching for pubs offering, say, food, or Sky Sports and have no interest in real ale. It thus can’t claim to be a comprehensive guide to all pubs.

The entries also tend to be somewhat anodyne and, while to some extent you can read between the lines and maybe conclude that, if it doesn’t say much about a pub, there isn’t much to be said, it does make it difficult to distinguish between the outstanding and the ordinary. While not suggesting it adopts the totally unmoderated but often entertaining user-generated comments of Beer in the Evening, it would benefit from some facility for used-added content, maybe allowing trusted users to add comments, or even just letting people give ratings out of 10.

Breaking out of the bubble

There can’t be anything about which so much has been written in the beer blogosphere as “craft keg”, and yet which has made so little impact on the mainstream of the pub trade.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those “all keg is piss” merchants and, as I’ve written here, I can see a role for craft keg in allowing specialist, low-volume beers to be served on draught, and to get some interesting non-mainstream beer into places such as restaurants and music venues that don’t have the facilities or the regular turnover to stock cask.

It has become a common sight in specialist beer bars within the urban beer bubble, and indeed BrewDog’s bars serve nothing else. But, despite the claims of some of its advocates, I simply don’t see how it is going to break out of that bubble and go mainstream in the same way that cask beer has. Any self-respecting pub now has cask, but will the same ever be true of craft keg?

No doubt someone will pipe up that it’s all over the place in London. That may be true – I don’t live in London and never go there, so I can’t really comment. But, in beer terms, as in many other fields, London increasingly marches to the beat of a different drum from the rest of the country, and even there I’d be surprised if it’s anything like ubiquitous in the dining pubs and suburban locals of the outer boroughs.

But, in the generality of pubs, you just don’t see it at all. There’s the odd craft keg tap in one or two beer-focused pubs in Stockport, but in most of the pubs I go in – family brewer tied pubs, pub company pubs, free houses – it’s conspicuous by its absence. I’ve recent been on holiday in the South-West and called in around 15 pubs of various types that either I have never visited before or not done so for a number of years. Plenty of good cask beer, but I can’t recall seeing a single craft keg tap between them.

If it is to make that breakthrough, craft keg needs a distinctive, easily recognisable champion brand, and the obvious one is BrewDog Punk IPA. Last year, I asked whether we’d see Wetherspoons stocking a craft keg beer before the end of 2013. The general verdict was that they probably would, but there’s no sign of it yet, and it looks less likely now than it did a year ago. And, if that did happen, such that we saw a distinctive craft keg ale in thousands of pubs nationwide, no doubt many of the current champions of the style would disown it.

Another problem is that most craft keg beers seem to be in the 5% ABV plus strength band, while in general there has been a distinct move away from stronger beers in the on-trade. Matthew Lawrenson asks here why we never see craft keg session bitter. While it’s perfectly possible to make a craft keg beer of modest strength, and some brewers do, what does that actually offer over a cask beer? Would it not just be a revival of “old keg”, albeit made by a man with an ironic beard in a railway arch? The argument about whether cask or keg is better for everyday supping beers has long since been won by cask.

If this huge breakout from the bubble does happen, it will be very interesting, and it will certainly pose a challenge to many of the CAMRA diehards. But I just don’t think it will.

Building a customer base

An argument I’ve often seen advanced, especially in relation to Stockport, is that new residential developments in close proximity to town centres are a way of revitalising their pub trade. On the face of it, this sounds plausible, but in fact it’s another manifestation of the “captive market” fallacy. Being the nearest pub to a large number of homes is no guarantee of success, and indeed one of the most typical patterns of pub closure is of stand-alone pubs in the midst of residential areas, or next to local shopping parades, which will often be the only pub within convenient walking distance for a large number of people. Going directly to the pub from home in the evenings is a far less typical pattern of pubgoing than is often imagined.

While there may be 10,000 people living in Manchester City Centre now, when thirty years ago there were only a few hundred, that is still only the population that would support the handful of pubs in a typical small market town, and in terms of the centre’s overall pub trade is a drop in the ocean. Pubs thrive in the centre of Manchester, and other large cities, because they function as retail, employment, business, cultural and entertainment hubs for a wide surrounding area and thus attract large numbers of people for a wide variety of reasons.

If new flats are built on land that was formerly derelict, or industrial premises, it might give a slight boost to pubs in the vicinity, although probably scarcely so much as you would notice. But if former shops and offices are turned over to housing, it will in fact be bad news for local pubs, as it will signal a retrenchment of the town’s hub function and mean fewer potential pubgoers visiting it.

A tonic for the neds

Being recently in the area, I thought I would pay a visit to Buckfast Abbey in Devon, home of the notorious Buckfast Tonic Wine. The abbey was founded in the late 19th century by Benedictine monks fleeing religious persecution in France, and now boasts an impressive church and a variety of other buildings and gardens spread across an extensive site. To be honest, I wouldn’t really recommend it as a tourist attraction, as it seems to cater primarily for coachloads of pensioners from Paignton and Torquay, but as it’s free it had to be worth a quick look.

I took the opportunity to purchase a small bottle of the wine, purely for research purposes, of course. The selling price in the abbey shop was £4.10 for a 35cl bottle, and £7.40 for a 70cl, so at 15% ABV even the bigger bottle is 70p per unit and thus hardly a cheap drink.

It pours a very dark, opaque brown with a slight reddish tinge, like an old ruby port. I had always imagined that it would have a medicinal, “cough mixture” taste, but in fact it’s just overpoweringly sweet, like red wine that has had a load of sugar and a bit of vanilla chucked in to it. To be honest, while I can understand the appeal of sweet cream sherry, this isn’t remotely pleasant. But if you don’t try it, you’ll never know what it’s like.

The main appeal, of course, is not that it’s cheap or nice-tasting, but that it has a very high caffeine content. This is what has made it an essential part of the Saturday night experience for Scottish neds looking for a buzz, somewhat ironic as its original intention was as a pick-me-up for old biddies. The manufacturers are careful to state on the label “High caffeine content” and point out that “the name ‘Tonic wine’ does not imply any health giving or medicinal properties”.

So notorious has it become that one Scottish MSP even proposed to ban all alcoholic drinks containing caffeine although, as the author of the article I linked to above is surely correct to say, “If Scots have a problem with Buckfast Tonic Wine, it is reasonable to conclude that the solution lies not in Buckfast but in Scotland.”

The abbey also has a gift shop selling various kinds of monastic produce from around the world, including beers from Chimay in Belgium and Andechs in Bavaria, albeit at very steep tourist prices.

Match abandoned

Shown on the right is a sign recently spotted in the window of the Admiral Boscarn pub in Looe, Cornwall. Despite the absence of Sky Sports, it didn’t look remotely appealing – as Beer in the Evening confirms – and so I didn’t venture over the threshold.

The second photo is another sign encountered on my travels, in this case displayed outside the Dolphin in the back streets of Dartmouth, South Devon. I suspect it may be rather tongue-in-cheek.

Saturday night can get quite lively in the Barbican area of Plymouth. In one pub a group of young women came in, obviously on a girls’ night out, and one of them distributed stick-on false beards and moustaches for them to wear. One of them, in a white mini-dress, decided that the best place for the beard was on the front in the manner of a merkin. Stay classy, ladies!

Sunday lunchtime through the years

In response to my recent post about the problem of not knowing exactly when pubs stopped serving, one commenter writes:

I think they should have kept the Sunday hours, out at 12 -12:30, home for 3 for Sunday dinner, a kip on the couch for an hour or so, a shit, shower and shave for the 7:00 start and out the door at 11:00 and bright eyed and bushy tailed for work next morning. The pubs have the same amount of people out on a Sundays, but they're all staggered at different times now. Christmas Day lunchtime is about the nearest you get to how it was these days.

He makes a very valid point about what the Sunday lunchtime session used to be like in many pubs, so I thought it would be worth reflecting on how it had changed over the years in my local pub.

I won’t name the pub as the aim is to describe changing times in general terms rather than comment on that particular establishment, although anyone who knows me will recognise which one I’m referring to. I have now been going in this pub regularly for 28 years, at least once a month, often considerably more, and as often as not at Sunday lunchtime.

It’s a fair-sized, but not huge, 1930s pub hidden away in a suburban area which is pleasant but not posh. The interior comprises three rooms – a traditional vault, a large wood-panelled lounge and a slightly plainer but still comfortable “smoke room” at the rear overlooking the bowling green. At first I thought, while nice enough, it was nothing particularly special, as there were quite a number of other pubs around in broadly the same style. But, as they have all been progressively remodelled, closed or sold off, its unique architectural qualities have come to be more apparent.

The two-hour Sunday lunchtime session must have been one of the busiest of the week, and if you weren’t there by 12.30 you probably wouldn’t get a seat. It was noticeable that people tended to meet up in regular groups, but many of the groups knew each other and exchanged banter. There was no food (although it did serve food on other days), no piped music and just Hydes Mild and Bitter on electric meters. All the keg beers (which in those days was probably just Harp, Stella, Strongbow and Guinness) were on meters too and served into oversize glasses. Yes, even Guinness. In the very early days they may even have still had Hydes’ own Amboss lager.

Most people seemed to drink ale and, as the next round was often got in before all had finished, you would see the small round tables virtually covered with pint glasses in various stages of fullness. Nobody got drunk or visibly the worse for wear; they would have three, four or five pints and then head home at maybe around 2.30 for their Sunday lunch, a fairly relaxed view being taken of the statutory ten minutes’ drinking-up time. This was the epitome of a lively, buzzing pub with a strong feeling of camaraderie and community spirit.

In 1988, closing time was moved back to 3.00 pm, which had the effect of spreading the trade out a bit more. Few would want to go for the full session, and most would tend to go a bit later so they were still there at last orders, although some continued to get in just after noon and leave before the end because they thought 3.30 was really too late for their lunch. It wasn’t a dramatic change, but you started to lose the feeling of everyone being in the pub together.

All-day opening came in perhaps around 1993, and around that time the pub also started to serve set Sunday lunches, with the rear smoke room in effect being used as a dining room. Another change in the 1990s was the 1994 Sunday Trading Act which meant people had other options on Sundays beyond going to the pub. Again, nothing drastic, just a steady, scarcely perceptible, thinning and spreading out of the available trade.

The pub gained something of a reputation for its Sunday lunches – even, apparently, being seen as a popular destination to top off Saturday night’s clubbing – and the diners started to encroach from the smoke room into the lounge. Eventually this was recognised by the layout being swapped around, with the lounge becoming the dining room, and the drinkers being banished to the back. I don’t know whether this actually put anyone off, but it was certainly a shock to the system on the day I walked in and encountered the new arrangement and it contributed to a feeling that drinkers were being treated as second-class citizens. The pub had started to serve Hydes’ seasonal ales on handpump and not too long afterwards the metered dispense for Mild and Bitter was replaced with handpumps and brim measure glasses.

By this time, the remaining band of Sunday lunchtime drinkers was much diminished, and getting a seat was rarely a problem, although it would fill up on occasions like Remembrance Sunday. With food also came children, whose presence would have been unheard of, and illegal, in 1985. Another change came with the introduction of Sunday lunchtime football matches on Sky. While most matches would just be shown in the vault, if United or City were playing they would also be shown in the smoke room using a specially-installed screen and projector, meaning that in effect anyone who just wanted a drink had nowhere to go. While undoubtedly the pub had more punters when a match was on than when one wasn’t, it must have had a knock-on effect at other times when unsuspecting customers turned up and found the curtains drawn and a group of raucous fans in their usual seat. You don’t really want to have to check the fixtures before venturing out to the pub.

This wasn’t the kind of pub that was going to be knocked for six by the 2007 smoking ban, but it was noticeable that one or two faces stopped appearing and a few others still came in for a while and popped outside for a fag every now and then but eventually, probably during the winter months, reached the conclusion of “sod this for a game of soldiers!” It is a dog-friendly pub and relatively recently a couple who I recognise as long-standing customers have been in for a drink with their well-behaved dog, although I haven’t spotted them in the past few months.

In recent years the pub has introduced non-Hydes guest beers and has even staged the occasional beer festival. However, although it is a pub that makes an effort to keep its beer well, with the best will in the world the lack of turnover means that on Sunday lunchtime you risk getting a slightly tired pint, which is another reason not to go and creates something of a vicious circle. The food trade also seems to have dropped off somewhat, and often the front dining room is far from full now. Maybe the traditional roast lunch no longer has the appeal it once did.

To be fair, the pub is often still fairly busy in the last two hours of the evening. But the heaving, wet-only, smoky Sunday lunchtime session of the mid-80s has now given way to a sanitised, smoke-free environment virtually devoid of drinking customers thirty years later. Such is moving with the times, if we are to believe the Good Pub Guide. And, while I wouldn’t seek to argue against flexible opening hours, allowing just a limited window in which to have a drink undoubtedly had the effect of bringing everyone into the pub at the same time and creating a feeling of togetherness which is now sadly absent.

Pricey bevvy

The Morning Advertiser reports that Newcastle City Council has introduced a 50p minimum unit price condition for all new licences and applications for licence variation across the on- and off-trade. It is described as voluntary, but no doubt a considerable amount of arm-twisting will be taking place. They have form on trying this sort of thing on before, of course.

50p per unit won’t make any meaningful difference to the on-trade, although it is still possible to buy some of the stronger real ales in my local Wetherspoon’s for below that price using a CAMRA discount token. However, it does set a precedent and one that no doubt Tim Martin will be watching very closely.

On the other hand, at least three quarters of all off-trade sales must be below 50p per unit, and it’s hard to see how any off-licence apart, perhaps, from a fine wine emporium could survive if forced to comply. And I’m sure if they seek to apply such a condition to any of the major supermarket chains they will get short shrift from their lawyers for restraint of trade.

Basically the council are just trying it on and in doing so exceeding their powers. It is not for them to dictate what prices legal businesses are allowed to charge, or what they are allowed to sell. It must be nice to be so awash with funds that you can afford to waste them on such ill-thought-out initiatives – of course, there isn’t a single unfilled pothole in the whole of the council area. Let’s hope they get a sharp legal kick-back sooner rather than later.

Trying to make sense of it all

I recently wrote about the third anniversary of my Closed Pubs blog and made the comment that “it’s all kinds of pubs – estate pubs, suburban roadhouses, country pubs, village pubs, urban locals, edge-of-town pubs, market town pubs.” However, it can’t be purely random, so I’ve taken a long hard look at the closed pubs I had included on the blog and seen for myself to try to work out whether there was any clear pattern that could be discerned. And some obvious trends did become apparent.

The most obvious is that pubs in working-class areas have suffered worst. In a sense, this is inevitable, as historically most pubs have mainly catered for working-class drinkers but, even so, it seems to be disproportionate. Such areas have been most vulnerable to depopulation and redevelopment, the decline of traditional industries, changes in ethnic mix and the growing gulf between pub and off-trade prices. Smoking prevalence is also much higher amongst working-class people. Within this area, pub closures can be divided into a number of categories:

• Areas of traditional Victorian terraced housing

• Inner-city housing “projects”, many of which have now pretty much lost all their pubs

• Council estates in general

• Areas on the edge of town centres with a mix of housing and small factories and workshops

• Smaller industrial towns with no tourist appeal or regional shopping function – for example my original home town of Runcorn

Second is that big pubs, whether estate pub or roadhouse, are more vulnerable than little ones. They are more attractive for residential redevelopment or conversion to convenience stores, they cost more to run, they need more customers to make them viable and many of them were probably never all that appealing in the first place. For example, in Withington in South Manchester, the massive White Lion and Manor House (ex-Golden Lion) have shut down, but smaller pubs like the Albert, Turnpike and Victoria are still going strong.

Third, and maybe counter-intuitively, isolated pubs in residential areas have suffered worse than those grouped with others. People often say “but it’s the only pub for a mile around” but clearly that hasn’t saved it. In some cases, these pubs have struggled to balance the needs of various customer groups, but it shows that the idea that people come home from work, have their tea and then go out for a few drinks at their local is not necessarily the standard pattern of pubgoing. Many pub visits are generated for reasons other than there being a pub on the doorstep, and chimneypots are no guarantee of survival, whereas pubs often seem to prosper by being part of a “circuit”. This applies to a number in areas of Victorian housing as well as those on 20th century estates. For example, returning to Withington, the Cotton Tree, which was in an area of housing about half a mile from the village centre, with no other nearby pubs, has closed down, but there are still five pubs in fairly close proximity in the centre.

The class factor works the other way too, as there seem to be some areas that are quite simply too upmarket to sustain pubs. For example, we have seen the closure of the Bleeding Wolf in Hale, Corbans (ex-Unicorn) in Halebarns (shown above) and the Royal Oak in Alderley Edge, all locations with no shortage of either spending money or potential customers living nearby. The residents may well socialise in restaurants or each other’s houses, but they no longer do it in pubs.

Market towns in general do not seem to have suffered too badly, likewise the smaller and more isolated coastal resorts. Possibly the existence of a captive market is a factor here, if the nearest big town is too far away to be easily reached for a night out, while they may also function as a hub for surrounding villages. Even here, though, the demise of traditional coaching inns is very noticeable, and peripheral pubs have suffered more than those in the centre.

The growing unwillingness to drink and drive even within the legal limit has undoubtedly led to a general thinning-out of pubs in villages and rural areas although, depending on the available catchment area, some have carved out a new niche by going all out for the upmarket “country dining pub” trade – but that is a lot more fickle than local boozers and really only as dependable as the last meal served.

Even so, in most areas there still seems to be a smattering of all-purpose and wet-led pubs, suggesting that the available trade has reduced rather than entirely disappeared. Ironically, this often means that pubgoers end up driving further than they used to. I can’t think of any rural areas that have been largely denuded of pubs in the way that some inner-city areas have been, although I believe this may have happened in some of the remoter, non-touristy parts of East Anglia. Some pubs seem to get into a downward spiral of frequent changes of licensee and format, eventually resulting in closure, whereas those with more continuity and a clear sense of purpose have remained in business.

In contrast, there are three distinct types of area where pubs and bars continue to thrive and indeed grow in numbers:

• The centres of large cities which also function as entertainment hubs for the surrounding area. This includes Manchester, but not any of its major satellite towns such as Bolton and Stockport. The inner London pub market seems to have become completely detached from the rest of the country.

• Major towns and cathedral cities which are substantial tourist draws in their own right, such as Bath and York, although even here you will see the typical pattern of pub decline in the suburbs and on peripheral estates.

• Middle-class residential urban enclaves, typically with a high proportion of workers in the education, media and healthcare sectors, such as Chorlton and to a lesser extent Didsbury in Manchester, and similar areas in other major cities. Chorlton has seen one of the most dramatic expansions of bar numbers anywhere, many of which serve interesting beer.

But, across the generality of struggling, workaday, provincial Britain, the pub sector has witnessed a drastic retrenchment in the past fifteen or so years that once would simply not have been conceived as credible. I don’t propose here to get into the debate as to what extent the lost pubs have been replaced by “bars” or other types of licensed outlet, but that large numbers of once viable and often prominent pubs have closed is indisputable.

What time is time?

The 2003 Licensing Act gave pubs a welcome flexibility as to when they stopped serving at the end of the evening. However, it has led to a lack of clarity over when they do actually shut up shop which was never a problem in the days when the vast majority had to put the towels over the pumps promptly at 11 pm.

In your local pub, this won’t be an issue, because you’ll be familiar with their pattern of hours. However, if you’ve been out for the evening and end up in a relatively unfamiliar pub at 10.30, it leads to something of a dilemma. Do they shut at 11, as many pubs still do, or are they going to keep serving longer? So do you stay there, or move on to somewhere else that you know will stay open until midnight?

Add to this the fact that many pubs, while they may continue serving after 11, close their doors so they don’t attract late-night drunks turfed out of other pubs, and so you have to make your decision about where to end up before the traditional closing time. And some pubs, while they may have a licence to serve until midnight, will often actually call time before that if the trade is sparse.

Of course you can always ask the bar staff when they plan to stop serving, but that might not be so easy if the pub is busy and, in any case, surely the pub should make it obvious without expecting people to ask. So might it not be a good idea for pubs to display clearly, possibly by a little clock face mounted above the bar, when they are actually going to shut up shop, so that customers know exactly where they stand?