Basstories

Earlier in the year, I reviewed Harry White’s very interesting and informative book on The Story of Bass. However, I pointed out that wasn’t a history of the famous beer itself (although that would surely make for a very interesting volume) but a survey of the complex history of the giant corporation that came to bear its name. I’m not the person to write that history of the beer, but I thought it would be worth setting down a few personal memories and reflections on it.

The business model of the original Bass company was to a significant extent based on selling its beer into the free trade across the country. Before Draught Guinness, Bass was the first nationally-distributed draught beer. This still lives on to some extent in areas like the West Country and North and West Wales, in pubs like the Seven Stars in Falmouth, the Dyffryn Arms at Pontfaen, the Black Boy in Caernarfon and the Bull’s Head in Beaumaric, none of which have ever actually been Bass tied houses. The late Rhys Jones recalled how, in the 1950s, Stockport brewer Robinson’s bought up a number of free houses on Anglesey that had previously sold Bass, something that was resented locally for decades.

Another aspect of this approach was concluding trading agreements with family brewers to sell Draught Bass in their pubs, giving them another string to their bow and Bass more sales. Most of these were swept away by the merger mania of the 1960s, but one that survived into more recent time was with Higson’s of Liverpool. They owned the now-closed George in the centre of Stockport, and I remember before the takeover by Boddingtons in 1985 being able to drink Bass in what was then a very characterful interior. Another pub stocking Bass was the Carnarvon Castle in Liverpool city centre, which is fortunately still with us.

In the mid-70s, the original gravity (OG) of Draught Bass was increased from 1039 to 1044 so as to be able to compete better with the popular premium beers of the time such as Ruddles County. This was a very rare example of a major beer brand increasing its strength. This was before my time, but there must be some older drinkers around who can recall what difference it made to the flavour and character of the beer. It should be remembered that, across large areas of Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire, Bass was sold as the pubs’ standard bitter, as was its Burton rival Pedigree. This is still true to a limited extent.

In the early 70s, there were only seven cask beers available in the whole of the city of Birmingham and one of them was Draught Bass, which was only sold in six selected Mitchells & Butlers pubs. One of these was the Bull’s Head on King’s Norton Green in the south of the city. This wasn’t the nearest pub to where I lived as a student in the late 70s, but sometimes we would pass the local to go and drink there as something of a treat. Bass was served in oversized dimpled mugs from electric metered pumps.

The cowls for these had a distinctive design reflecting the look of a Bass mirror, used for both metered and free-flow dispense. I don’t think the image is an actual font, but it gives an impression of the general look. I believe these survive in a handful of Bristol pubs where there is a tradition of drinking “flat Bass”, usually direct from the cask, which to some extent sails under the CAMRA radar. I don’t know Bristol well, but I have experienced this in the tiny Myrtle Tree in the Hotwells district, a few doors down from the better-known Bag of Nails “cat pub”.

The Bass company had a scattering of pubs in the Stockport area which had mostly come via the Charrington branch of the mega-merger from Hardy’s Crown Brewery of Hulme. In the late 80s, they decided to promote cask Bass by introducing it into the Bull’s Head and the Reddish Vale in the downmarket suburb of Reddish. While on one level this was an initiative to be welcomed, in practice it seemed to be an experiment designed to fail. The locals tried it, but complained that it was expensive, and gave them a bad head, because it was that bit stronger than the keg Stones Bitter they were used to. Not surprisingly, it didn’t last long. If they had been serious about reintroducing cask beer, it would have made more sense to switch the Stones from keg to cask. Both pubs have long since closed, and of what I think were at one time eight Bass pubs in Stockport only two now survive.

The beer itself has gone through a number of changes in production method and location, with Bass themselves abandoning brewing in the Union system in the late 80s, and contracting it out to Marston’s in the 2000s. Pedigree is still brewed in unions, but not Bass. Inevitably some people will say it’s now a pale shadow of its former self. However, which beers can really be said to be the same as they were forty or fifty years ago, and people’s memories of what beers tasted like back then are inevitably hazy and coloured by memories of their own lives in general.

Bass had always been a beer I quite liked, but I always tended to pigeonhole it as just another brew from the Big Six national brewers. My memory of the old union Bass was that it could sometimes have a rather cloying character that is absent from the current version. It is significant that the great beer writer Michael Jackson considered that Pedigree, not Bass, was the classic of the style.

I’ve given it more attention in the present century when it has become something of an endangered species, and I have to say that to my tastebuds the current incarnation is an excellent beer that preserves its distinctive bittersweet character and does not disgrace its honourable heritage. It stands up very well against its direct competitors. If it’s not the kind of thing you like, fair enough, but if you think it’s a poor beer compared with others in the same category that really says more about you.

It’s also significant that, as it is not actively promoted either by AB InBev or by pub companies, every pub that serves it has made a positive decision to stock it rather than having it foisted on them. Compare this with Taylor’s Landlord, another excellent beer in top condition, but all too often poorly looked after and extremely lacklustre when actually drunk in the pub.