Shield burial

Molson Coors have announced that they are “resting” production of their iconic Worthington White Shield brand, something that has caused a certain degree of anger amongst the beer writing community. In the early years of CAMRA, White Shield was, along with Guinness, one of only two widely-distributed bottle-conditioned beers in the UK. It came in half-pint bottles and was mostly sold in pubs, including those of Bass themselves, but also several independent brewers such as Greenalls, Hydes and Robinson’s.

It mainly appealed to an older demographic, who would often add one to a half-pint of draught bitter to liven it up, or have one to round off the end of a session. Most preferred to pour it carefully to leave the sediment in the bottom of the bottle, but some would deliberately put it in the glass with the aim of keeping themselves “regular”. A few would even pour the beer clear and then consume the sediment separately.

In the early 80s, I was working in Surrey and my parents came down for the weekend and stayed in a nearby hotel. The bar had no cask beer, but they did have a stock of well-aged bottles of White Shield. (Not sure whether this was before the days of best before dates on beer). These had really enjoyed a thorough secondary fermentation and, while some were distinctly lively, they tasted delicious.

However, the old-style half-pint bottles in pubs were a declining sector, and at some point, from memory around 1990, Bass, noting the interest from beer enthusiasts, decided on a big relaunch. They jacked up the price and put it in fancy 33cl bottles with an information leaflet on a little string around the neck. However, as so often happens, they had misjudged the market and failed to realise that it was predominantly drunk by old boys, not by the beer cognoscenti. Its traditional market was destroyed, while there wasn’t remotely enough interest from enthusiasts to take up the slack.

After a while, the decision was taken to move it into 500ml bottles to align it with the growing “premium bottled ales” sector, but it seemed to suffer from a rather schizophrenic approach to production and marketing. At one point, brewing was contracted out to the now-defunct King & Barnes brewery in Horsham, Sussex. While they were capable brewers, their interpretation followed their own house style and was far too sweet to properly represent its traditional Burton character.

After a while, production was brought back in house by what became Molson Coors, and it established itself as a something of a flagship product, albeit a low-volume one. At one point it even spawned a cask “little brother” called Red Shield that was intended to compete with beers like Bass and Pedigree. I also recall having a rather nice drop of cask White Shield in the Dog in Burton-on-Trent just before the 2020 lockdown.

However, distribution of the bottled product, never particularly extensive, seemed to steadily contract. Tesco stopped stocking it, and I think the last time I ever saw it was in Booths, again just before the lockdown. Now the company have decided to “pause” production of a brand that had become virtually invisible anyway. Perhaps they could have done more to promote it, but it takes two to tango, and maybe the retailers were coming back and telling them that it simply wasn’t shifting. This Twitter poll showed little enthusiasm for it:

POLL: Did you drink Worthington White Shield (assuming you could find any)?

— Pub Curmudgeon 🌸🍻 (@oldmudgie) August 14, 2023

No doubt it suffered from the same problem as other bottle-conditioned ales, that buyers saw little benefit in them over their brewery-conditioned counterparts, and were deterred by their inconsistency. I wrote recently about the withdrawal of bottle-conditioned Pedigree, and indeed the segment now seems to have virtually disappeared from major retailers, despite all the exhortations of the beer writers.

This one is particularly regrettable, as it was one of the original bottle-conditioned beers, and one where the process did confer a real benefit. When it worked, it produced an excellent, highly-distinctive beer, but unfortunately all too often the yeast didn’t really seem to take hold and you ended up with a bottle of flaccid glop. It’s a beer that I used to buy fairly often, but the high ratio of duds meant that I ended up doing so less and less.

It does seem to be the case that the multinational companies who now control what were once the crown jewels of British brewing pay scant regard to its heritage. We have seen this with the way Draught Bass has been marginalised. Hopefully Molson Coors will find a way to keep the brand going and also get to grips with the quality control issues. But there are parallels here with the fate of the Crooked House, in there has been widespread anger at the demise of something that previously fewer and fewer people were actually buying or visiting.