Falling short of success

At CAMRA’s annual National Conference being held in Dundee later this month, the following motion has been put forward by Swale branch:

This Conference agrees that oversized lined glasses should be mandatory for pubs and clubs to be entered into the Good Beer Guide. It therefore instructs the National Executive to ensure that licensees are aware of this change and shall be given until the 2026 edition to comply.

My immediate reaction is “Good luck with that!” A better way of reducing the number of entries to double figures is hard to imagine, although obviously it would make life a lot easier for the intrepid people trying to tick off every pub in the guide. It also greatly overestimates CAMRA’s influence on the licensed trade.

I wrote about this back in 2014, and nothing has changed since then. It’s something that just isn’t seen as a significant issue any more. If it was, pubs might seek to gain a competitive advantage by using lined glasses, but in practice vanishingly few do. If there was already a critical mass of pubs using them, then such a motion might stand some chance of success, but there isn’t. A full measures law was included in the Labour manifesto in 2001, and indeed Wetherspoon’s jumped the gun on it, but in the end it never happened, and its time has now surely passed. I ran a quick poll on Twitter that shows it isn’t at all commonplace.

POLL: Do you regularly visit any pubs that use oversize lined pint glasses?

— Pub Curmudgeon 🌸🍻 (@oldmudgie) April 2, 2024

It also seems to be the case that British drinkers have an attachment to the concept of a brimming pint glass. Back in the days when oversize glasses were commonplace, a lot of drinkers didn't actually like them because of the air space left at the top of the glass, and described them as “glass buckets”. Somehow it just doesn’t look right.

You also have to be very careful what you wish for. Serving a pint to the line, and excluding the head above the line, is by definition giving a certain amount of over-measure due to the amount of liquid contained in the head. Plus it is difficult to achieve with any degree of accuracy in a busy pub. So, if such a law was brought in, it is inevitable that the major pub operators would lobby to be allowed to use metered dispense, to ensure they don’t give over-measure.

Now I used to like metered dispense when it was commonplace, because it ensured you got a full pint and prevented your beer being spoilt by barstaff with an incompetent pulling technique. But I imagine losing out on thirds and tasters would not go down too well, and nor would the loss of the “theatre of the serve” associated both with dispensing Draught Guinness and pulling cask pints.

And it’s impossible to discuss this subject without recalling that, in the 1980s and 90s, there was a large-scale replacement of oversize glasses with brim measures that CAMRA didn’t raise a peep about, because it also happened to involve the replacement of metered dispense with handpumps.

There is another motion on the order paper from Edinburgh and South-East Scotland Branch instructing CAMRA to abandon any campaigning for full pints on the grounds that it has been “by any metric, a failure”. I can’t see that one being passed either, but maybe it is time for CAMRA to recognise that it is pissing in the wind on this issue and put it on the back burner.

CAMRA beer festivals are often now the only places drinkers ever encounter lined glasses, and the lack of demand can make festival glasses difficult to source. It’s a gesture that comes across as “everyone’s out of step but our Johnny”, and perhaps that instruction should be quietly dropped too.