Proof of Age

There are a number of pubs around that make claims to be the oldest, whether in their own city or county, in England or in the whole of the British Isles. One of the best-known is Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, which allegedly dates from King Richard the Lionheart setting out on Crusade to the Holy Land in 1189. Then there is Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans, which hit the headlines in 2022 when it was reportedly threatened with closure, bringing to end a record of trading as an inn dating back as far was 793.

These claims add a bit of colour and help enhance pubs’ appeal, but it’s generally recognised that they need to be taken with a pinch of salt and do not necessarily stand up to rigorous historical analysis. And indeed this is shown to be the case in a new book by buildings archaeologist James Wright entitled Historic Building Mythbusting. In this he casts a critical eye over many of the popular beliefs surrounding our inheritance of historic buildings.

For example, there is no evidence that the actual building of the Trip to Jerusalem is older than the 17th century. It was not mentioned as a public house until 1751, and was originally known as the Pilgrim, only gaining its present name in 1799. There are two other nearby pubs, the Bell and the Salutation, that actually have a better claim to be the oldest in the city of Nottingham. Likewise, Ye Olde Fighting Cocks began life as a monastic dovecote around 1400, and was relocated to its present site around 1600. It was first mentioned as a pub in 1756, and at the time was known as the Three Pigeons, receiving its current name in 1807.

On the other hand, there are a number of pubs that have a much more valid claim to great antiquity, but which are not so widely celebrated. Probably the oldest is the George at Norton St Philip in Somerset, still a rather magnificent and commanding building, parts of which can be reliably dated to the late 14th century. Others that can definitely be dated to the early part of the 15th century include the Bull at Ludlow, Henry Tudor House in Shrewsbury and the perhaps better-known galleried New Inn in Gloucester.

Two of the other themes often have a resonance for pubs – “There used to be a secret passage from the pub cellars to the church”, and “This pub was built from old ships’ timbers, you know.” However, both of these are revealed as being largely old wives’ tales. If you think about it, the difficulties in the pre-modern era of excavating and hiding lengthy underground passages, or of transporting large quantities of wood over poor-quality roads, make them both inherently unlikely. But they make a good story!

Amongst the other topics, one of particular interest is the common view is that mediaeval stonemasons would insert the occasional sexually explicit carving into the decoration of churches either because they were disgruntled at not having been paid properly, or because they just wanted to see what they could get away with. But in fact these carvings are so common, and there is so little evidence of official disapproval, that the conclusion has to be that they represent a mediaeval frame of mind that the modern association of Christianity with po-faced Puritanism finds difficult to comprehend.

Maybe the most significant point made in the entire book is debunking the extremely common view that spiral staircases in mediaeval castles were almost always built with a clockwise rotation to give an advantage to right-handed swordsmen defending them against attackers. This is widely prevalent, and is often found in official guidebooks produced by the likes of English Heritage, but has no verifiable foundation whatsoever. A substantial minority of spiral staircases were in fact anticlockwise, including many in Edward I’s famous castles in North Wales, and there is no reference in the Middle Ages to this being a factor in castle architecture.

It’s a substantial and attractively-produced paperback of 228 pages, with an insert of 16 pages of colour photographs to illustrate its themes, and retails at £20. While a book of proper academic rigour, with a full set of references, it is written with a light touch and well leavened with humour,, making it accessible for the general reader. One minor quibble is that it uses a sans-serif typeface and grey rather than black lettering which makes it slightly harder to read than it otherwise could have been. I’d thorough recommend it to anyone interested in old buildings, history or folklore, and it would make an excellent Christmas present for anyone that way inclined.

James Wright is also undertaking an extensive speaking tour to promote the book, which is currently on hiatus, but will resume in the Autumn.

A Utopia of lager

My recent post about authenticity in lager reminded me of Devon-based Utopian Brewing, who specialise in making classic lager styles using local British ingredients. This prompted me to buy myself a mixed pack of their beers as a birthday treat. This comprised six different beers, all in 440ml cans, namely:

• Premier British Lager (4.7%)
• Unfiltered British Lager (4.7%)
• Bohemian British Lager (4.2%)
• Akoya British Pilsner (5.0%)
• Augsburg Export Lager (5.5%)
• Wondrous Isles Modern Pale Ale (4.4%)

I don’t propose to give a detailed review of each one, but the five lagers were all clean-tasting, well-made beers with a genuine lager character. Unlike many “craft” lagers, they did not fall into the traps of either using inappropriate New World hops or being overtly sweet and malty. My favourite was probably the Akoya British Pilsner. The Unfiltered Lager was only lightly hazy, not murky – fairly similar in opacity to unfiltered Stella. The Bohemian and Augsburg lagers were both a credible take on those respective styles, but not quite on a par with the best beers from the Czech Republic and Bavaria.

The odd one out was the Wondrous Isles, which was a slightly hazy, hoppy IPA in the modern style with a more pronounced fruitiness than many others in that category.

They don’t come cheap, however, with the six-pack coming in at £18.00, or £23.50 including postage, which is over twice the price per can of a four-pack of Stella or Heineken in the supermarket. On the other hand, they are clearly competing in the craft market, not the mainstream, and I am regularly paying around that for authentic imported German lagers.

A further drawback is that they are all in the 440ml size, which always leaves me feeling slightly short-changed compared with a 500ml. But it is interesting how the craft sector, having initially decided 330ml was the future, has increasingly embraced 440ml. Maybe eventually they will go the whole hog to 500ml to differentiate themselves from supermarket slabs.

At those prices Utopian are going to remain a niche producer rather than challenging the mainstream, but it is good to see a modern craft brewery pursuing a different niche from the usual hoppy IPAs and pastry stouts.

However, as I said in my previous post, beer is not solely a functional product, and it is impossible to drink a beer in isolation from its heritage and cultural associations. For that reason, most drinkers will feel that a replica, however good, will never be on a par with the authentic original product from which it takes its inspiration.

Interestingly, it has been reported this week that Utopian are opening their own pub in the Devon market town of Hatherleigh, featuring their own beers alongside those of other independent brewers. However, it also seems they have chosen this moment to unfollow me on Twitter, although I won’t use that as a reason to slag them off.

Protesting too much

The Co-op convenience store chain has come under fire for an advertising campaign urging people to watch the European football championships at home with beers from the fridge rather than going to the pub. The retailer has put out a series of TV and radio adverts claiming “It’s hard to see the screen in the pub, stay in with two pizzas and four beers” linked to promotional offers during the Euros 2024 tournament.

This has been widely attacked by representatives of the pub industry, being described as “disgusting” and “ridiculous”, and with one commentator saying that “the company’s ethical approach has long been forgotten.”

However, this response comes across as distinctly thin-skinned and precious. Pubs are commercial businesses, not sacred institutions, and have no right to be shielded from the rough-and-tumble of competition. Nobody would object to an ad saying “don’t watch the footy at home, it’s much more fun down the pub”, so why is there a problem with the opposite?

The venues that benefit most from the football will tend to be knocked-through drinking barns where most of the customers are on Stella or Madri, not chocolate-box locals or trendy craft bars, many of which won’t even show it in the first place. In any case, if you are looking for good-value beer offers to drink at home, the Co-op is far from the cheapest place to go.

Being referred to in your competitors’ advertising is generally regarded as a sign of strength rather than weakness, as pointed out by licensee Joe Buckley, who took the ad as a compliment to the pub sector. For many, pubs have come to be seen as essential venues for big sporting occasions in a way that they weren’t a generation ago. The pub trade is fully entitled to respond by pointing out that, not only do pubs offer much more atmosphere, they also have a far wider range of beers, including cask, which is not an option at home.

Pub operators would be well advised to accept the realities of a competitive market rather than just whining that life is unfair. And, yet again, the anti-drink lobby will be laughing into their sarsaparilla as the two segments of the drinks industry are at loggerheads.

Decision day

As with previous General Elections, I created a poll to gauge the sentiments of blog readers. The 2019 equivalent can be seen here. This year’s results are shown below. This time I recorded 265 votes as compared with 257 in 2019. I did not share this beyond this blog and the related Twitter account. I froze this poll last night, so if you view the original one or two more votes might have been added.

Using the Electoral Calculus model, the number of seats for each party this would produce are as follows:

Conservative 9
Green 2
Labour 254
Liberal Democrat 50
Plaid Cymru 2
Reform 300
Scottish National Party 14
Speaker 1
Northern Irish parties 18

This produces a hung Parliament with Reform as the largest party. In that scenario it would be difficult to form a stable government. Bear in mind that this purely reflects the opinions of blog readers and is not intended to be a representative sample of the population.

By contrast, the final YouGov MRP projection, issued at 5 pm last night, gives very different figures.

Final YouGov MRP shows Labour on course for historic election victory

Labour: 431 (+229 from GE2019 result)
Con: 102 (-263)
Lib Dem: 72 (+61)
SNP: 18 (-30)
Reform UK: 3 (+3)
Plaid: 3 (-1)
Green: 2 (+1)

Fieldwork: 19 June - 2 Julyhttps://t.co/JxacgEVIPW pic.twitter.com/g8G2mtbGTn

— YouGov (@YouGov) July 3, 2024

While there is a hundredfold disparity in the number of seats for Reform, this only represents the impact of their vote share doubling from maybe 17% to34%. What the actual results are we will find out in the small hours of tomorrow morning.

This final poll from Survation is fairly representative of the percentages the major pollsters are predicting.

Final Survation Poll of the 2024 General Election:

18 point Labour lead

Labour: 37.6%
Conservative: 19.9%
Reform UK: 17.0%
Liberal Democrats: 12.1%
Green Party: 7.2%
Scottish National Party: 3.0%
Plaid Cymru: 0.6%
Other: 2.4%

Based on telephone interviews of 1,679 respondents…

— Survation. (@Survation) July 3, 2024

There was little mention of pubs and beer, or wider lifestyle issues, in the campaign, with the exception of Labour announcing a rather half-baked idea to allow communities to purchase closed pubs, and whatever the result we can expect more bans, more restrictions and more taxes.

Seeing the wider picture

Last month, US beer writer Jeff Alworth ruffled a number of feathers in the British beer community with this controversial post on the subject of cask beer quality. He quoted former Fullers head brewer John Keeling, who said:

In my travels up and down the country I can confirm that most family brewers who are the backbone of cask beer are […] reporting a decline in sales. Indeed, cask beer sales are now less than 9% of all draught beer sales and around 4% of total beer sales…. The reason is the old elephant in the room – that of quality. I have long said that the worst beer you can drink in Britain is cask beer. Cask beer that has been on serve for seven days is no good to anybody never mind what the latest new hop you use.

This provoked an angry and defensive response from many British cask enthusiasts, who insisted that in the pubs they frequented cask was thriving, and was consistently served in top quality. It is certainly true that plenty of pubs do serve cask well and sell a lot of it, but it doesn’t mean that at the same time the wider picture isn’t much less rosy.

This reflects what I wrote last year, about how many beer enthusiasts and commentators are led into the selection bias fallacy, whereby they extrapolate from their own experience that the general health of cask is a lot better than it actually is. Jeff later added an update to his post in which he said:

I do think my friends across the pond may be blind to how serious a problem poor quality is. If you are a cask fan, you have opted in to a lifestyle choice in which variability is a given and bad pints are a tolerable downside. Many on Twitter seemed to hand-wave this away, arguing that it’s not a problem if you go to the right places, or the bad pints aren’t that bad, or some other justification.

Consider those who haven’t joined you in this lifestyle choice, however. Most drinkers are not avid fans. They flow like water to the easiest, most pleasant glass of booze. Choices are legion. What is the value proposition of a form of booze that is unreliable and occasionally horrible? There’s a reason 91% of the time people buy a pint of beer that is not cask—what to speak of those who choose wine or a cocktail instead.

It should be pointed out that the main thrust of Jeff’s argument is to support the use of cask breathers, which I regard as something of a red herring. Cask breathers are essentially a means of papering over the cracks, and the key to maintaining quality should be to align cask size and beer range with the level of turnover. Now that 4½-gallon pins are widely available, there really shouldn’t be an excuse for keeping beer on too long. If you can’t sell 12 pints of a beer in a day, there’s little point in bothering in the first place.

Some have suggested that it would be perfectly OK for cask to retreat from the mainstream and confine itself to a niche market, but that is basically a counsel of despair. In any case, if cask’s overall profile is reduced it will eventually reflect back with lower demand in the niche and mean that fewer brewers bother to produce it. And I see no evidence that pubs are dropping cask in any numbers. They still see it as an important product to have on the bar even if they struggle to keep it in good condition.

The problem is also often blamed on large corporate pub owners who are more interested in the bottom line than in maintaining quality. There is some truth it this, but it is wrong to say that independent pubs are uniformly good either. Indeed some of the worst beer I’ve had over the past couple of years has been in independent pubs. There’s nobody looking over your shoulder to tell you that you’re getting it wrong. In my experience, the most reliable category of pubs for beer quality is family brewer tied houses.

There are plenty of ways to mess up beer, but the issue that overshadows everything else is slow turnover. There is no magical way of “looking after your beer” that doesn’t involve achieving sufficient turnover. When I survey the handpumps on the bar, the key things I want to know are when the beer was first put on sale, and when the last pint was pulled, but unfortunately this is information that just isn’t made available.

Last week I had some first-hand experience of drinking outside the bubble on a trip to South-West Scotland. This was primarily a sightseeing holiday, not a drinking holiday, and my expectations were not great, but I still ended up being disappointed. I thought at least with six pubs listed in the Good Beer Guide under Dumfries there would be some decent beer, but I didn’t encounter a single pint that I would rate as good. Indeed, in one GBG-listed pub that was also a recent CAMRA award winner I was served with a pint that, while not obviously “off” in any way, was at room temperature. (I didn’t take it back as I don’t go out to have an argument, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever return there anyway).

And Dave Morton’s experience in Glasgow last week was pretty dispiriting. In what other consumer market are customers routinely sending back half the products they are presented with?

We've called it a night after 9 pubs in Glasgow. Never have I had to take so many pints back to the bar. All swapped cheerfully after explaining that the beer was oxidised, but in one pub 3 beers were like that.
I've not had an outstanding beer all day, but plenty of decent beer

— Dave Morton (@dmonbeer) June 29, 2024

In a highly fragmented industry, there’s no easy answer to this question. All we can really do is continue to highlight those pubs that do consistently serve their beer in good condition. And beer writers and commentators need to take their heads out of the sand and accept that, across the board, there is a major problem with cask quality that does the sector no favours.