Crying over spilt beer

Hard on the heels of the announcement of the closure of their Wolverhampton brewery, Carlsberg-Marston’s have informed us of their plans to discontinue a large number of mostly cask ales. These including, most strikingly, Banks’s Mild, the cornerstone on which the original Wolverhampton & Dudley company was built, and Bombardier, which maybe fifteen years ago seemed to crop up all over the place in the way that Doom Bar does now, and was even advertised on TV by the late Rik Mayall.

The full list of discontinued beers is:

Cask:
Banks’s Mild
Banks’s Sunbeam
Bombardier
Eagle IPA
Jennings Cumberland Ale
Marston’s Old Empire
Marston’s 61 Deep
Ringwood Boondoggle
Ringwood Old Thumper

Keg:
Mansfield Dark Smooth
Mansfield Original Bitter

However, some of these, including Banks’s Mild, will live on in keg or packaged form, so all is not entirely lost.

The combined company had inherited a sprawling portfolio of often overlapping brands, so some degree of rationalisation was inevitable. In particular, they had Cumberland Ale, Boondoggle, Sunbeam, Hobgoblin Gold and Wainwright Gold which all occupied much the same territory in the beer market. I’m not sure exactly where, but I’m sure I once went in a pub where the entire cask range comprised three beers from that list.

It is understandable that people will feel sadness and disappointment at this news, but a reaction of anger and betrayal seems misplaced. Whether it is pubs, beer brands or breweries, large companies have little room for sentimentality or considerations of “heritage”. People may feel an attachment to pubs or beers that they do not towards brands of chocolate or soap powder, but at the end of the day they are commercial products, not government services.

This applies further down the scale of size too – my local family brewer Robinson’s a few years ago dropped its Hatters Mild, to considerable outcry, and have also ruthlessly culled about a third of their pub estate, including some properties that at one time would have been regarded as jewels in their crown.

No doubt some twerp will pop up in the comments to say “You call yourself the Pub Curmudgeon, but you’re acting as an apologist for the international brewers.” However, all I’m doing is putting across the perhaps unpalatable truth. It has always been thus. If you sell your offspring to the crocodile, you should not be surprised if he ends up devouring some of them. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, at least subsconsciously, some people seem to feel that the British pub and brewing industry should have been frozen in about 1955, and all discontinuation of brands, takeovers and pub and brewery closures should have to go through some form of statutory process.

It also seems ironic that some of the same people who, only a few weeks ago were urging us to drink independent beers whenever possible, are now lamenting the loss of big brewery products which presumably they considered to be inferior. If you won’t stand up for Eagle IPA, don’t be too surprised when its owners stop brewing it. On the other hand, some commentators have said that we should look to the future and concentrate on the wide variety of often excellent cask ales that are still available, rather than getting too upset about the loss of beers than many people didn’t think much of anyway. Boak & Bailey definitely fall into this camp.

It’s important to remember that Carlsberg-Marston’s is now a pure brewing operation under different ownership from the Marston’s pub company. What they produce is entirely dependent on what their customers want to order and, while to some extent they can promote particular products, they can’t dictate whether they appear on bars. If they’re selling less Banks’s Mild, it’s because customers aren’t drinking it and thus pubs aren’t ordering it.

On the other hand, a vertically integrated brewer and pub operator can decide which beers are sold in its pubs, which can provide a cushion against the fickle tides of fashion, while at the same time what appears on their bars is a reflection of the company as a whole. This virtuous circle is broken when the relationship is severed.

To some extent this is a hangover from the 1989 Beer Orders which did much to break the connection between brewer and pub operator, and have continued ever since to exercise a negative influence over the industry.