Adding insult to injury

The Daily Telegraph reports that the government have spent over £35,000 on beermats to boast about increasing the minimum wage. This in itself is a distinctly disingenuous message, as the increase is funded not from government largesse, but by forcing employers to pay money that they may well not be able to afford.

And it seems rather rich expecting pubs to display these mats, when increasing the minimum wage by well above the rate of inflation is one of a raft of measures that have sharply increased their costs with effect from the beginning to April. It comes alongside increasing the rate of employers’ national insurance, almost halving the threshold at which it begins to be payable and drastically cutting the discount on business rates.

Any employee feeling pleased with themselves for receiving an above-inflation pay rise may find that their hours have been reduced to compensate for it, while possibly seeing some of their colleagues let go because their employer can no longer afford to pay them.

On top of this, today it has been reported that there was a net loss of 109,000 jobs during May, added to 55,000 already lost in April, following the steep increase in employment costs. A large proportion of these job losses will have been in the hospitality sector. So it will not be surprising if any pubs receiving a pack of these mats regard it as a sick joke, and they end up in the recycling.

Ties that bind

When you ask people about how to improve the fortunes of the British pub, one issue that often comes up is the beer tie. Remove restrictions on supply, and allow pubs a free choice on which beers to stock, and they would be in a much stronger competitive position. On the fact of it, this sounds like a great idea, but in reality things are not that simple.

The “beer tie” refers to the ability of brewers to either own licensed premises directly, or control the supply of beer to them. In many countries, this kind of arrangement is prohibited, both because it is seen as anti-competitive, and because allowing alcohol producers to influence retailers is viewed as undesirable from a public health perspective. But this does not preclude large non-brewing companies owning multiple outlets.

One of the most extreme examples is in the United States, where after the repeal of Prohibition a three-tier system was introduced that compels brewers to sell through independent wholesalers rather than dealing with retailers directly. However, this did not stop the US beer market becoming one of the most concentrated in the world, with virtually all small and medium-sized independent breweries having disappeared by 1970. Indeed it could be argued that it encouraged this trend.

In Britain, in contrast, brewers have always been allowed to own pubs and sell their own beer exclusively through them. In the latter part of the 19th century, as the supply of licenses was restricted, brewers increasingly started buying up pubs to protect their own business and keep them out of the hands of competitors. Until the Second World War, the industry remained relatively fragmented, with no brewers having a national presence in pub ownership.

However, in the 1950s and 60s, there was a wave of mergers and takeovers that led to the creation of the infamous “Big Six” national brewers, who controlled around three-quarters of all the pubs in the country and often had local monopolies or duopolies. There did remain a substantial stratum of smaller independent brewers who in some areas, particularly the North-West, still had a significant presence in the market.

In the early days of CAMRA, many members criticised the tied house system on the grounds that it prevented pubs stocking the beers their customers wanted to buy. But without it it is likely that cask beer would have virtually or entirely disappeared. As much through inertia as a sense of commitment, most of the independent brewers continued to produce cask, as did many Big Six subsidiaries that served a distinct local market. Without this, pubs would have tended to go for whatever was most fashionable at the time, as they did in US, and that was nationally distributed and advertised keg beers.

In the early 70s, a “free house” often meant one that served Younger’s Tartan. Those who were around at the the time may remember the advertising slogan “worth passing a few pubs for”. Cask did virtually disappear in Scotland, where the tied house system was much weaker and there were only two small independent brewers. It is no exaggeration to say that the tied house system saved cask beer in Britain as anything more than an obscure niche product.

While considerable disquiet remained about the market power of the “Big Six”, little was done about it beyond some rather half-hearted pub swaps which resulted, for example, in Greenalls acquiring some former Wilson’s pubs in Stockport in return for some of their own in North Cheshire and South Lancs. However, the nettle was finally grasped in the form of the Beer Orders, which came into effect in 1989. These rules prevented any brewing company owning more than 2,000 tied houses, at a time when the biggest had around 7,000 each. Of any pubs above that figure, half would have to be freed from tie. All tenanted pubs belonging to the national brewers were allowed to stock a cask-conditioned guest beer.

At the time, this was widely welcomed, particularly by CAMRA, but ironically it happened at a time when the grip of the Big Six had already started to loosen. The rise of international lager brands was severing the connection between the brewer’s name above the door and the beers stocked, and splitting companies into brewing and retailing divisions put more focus on the actual performance of pubs. The big brewers started selling off large swathes of their “lower-end” pubs, either to independent brewers such as Belhaven and Vaux in this area, or to standalone non-brewing companies which rapidly became known as “pubcos”.

With hindsight, it is difficult to discern exactly what the proponents of the beer orders expected the outcome to be. It was never realistic that the big brewers would split themselves up into regional companies reflecting the pre-merger structure, and the growing dominance of national and international lager brands made regional beer identities less relevant. And the big brewers were never going to accept operating large estates of free-of-tie pubs, as it completely undermined their business model.

So the outcome was progressively selling the surplus pubs off to newly-formed stand-alone pub companies, often headed by former Big Six executives, who would be able to perpetuate the tied pub model because they didn’t brew themselves. Some of the biggest names were Pubmaster, Punch Taverns, Enterprise Inns and Admiral Taverns. To acquire these pub estates, the new pubcos had to load themselves up with large amounts of debt that eventually were to prove problematical. The erstwhile Big Six in general exited both brewing and pub retailing, and most of them no longer exist in a recognisable form. The one exception was Scottish & Newcastle, who barely scraped over the 2,000 pub threshold anyway. They eventually passed into the hands of Heineken and are still a major pub operator in the form of Star Pubs & Bars.

The major pubcos in their various guises remain the largest owners and operators of pubs in Britain, but have never won much, if any, affection, and have attracted criticism for restricting choice, selling off viable pubs, exploiting tenants and failing to invest in their estates. The issues with the relationship with tenants have led the government to create a Pubs Code overseen by a Pubs Adjudicator to oversee it. Given the precipitate decline in the pub trade in the past twenty-five years, which was not foreseen in the last century, the debt burden has proved an enduring millstone around their necks. In particular, they failed to predict the disastrous outcome of the 2007 smoking ban, with some executives even painting it as a business oppporunity.

It has even been questioned whether this is a legitimate business model at all. Why should a company be able to control the supply to lessees when they don’t make any of the products themselves? However, if you look at most of the remaining family brewers, most of the beer sold in their pubs is bought-in keg and lager brands. I remember listening to a presentation by the directors of Robinson’s where they said they had a target of 30% of sales being their own production. Hydes can’t be much more than 15%. This is surely a difference of degree, not principle. Only a handful of brewers such as Holt’s and Samuel Smith’s are honourable exceptions who seek to make all their draught sales their own products.

There are many parallels in other markets and industries where self-employed people or independent companies operate businesses where they are operating under the banner of a parent company and purchasing stock from them. Examples include convenience stores, restaurants, fuel retailing and domestic and industrial services. It’s by no means unique to pubs and can offer people a relatively low-cost and low-risk route into self-employment, as pubs have long done.

The charge is also laid that pubcos are primarily interested in property rather than actually running pubs. Yes, they do have a keen eye for property market considerations and are not going to hang on to pubs for sentimental reasons, but the same is true of Wetherspoon’s and family brewers. They do have area managers and business development officers, they offer training, marketing and financial advice, they invest in refurbishing pubs, they introduce new branding concepts. They may not do these things well, or sufficiently, but it cannot be argued that they do not do them at all and have no interest in pubs as ongoing businesses.

In response to this, various groups and social media accounts have grown up that purport to “champion” or “campaign for” pubs. But they are not doing so in a wider sense, but merely articulating a sense of grievance against pubcos. This may be justified to some extent, but they never seem to be able to get beyond moaning to put forward any positive alternative vision for the industry. As I said back in 2014,

So you have to wonder what is the motivation for these people? Are they basically living in a fantasy world, or are they spurred on by a visceral anti-capitalist agenda that completely ignores the real reasons pubs are closing – often combined with an animus towards the evil supermarkets who have the cheek to sell us a wide range of stuff at keen prices? It almost comes across as a deliberate distraction technique. The one thing that is certain is that they aren’t really interested in the long-term viability of pubs.

The idea that tied leases could be scrapped is entirely fanciful. The raison d'être of pubcos is operating pubs, so, as with the Big Six before them, they are not going to hold on to estates of free-of-tie properties. They would convert the best of them to direct management, or the franchise models that are becoming increasingly common, and sell the rest off. A few might go to sitting tenants, but most would be snapped by true property companies who would milk them for all they were worth and have no interest in maintaining them as pubs. And independent free houses are only guaranteed survival as long as their owner wants to stay in the business. Whenever they want to retire or move on, the pub is put “into play” and its future is at risk.

It is certainly not my intention here to defend pubcos. They are operating a fundamentally flawed business model that only exists because of historical factors. There is a rationale for operating an estate of managed pubs following specific trading formats, as Mitchells & Butlers do, but nobody would invent unbranded tied leased pubs if they didn’t exist already. The industry would be a lot stronger if many more pubs were owned by brewers. But we are where we are, and abolishing tied leases would make things a lot worse. Plus it isn’t going to happen anyway, so perhaps people would be better off devoting their efforts to campaigning against the anti-drink lobby and high alcohol duties.

Imagining that the pub landscape can be transformed into one of independent freeholders all able to choose beers from the whole breadth of the market is a “three acres and a cow” fantasy that simply isn’t going to happen. The reality is that most of the pubs in the country, particularly the bigger ones with higher volumes, will continue to be owned by large commercial companies who want to control what they sell and how they are run. Any attempt to improve the competitive environment in the industry has to recognise that.

Early to bed

Earlier this month, Keir Starmer announced that pubs would be allowed to stay open until 1 am on Thursday 8 May, to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day. He said “Keeping our pubs open for longer will give people the opportunity to join in celebrations and raise a glass to all of the men and women who served their country, both overseas and at home.”

However, at a time when the pub trade had just been hit with a triple whammy of swingeing increases in National Insurance, the minimum wage and business rates, this was understandably seen by many licensees as a patronising sop that would be of little or no value to them. On a midweek night, it was doubtful whether many drinkers would want to take advantage of it anyway. All the reports were that the actual take-up was extremely low. As Adrian Chiles writes in this article in the Guardian, “I asked around the pubs near me and was met with shrugs and shakes of heads. I didn’t find one that opened late last week. In my local they didn’t even know it had been an option.”

Maybe the response would have been different had it been on a weekend night, but there is a more general feeling that there is much less appetite for late-night drinking than there used to be. One licensee he spoke to said that Covid lockdowns had been a major stimulus for this change, and there certainly was a period when a 10 pm curfew was imposed, where pubs were actually allowed to open at all. But I would say that the trend goes back well before that. Chiles goes on to say:

A while ago, an old friend was back in the area. We met at our teenage haunt – the Station Inn, West Hagley, since you ask. It was great to see him. But come 9.30pm there was a general feeling it was time to call it a night, and off we went. And I realised I couldn’t remember the last time I’d stayed out late enough to hear last orders called.

I took this to be a sad, if not unhealthy, sign of my advancing years. But I’m starting to wonder if it’s not just me. Once upon a time a pub wasn’t really a pub if it didn’t stay open until 11pm. These days, many a pub calls it a night an hour or two earlier if trade is quiet.

I have to say that it’s relatively rare that I’m in a pub at closing time, but one kind of occasion where I am is attending CAMRA meetings. There was a time when you would return to the main body of the pub after the formal proceedings had finished, and find it absolutely packed in the run-up to last orders. But, more and more, while the pub may have been ticking over nicely earlier in the evening, after 10 pm the customers are visibly melting away. Last year, on holiday in Sussex, there were two occasions when I was asked whether I wanted another drink before 9 pm, as they were about to close up.

There are various factors behind this. As well as the ongoing hangover of lockdowns, pubgoers are older on average and less willing or able to burn the candle at both ends, and there is a generally more circumspect attitude towards alcohol in society in general. It’s much less acceptable to turn up at work in the morning nursing a hangover. The liberalisation of licensing hours that allowed many pubs to stay open after 11 pm may perversely have encouraged this by making customers choose their own time to head home rather than having it imposed on them.

It’s not all a one-way street, though. There are times of the day when the trade is healthier than it was once. The popularity of many pubs in the late afternoon after tradesmen have knocked off has been widely observed, and in many cities and large towns pubs can be very busy in the early evening at weekends. But, overall, there has been a marked change in pubgoing habits, and the phrase “the night-time economy” is less accurate than it once was.

And, when we have days of national celebration or commemoration, wouldn’t it make sense to encourage pubs to stay open all day, rather than into the small hours?

Scarcity bites

A few weeks ago, I was browsing the Wetherspoon’s app and noticed that the chicken breast bites were “temporarily unavailable” I thought nothing of it, as branches can run out of food items and deliveries can be late. But, checking back a few days later, they were still absent, and the problem seemed to be general across their estate.

We are now into the fourth week of the shortage, and it has made the press. Being “in tears” over the absence of such a mundane item may seem an over-reaction, but if your favourite menu item is missing for a prolonged period you’re entitled to feel annoyed. They’re hardly the most scintillating item on Wetherspoon’s menu, and to my mind are inferior to McDonald’s chicken nuggets. But, as someone who is fussy about food and often divides it simplistically between items I won’t eat and those I will, they fall into the latter category. It’s also unfortunate timing given that Wetherspoon’s have recently been promoting a mix-and-match offer on “Wings, bites and strips”.

Apparently the shortage is due to issues with the supplier. But chicken bites are very much a commodity item, and surely by this time they could have found an alternative source, even just starting on a regional basis. Apparently they are still available in Ireland, including the North, indicating that they are using a different supplier there.The whole episode suggests an uncharacteristic failure of supply chain management.

Downfall

The Drinks Business reports on concerns that German beer is losing its lustre both at home and abroad.

Shocking new figures from the Statistisches Bundesamt office have revealed that global interest in German beer is rapidly diminishing alongside continued ambivalence for local beer in Germany itself. Assessing 2024 figures from the country’s Federal Statistical Office, EWN it was highlighted how Germany exported 1.45 billion litres of beer last year — marking a 6% decline compared to 2014. Notably, more than half of these exports (55.7%) were shipped to fellow EU member states, showing that domestic thirst had already started to wane.

Granted, alcohol consumption has dropped across many global markets, coinciding with growing public interest in health and wellness products. Added to this, non-alcoholic beer has been on the rise, seeing a boom in sales and offering a way for drinkers to adapt their drinking habits. But why has all of this had such a detrimental impact on German beer?

However, this needs to be taken in context, and I doubt whether it’s any worse than the decline in beer sales in other countries, prompted by increasing health concerns and anti-alcohol sentiment. Germany’s export figure is still well over three times the 411 million litres exported by the UK, and German drinkers consume half as much again as we do, at 94.4 litres per head against 64. A fall of 6% over ten yeards is hardly “rapidly dimishing”. German brewing is still a massive business, and enjoys a massive domestic market.

However, Germany is immensely proud of its brewing tradition as one of the key players in the development of lager, which is now the world’s dominant beer style. In contrast, while we tend to regard ourselves as a nation of beer-drinkers (perhaps somewhat unjustifiably) we are distinctly equivocal about our own brewing heritage. The average quality of beer consumed in Germany is considerably higher than that in this country, where the market is dominated by domestically-brewed international lagers.

I have to declare an interest here, as I am a big fan of German beer, and would regard it as my principal beer indulgence. I’m really not interested in drinking the likes of Stella and Madri, but am happy to fork out twice as much for the authentic German equivalent, while the modern premium craft beers entirely pass me by. I mostly buy these from the excellent Bottle Stop off-licence in Bramhall, but also from other sources such as Lidl’s Festbier pack. It only adds up to one or at most two bottles a week, but I’m happy to treat myself occasionally. If I had to name a favourite, it would probably be the distinctive, intensely hoppy Jever Pilsener from the north of the country, but I also very much enjoy the Bavarian Helles style.

While German beer has a high reputation internationally, it has never really taken off amongst the global beer brands in the same way that other European brewers such as Carlsberg and Heineken have done. German beers often appear as premium options, but they have never conquered the mainstream. AB InBev made some attempts to promote Löwenbräu as a global brand, and for a while Beck’s had a considerable reputation in the UK, before its owners decided to trash its image by reducing its strength from 5% to 4%. But there are no German brands amongst the world’s top twenty beers.

Despite the busy scenes in famous venues such as Hofbräuhaus in Munich, in fact Germany consumes a much higher proportion of beer at home than the UK. Statistics produced by Brewers of Europe show the relative proportions between on and off trade being, in 2015, 49/51 in the UK and 23/77 in Germany. The share of the on-trade will have further diminished since then in both countries. So it is a beer market with a very different structure.

German brewers have sometimes been criticised for a lack of innovation. However, while the country is generally known for pale lagers, it produces a huge variety of other styles such as Dunkel, Bock, Altbier, Kölsch, Weizenbier, Berliner Weisse, Rauchbier and Steinbier. The argument that it is all the same doesn’t hold water. And would it really be that desirable for German brewers to be trying to produce ersatz IPAs?

Germany also has the Reinheitsgebot beer purity law, which restricts ingredients to barley malt, hops, yeast and water, plus wheat malt for wheat beers. It does not apply to imports due to EU competition law. This originated in Bavaria in the 16th century with the noble intention of preventing the adulteration of beer with inferior adjuncts. However, it could be said to holding German brewing back, as most other major brewing nations, notably its neighbour Belgium, embrace other ingredients not so much for cheapness as to add different character to beer. I recently wrote about Thornbridge’s Union beers, which include expensive invert sugar to achieve a traditional English pale ale character.

The all-malt requirement does tend to give all German beers, even the so-so ones, a distinctive full-bodied character and a kind of austere purity. The variation between different brands of Pilsner or Helles is certain considerably less than that, say, between classic British bitters. This could be seen as a limiting factor. None of the leading British lager brands are German in origin, and all have a noticeably sweeter flavour than typical German beers.

While both these factors could be regarded as holding German beer back to some extent, on the other hand they demonstrate a reluctance to lower standards. It is certainly true that German brewing has shown a decline both domestically and in export markets, but it remains a powerhouse compared with its British equivalent. This is only a source of concern because Germany was so proud of its brewing traditions in the first place. And, in a sense, maybe German brewers deserve praise for sticking to what they do best rather than chasing every passing fad.

It’s a pity, though, that Wetherspoon’s, amongst their extensive array of bottled “world lagers” don’t have a single German offering. I occasionally used to enjoy a Krombacher when they stocked it.

Priced out

I recently saw a couple of posts on X/Twitter expressing dismay at the rising price of beer in pubs. One was taken aback to find a London pub asking £7 for a pint, while the other was appalled that the price of Guinness in a Salford pub had risen by 70p over one weekend. With the multiple cost pressures imposed on pubs by the government, we are likely to see many more such stories in the coming weeks and months.

The obvious answer is to vote with your feet, but pricing in pubs is a very different concept to that of groceries in shops. One obvious difference is that a pint in a pub is always to some extent a discretionary purchase. You don’t *have* to buy it, and always have the option of staying at home instead, as the declining sales of beer in pubs demonstrate.

A pub isn’t simply a shop that sells alcohol – each one has its own distinct characteristics in terms of its general ambiance, the other people who go there, and its wider offer in terms of such things as food, games, TV sport and live music. If you value these things in a pub, it will take quite a hike in prices to drive you elsewhere, and indeed drinking less or going less often are more likely responses.

Each pub depends on its location for a lot of its clientele, whether it is people who live locally, or who happen to be in that particular area, whether a town or city centre or close to a tourist attraction. The range of pubs from which potential customers will realistically choose is limited. Relatively few people are going to travel a substantial distance solely to visit a particular pub, and those who do are unlikely to be mainly motivated by price anyway.

The average British adult only drinks about 1¼ pints of beer in a pub each week, which really isn’t very much. Drinking a lot of beer in pubs, such that it has a significant impact on your personal budget, is very much a minority pursuit. Many pubgoers are there primarily to have a meal, and if you’re happily spending £17.95 on a braised lamb shank, whether your pint of Landlord is £4.75 or £5.50 is neither here nor there. A further factor is that, although it’s a dwindling custom, many drinks are purchased in rounds, so the impact of high prices is dulled. If you are someone who is price-sensitive and drinks a lot in pubs, then you will obviously gravitate towards Wetherspoon’s or one of the “value pubs” found in most towns, but a large segment of pubgoers do not fall into that category.

The combination of these factors results in the overall price elasticity of beer in pubs being well below 1. If you increase the price by 10%, you may lose some custom, but it will probably be considerably less than 10%. So, as I said in my recent post about Wetherspoon’s business model, over many years it has been tempting for the pub industry in general, in response to higher costs, to increase prices by just a little bit above the prevailing rate of inflation. They lose a bit of sales volume, but protect their margins. However, the end result of this is that eventually you wake up and realise that, in real terms, a pint costs twice as much as it did fifty years ago. This is a kind of “tragedy of the commons”, whereby individual pubs make decisions that seem sensible for them taken in isolation, but it has a highly negative effect on the industry as a whole. Many people now simply find drinking in pubs unaffordable.

The relatively low price elasticity of beer in pubs cuts the other way too, of course. If you cut your prices by 10%, you’re very unlikely to grow your trade by the same amount. As I wrote back in 2016, there are plenty of reasons for the long-term decline of on-trade beer sales that are nothing to do with price. If anything, it’s because, for a variety of social and legislative reasons, the range of occasions when people will even consider a visit to the pub, except if having a meal, has drastically reduced. People just don’t weave the odd one or two pints into the pattern of daily life like they once did. Reducing external cost pressures will put pubs in a healthier financial situation, but it won’t necessarily do anything to increase their trade.

In the early days of CAMRA, there was often an inverse correlation between price and beer quality. The keenest prices tended to be found in the tied houses of independent family brewers who had not invested in either expensive, ephemeral pub renovations or large-scale marketing campaigns. This is much less true nowadays, as many of the remaining family brewers have moved upmarket and concentrated on food-led pubs. Around here, Robinson’s and Lees no longer offer a cheap pint and seem to have largely given up on working-class boozers. Some of the smallest brewers such as Batham’s, Holdens and Donnington do still offer low prices, however, and Samuel Smith’s, despite several price increases since Covid, are in the North still usually cheaper than anywhere else apart from Wetherspoon’s if you can actually find one of their pubs that hasn’t been closed down.

Now, pricing seems to depend much more on the social status and spending power of the pub’s location. Some pubs deliberately use high pricing as a means of customer selection, while in less affluent areas there will be “value pubs”, often keg-only, with notably low prices and clientele to match, either independently run or offshoots of major pubcos. Some of the worst and most expensive cask beer is found in upmarket food-led pubs, where a row of colourful pumpclips on the bar adds to the atmosphere even if they don’t actually shift much of it. I’m not exactly on the breadline, but I have to say that finding a pub that is charging well above the odds for their local market is something that sticks in the craw, and is very often a signifier of the kind of “up itself” pub I’d prefer to avoid. There is no automatic correlation between more expensive and better. On the other hand, a commitment to reasonable (not dirt-cheap) prices often indicates a generally positive attitude to customer service.

There does, however, sometimes seem to be a naïvety about pricing amongst independent operators, who fail to understand that what customers are willing to pay is just as important as what the product actually costs. I recently read of one modern bar in a Northern city who were complaining that they couldn’t make any money despite being packed out all the time. In this situation, surely adding 20 or even 40p a pint across the board would hardly be noticed, but go a long way towards solving the problem.

Over the years, very much unlike supermarkets, the pub industry has demonstrated a general reluctance to compete overtly on price. There has been a kind of gentlemen’s agreement not to rock the boat. A major factor in this is that, if they were to go for a low-price strategy in their managed houses, they would undermine the business of their leased and tenanted pubs. This provided a market opportunity for Wetherspoon’s, who were new entrants solely operating managed pubs and did not have to consider the interests of tenants. While many pubs offer happy hours and midweek discounts, it is very rare to see them promoting themselves as offering consistently low prices across the board.

And while we’re on the subject, surely the time is long overdue for pubs to clearly display draught beer prices at the point of sale. They must be about the only type of retail outlet where this doesn’t happen. That way I could avoid a shock like being asked £3.15 for a half of 3.8% house beer in a very ordinary pub in Chester city centre. Wetherspoon’s do this, most craft bars do, so why can’t the general run of pubs?

Part of the Union

At the beginning of last year, Carlsberg-Marston’s announced that they were discontinuing the use of the Union sets at their Burton brewery, which were used to brew Marston’s Pedigree. This decision was met with a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth but, as I said at the time, “it must be remembered that Carlsberg-Marston’s are a commercial company, not the custodians of a brewing museum.” They will have made a hard-headed decision that the additional costs involved in operating the unions outweighed any additional kudos that they conferred amongst consumers. The fact that many beer enthusiasts tended to sneer at Pedigree can’t have helped the case for their retention.

However, later in the year, Thornbridge Brewery in Derbyshire managed to obtain one of the Union sets and proceeded to put it into service for brewing. They must have concluded, reasonably enough, that there was sufficient regard for the process amongst enthusiasts to make it a commercial proposition. They started off with a Union-brewed version of their iconic Jaipur IPA, and then went on to brew a specific beer called The Union, in more of a classic English style, at a hefty 7.0% ABV.

In my end of year review, I suggested that “maybe they could also consider brewing a 4.5% Burton-style pale ale that would be a direct replacement for Union Pedigree”, and indeed this came to pass earlier this year in the form of the 4.5% 1838.They were offering a mixed case of four of each beer, so I thought I would get my hands on one and give them a try. Both are bottle-conditioned beers, a technique that Thornbridge seem to have mastered to produce consistent results.

First up was The Union (7.0% ABV). Thornbridge describe this as follows:

The Union is a classic British style IPA, created using the very best ingredients we can get our hands on and then fermenting it in our Union set. For our base malt, we have used Maris Otter from Norfolk, where the sandy soil and maritime climate is perfect for growing the variety. We've also added a touch of Simpsons' best crystal malt to add a touch of colour and rounded sweetness and some of the special (and expensive) "Brewers Invert No. 2", sugar from Ragus, which will add notes of caramel and toffee while helping to keep the beer's body in check. The all important hops are British grown Goldings and Northdown, which gives us some gentle berry flavours and rounded cedar-like hop aromas to balance the maltiness. We've pitched two of our yeast strains, namely our fruity British cask ale strain and the California ale yeast, which is fairly neutral in flavour and ensured the attenuation we were looking for.

My tasting notes were: Pale colour, no problem with pouring it clear. Not gassy, but gentle spires of carbonation rising in the beer. Hoppy, but not so much so as Jaipur. Initially light, but the alcohol heft comes through later. A fairly, subtle, restrained beer for its strength. Their openness about the use of invert sugar, something that is integral to the character of this style of beer, is worth noting.

I then moved on to the 1838 (4.5% ABV). Thornbridge say of this:

Named after the year the Burton Union system was patented by Peter Walker, 1838 is brewed exclusively on the set at Thornbridge. 1838 combines the best British malt, Maris Otter, with the finest Goldings hops for a full-bodied, premium pale ale with a light amber hue. This beer delivers sweet, biscuity malt flavours balanced with floral hop notes and a crisp finish.

My tasting notes were: Pours clear, good carbonation, dense, rocky head. Slightly darker than The Union, probably mid-way between Jaipur and Pedigree. Definitely hoppy, but with a firm malt base and a hint of sweetness. Another subtle yet complex beer. and very drinkable.

These are both very good beers, and demonstrate that there can be a successful niche market for a product that enthusiasts valued, but was no longer considered viable in the mainstream. However, in a world of heavily-hopped New World IPAs, the question must be asked whether these relatively understated beers in a classic English style will make a mark. Ordering online, these beers came to almost £4 a bottle, so they are probably something better regarded as an occasional treat rather than a regular drink, especially when Jaipur can be obtained from Morrisons at 4 for £7.

Reinventing the pub

Last month, Wetherspoon’s announced that they were removing steaks, gammon and mixed grills from their menu. This resulted in a predictable outbreak of grumbling, but it’s the only the latest example of a long record of discontinuing supposedly popular menu items. One of the most notorious was dropping Sunday roasts in 2016. Later they discontinued traditional Christmas turkey dinners. It is another example of the company taking a somewhat ruthless attitude to revamping their offer to increase their profitability. They must have decided that steaks were a declining market and required too much time and effort in the kitchen.

This month, the pub trade will experience a massive increase in costs, with swingeing hikes in national insurance and business rates, and a rise in the minimum wage well above inflation. The stagnant general economic climate means that customers don’t have the money for large price increases. The inevitable result is that pubs will struggle, and a fair number will end up closing. But it’s a good bet that Wetherspoon’s, while they will experience the same pressures, will manage to weather the storm.

The first pint I ever bought in a pub cost me 21p in 1976. The Bank of England’s official inflation calculator* reckons that the current equivalent price would be £1.39. But, in reality, a similar pint in a pub around here today would cost at least £4, almost three times as much.

It’s often not recognised that buying a pint of beer in a pub is primarily buying a service, not simply a physical product. The wages of the staff and the overheads of the premises also have to be taken into account. Over time, as real wages increase, while manufacturing efficiencies reduce the price of physical products, the price of services rises vis-à-vis that of goods.

It is generally acknowledged that the price elasticity of a pint a beer in a pub is well below 1. If you increase the price by 10%, you will lose some sales, but almost certainly well below 10%. So, over time, it has always been tempting for the pub industry in general, in response to higher costs, to increase prices by just a little bit above the prevailing rate of inflation. They lose a bit of sales volume, but protect their margins.

This makes sense in the short term, and I do not blame any pub operator or individual publican for doing it. But it has a cumulative effect, and suddenly you realise that a pint is twice as much in real terms as it used to be, and increasingly unaffordable for many people. To try to break this vicious circle, Wetherspoon’s have ended up reinventing the pub model from the ground up. The fundamental point is that the underlying cost assumptions of the pub trade should not be taken as fixed.

This wasn’t something that was in place from the beginning. Tim Martin started out by converting former shops to offer something that most London pubs at the time didn’t – cask beer, food service, consistent opening hours and a comfortable, welcoming, unthreatening environment. In the early days, they weren’t markedly cheap compared with the competition. It wasn’t until the mid-90s that they started expanding outside their initial South-East base – the Moon Under Water in Manchester city centre opened in August 1995.

But it is an approach that has evolved over time. Every aspect of the pub cost base has been challenged in the quest to make a lower margin viable. A key aspect of this is the “pile it high, sell it cheap” approach. Wetherspoon pubs are markedly larger than the average, so the overheads are spread over a larger sales base. Over time, they have disposed of many of the smaller premises acquired earlier in their history. They may make less profit for pint, but they make more in total.

As the largest single on-trade purchaser of alcoholic drinks, beer in particular, they are in a position to drive a hard bargain with suppliers. Over the years, they have had several high-profile disputes with suppliers over costs, most notably ditching virtually all Heineken brands three years ago. While some micro-breweries have a long-term relationship with them, they are trading margin for security, and others won’t deal with them because they don’t find the prices they are willing to pay acceptable.

As I mentioned with the menu changes, all aspects of the operation are constantly reviewed to maximise efficiency and drive out costs. The idea that the popular Wetherspoon App does this may seem counter-intuitive, as it introduces table service for drinks, but in fact it automates the ordering process and makes managing workflow much easier, this smoothing out the peaks and troughs. They also constantly review their property portfolio to weed out poorer-performing branches and eliminate expensive leases. If an apparently busy Wetherspoon pub is unexpectedly disposed of, it’s probably because the lease cost was deemed excessive.

The pricing is finely tuned between different locations, often in a seemingly perverse way. In particularl, they charge a substantial premium in the centres of larger cities, where they have a more captive and less cost-conscious market. They are also often not quite as cheap as people imagine. Pretty much everything on the drinks menu is priced below the nearby competition, but the differential on cask beer is greater than that on kegs and lagers because that is the figure most often used to make price comparisons.

They have also tried to eliminate many of the aspects that make pubs unattractive to customers. Most of their premises are conversions from other type of business rather than former pubs, and where they have acquired existing pubs they have typically totally remodelled the interior. They are largely open-plan without nooks and crannies, and have a large windows on the street so you can see in from outside. There is never a fear of going in the wrong side.

They, in general, avoid features such as live and piped music and TV sport, which do appeal to some but on the other hand can be seen as divisive. People are never going to say “I don’t want to meet up at Spoons because of X” – in a sense they are a kind of lowest common denominator pub. Food and drink menus are put out on all tables so you know exactly what is available and how much it will cost. They also open, and serve food during, long and predictable hours, so that potential customers have the confidence they can go there without worrying about unexpectedly finding it closed. The whole process of a pub visit is made as painless and risk-free as possible.

The overall result of this is that their premises can often come across as large, impersonal and soulless. They lack the intimacy and character often associated with traditional pubs. While they often occupy architecturally impressive buildings, they fill them with cheap, generic loose furniture. You rarely feel cosy in Wetherspoon’s, and I suspect there is an unspoken objective to prevent customers feeling too settled and minimise dwell time.

Cask beer is a key aspect of their appeal, and their association with CAMRA in the form of discount vouchers gives them valuable low-cost publicity. But the standards of cellarmanship vary widely – some branches are consistently good, others much less so – and all too often the beer, even if in decent nick, gives the impression of having been drawn through a very long pipe. They also have a knack of having eight or ten handpumps on the bar but still offering an oddly unbalanced range.

Wetherspoon’s are often accused of having an exploitative attitude towards their staff, but this largely comes across as an exercise in sour grapes. They offer conditions equal to or better than other major players in the market, and have all the benefits and well-developed human resources policies you would expect from a large company. They also offer the opportunity of career progression from an entry-level job, which is not the case for someone doing bar work in an independent pub. The staff are kept busy, but they often give the impression of being more cheerful than those in other chains, and at a recent local CAMRA meeting we were given an impromptu presentation by the manager of one of our branches whose genuine enthusiasm for the opportunities the company had given her was very evident.

In a similar vein, some people object to Tim Martin’s well-documented and public support for Brexit. That is their right, of course, but to boycott a company on political grounds often comes across as cutting off your nose to spite your face, and unless you read the company magazine it is not something you would even notice in their pubs. In any case, the people who are most vocal on this are probably those who would rarely set foot in the place anyway.

But, despite these negative features, it’s impossible to ignore the low prices, and there will be plenty of customers in the typical Wetherspoon’s who otherwise wouldn’t be in a pub at all. Personally, I would rarely use one just for a drink, although I might occasionally call in the one in central Stockport on a midday lunchtime when many other places nearby are closed. I do use them sometimes for food, as even setting aside the value for money it can be difficult to find anywhere else in the vicinity with a comparable choice. I’m certainly not an uncritical cheerleader, but I recognise them as a well-run and innovative company who offer something that a lot of customers want.

Many other pub operators will look at Wetherspoon’s and ask how they can be expected to compete with that. The answer is that, in many cases, they simply can’t. The once-common mainstream pubs offering an unexceptional range of beers and food are much thinner on the ground now in town and city centres. But established pubs have no right to continued existence, and Wetherspoon’s have acted as a classic disruptor in a complacent market.

If you want to compete, you have to offer something that Wetherspoon’s don’t. For example, in the centre of Stockport, there is a keg-only sports boozer right opposite Wetherspoon’s and an award-winning craft beer bar a few doors down, together with a historic pub with a high-end food offer a couple of hundred yards away, all of which seem to do well. Plus the Wetherspoon’s model is essentially to depend on existing footfall in their locality rather than being destination pubs that people will make a special journey to visit. Relatively few of the customers in Stockport suburbs like Heaton Moor or Marple will see the town-centre Spoons as a direct competitor to their local pubs.

The existing major pub operators made a few half-hearted attempts to compete with Wetherspoon’s by offering something similar – the Goose chain created by what was Bass particularly springs to mind. The British pub market has never been a closed shop, and throughout their existence Wetherspoon’s have been able to obtain most of the new licences they wanted. But, while the opportunities were there, the established operators did not take them because they would have undermined their existing businesses, and in the long run they paid the price.

There is a cloud on the horizon, though. Much of what Wetherspoon’s have achieved is the vision of one man, and founder Tim Martin reaches the age of 70 later this month. He’s not going to be around for ever, and the risk must be that the chain ends up going the way of many other once-successful British brands, and loses its distinctive appeal for what no doubt seemed entirely sensible commercial reasons at the time.

* In my view, this understates the genuine rate of inflation, as it has been rebased from RPI to CPI. But even using RPI it would come out as £2.17, so the basic point stands.

Mid-strength midwittery

The Guardian newspaper always has a tendency to regurgitate nonsense on lifestyle issues, and its latest effort is a piece entitled Everyone’s drinking mid-strength – but what actually is it?

A report, published by KAM Insights, has found that, when out at the pub with friends, 50% of UK consumers would rather have two so-called “mid-strength” drinks than one full-strength one. The report, entitled The Mid Strength Opportunity, also finds that 13% of consumers are “coasting”, meaning they’re drinking more mid-strength drinks throughout the evening, so they can stay out for longer and keep tabs on how much alcohol they’re consuming.

However, as the report admits, this research has been funded by an organisation called the Mid Strength Collective, a group of 12 businesses that produce and sell mid-strength drinks, so it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that they would say that, wouldn’t they?

An obvious problem is that these products simply aren’t visible in the market place. They conjure up one example of a 2.1% lager, but frankly these are products that I never come across either in pubs or the off-trade. Wine-style drinks in the 5-8% strength range are perhaps more common, but again they only occupy a tiny section of the wine aisle and virtually never appear in pubs. And how many people are going to pay £9.99 for a bottle of 5.5% diluted wine? It’s significant that both are conspicuous by their absence in Wetherspoon’s, who can be regarded as pretty representative of the mainstream pub trade in what they stock.

Some years ago, Guinness launched a 2.8% variant that was explicitly called “Mid-Strength”, but this seems to have fallen between two stools and never achieved much traction. Apparently it retains a following in Irish golf clubs to help customers avoid falling foul of Ireland’s now draconian drink-driving law. Nowadays there is a much wider and better-quality range of zero-alcohol offerings, Guinness being a particular case in point, and if people want to reduce their intake while still have something resembling an alcoholic drink, they are much more likely to go the whole hog.

It is certainly true that, in recent years, there has been a reduction in the strength of alcoholic drinks across large swathes of the market. But this has overwhelmingly been driven by duty savings, not by consumer demand. We have seen all four leading smooth bitters, and one of the three biggest-selling ordinary lagers, cut to 3.4%. 4.6% now seems to be the benchmark for premium lagers, and the budget end of the wine market has settled at around 10.5-11.0%. I’ve written extensively about 3.4% beers, and 11% wines are somewhat similar – they can be palatable enough, but always give the impression of being a bit lacking.

I don’t remember drinkers complaining that 5.0% Stella was too powerful and wanting its strength cut. Drinks producers have been able to get away with this because consumers can only choose from what is put before them, and few people are really going to be bothered to seek out alternatives for a 0.2% difference in alcohol content, even if they were available. There are one or two exceptions to this. There were widespread complaints about some full-bodied red wines creeping over 14% and thus becoming a bit overwhelming, and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that cask ales above around 4.5% do not find many takers in the majority of pubs. But I don’t think there were any reports of drinkers shunning 5% lagers.

These kind of stories always seem to make the assumption that people are engaging in lengthy drinking sessions and have to find some way of getting through them while retaining a relatively clear head. But that rests on the further assumption that others are happily downing standard-strength drinks throughout. If you have to find a way of surviving it, maybe you need to reconsider your social life. I suspect this might be related to the student experience. The same applies to the reported phenomenon of “zebra-striping”, that is alternating alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. And how common is that form of drinking anyway, whether in pubs or at home? At a guess, I’d say that the modal average for the number of alcoholic drinks consumed in a pub visit is one. Yes, prolonged sessions do exist, but they are not the norm.

The conclusion has to be that the idea there is a significant potential demand for mid-strength alcoholic drinks is wishful thinking. If people really don’t want a standard-strength drink, they will choose an alcohol-fee one (or a soft drink) instead.

What goes around, comes around

The Manchester Evening News reports that the Sparking Clog pub in Radcliffe, Greater Manchester, has recently reopened after being given a unique “Two Door Pub” concept. The StreetView image above dates from last year and may not reflect its current appearance. I am informed by Tandleman that the pub was built in the late 1980s by Banks’s, who still own it in their current guise of Marston’s.

A Greater Manchester pub which closed its doors last month for a major refurbishment has reopened. The Sparking Clog pub in Bury has undergone a huge makeover with over £400,000 spent on the upgrade. The much-loved community pub in Radcliffe was temporarily closed for just under a month for the six-figure makeover. It has now introduced a unique “Two Door Pub” concept, as well as a refreshed bar area and a dedicated family lounge.

Located in the heart of Radcliffe, The Sparking Clog's new design divides the pub into two distinct areas: a 'vibrant' locals' bar and a 'warm, welcoming' family lounge. A central partition creates these separate spaces. The new bar area is complete with 4K big-screen TVs, TNT, and Sky Sports for guests to enjoy all the latest fixtures.

General Manager of The Sparking Clog, Gary Hanmer, said: “We can’t wait to show our wonderful guests the result of our refurbishment. “With the inclusion of new TV’s and sports channels, we hope our customers join us to enjoy this year's big summer of sports. We can’t wait to have our loyal customers back!” The Sparking Clog remains a dog-friendly locals pub, and also boats a beer garden, giving guests the option to drink and dine inside or alfresco.

All well and good but, hang on a minute, isn’t this “unique concept” simply reverting back to how pubs used to be a couple of generations ago? Back in the 1960s, most pubs had, at the very least , two separate bars, a public bar with plainer furnishings and a more down-to-earth atmosphere, where drinkers in working clothes would be served, and a more comfortable, sedate and genteel lounge. Back in those days, the beer was usually a bit cheaper in the public bar as well.

However, over the years, brewers steadily knocked their pubs through into a single room. This was in tune with the spirit of the age, being seen as more modern, inclusive and egalitarian. It also made supervision of the pub easier and, at a time when public bar prices were regulated by law, allowed the pub to charge the higher lounge prices throughout. It’s now relatively uncommon to find a pub with completely separate “sides” and, even where they do, the old price differential has disappeared.

The problem with this, though, was that it effectively turned the pub into a monoculture. It may have erased old-school class divisions, but it failed to recognise that customers might have different expectations of a pub, and want to pursue different activities. Very often, the old public/lounge split moved from one single pub to defining different pubs in an area.

I recall seeing a similar story a while back, about how pubs were moving back towards a more compartmentalised approach to cater for different customer needs. In particular it needs to be recognised that TV sport, while it undoubtedly attracts customers, results in a distinctively boisterous, male-dominated atmosphere that may deter many people. My local pub, while it retains a traditional layout, suffers from having giant screens in every room. It remains to be seen, though, how widely this concept will spread.

Looking back to the debate before the introduction of the dreaded smoking ban in 2007, one option that was mooted was banning smoking in any areas of pubs where children were admitted. This could well have led to a set-up very much like this, with a robust, boisterous, adults-only public bar and a sanitised, smoke-free, family-friendly lounge.

However, I can’t help thinking that this concept still fails to cater for a significant sub-section of pubgoers, those who are just looking for a quiet pint, a comfortable seat and a chat well away from both TV sport and screaming children.

Five Years On

Today marks the fifth anniversary of that fateful day when Boris Johnson announced to the country that the pubs would be completely closed until further notice due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I contemplated going down to my local for a last hurrah, but eventually decided against it. This ushered in sixteen months of either total closure or varying levels of ever-changing and often ludicrous restrictions, which were not fully lifted until Monday 19 July 2021. Even after this, for whatever reason, a handful of pubs persisted with the old regime, including, shamefully, the current holder of CAMRA’s National Pub of the Year Award.

Do you remember when you were only allowed to visit a pub if you consumed a “substantial meal”, although a Scotch egg or a hot Panini would suffice? Or when you were required to put on a mask if you had to stand up to go to the toilet? Or pubs were forced to operate table service, with all bar sales banned? Or when you had to provide your details for contract tracing, resulting in a surprising surge in visits by Isaac Hunt and Mr R. Sole? Or when all the pubs were forced to close at 10pm on the dot, resulting in a massive crush on public transport, making a mockery of social distancing? Or when different areas were allocated in “tiers” of restrictions, meaning that pubs could be closed on one side of a street and open (after a fashion) on the other? And how a minority of licensees seemed to demonstrate overzealous enthusiasm in enforcing this nonsense? In Scotland, there was even a period where you could have soft drinks inside the pub, but had to go outside if you wanted an alcoholic drink.

Pubs have now been allowed to trade normally for over three and a half years, and have recovered much of the lost ground, but still seem somehow subdued and diminished compared with how they were in 2019. The British Beer and Pub Association have stopped publishing their regular beer consumption statistics, but it would not surprise me if on-trade beer sales in 2024 were at least 20% lower than five years previously.

The phenomenon of queuing for service at the bar has become increasingly common, although this must have come from behaviour in shops as, apart from a brief period in the summer of 2020, pubs were never allowed to operate bar service. The trade in pubs often visibly thins out after 9 pm, while previously they would be buzzing until 11 or later. And the switch to working from home has only been partly reversed, damaging the business of many pubs in town and city centres. Many small breweries seemed to bide their time during the period of lockdown, only to discover that their businesses were no longer viable in the colder climate they emerged into, resulting in a wave of closures.

Of course this spread to the whole of society, not just the hospitality industry. So-called “non-essential” shops were closed, and benches and children’s play equipment in parks taped over. In Scotland, it was even proposed to saw the bottoms off school doors to promote ventilation, although I’m not sure whether this was ever actually done. We got our first taste of the reality of two-tier policing, when the contrast between the treatment of Black Lives matter demonstrations and anti-lockdown protests was only too evident, not to mention the heavy-handed response to a gathering to mark the murder of Sarah Everard, who had been killed by a serving police officer.

The panoply of regulations, at the same time absurd and oppressive, was seized upon by every obnoxious, jumped-up jobsworth in society who took delight in exercising power over others. The role of Covid Marshal seemed ideally auited to anyone who had missed a vocation as a PoW camp guard: the kind of people who during the Second World War were denounced as “little Hitlers”. It became a living demonstration of the truth of P. J. O’Rourke’s saying that “Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum.” Pub licensees have always had a penchant for imposing petty rules, and sadly a small but significant minority saw lockdown restrictions as a golden opportunity to boss customers around.

A variety of sinister psychological techniques were used to promote public adherence to lockdowns, and howl down any criticism. This showed all too clearly how it is possible for a supposedly open and democratic society to acquiesce in totalitarianism. We became a society where people gleefully shopped their neighbours to the authorities and decried anyone daring to step out of line as “Covidiots”. This was chronicled in Laura Dodsworth’s coruscating book A State of Fear, which was published as early as May 2021.

The crisis wasn’t something that appeared and then blew over. Its impact is still with us in many ways today, as US beer writer Jeff Alworth explores in this blogpost, in which he draws a connection between the effect on the brewing and hospitality industry and wider society. It’s an interesting an thoughtful piece which is well worth reading, although I certainly don’t agree with all his conclusions.

It is important to point out that Covid and lockdown are different things. Covid is a disease, but the response to it, and how severe and long-lasting it would be, was a political choice. Lockdown was not an ineluctable consequence of Covid. Jeff in effect recognises this when he says “Blue states, where shutdowns were more common and durable, seem to be in worse shape.” Lockdown was not a single, indivisible concept; it was a deliberate choice from a range of policy options.

School closures, imperfectly and patchily substituted by online learning, have left many pupils really struggling and well behind with their education. Pausing a wide range of medical services has hugely increased NHS waiting lists and left many people with serious conditions still untreated. The social isolation of lockdown has carried on into the following years, reducing social contact and leaving people more lonely, often resulting in mental health problems. The costs associated with business support and furlough payments, and the reduction in tax revenues from reduced economic activity, have created a mountain of debt that continues to hang over the entire economy. All of these factors have combined to produce a far greater feeling of political alienation.

Jeff says “I personally offer blanket immunity to any public officials who made decisions in good faith with limited info—they were given impossible choices,” but I would strongly disagree. This may have been excusable in the very early weeks, when there was a general sense of confusion and lack of clarity over what was happening, but it wasn’t too long before the disastrous long-term consequences of lockdown had become all too clear. Many respected commentators were saying this at the time, so the argument that “we were doing the best we could with the knowledge we had at the time” does not wash. The cartoon below was published in early May 2020, less than two months in.

And this one entitled “The Second Wave”, although later, makes the point even more strongly.

It was often suggested at the time that there was a trade-off between saving lives and saving the economy, but except in a very short-term sense this is a false dichotomy. Without a healthy economy, in the longer term public health will suffer. And there was no clear correlation between the length and severity of lockdowns and public health outcomes. Sweden was the only major European nation not to have any kind of formal lockdown, but its results were somewhere in the middle of the scale, some better, some worse. And Peru, which had one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, also had one of the highest death rates. (I am not suggesting that there is a reverse correlation either, just that there is no clear link either way).

The fact remains that, five years after the start of lockdown, the Covid crisis has had profound, long-lasting and damaging implications across the whole of society. Yet people seem all too willing to memory-hole it, as it is just too uncomfortable to address. This goes far beyond the hospitality industry. As a society we are poorer, sicker, less well educated, and more isolated and more divided than we otherwise would have been. And most of that was a political choice.

Pub pointers

A few days ago, I linked to an article by food writer Jay Rayner setting out a listing of sometimes uncomfortable home truths about the food and restaurant industries. I invited suggestions for similar points about the world of pubs and beer, and what follows is a collection of the best of these, some my own, some submitted by others. Most of these are thoughts on the running of pubs. Please note that I don’t necessarily wholly endorse all these points.

• Always provide beermats. Nobody wants tables sopping with spilt beer.

• People do not queue to be served at the bar of a pub.

• Music should be played to suit the customers, not the bar staff.

• Keep to regular hours and make sure they are well publicised, including displaying them on the door.

• If you have a website or social media page, keep them up to date.

• The hospitality business is about hospitality. Nobody wants to be served by miserable staff who think the job or the punters are beneath them.

• If you must have seating at the bar, leave a dedicated space for people to be served.

• If there’s a crush at the bar, customers feel much better if you’ve at least acknowledged their presence.

• Don't leave doors open when it's cold.

• Opening doors and windows on a sunny day does not warm the interior of a pub.

• Italic script lettering painted on the outside wall of a pub is always a bad sign.

• “Please wait here to be seated” has no place in a pub.

• Seat reservations for drinkers should be a total no-no.

• Nobody ever walked out of a pub because there were no posing tables.

• Do not use your customers as unpaid quality control.

• Compromising on cask beer quality is a false economy.

• Price is about status not quality. If you like cask beer, the cheaper pubs get the turnover and have a better pint. If you find a pub full of working class blokes drinking pints of bitter and not Carling it will be a great pint.

• Jam jars showing the colour of cask beers are a pointless affectation for regular beers.

• Unless a customer is being obviously arsey, never quibble about changing unsatisfactory beer.

• Serving beer in the wrong branded glass is worse than in an unbranded glass. Invest in some glasses branded with your pub name.

• Throw away old scratched and pitted glasses.

• Make the prices of draught beers clearly visible at the point of sale.

• Any attempt to launch a lower-strength variant of an existing beer brand is doomed to failure, and may well end up undermining the parent brand.

• Beers with seasonal themes such as Hallowe'en and Christmas are almost invariably disappointing, and too often guilty of appalling puns.

• The culture of ever-changing guest beers militates against efforts to establish a price premium for cask ale.

• Make sure you regularly clean and restock the toilets.

• Avoid any establishment calling itself something “…and kitchen”

• If you serve food, put menus out on the tables. Even if customers aren’t eating, they may read them and be encouraged to return for a meal.

• You have to decide whether you are primarily a sports pub or a dining pub. You can’t be both at the same time.

• Don’t serve sandwiches and similar snacks with chips as a default option – give customers the choice.

• Treat tea and coffee as menu items, not bar items.

Reflected glory

Anti-drink pressure group Alcohol Action Ireland have complained that advertising of alcohol-free beers is being used to circumvent more general restrictions on alcohol promotion. At first sight, this may come across as yet another example of being joyless wowsers, but actually in the context of their own terms of reference they do have a point.

It seems fairly self-evident that advertising of alcohol-free variants will to some extent reflect on the parent brand too. The two products cannot be seen as entirely distinct. This works two ways – if someone wants to drink an alcohol-free beer, they are likely to be motivated to choose one carrying the same branding as a familiar standard beer, while the promotion of alcohol-free variants contributes towards awareness of the overall brand.

Possibly one of the reasons why the previous bout of enthusiasm for low- and zero-alcohol beers fizzled out thirty years ago is that they tended to be stand-alone products like Barbican, Kaliber and Clausthaler, rather the ones sharing an identity with existing brands. It is also noticeable that the share of advertising devoted to alcohol-free beers is considerably great than their actual market share, as the manufacturers attempt to cultivate an image of being socially responsible. Much the same is true of the share of car advertising devoted to electric cars.

If the exact same products were marketed as something like “malt soda”, with no attempt to link them to alcohol brands or imply that they were in any way connected to beer, then these objections wouldn’t apply. Nobody claims that the existence of fizzy apple juice is an attempt to promote cider. But the fact is that they aren’t totally discrete products, and it is distinctly disingenuous to argue that the promotion of, say, Guinness 0.0 does not in any way contribute towards increasing awareness of the Guinness brand as a whole.

This is why alcohol-free beers are treated as age-restricted products, as they carry alcohol branding and are explicitly intended to ape alcoholic drinks, so could be seen as representing the promotion of alcohol to under-18s, something explicitly prohibited in marketing codes. And it is why candy cigarettes, which I remember enjoying as a child, have not been sold for many years.

The real battle is whether to restrict alcohol advertising as such in the first place. Once that has been conceded, quibbling about alcohol-free variants is just an ultimately doomed attempt to find a loophole. If you ban alcohol advertising, this logically follows, and it was never going to be a get out of jail free card for drinks manufacturers.

Food for thought

Food critic Jay Rayner (son of agony aunt Claire) has written a column in the monthly Observer Food Magazine for the past fifteen years. This has now come to an end, but to sign off he has given us a list of trenchant opinions about the food and restaurant industry, many of which will strike a chord with blog readers. Do read the whole thing – it isn’t paywalled – but here are some of the highlights:

• Individual foods are not pharmaceuticals; just eat a balanced diet. There is nothing you can eat or drink that will detoxify you; that’s what your liver and kidneys are for.

• People have morals but food doesn’t, so don’t describe dishes as “dirty”.

• Fat is where the flavour is and salt is the difference between eating in black and white and eating in Technicolor, even if your cardiologist would disagree.

• Brown foods and messy foods are the best foods, and picnics are a nightmare.

• Most dishes can be improved with the addition of bacon.

• All new restaurants should employ someone over 50 to check whether the print on the menu is big enough to be read, the lighting bright enough for it to be read by and the seats comfortable enough for a lengthy meal.

• If a waiter has to explain the “concept” behind a menu there is something wrong with the menu.

• The kind of wines that natural-wine fans adore smell of uncleaned pig’s bottom and are horrible.

• And food should always, always, be served on plates. Not on slates. Not on garden trowels. Not on planks. On plates.

It might be interesting if someone could come up with something similar about the world of beer and pubs…

Ten of the best

Well-known beer writer Pete Brown has been given a weekly column on beer and pubs in the Sunday Times magazine. He says this will be the only regular column on the topic in any national newspaper. His first contribution is a list his ten favourite “proper” pubs. A non paywalled version of the article can be found here. He says:

Beer never tastes as good as it does in a pub — provided you’re going to the right ones. It takes longer to get drunk on beer than on wine or spirits, so the pub is built around that long, slow curve of inebriation.

The pub is our pressure release valve. I’ve seen people’s body shape change as they walk into a pub, as if they were being given an invisible hug. It’s the Rovers Return, the Woolpack or the Queen Vic, where men and women from all walks of life meet as equals. It’s where you might meet the person you’ll spend the rest of your life with. It’s the place where your mate saw that great band when they were starting out. It’s the shelter of stone walls and a roaring fire after a rainy country walk. It’s where you go for a big game, even if you can watch it at home.

Here are ten pubs I’ve drunk in professionally that are among my favourite pubby pubs. Yes, the beer is good, because it’s well chosen and well looked after. So is the food, if they serve any. What they have in common is a good atmosphere — because the people who run them care, they love the pub and they’re good at it.

The ten pubs on his list are:

1. Blue Stoops, London W8
2. Bow Bar, Edinburgh
3. Coopers Tavern, Burton-on-Trent
4. Crown Liquor Saloon, Belfast
5. Free Trade Inn, Newcastle
6. Grapes, Liverpool
7. Pigs Nose Inn, Kingsbridge
8. Rosebery, Norwich
9. Rutland Arms, Sheffield
10. Ty Coch Inn, Morfa Nefyn

I’ve only been in three of those - the Bow Bar, the Coopers Tavern and the Crown Liquor Saloon. The Grapes in Liverpool is the one on Roscoe Street, not the more familiar one near the Cavern Club.

Obviously any such list will be highly personal and subjective, and will also inevitably have a recency bias. You will remember a pub you visited last month much more clearly than one you haven’t been to for twenty years. On that point, he says of the Free Trade Inn, “the graffiti in the loos is an essential (if unrepeatable) read”, but apparently the pub was spruced up a few years back and that has now disappeared.

With the exception of the Coopers Tavern and the Crown Liquor Saloon, he’s avoided the “usual suspects” all too often seen on lists of classic pubs. It’s also good to see some writing about pubs that doesn’t primarily focus on their food offer, which is all too often the case with articles in the quality press.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I haven’t always been Pete Brown’s biggest fan, and the feeling is mutual. However, he does write well when he puts his political prejudices to one side, and articles like this are entirely positive for pubs.

In response, someone suggested that I should come up with my own list. I duly did this, but deliberately confined it to pubs that I have visited in the post-Covid era and so have experienced relatively recently. This means I have excluded what would otherwise have been nailed-on certainties sich as the Blue Bell in York and the Star in Bath. My ten are as follows, split evenly between urban and rural:

1. Anchor, High Offley, Staffordshire
2. Bell, Aldworth, Berkshire
3. Black Horse, Clapton-in-Gordano, Somerset
4. Boat & Horses, Newcastle-under-Lyme
5. Cross Foxes, Shrewsbury
6. Crown, Churchill, Somerset
7. Great Western, Wolverhampton
8. Hare & Hounds, Manchester
9. North Star, Steventon, Berkshire
10. Templar, Leeds

I did something similar back in 2013, and there are only two pubs that have carried over. Some pubs have changed, not for the better, some were only there because I had had particularly good recent experiences, while others fell out simply because I haven’t visited them recently. For example, on my two visits to the Digby Tap in Sherborne, I’ve thought it was a splendid pub, but I haven’t been there since 2004.

Of course, unless you feel welcome and at home in a pub, however good the beer, and however impressive or characterful the interior, will all count for nothing. But that doesn’t mean a “hail fellow well met” bonhomie, it’s often simply more a case that there’s nothing in the reaction of staff or other customers to make you feel uncomfortable or out of place.

Bottling out

From 1 April 2025, a new tax on the packaging of a wide range of consumer goods will be introduced, known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR).

Under the new rules, businesses will be charged a fee based on the amount of packaging they use, such as glass, plastic and aluminium. The money is meant to help local authorities fund waste collection and aims to encourage recycling by shifting the cost of onto the manufacturer. Ministers hope to raise £1bn through the scheme.

The Government has said the reforms are about “minimising the environmental impacts of packaging and maximising the contribution that packaging reform can make to net zero and the protection of our environment.”

However, the scheme has been criticised by the food and drink industries on the grounds that it adds a further layer of cost and bureaucratic complexity, and will contribute to inflation at at a time when consumers are already hard-pressed.

A key aspect of the scheme is that it based on the weight of packaging, so higher charges will be imposed on glass relative to lighter materials such as aluminium, plastic and cardboard. This has obvious implications for the drinks industry, where a wide range of items, including most premium products, are packaged in glass.

This article from The Grocer, which is free to read, sets out the costs for various types of glass packaging. A typical spirits bottle will incur a cost of 12.2p, a wine bottle 10.4p and a beer bottle 5.7p. Comparing it with wine, I suspect the figure for beer relates to the 330ml size, and the charge on a 500ml bottle will be more like 8.5p. Once VAT and retail margins are added on, the increase at the point of sale could be up to double these figures. This has very significant implications for the bottled beer market.

Net zero threatens to kill off the beer bottle, brewers have warned. A looming “glass tax” meant to encourage recycling will shatter profit margins and prompt brewers to opt for cans instead, according to the industry. The choice of drinks on supermarket shelves will become more limited and bottles that are still available will cost more, ministers have been warned.

The British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) said the new packaging tax, which will hit glass particular hard, could force brewers to abandon bottles altogether. Mark Kelly, a beer seller at London brewery Sambrook’s, said: “We think beer bottles will die off in the long term.”

This could potentially lead to a major shift in the market from bottles to cans. I ran a quick poll on Twitter/X, which showed that a slight majority of respondents would be unhappy with this, although just under half would either be indifferent or would actively welcome it.

POLL: What would be your reaction if your favourite bottled beer was put into cans instead?

— Pub Curmudgeon 🌸🍻 (@oldmudgie) February 10, 2025

So, while the potential cost savings will be compelling, there is a substantial barrier of customer sentiment to be overcome before drinkers can be persuaded to switch to cans. Bottles are generally perceived as classier and upmarket, while cans still carry something of a stigma, and are seen as an inferior container only suitable for low-quality beers. Quite a few drinkers will happily drink bottles, but draw a line at cans. There is also a persistent view that cans impart a metallic tang to beer, although this, while maybe true in the 1970s, hasn’t been the case for decades. Personally, while I recognise the aesthetic appeal of bottles, I’m really not particularly bothered, and recognise that the same beer will taste no different from either type of container.

The main categories of beer primarily sold in single bottles are “world lagers”, typically in a 660ml size, and “premium bottled ales”, mainly in 500ml. Some lagers are also sold in multipacks of 330ml bottles and appeal to those who like the ritual of drinking from the bottle, although these are generally also available in cans of the same size.

Most of these beers, in terms of overall volume, are sold by supermarkets, and they are generally sold in multibuy offers, such as 4 for £7 or 3 for £6. This tends to suppress the normal operation of the price mechanism, as they cover a wide range of products of different strength and perceived quality. There is no incentive to choose a particular bottle purely because it is cheaper. However, with recent duty rises, the economics of these offers must be under pressure now. Retailers and producers will have to think carefully whether it is best to take the hit of the EPR and increase the headline price of the offers, or take a gamble on customers accepting canned beers at a lower price.

A side-issue is the question of bottle-conditioned beers, which only account for a tiny proportion of the market, but assume a greater importance in the minds of many commentators. With a bottle, it is possible to see that the beer has cleared and then pour it carefully to ensure the sediment doesn’t enter the glass, but this is much more hit-and-miss with opaque cans. Some craft brewers have produced “can-conditioned” beers, but that is a market that is much more accepting of cloudiness. There have also been several examples of batches of cans exploding due to over-vigorous secondary fermentation. I can’t see strong imported Belgian bottled beers such as Duvel switching to cans, as their distinctive bottles are part of their appeal and they already command a substantial price premium.

There is, of course, an established precedent in that, over the past decade or so, the craft beer segment has pretty much entirely switched from bottles to cans, mainly in 330ml and 440ml sizes. They offer a bigger canvas for innovative graphic design, and they also establish a point of differentiation from the stuffy Premium Bottled Ales. Plus craft beer drinkers are by definition more open to innovation. But they have overcome any lingering stigma surrounding cans and proved that they can be sold by supermarkets as individual items and command a premium price. It also can’t have gone unnoticed that cans have better “green” credentials, as they are cheaper to transport due to their lighter weight, and can be more completely recycled.

Looking at the longer term, the government have said they will introduce a Deposit Return Scheme for England in the second half of 2027, but their proposals as they stand at present will exclude glass bottles. So might we see beers that had switched to cans to minimise EPR move back into bottles so they don’t need to add a deposit?

It’s hard to forecast how this will go – will the market reflect the higher desirability of bottles and bite the bullet on price, or will the cost pressures be so overwhelming that they will overcome customer resistance and compel a switch to cans? But it will be interesting to see how it pans out.