Watering the workers’ beer

I am the man, the very fat man
That waters the workers’ beer
And what do I care if it makes them ill
If it makes them terribly queer
I’ve a car, a yacht, and an aeroplane,
And I waters the workers’ beer.

So goes the popular song from the inter-war era. And the latest domino to fall is Fosters Lager, whose makers Heineken have announced that its strength will be reduced from 3.7% ABV to 3.4% with effect from February next year. It’s perhaps surprising to remember that it was 4.0% as recently as early 2023. Heineken claim that this is due to the drinking public demanding lower-strength beers, but in reality that is totally disingenuous, and the underlying reason is obviously the immense saving in beer duty.

The British beer market was once dominated by what were regarded as “ordinary strength” session beers in the 3.6-4.0% strength range. But, over the past couple of years, since the duty cut-off at 3.4% was introduced, this entire sector has been pretty much wiped out, at least as far as keg beers are concerned. Carlsberg, Fosters, John Smith’s, Worthington, Boddingtons and Tetley have all been cut, leaving Carling as the last mass-market beer standing at 4.0%.

Maybe Molson Coors will decide to position Carling as a kind of “premium mainstream” brand alongside the likes of Amstel and Coors. Or maybe they will eventually succumb to the trend too. They must have given it serious consideration. While Guinness is promoted as a premium product, at 4.1% it is broadly in the same strength category. It’s hard to see that falling too, but I’d lay money they’ve done test brews. Given that Guinness 0.0% is surprisingly convincing, they’d probably make a pretty good job of it too.

It’s easy to point the finger of blame at brewers, but from a commercial point of view the duty savings are so great – over 50% for 3.4% compared with 3.5% – that you can’t really blame them if they feel it won’t put off too many customers. If your regular tipple in your local is Fosters, which is the only standard lager on the bar, even if you’re not happy with the move, what else are you going to do? But it represents the relegation of this whole market sector to the category of “zombie brands”, that may still earn substantial revenue for their makers, but are no longer heavily promoted or viewed as a source of corporate pride. The major brewers serving the UK are past masters at brand destruction.

Much of this business has moved upmarket to the “world lagers” around the 4.6% mark, in what can be regarded as a triumph for the strategy of “premiumisation”. Moretti is now second only to Guinness as the best-selling beer brand in the UK, and Madri has recently overtaken Carling, once the unchallenged market leader, in sales volumes. This also gives the lie to the claim that drinkers are shifting to lower-strength beers.

The same phenomenon has hit the cask sector, although as this is more fragmented, and most of the leading brands are in the 4%+ premium segment, the effect has not been so noticeable. However, three of the best-known “ordinary bitters”, Greene King IPA, Ruddles and Banks’s Amber, have been shifted down to 3.4%, and a number of less prominent brands have followed suit. For a mild such as Taylor’s Golden Best that was previously only 3.5% it won’t really make any noticeable difference, but Banks’s Amber is certainly lacking compared to how it was before. It’s now common to see one-off guest beers that weigh in at 3.4%. However, we’re fortunate in my local area that all the family brewers with tied estates – Holts, Hydes, Lees, Robinson’s and Samuel Smith – still sell a cask bitter of 3.8% or higher, and of course Robinson’s Unicorn at 4.2% has always been an example of presenting a best bitter as an ordinary.

In response to this, drinks writer Phil Mellows has argued in the Morning Advertiser that beer drinkers are too hung up above %ABV. As long as the quality is there, he says, why should they be concerned? However, this really misses the point. Anyone knowledgeable about beer recognises that it is possible to produce good beers across a wide range of strengths – stronger does not automatically mean better, and drinkers will choose beers of different strengths depending on mood and occasion. But it has to be acknowledged that the key point of beer is that it contains alcohol to a greater or lesser extent. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t drink it, or at least not in anything like the same quantities.

Alcohol content is a vital element in the flavour make-up of beer, adding body, warmth, richness and sweetness. Make anything more than a trivial tweak, and it will significantly change the character of the beer. It is one thing to specifically set out to brew a low-strength beer, but something entirely different to reduce the strength of an existing beer that was designed for a higher strength. You may not have thought much of Fosters even when it was 4%. But now it is 3.4%, a 15% strength reduction, it is not the same product and, I would suggest, an inferior one.

He also draws a comparison with wine that is somewhat wide of the mark. He says “you seldom see wine drinkers ask how strong a wine is, even though a ‘full-strength’ wine can vary between 8% and 14%”. But, in practice, for many years the vast majority of table wines were between 11.5% and 14%, which is the equivalent of 3.4% to 4.2% for beer, a pretty narrow range of strengths. People didn’t really need to be bothered. Even then, concerns were expressed about some full-bodied reds from warm countries edging up above 14%, which was felt to be a bit overpowering. More recently, switching wine to a sliding duty scale rather than a flat rate has resulted in many cheaper wines being reduced to 11% or even 10.5%, which has drawn comments that the resulting products, rather like 3.4% beer, may be sort of OK, but are pretty uninspiring and watery.

Wine also differs from beer in that you don’t make wines of widely varying strengths from the same basic materials. The strength of wine depends on a combination of the type of grapes used and the climate of the country in which it is made. Broadly speaking, warm-country reds are considerably stronger than cool-country whites. But its strength is largely a product of its natural environment, not a deliberate decision by the winemakers.

Mellows points out that it is possible to produce characterful cask beers at 3.4% (although it is even easier to produce insipid ones). It is also possible to brew decent keg milds at that strength, as Samuel Smith’s have shown. But, while I won’t automatically turn my nose up at it, I don’t want to drink 3.4% beer all the time, or indeed most of the time.

And the whole swathe of mass-market 3.4% legs – Carlsberg, Fosters, Bud Light, John Smith’s, Worthington, Boddingtons and Tetley – are a sorry bunch of forgettable, lacklustre brews that drinkers may grudgingly put up with it, but which inspire zero enthusiasm. The general reduction of alcoholic strengths has resulted in a wholesale degradation of product quality. And this was an all too predictable outcome of a government policy (introduced, don’t forget, by the Tories) that many at the time who should have known better welcomed.

Care of the community

An ongoing theme of this blog has been the conflict between the interests and desires of pub customers and the commercial companies who own and run pubs. Pubgoers may regard their local as a valuable social resource and community pub, but the owning companies, not entirely unreasonably, feel that they have to make a profit to stay in business. Inevitably this leads to customers feeling aggrieved when the owning companies decide to close or sell off pubs.

The obvious response to this is “well, if you feel so strongly about your pub, why not stump up the money to buy it yourselves?” A growing number of communities up and down the country have been doing just that, a trend that I wrote about back in 2017. In principle, this is a welcome development, moving pubs from the strictly commercial sector to what might be called the heritage sector, in a similar way to preserved railways, where buildings and activities are preserved for their perceived social value over and above their narrow economic utility.

However, as I said in that piece, for a local community, actually buying their pub is only the first step in the process. They then have to go on to find a way to keep it in operation in the long term. A community pub starts off with a built-in advantage over one owned by a brewery or pubco, as it isn’t expected to earn a return on the invested capital, and its owners may well have a better idea of what is likely to appeal to customers in that particular locality. But it may well turn out to be the case that there were valid reasons due to the simple lack of custom in that location that the previous owners were justified in deeming it unprofitable.

An example of this was recently reported with the Samson Inn in Gilsland on the Cumberland/Northumberland border. This was acquired by a Community Benefit Society, but the tenant recently handed the keys back saying that he was unable to make a living out of it.

George Campbell, the pub's tenant, shared a statement on Facebook announcing the decision. “It is with sincere regret that I have to announce that I shall be ceasing to trade the Samson Inn as of close of business Sunday evening (October 26).” He added this was the 'only course of action left open', as the Samson Inn is a 'seasonal business' and it has not been able to run ‘profitably’.

Letting a pub out to a tenant is the simplest way of keeping a community-owned pub in business, but obviously that requires the pub to be able to attract enough business to provide a living for at least one person. If that isn’t possible, then the owners will have to consider employing a paid manager, or running it themselves with volunteer labour, possibly with restricted hours, and accepting that they will have to incur an ongoing loss year-on-year to keep their treasured community facility in being.

It’s interesting to consider these issues in the context of the Golden Lion at Ashton Hayes in west Cheshire (shown above), which reopened in August this year after having been closed for ten years, having been acquired by a community interest company. It’s obviously a substantial, professional operation, but comes across as an archetypal pastel-shaded, stripped-pine upmarket Cheshire dining pub. It’s the kind of place where the beer is £5 a pint and you can order a “Sweet potato and kale pie with roasted new potatoes, French beans and tomato relish” for 17.95.

Now I freely admit that this isn’t my favoured style of pub, but it’s not really for me to criticise. Presumably the owners have decided that that is what works best in that particular location and is likely to ensure the pub’s long-term viability. And a slick dining pub is better than no pub at all.

On visiting it, you wouldn’t really guess, though, that it was a community-owned pub. I might expect a pub that set out to be a hub of the local community to be a bit more cluttered and lived-in, with a cosy alcove of bench seating where old boys chew the fat, dogs of indeterminate breed dozing in front of a real fire, a noticeboard advertising a variety of local events, and a collection of dog-eared back issues of Cheshire Life magazine. Maybe it will eventually mellow and become a bit more frayed at the edges; only time will tell.

But this underlines that merely transferring a pub to community ownership is of itself no guarantee of success – you need to have a viable business plan, and if you can’t run the pub profitably you will need deep pockets to fund annual losses.

I remember going in the Golden Lion once or twice in my younger days when I lived in that area. It was a Greenalls pub then, like most in the area, but I never thought it was anything special. Interestingly, following a local referendum, the name of the village was changed a few years ago from Ashton to Ashton Hayes, taking the name of the local “big house”, as it was felt there were too many Ashtons around and it was easily confused.