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.

Realisation dawns

From the beginning of this month, new government regulations prevent restaurants and fast food outlets from providing unlimited refills of drinks deemed to be high in sugar. This includes not just fizzy soft drinks, but items such as hot chocolate in Wetherspoon’s. This has caused several commentators such as Andrew Lilico here to suddenly wake up and, as it were, smell the coffee.

Is this true? It's now illegal to sell bottomless portions of Coke? https://t.co/GdbtNa9DRK

— Andrew Lilico (@andrew_lilico) October 3, 2025

I have to say that free refills isn’t something that particular concerns me personally. It’s a relative recent innovation anyway, and in general one soft drink is enough. Overall, I doubt whether the take-up is very great, but it something that appears generous and creates a positive impression. However, prohibiting this kind offer seems to have a struck a chord with a number of commentators who would not normally pay much attention to issues of this kind.

This illustrates how it often takes something that affects them personally to bring home to people the existence of a wider trend. For example, widespread closures of pubs may not have really registered with someone until one that they happen to like visiting shuts down. Only then do they begin to notice a pattern rather than an isolated instance.

Over the past fifteen or twenty years, we have seen a whole raft of new lifestyle restrictions brought in, many of which have been chronicled on this blog. Taken in isolation, they may not add up to very much, which is why they might have gone unnoticed, but as a whole they represent a significant change to the operation of the food and drink market.

In food, we have seen reductions in pack sizes, such as the phasing out of XL chocolate bars, restrictions on displays in supermarkets, attempts to reformulate dishes to reduce fat, salt and sugar content, the “sugar tax” on soft drinks, these curbs on refills and, from next January, sweeping restrictions on advertising and promotion of a huge range of everyday food items.

In the sphere of alcohol, we have seen producers “encouraged” to reduce strengths to “take alcohol units out of the market”, the recent duty changes which have made it financially attractive to reduce huge swathes of the beer market to 3.4% ABV and, in Scotland and Wales, minimum unit pricing and bans on multibuy offers. From the perspective of when I began this blog, it is perhaps surprising that much of the attention of public health has been diverted from alcohol to food, but there is sure to be more to come, especially in the area of advertising and promotions.

While the latest measures are being implemented under Labour, they were planned by the Conservatives, and indeed the Conservatives were power for most of the period under review. This policy area at least has been a cross-party initiative.

The government themselves have admitted that the effect of these measures will be trivial, amounting at most to a handful of calories removed from the average diet. So it is hard to see why the restrictions are justified, except to placate shrill pressure groups demanding that “Something Must be Done!” And it seems that some people derive a perverse pleasure from dictating how others live their lives. It’s also profoundly patronising. Adults are being treated not as intelligent, responsible individuals in control of their own lives, but as weak-willed, gullible dupes who have to be protected from themselves.

The whole thing perfectly exemplifies this famous quotation from C. S. Lewis:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

And don’t imagine for a minute that this is the end-point, because there’s still a long way further to go.

Out of sight, out of mind

The Morning Advertiser reports on research carried out on behalf of Ossett Brewery showing that cask suffers from a visibility problem in the pub. Apparently a mere 10% of drinkers could recall seeing the available cask beers, and only 19% can identify cask from the signature handpull. “Handpulls often sit too low or are hidden, while lager and craft keg dominate at eye level.”

There’s a certain amount of truth in this. Pumpclips aren’t illuminated, and are sometimes fussily designed and difficult to read. Plus they are located at a lower level than the tall fonts and T-bar dispensers that often dominate bars, so don’t stand out. While it often used to be the case that the bank of handpumps dominated the centre of the bar, I can think of two local examples where recent refurbishments have led to them being moved to a less prominent location.

However, I’d expect that the majority of beer drinkers in a pub are at least aware of the presence of handpumps on the bar, even if it’s not their preferred drink. The report says that 49% of drinkers “are not really sure what cask is”, but they probably have an approximate idea, even if it’s just perceived as something warm, flat and old-fashioned that isn’t for them.

In the early days of CAMRA, a substantial proportion of cask beer in the North and Midlands, maybe getting on for a half, was dispensed through various form of electric pumps that were difficult to distinguish from keg or tank beer taps. Most drinkers simply referred to “Mild” or “Bitter” rather than specifically identifying the beer as “real ale”. This obviously posed a problem in making it difficult to determine which beer was real and which wasn’t, especially for the casual customer, and so over the years the use of handpumps was encouraged as providing a clear and unmistakeable symbol of real ale. By the turn of the century, electric cask beer dispense had largely disappeared, and it now lingers on in only a tiny handful of pubs.

However, this is a double-edged sword. What allows you to clearly identify something also allows people to instantly dismiss it as something not for them. Many drinkers will see a beer on a handpump and immediately reject it out of hand. It’s something “other” than the general run of beers on keg taps.

A few years ago, I reported on an experiment by Sharp’s Brewery to get over this issue by dispensing cask Doom Bar through bar mountings of the same form as keg taps, although clearly identifying it as “Cask” on the cowl, so nobody is being deceived. There is no technical issue with doing this, and indeed free-flow electric dispense of cask beers was once commonplace. The argument in favour is that it does not confine cask to a kind of psychological ghetto, but on the other hand it could be seen as being somewhat ashamed of cask and trying to pass it off, at least at a subliminal level, as being like keg. In any case, nothing much ever seems to have come of it, and I never encountered it in action in a pub.

The report suggests that drinkers need more education about what cask, but in reality if you feel that customers need to be educated about your product you’ve lost the battle. People might do research and consult brochures if they’re buying a consumer durable that will last for years, but for an ephemeral product consumed at point of sale and costing a few pounds they will largely look to advertising, social cues and the simple fact of what is placed before them. And, while surveys show people want locally-brewed beer (who would say they didn’t?), revealed preference tends to show that in real-world purchasing decisions this isn’t a high priority.

While cask may to some extent suffer from a low profile in pubs, in practice the main reasons deterring people from choosing it are that it is too often offered in the form of obscure brands that they have never heard of, and there is a small but certainly non-negligible chance of getting one that is seriously sub-standard, especially in the general run of pubs as opposed to specialist outlets. I don’t really think brightly-coloured handpumps and mounting pumpclips higher is going to make that much difference.

Cask continues to enjoy a loyal following amongst enthusiasts, and is in no danger of disappearing entirely. However, enthusiasts tend to value a wide choice and positively welcome unfamiliar beers, while often regarding the possibility of getting the occasional sub-standard as an occupational hazard. This goes directly against what is needed to develop it in more generalist pubs.

There has to be a laser-like focus on quality at the point of dispense and a ruthless attack on over-ranging, which is too often meekly accepted as the price that has to be paid for providing “a good range of beers”. And, to be effective, promotion needs to focus on individual, recognisable brands, not on cask as a generic category.

A journey into Middle England – Part 2

Having left the Old Swan, a short walk back west towards the town centre of Atherstone brought us to the Hat & Beaver, its plain frontage brightly illuminated in the Autumn sunshine. While the name may seem whimsical, it reflects Atherstone’s long heritage of the hatting industry. Apparently at one time in the past it produced more hats than Luton, and was responsible for making Tommy Cooper’s fezzes. We had been warned about the possibility of encountering over-familiar dogs in this pub, but today none were in evidence, although there was a dog bowl in one corner. Atherstone seems to be a good place for dog-loving pubgoers, with several pubs either having dogs inside, or signs proclaiming they were “Dog Friendly”. In keeping with the exterior, the interior is fairly plain, with a public bar with a tiled floor at the front, an intermediate area with an alcove of seating at a higher level, and a lounge section with a wall bench at the rear.

The only cask ale was Bass, at a bargain price of £3.50 a pint, where most of the beer in the town was between £4.20 and £4.50. The pub had recently received a delivery of the new Bass merchandise, including pumpclips, bar runners, beermats and glasses with the legend “Trademark No. 1” on the rear, as shown in the photo above. As in the two earlier pubs with Bass, while you would have been happy to drink it all night, it didn’t quite scale the heights that it can be capable of. A nice touch was that the barman turned down the music in the area where we were sitting to help us hear our conversation, although in fact it was pretty tasteful anyway. As you might expect in a pub of this type, the racing was showing on the TV with the sound off.

We continued further west along Long Street back into the town centre. While you would not describe Atherstone as an upmarket place, there were relatively few boarded-up premises and a good number of independent shops, suggesting it isn’t doing too badly. Turning right, we headed up to the spacious Market Place, which gently slops uphill to the handsome St Mary’s Church with its distinctive octagonal tower. On this are two pubs that make rather more concessions to modern beer trends than most of the others in the town, and which appear to take turns to be included in the Good Beer Guide.

The first, on the right, was the Market Tavern Tap, which presumably was a long-established pub originally just called the Market Tavern. The door on the right leads into a passageway down the side giving access to a comfortable front lounge and a smaller snug at the rear. The lounge was by some way the busiest pub room of the day so far, and appeared to be a popular spot for the gentlefolk of Atherstone – and their dogs – to enjoy a teatime pint. There was a fire burning in the grate even though it was quite a warm afternoon. There were seven cask beers available, including Iron Pier Stout, Brew York Duality, Big Dipper Bitter and Proper Job.

Across the Market Place is the Angel Ale House, which again was presumably once just called the Angel. This also is a double-fronted pub, this time mco with the door at the extreme right. A few steps down give access to a spacious front bar with a tiled floor. There were a good number of customers, although not quite as many as the previous pub. This one was in the 2025 GBG, but has been replaced by the Market Tavern Tap for 2026. There were five cask beers on the bar, including Oakham Citra, Theakston Peculier IPA and Leatherbritches Mad Ruby and Hairy Helmet.

Numbers were thinning out now, but having spotted a handpump in the Wheatsheaf earlier on, two of us decided to call in on the way back to the station. This is a much plainer and more down-to-earth pub than the previous two, with a public bar area at the front, a couple of alcoves of seating in the middle, and a raised area with a pool table to the rear. The clientele were noticeably younger than any of the earlier pubs, but maybe this was just a function of the time having moved on from afternoon to early evening. On the bar were two handpumps, once with a reversed pumpclip for Greene King Yardbird, and the other serving Genevieve, a collaboration between Greene King and Thornbridge, which was actually pretty decent.

From here it was only a short walk back to the station, with the ultra-low underbridge having to be negotiated to reach the northbound platform. My journey back involved changing at Crewe rather than Stafford. The London North Western train on the first leg ran to time, but unfortunately the West Coast one for the final stretch was delayed 25 minutes, meaning that I did not get back to Stockport until just after 9 pm.

While Atherstone may not include any world classics of the pub world, it is an interesting and characterful town in its own right, and we were able to visit all of the cask-serving pubs in the town centre; there are three or four more that only have keg beers. This made for a very enjoyable day out and gives the opportunity to get a feel for what makes a place tick that you don’t get by just cherry-picking one or two from a beer guide. The front room of the Market Tavern Tap was probably my favourite pub space of the day, but I would also be more than happy to spend time in the Maid of the Mill and the Old Swan, and the Hat & Beaver is certainly not lacking in character. The only pub I wouldn’t really be too concerned about returning to was the Wheatsheaf.

See here for Part 1.

A journey into Middle England – Part 1

Atherstone is a market town in North Warwickshire with a population of about 11,000, located between Coventry and Burton-on-Trent, very close to the geographical centre of England. The only time it will enter into most people’s consciousness is when they speed through it at 100 mph on an express train between the North-West and London Euston, and may just notice the station sign. Some may have driven past it on the A5, but it was bypassed as early as 1955, so few will have actually ventured into the town itself.

So why choose it for a pub trip? Well, it’s easily accessible by train from Stockport, and indeed many other parts of the country, it’s always interesting to visit a town that I have never even set foot in before, and it has a collection of unselfconscious, unspoilt-by-progress pubs that ended up providing a very enjoyable day out.

The train journey from Stockport takes about an hour and a half, changing at Stafford, and today everything ran to time on a beautiful sunny Autumn day. Approaching Atherstone, you see the slightly sinister-looking landmark tower of the Victorian mansion Merevale Hall, situated on a spur of the hills southwest of the town.

Our meeting place and first stop was the King’s Head, located round the back of the station on a stub of the former A5, accessed by a remarkably low bridge under the mainline railway with a headroom of only 6’3”, which might trouble some taller humans. This is a chalet-style 20th century pub now mainly concentrating on food, but with a pleasant interior and plenty of comfortable seating. The sole cask beer was Taylor’s Landlord, which was in pretty good nick.

From here, there was a very pleasant ten-minute walk up five locks of the Coventry Canal, offering a surprisingly bucolic location given how close it is to the town centre. Our next pub stop was the Maid of the Mill, located next to a derelict factory building situated by the canal bridge. Outwardly, it has an unassuming two-bay frontage, but inside is surprisingly spacious, with two areas of comfortable seating on either side of the central door, and a section with a pool table extending to the rear. Cask ales were Bass, Old Speckled Hen and Abbot Ale. Most of us plumped for the Bass, which was good, although not quite scaling the heights. The pub had a sign instructing customers not to bring in products from the nearby chip shop. We met an 86-year-old regular enjoying his pint of Bass with whisky chaser whom a couple of the party had encountered on previous visits.

Heading north, we returned to Long Street, the former course of the A5, which runs ruler-straight through the centre of the town. The heavy traffic must have been a great annoyance to the townspeople before the bypass was constructed. A short walk east brought us to the White Horse, our scheduled lunch stop. This has a fairly unassuming frontage, but in fact goes a long way back, with a conventional pub-type area at the front and an extended dining section at the rear. Cask beers were Bass, Butty Bach and Oakham Citra. Again most chose the Bass, which was good but not outstanding (probably NBSS 3 on the CAMRA scoring system).

There is an extensive and varied menu of pub food, and it is one of the few places in the town catering for diners. However, it has to be said that the service was distinctly slow, taking around half an hour between placing orders and the dishes actually appearing. I ordered a lamb kofta on flatbread, where I was told they would have to substitute naan bread, which turned out to be overcooked and rock-hard. Those who opted for fish and chips or fishcakes seemed to be better served.

The delays with the food meant we were maybe half an hour behind schedule as we moved on the next pub, the Old Swan, the furthest east along Long Street we would go today. This is a striking 16th-century half-timbered building, probably the oldest pub in town, with an unspoilt interior that merits a two-star entry on CAMRA’s National Inventory (photo from the CAMRA website). Apparently it was remodelled in 1962, but scarcely changed since then, comprising a long front bar, a small separate snug to the right and a cosy lounge at the rear with extensive bench seating.

We found a congenial spot in the lounge. It’s a Marston’s tied house, and the cask ales available were Pedigree and Banks’s (Amber) Bitter. The barmaid warned that Pedigree was about at the end of the barrel, and so it proved, although it was willingly changed for Banks’s. Now brewed at Burton and reduced to 3.4% ABV this, while pleasant enough, is sadly now a shadow of its former self.

To be continued…

Settle down now

Over the years, I have often praised Wetherspoon’s business success in building an empire of large, thriving pubs from scratch in the face of an overall declining market. Earlier this year, I described how they had turned the existing business model of the industry on its head to be able to consistently deliver both food and drink at a much lower price point. I would largely agree with Cooking Lager’s comments about how the Wetherspoon’s App revolutionises the pub ordering process. And I will happily admit to using Spoon’s once or twice a month to take advantage of their food menu which, while not necessarily of gourmet quality, is unmatched by any competitors in its low prices and breadth of choice.

But please do not assume that this makes me a kind of uncritical fan of the company, as some people are. And, let me say it bluntly, in general I really don’t find Wetherspoon’s pubs congenial places to go for a drink.

Some years ago, I remember one member of the local CAMRA branch saying “I really don’t care what the pub’s like, so long as the beer is good.” But I have to say my attitude is pretty much the opposite. Obviously I don’t actively want to drink poor beer, but my priority when choosing somewhere to drink is a congenial environment. Maybe it is something of an autistic spectrum thing, but I would say I am much more sensitive than most to the physical characteristics of pubs.

I’ve been drinking legally for forty-eight years, and during that time I must have tried thousands of different beers. That’s more than enough to have worked out what I like and what I don’t. While I am interested in tasting beers like the new Boddingtons that are likely to become a permanent part of the landscape, or seasonal brews from local family brewers, my enthusiasm for tasting beers that I have never heard of before and am never likely to encounter again is pretty much zero. If you discount the Spartan industrial chic taproom kind of establishment, you really don’t tend to find uncongenial pubs with good beer. Broadly speaking, nice beer is found in nice pubs.

The key thing that I’m looking for is a sense of cosiness and enclosure. I’m not sure which pub the photo above is of – I believe it’s somewhere in the Welsh Marches – but that’s my kind of pub interior. Anywhere with tables and chairs in the middle of the room well away from the walls is a bit too wide-open for me, and I certainly don’t feel at home sitting there.

The best form of pub seating is wall benches, and my favoured spot is one where there is natural light from a window and I have a view of the bar or the door of the room. If there is loose seating, it should be arranged with the tables parallel to the wall rather than at right angles so you are looking into the centre of the room. Round tables are better than rectangular ones, especially with loose seating. Long tables that seat more than two at each side are a very bad idea. High-level posing tables are a complete no-no. Piped music is tolerable so long as it’s not too loud, but TV sport with the sound up is seriously offputting. Music can play in the background, but any TV with sound demands attention.

Fortunately, two of my nearby pubs, the Nursery in Heaton Norris and the Griffin in Heaton Mersey, tick most of those boxes, but unfortunately both are cursed with intrusive TV sport. I’ve often praised the quiet, cosy, comfortable environment of Samuel Smith’s pubs. All of those I regularly visit offer cask beer, but even if they didn’t I’d still enjoy going there.

But, sadly Wetherspoon’s, despite their low prices and lack of piped music, offer none of this. The typical Spoons branch has wide open spaces filled with a variety of loose furniture and posing tables. The picture above of the Palladium in Llandudno perfectly illustrates this – an impressive interior filled with cheap, disposable furniture. I might go in there for a meal, but I wouldn’t remotely feel at home. I’ve described such places in the past as being like a works canteen in a cathedral.

Some Wetherspoon’s are exceptions to this rule. For example, looking at my local ones, the Gateway in Didsbury has a congenial rear room with bench seating along one side, and another couple of corners of bench seating. The Kingfisher in Poynton has a raised area along the front that is only two tables deep and offers an element of seclusion from the rest of the pub. Both also have abundant natural light. Both, though, are conversions from pre-existing pubs. In contrast, the Calvert’s Court in Stockport, a former furniture shop, is basically just one long rectangular box.

So, while Spoons are a successful business and offer temptingly low prices, for me they really aren’t remotely appealing places just to go for a drink.

Only bad pubs close

The Waggon & Horses, a large Greene King-owned dining pub located in Handforth, just south of the Stockport boundary, has recently closed its doors for the last time. It is reported that the site will be redeveloped as an Aldi supermarket. Originally owned by Greenalls, it was a large, rather plain-looking 1930s roadhouse-type pub that has for as long as I can remember operated with a food-led format. Indeed, despite having lived in the Stockport area for forty years, I have never been in it, and now I never will.

Some may say that this was no great loss, but every pub that closes is another chip off the edifice of the pub trade. Inevitably it drew a response from certain quarters of “well, only bad pubs close”. Possibly it might have lasted longer if it had been run in a different way, but would that have simply drawn trade from other pubs as opposed to increasing it in total? And this comment, which you often hear, is one of the most unhelpful and misleading things that can be said about the decline of pubs.

Since their heyday in the late 70s, not far short of half the pubs in Britain have closed. Beer sales in pubs have fallen by more than two-thirds. I have discussed at length on this blog the various reasons for this – a toxic combination of legislation, changes in social attitudes to alcohol, demographic shifts and changes in patterns of economic activity. It has been driven by a general decline in the demand for what pubs have to offer, and to construct a narrative that, if pubs had been run better or diffeently, most of this could have been avoided, completely bursts the bounds of credibility. Indeed, on average, pubs now are considerably better run than they were in 1975, when there was a substantial bottom end of really dreadful establishments.

At a micro level, it does have some relevance. Take a village with two pubs, but where the overall level of demand has fallen such that there is only now the demand for one. Almost by definition, the less appealing and less well run of the two, let us call it Pub B, will be the one that closes. But that doesn’t mean that the reason the village now only has one pub is that Pub B was a bad pub, just that it was not quite as good as Pub A. Over the years, many well-run pubs have closed for reasons totally beyond their control, such as urban redevelopment, closure of local businesses, demographic changes in their area, or new road construction leaving them on an isolated backwater.

You have to wonder why people are so keen to espouse this argument. Some, obviously, are just a bit dim and unable to see the wood for the trees. But others seem to latch on to it because they are unwilling to confront the wider socio-economic reasons for the decline of the pub trade, so it acts as a comfort blanket. You see some “beer communicators” pointing to niche businesses doing well in favourable locations and saying “see, they can do it, so why can’t others?” But somehow I don’t think becoming a trendy craft bar would have saved the Waggon & Horses.

As an aside, there is a similar conflation of the specific and the general in the oft-heard mantra that “bad roads don’t cause crashes, bad drivers do.” In a sense, this is true, as most crashes (apart from those caused by mechanical failure) result from driver error of some kind. But it is profoundly unhelpful and counter-productive in terms of improving road safety.

Since the early 1960s, the number of fatalities on Britain’s roads has fallen by more than 75%, even though the number of cars on the road has vastly increased. But very little of this is due to improvements in driving standards, which often, from observation, seem to be pretty poor. Rather it is the result of a combination of improved medical care, better primary and secondary safety of vehicles, MoT testing, stricter enforcement of dangerous behaviours and, significantly, improvements in the design and layout of roads.

A perfect example of this is motorway crash barriers. It may shock younger readers to learn that, in the early days of motorways in the 1960s, there were no central reservation crash barriers. And, unsurprisingly, there were a number of serious accidents caused by vehicles, usually heavy lorries, crossing over into the opposite carriageway.

So what was the best way of dealing with this problem? Public education campaigns? Imposing severe penalties on drivers responsible for crossover accidents? No, it was installing crash barriers, so the accidents could not happen in the first place. There was no improvement in driving standards, but safety was greatly enhanced. Bad roads may not per se cause crashes, but better roads certainly help prevent them.

Smoking out freedom

I recently saw this interesting post on X/Twitter about how smoking bans are a touchstone for a society’s general attitude to freedom. I won’t make any further comment beyond saying that they are an examplar of the dictum of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein that “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”

I have a running theory that a country’s attitude towards smoking tobacco tells you whether or not it has succumbed to the liberal technocratic project.

Smoking is one of those things that the data-driven managerial consensus - the same one that produced The Science™ as an infallible moral authority - has pulled out all the stops to not just discourage but eliminate all together.

It all happened very quickly. The wholesale rejection of smoking is now so entrenched in our cultural ether that it is very much taken as the only true Enlightened position.

What’s astounding is how quickly it happened - seemingly in a single generation. It was a multi-pronged whole-of-society approach involving a very strategic shaming campaign (those odious cigarette pack labels showing deformities) and every other policy lever in the governance toolbox.

The fact that France of all nations, just this summer, took the extraordinary step of banning smoking in outdoor public spaces including parks and beaches, says everything.

First they shame you, then they tax the shit out of tobacco products, and then they regulate where you can smoke. And that space eventually starts to shrink - from just some outdoor places, to now “just” this corner where we tell you (in Singapore they set up cones around which you can smoke like an undignified crack addict but you can’t stray beyond the painted box on the floor, and if you do, you get yelled at like a child that colored outside of the lines), and then someday, to nowhere at all.

I now consider only the countries which have a laissez-faire approach to smokers the only “real” ones left. It’s a good proxy for the embrace of genuine romanticism in an age of technocratic management. This isn’t just plaguing liberal democracies by the way - even places like the UAE and China are increasingly shrinking spaces where you can light up a cigar or cigarette.

It’s why I love some parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia so much. They still feel like real places - not Disneyland versions where everything is micromanaged. They are still wild and free, unmolested by the managerial revolution.

Limiting the pub

Scarcely a week goes by without the present government announcing a policy to antagonise yet another group in society. They have now put forward a set of proposals to improve road safety that include the reduction of the drink-driving limit from 35 μg to 22 μg, the equivalent of 80 mg to 50 mg in “old money”. This had originally been proposed by the Blair government elected in 1997, but for whatever reason was never proceeded with.

The reason put forward for this is obviously to improve safety. And, as Christopher Snowdon writes, we have an example from a neighbouring jurisdiction of exactly what difference it is likely to make.

Fortunately, this is a question that can be answered with empirical evidence. In 2014, Scotland lowered the limit to 50mg of alcohol. What happened next has been evaluated in three peer-reviewed studies, one written by public health academics and two written by economists. They all found that lowering the limit had no impact on the number of road accidents, casualties or fatalities in Scotland. The most rigorous of these studies, published in the Journal of Health Economics, concluded that the lower limit “had no effect on road traffic accidents, even in circumstances that are more likely to be associated with greater alcohol consumption (such as weekends, multiple vehicle crashes, urban areas, and local authorities with a large concentration of premises) or among individuals who may experience heavier drinking (such as young adults and men).”

Whatever the safety implications, such a policy would inevitably have a significant effect on the pub trade. While those who inhabit an urban bubble may be reluctant to acknowledge it, nationwide there are a very large number of pubs to which a majority of customers travel by car. There will be several thousand where that accounts for over 90% of their trade.

Every week, hundreds of thousands of people drive to pubs and consume alcohol within the legal limit. Yes. a few customers do break the law, as people still will with a lower limit. But, given the severe potential consequences, the vast majority of drivers abide by it, and indeed generally leave a wide margin below it. So, with a lower limit, the overwhelming majority will modify their behaviour, by drinking less or nothing, or simply not visiting at all. Even those who continue to visit may do so less often. So the overall effect on trade will only point in one direction.

Many pub visits, especially to those in out-of-down locations, are combined with another objective, such as a shopping trip, visiting a tourist attraction, attending a sports fixture or seeing a film or play. If people find it convenient to travel by car for these purposes, then it is likely to be the call into the pub that gets the chop.

Urban areas would not be immune either. Within any urban area outside of large town and city centres, the range of pubs that can be conveniently reached by public transport is much less than those that can be accessed by car. People will be making multi-purpose journeys for the same reasons listed above. It is a matter of observable fact that many people visit pubs by car in urban areas.

Outside London, over 70% of workers commute by car. Lowering the limit will also reduce the amount someone can drink in the evening without running the risk of falling foul of the law the following morning, and so may well act as a dampener on drinking “on a school night” even in pubs nobody actually drives to.

Descriptions in the Good Beer Guide often refer piously to pubs being “popular with walkers and cyclists”. But there will be relatively few pubs where that trade is more than the icing on the cake, or extends beyond a few sunny summer weekends. To imagine that walkers and cyclists can sustain rural pubs is wishful thinking. Plus many of those walkers and cyclists will actually have travelled by car to reach rural areas. There is one rural pub listed in the current Guide in a remote location in rural Staffordshire miles away from any public transport. Yet it does not open before 7 pm on any day of the week. Somehow I can’t see it attracting many walkers and cyclists on a rainy Tuesday night in November.

No doubt the same useful idiots who claimed that the smoking ban would leave pubs largely unscathed will say the same about the cutting the drink-drive limit. And they will be equally wrong. But there is a parallel with the smoking ban in that the effect is likely to be insidious and drawn-out rather than immediate.

Both policies acted to accelerate an existing trend. Smoking rates were already in steep decline, and it is noticeable that younger age groups are markedly less willing to drive to pubs and drink within the legal limit than over-50s. This doesn’t mean they find another way of getting there, it means that they just don’t go, and this has been a largely unheralded contributor to the decline of pubs over the past couple of decades,

The situation of every pub will vary depending on its combination of the proportion of car-borne trade and wet sales. Without naming names, there are some pubs that it is very hard to imagine will still be viable after a limit cut. But most will think “well, it’s not good, but it doesn’t put us out of business overnight.” They will try various initiatives such as upping their food offer, putting on special events and appealing more to locals. But, with the overall level of trade being down, inevitably the weaker and less attractive pubs will start going to the wall more quickly than they would have done otherwise. However, it will be a process drawn out over several years rather than happening within a matter of months.

Going into food isn’t going to be a panacea either. There’s plenty of evidence that the pub food market is pretty saturated, so attempts by previously wet-dominated pubs to expand into food may not meet with success. In recent years, several high-profile dining pubs have closed, one of the latest being the prominent Waggon & Horses at Handforth just south of the Stockport boundary, which is reportedly due to close in the coming months. Existing destination dining pubs, while they may be protected to some extent from the impact, may still experience some reduction in trade as people feel less inclined to drive out to them for a meal.

This policy is put forward as a means of improving safety. But the case for that must be made, rather than being accepted as a given. And it is delusional to imagine that it would not have a significant negative effect on the pub trade. Indeed, while it may not be the explicit intention, rather like the smoking ban it is hard to avoid the conclusion that its impact in practice would be much more to undermine pubs than improve health and safety.

If you don’t open it, they can’t come

The licensee of the Wonston Arms in Hampshire, a former CAMRA National Pub of the Year, recently had an article published in the Daily Telegraph entitled The village pub I run is being taxed to death. This certainly struck a chord with many, as did his post on X about his pub having precisely zero customers at 5 pm on a sunny Saturday.

However, once you delve into it a little deeper, you find that this pub is open for the grand total of 27½ hours a week and, on the six days when it is open, has five different patterns of hours. This suggests that he perhaps isn’t trying as hard as he could to attract customers. And drinkers might well have shunned the place at 5 pm on Saturday knowing that he was going to be shutting up shop a couple of hours later.

I know times are hard, and the circumstances of every pub are different. But, as I wrote back in 2022, opening short and erratic hours is a sure-fire way of deterring potential customers. If they call in to your pub and find it closed when they might have expected it to be open, they might well go elsewhere next time. You don’t know who your potential customers are, or when they are likely to want to visit you. This kind of thing is only going to work if you are basically appealing to a clique of cronies whose habits you are familiar with. And the fact that you’re never sure when they’re going to be open must be a negative factor for the pub trade in general.

As Rory Sutherland wrote in the linked article, “It cannot escape the notice of café operators that one reason why both chains and immigrant-run businesses do well is that they are open consistently and open late.” This is discussing cafés, but it applies just as much to pubs and bars. If you’re not opening even for the approximation of a normal working week, and adopting a reasonably consistent pattern, you’re not really making much of an effort.

One of the key reasons for the success of Wetherspoon’s and other chains is that customers have the confidence to go there knowing they will be open. And the type of businesses we’re talking about here are not ones with large brigades of expensive staff, but mom-and-pop operations. If corner shops are struggling, they open longer hours, but micropubs are more likely to curtail their hours and grumble that life isn’t fair.

Nobody should imagine that the cavalry are going to appear over the hill, either. Various industry bodies have launched a campaign to persuade the government to reverse last year’s increases in buisess costs, particular Employer’s National Insurance, and introduce a lower rate of the VAT for hospitality. All well and good, but in the context of a £50 billion “black hole” in the public finances having been recently revealed, the chances of this being acted upon must be very small, to put it mildly.

It’s certainly a harsh climate out there, and many good businesses are struggling. But it’s not going to completely wipe out the hospitality industry, or anything like it, and the businesses who come through on the other side will be those who roll up their sleeves and demonstrate enterprise and innovation, not those who just put up the shutters and moan.

On a brighter note, the well-known Crown Inn, situated under the viaduct in Stockport, is reopening this Friday, having been taken over by the licensees of the Petersgate Tap. It’s good to see someone showing a declaration of faith in the future of the industry. And their planned opening hours are a model of being both long and consistent.

Fresh cream

Budweiser Brewing Group (the new name for AB InBev in the UK) have announced that they are relaunching Boddingtons Cask Bitter, which was last produced in 2012. It will be brewed and distributed in the North-West by Middleton-based J. W. Lees. It will be brewed at 4% to a new recipe.

Brian Perkins, president of AB InBev in Western Europe, added: “We are excited to relaunch Boddingtons Cask Ale in partnership with JW Lees, combining one of the UK’s most iconic beer brands with one of its most respected brewers. We see real growth potential for Boddingtons in the UK on-trade, and this is a great example of how strategic partnerships can unlock value for both businesses and beer lovers alike.”

Following on from their recent investment in Draught Bass, another brand owned by BBG, this represents a significant vote of confidence in the cask ale sector from the major international brewers. However, any revival of a historic brand is very much dependent on people’s memories of the original, and in the case of Boddingtons this falls into two distinct strands.

In 1969, the original Boddingtons company successfully fought off a high-profile hostile takeover bid from Allied Breweries. In retrospect, this can be seen as a precursor to the rejection of the “big is beautiful” approach to brewing that manifested itself in the 1970s, spearheaded by CAMRA. Boddingtons were one of the poster boys of the original real ale movement. They had 270 pubs spread across the North-West, so it wasn’t particularly hard to find, and they had the badge of honour of every one selling real ale. Their Bitter, described in the 1978 Good Beer Guide as “straw-coloured and exceptionally bitter”, gained legendary status. Even though it had a modest Original Gravity of 1035, it was very thoroughly attenuated, which was believed to result in an alcohol content of about 3.9% ABV, giving it a bit of extra kick and contributing towards its distinctively dry character.

However, around the turn of the decade, something seemed to happen to it. Opinions vary as to whether it was a yeast infection, or a change in the hop supply, or whatever, but Boddingtons Bitter somehow lost its distinctive character. The brewery insisted that nothing had chanhed, but it just wasn’t the same. Growing up in North Cheshire, it was a beer I rarely came across, but when I moved to Stockport in 1985 I found myself wondering what all the fuss was about. It was still a decent beer, but it certainly wasn’t outstanding in comparison to its local competitors, and neither did it qualify as being exceptionally bitter. Anyone who remembers it from how it was in the glory days of the 1970s will now be of pensionable age.

I don’t propose to go in to detail on the convoluted history of the Boddingtons company, but in 1989 the Strangeways brewery and associated brands were sold to Whitbread, leaving it as a pure pubco, which eventually fell into the questionable hands of Greenalls. At first, Whitbread were primarily interested in the cask brand, which gained national distribution and high-prfile advertising using the “Cream of Manchester” slogan. There were some memorable TV ads featuring first Anna Chancellor and then Melanie Sykes.

However, in the 1990s attention increasingly shifted to the then innovative nitrokeg smooth version and the “widget” canned beer, with cask taking a back seat. As Whitbread exited pub retailing, and the wave of enthusiasm for nitrokeg dissipated, the Strangeways brewery was closed and Boddingtons faded as a brand. Production of the cask version eventually ended up with Hydes in Moss Side, and the alcoholic strength was upped to 4.1%, which took it into a different strength category and alienated many long-standing drinkers. My memory of it in this era was was it was a sweetish, rather gloopy beer that bore little resemblance to the original.

Eventually it was put out of its misery in 2012, although the nitrokeg version, brewed at Magor in South Wales lingered on. Along with the other leading smooth bitters, it has now been reduced to 3.4% to take advantage of duty savings, and has been reduced to the status of something of a “zombie brand” that crops up in downmarket keg pubs and social clubs and appeals to a dwindling group of older drinkers.

As I said above, the decision to relaunch Boddingtons Cask represents a major investment in the cask sector by BBG. Broadly speaking, this is welcome news, although no doubt it will cause some conflict amongst those who at the same time bewail the decline in cask’s market share but denigrate any attempt by the international brewers to involve themselves in it. To succeed, cask needs strong, recognisable brands.

I will certainly be keen to try it when it appears in December, and if done well it’s likely to be the kind of beer I like. However, it will need to be a good product in its own right rather than depending on fading memories of former glories.

The press release also suggests that Lees are to some extent getting into bed with BBG rather than simply acting as a contract brewer. As William Lees-Jones says in the press release, “We also look forward to working with Budweiser Brewing Group with their portfolio of market-leading lagers and premium packaged beers in our pubs.” Lees’ own cask beers, while I like them, are often seen as something of an acquired taste, and you have to wonder whether this will lead to Boddingtons become the leading bitter in their own pubs. And where will it leave their own MPA (“Manchester Pale Ale”), which was deliberately created to be reminiscent of classic Boddingtons?

Tuck in for Britain

In an attempt to combat “food poverty”, the government have announced a pilot scheme to set up state-subsidised restaurants offering cheap and nutritious food, with the first examples set to open in Nottingham and Dundee.

This conjures up memories of the British Restaurants that were set up during World War 2 to offer workers cheap and appetising lunchtime meals that were outside the scope of food rationing. These proved very popular and at their peak there were over 2,000 examples. They are well and sympathetically described in the linked article. However, with post-war prosperity their appeal faded and the last examples had disappeared by 1960.

In the current environment, there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of cafés serving cheap and cheerful sit-down meals, plus there is always the option of Wetherspoon’s who offer a variety of straightforward dishes at very affordable prices. So it’s hard to see that many people are really excluded from eating outside the house because it’s beyond their means.

However, the powers-that-be probably don’t think commercial catering outlets achieve appropriate nutritional standards. So expect an absence of fried food and processed meat, and a strong emphasis on vegetarian and vegan options. We may even see a return of that wartime delicacy Woolton Pie. Whether this approach will win favour with the target market is of course open to question.

Add to this the lack of commercial acumen typically displayed by local authorities, and a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to customer service, and these subsidised diners may end up having very little appeal. Their only selling point is likely to be dirt-cheap prices. Although if, against predictions, they do prove successful, private sector rivals may well complain that they are victims of unfair competition.

The wartime British Restaurants were aimed at working people, but it appears that their modern equivalents are intended for those living on benefits and unable to work due to sickness or unemployment. Given this, might it be a better use of public money to provide people with support to encourage them to cook their own meals from fresh ingredients, which would save them even more money?

At the end of the day, this scheme will probably not amount to very much. But it is another example of well-meaning but patronising nannying that seeks to discourage self-reliance and promote dependence on the State.

The long retreat of cask

The Morning Advertiser recently published figures confirming the continued decline of cask beer sales in the UK, which were reflected on by beer writer Phil Mellows:

Once a month I’m privileged to have sight of the official beer sales figures for the UK. When they pop up in my inbox I duck behind the settee and peer at them through my fingers. I’m a cask beer drinker you see – well, about three-quarters of the time – and watching the steady and sometimes not so slow decline of the category is scary.

According to the pub trade’s Morning Advertiser this week, cask ale volumes dropped by more than 7% in the past 12 months on top of year after year of similar falls for as long as anyone can remember. Barely 8% of total beer sales in pubs and bars – also in decline – are now poured from a handpump. I remember when it was twice that and people were worried then.

8% of on-trade beer volumes represents less than a million bulk barrels a year, which is less than the production in the 1970s of one single brewery, Mitchells & Butlers at Cape Hill in Birmingham, most of which comprised the unlamented M&B Brew XI. It could even be true that more Brew XI was drunk in 1975 than the entire cask sector today.

So what has caused this calamitous long-term decline? Everybody of course trotted out their own favourite hobby-horses – the big brewers, the pubcos, the rise of craft keg, CAMRA taking its eye off the ball, the anti-drink lobby – but the reality is that it is due to a combination of factors that have taken effect over a long period of time. I thought I would create an X poll to see what people thought were the most important reasons.

POLL: What is the biggest reason for the decline in cask beer sales?

— Pub Curmudgeon 🌸🍻 (@oldmudgie) June 28, 2025

The winner by a short head was “Old fashioned image”, although it is not clear whether people interpreted this as referring to the beer itself or the people who drink it. Over the past decade or so, cask ale brewers have made major steps to update the image of their beers, and it’s common now to go in a pub where most of the pumps are taken up by what might be described as “modern” cask ales. So I suspect it’s more a case of making judgments about the typical cask ale drinker. I will return later to the subject of quality.

Cost was often mentioned as a factor but, while it’s undoubtedly a major reason for the overall decline in beer drinking in pubs, it doesn’t explain why people have moved away from cask, given that cask in pubs is virtually always significantly cheaper than lager, Guinness or craft kegs.

In the early years of CAMRA, its proposition was very simple, that cask beer, when properly kept, tasted much better than its keg or tank equivalents. This was demonstrably true, and few people had much enthusiasm for the old keg ales. However, the world has moved on, and now there are very few direct keg equivalents to cask ales. Samuel Smiths and Felinfoel are the only brewers I can think of still offering this.

The alternative to cask is now not keg ales, but Guinness and international lager brands, mostly British-brewed. We even now have accounts on X celebrating British pubs praising the availability of Cruzcampo or Staropramen “in the right glass”. More and more people are now repertoire drinkers who will vary their choice of beer depending on the venue and the occasion. They are not dogmatically wedded to one particular category. “I like cask, but I find myself drinking Guinness more and more”, said one person. The challenge for anyone wanting to promote cask is how to encourage people to include it within their overall drinking repertoire. Simply denigrating other beers comes across as snobbish and is a poor tactic to win people over.

Personally I am much less dogmatic about drinking cask than I used to be. I would regard “exploring pubs” as a leisure interest, and if I’m going to a pub because I think it is an interesting place to visit I will pretty much always go for cask if they have it. If it’s poor, then I probably won’t be going back again anyway. The cask selection defines a pub in a way that having Madri and Guinness on the bar doesn’t. However, for what I would describe as “functional” pub visits, whether having a meal or just fancying a pint at a particular place and time, I might well swerve the cask unless I was confident it was going to be good. I described a couple of years ago how I plumped for a Carling rather than a single-pump Ruddles in a pubco pub. So I suppose that makes me a repertoire drinker too.

The point has been made that pub operators are reluctant to stock cask because it’s “too much trouble”. Obviously they are commercial companies and every product has to earn its keep on the bar, but the difficulties of keeping cask are often exaggerated, sometimes by those who are trying to surround it with an aura of mystique. In reality, all it takes is the conscientious application of simple principles. In the 1970s, CAMRA successfully persuaded brewers that it was worth the little extra trouble because it would bring the customers in.

The one category of pub operators for whom it definitely isn’t too much trouble are the family brewers. The vast majority of them stock cask in all or virtually all, their pubs. It is the product that bears their name, and which defines them as a business. I’d say that the tied estates of family brewers are, overall, where cask ale is best presented and best kept.

Most of the people who write about beer and pubs, whether professionally or as amateurs, are cask enthusiasts and, as I wrote a couple of years ago, this inevitably leads them to form a somewhat rose-tinted view of cask quality and availability. With the best will in the world, they’re naturally going to gravitate towards those pubs where cask is enthusiastically promoted and served well, and rarely venture into the “long tail” of other outlets.

There is little recognition of just how poor and inconsistent cask beer is in so many pubs that stock it. There are multiple reasons for this, but the biggest of all is overranging, simply stocking more beers than your turnover can support. My heart sinks whenever I read of some pub offering “a good range of cask ales”. More often than not, it will be a good range of tired, tepid glop. I’ve written about this at length over the years, but it seems to be a blind spot in the industry. A wide choice is perceived as something customers are looking for, and it seems to be a case of waiting for the other chap to blink first in terms of reducing your range, although I have seen some steps in this direction. Outside trusted outlets, ordering cask is a gamble, and losing out a few times will be seriously offputting to anyone for whom it isn’t a default choice.

There is always a tension between obscurity and over-familiarity with cask ranges. Surveys have shown that around 85% of drinkers want to see recognisable beers on the bar. They don’t want every trip to the pub to be a journey of discovery, and if all they see is a row of unfamiliar names, they may well be tempted to choose something else. But, on the other hand, one of cask’s USPs is local or regional provenance. It’s not meant to be uniform across the country, so when you find Taylor’s Landlord in Somerset or Fuller’s London Pride in Cumberland it comes across as something of a disappointment. A balance has to be struck between the two.

A factor working in cask’s favour is that it is proving very resilient. While sales volumes have fallen, this has not been matched by its wholesale removal from pubs. By and large, the keg-only pubs are still either trendy urban bars or working-class locals. It is rare to come across a pub that you really would expect to serve cask but doesn’t. It is still seen as an important part of the mix to attract casual customers, and this provides an element of optimism for the future. It also has to be remembered that Britain’s biggest pub operator in volume terms, Wetherspoon’s, is also a strong supporter of cask and indeed sells around one in ten pints produced.

Seven years ago, I wrote about The Cask Crisis, and much of what I said then still applies. The beer and pub market, compared with most other consumer markets, is relatively fragmented, and the ability of any single company to influence customers’ behaviour is limited. The long-term decline of cask is due to changes in customer preference, not some sinister conspiracy. There are no simple solutions, but in many outlets, cask continues to thrive and enjoys a loyal following. The best way to promote it is not through hand-wringing, but by highlighting the breweries who produce it and the pubs where it is served well and with enthusiasm.

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.