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 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.

Early to bed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scarcity bites

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

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

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

Downfall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Priced out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part of the Union

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reinventing the pub

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mid-strength midwittery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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