Toying with expectations

Just over three months ago, I wrote about the government’s painfully slow roadmap to unlocking the economy, and in particular the hospitality trade. Some interpreted this as simply a moan about the glacial pace, and indeed to some extent it was. The mantra of “data not dates” seemed to only apply in one direction and, despite a very swift fall in infections and deaths, no opportunity was taken to bring the key milestones forward. However, I also said that, at the end of the day, what people will remember is whether we reached the destination in the end, rather than how quickly we got there.

If it does turn out that the impact of the virus has by then become trivial, and we are able to enjoy the second half of the year to the full, then we may look back on the preceding fifteen months as just a bad dream. A successful and prosperous reopening of the economy will erase a lot of bad memories. But only time will tell.

The first two major steps – allowing outdoor drinking on 12 April, and then indoor drinking under tight restrictions on 17 May – both happened according to plan. There were reports that some ministers had wanted to delay indoor opening due to the threat from the “Indian variant”, but this never actually seemed likely to come to fruition. But now, three weeks away from the supposed final step of removing all restrictions, things are starting to look much more cloudy. I think I was being quite prescient when I said:

It’s not difficult to imagine the desiccated sociopaths of SAGE having kittens and decreeing that the Tier 1 restrictions need to continue throughout the summer. I’m not making a prediction, and I sincerely hope it doesn’t happen, but don’t say you haven’t been warned!...

Of course the Indian variant is something that shouldn’t be casually dismissed, but so far its impact seems to be fairly localised and there’s no evidence it’s getting out of control. Covid-related deaths continue to average less than ten a day across the whole of the UK, and the increase in reported cases is mainly due to a programme of surge testing in affected areas. Most of those testing positive are relatively young and thus at little or no risk. There are certainly no grounds for using it as an excuse to abandon the whole unlocking plan.

Yet we are seeing all kinds of conflicting reports coming out, which are toying with people’s expectations and leaving us none the wiser as to what is actually likely to happen. On the one hand, we are told that everything is still going according to plan:

🚨 | BREAKING: SAGE Source: Most likely outcome is June 21 still goes ahead

Via @theipaper

— Politics For All (@PoliticsForAlI) May 28, 2021

But, on the other hand, some scientists are calling for a two-month delay:

🚨 | NEW: Independent SAGE’s Christina Pagel says we should delay the June 21 freedom date by just two months as “it’s not that long to wait”

Via @BBCr4today

— Politics For All (@PoliticsForAlI) May 28, 2021

It may not be that long to wait for her, but for many pubs it would mean missing out on full trading for a second summer season in a row. And remember that “Independent SAGE” was the body set up because they felt that Chris Whitty and company were being too lax on Covid restrictions!

Today it has been reported that the government are considering diluting the plans by relaxing some of the social distancing guidelines, but maintaining the requirement for masks. Surely, though, the mask mandate is a key plank of the whole apparatus of restrictions, and no thought seems to have been given as to how this would impact on hospitality. Ending capacity limits means allowing perpendicular drinking, but that is completely incompatible with expecting people to wear masks.

Some pubs have reported fairly healthy trading in the first two weeks of indoor opening, but many others are finding things desperately quiet. Look at these two accounts from a pair of award-winning regular Good Beer Guide entries in the North-West:

Our hourly average was £23.87 today. Totally inundated with customers!🙄

— TheStarGlossop (@StarInnGlossop) May 25, 2021

Many thousands of pubs, especially wet-led ones, are completely unviable while these restrictions remain in force.

Nothing has yet been decided, so all is still to play for. But there is now a serious risk that the 21 June target will slip. This isn’t just a case of whether punters can have a drink at the bar – it is whether many people will have a viable business at all, which must be a hugely stressful situation, and makes forward planning impossible. If they lose another summer season, many pubs are unlikely to make it to Christmas. Over the past fifteen months, hospitality has consistently been treated as a scapegoat and been about the last sector to be unlocked, despite no evidence of playing a disproportionate role in spreading infection. Nothing seems to have changed. And my hoped-for birthday pub crawl of Stockport on 24 June is looking in serious doubt.

Unless there was clear evidence of infections rocketing, a delay would involve a major loss of credibility and political face on the part of the government, and hopefully this will lead them to draw back from the brink. The whole point of setting a leisurely timetable was that the public could have confidence it would be achieved.

Reservations about reservations

Although pubs have now been allowed to reopen indoors, the requirements for table service and continued social distancing mean that they are unable to operate at anything like full capacity. To make the best use of that capacity, many have introduced advance booking systems where they didn’t before. And this has led to the inevitable complaints about customers making bookings and failing to turn up.

If you don’t contact the pub in advance to cancel, this is of course pretty thoughtless and inconsiderate behaviour. I’m not defending it for a minute. However, if it really does cause a serious problem for pubs, then surely the remedy is in their own hands, to require people making bookings to give a deposit in advance which is not refundable unless they give sufficient notice of cancellation.

Many will reply that it isn’t quite that simple, and undoubtedly it isn’t a one size fits all situation. There are two different scenarios – making bookings for food and just for drinks. Booking for meals is well-established and any pubs operating it will be used to a certain level of no-shows.

Booking for drinks service, on the other hand, is more of a novelty, though, and something pubs may feel is forced on them by reduced capacity. I can’t say I’m a fan of the idea at all, but it’s maybe understandable that a pub feels they would prefer to serve a free-spending party of six rather than a solitary codger occupying a whole table while nursing a pint. However, people may feel less compunction about cancelling a drinks booking rather than one for a meal, and there have been stories of people making multiple bookings and choosing the one they fancy most on the night.

Pubs may feel that requiring a deposit is going to put customers off making bookings in the first place. That may be true to a limited extent, but if people are deterred by it, it suggests they weren’t entirely committed to their plans in the first place and thus more likely not to turn up. Pubs have to make a judgment of balancing one factor against the other.

And, in general, if you are accepting walk-in customers as well as bookings, a cancellation doesn’t impact all that much on your earning capacity if the space can be taken by other customers. It is a more serious issue if you are operating on an advance booking only basis. As a general rule, unless you’re supremely confident about filling all your space, operating a mix of bookings and walk-ins will minimise the downside risk.

So I return to my original point, that customers cancelling bookings is an unfortunate fact of life, and if you feel it causes a serious problem for your business the solution is a simple one of requiring deposits rather than just moaning about it on social media. And Wetherspoon’s seem to get along fine without taking any advance bookings at all.

Edit 21/05/2021: It has been pointed out on Twitter that the EPOS systems used for card payments in many pubs may not accept remote payments. That may well be true, but I’ve been making card payments over the phone for thirty years, so surely it isn’t an insurmountable problem for pubs to do it if it’s important to them.

Maskerade

As of today, pubs in England will once more be able to welcome customers indoors, although they will still have to operate table service. Pubgoers will also be legally obliged to wear a face mask on entering a pub until they are seated (unless exempt) and also if they get up to visit the toilet or go outside for a smoke. It is very hard to see how the act of putting a mask on as you walk in from the street and taking it off again thirty seconds later is going to make any difference to the spread of the virus. Are we expected to believe that it freely circulates at head height, but not at shoulder level when people are seated?

Even if you accept the rationale for masks, the way people are expected to use them in pubs goes completely against the official guidelines. “Avoid taking it off and putting it on again in quick succession,” they state. But even if you only make one toilet visit during your stay in the pub, you will still go through that sequence three times. It will be considerably more if you’re settled in for a long session.

I’ve seen teenagers in the street ask if any of the group has a mask on them so they can borrow it to go in the chippy, and it’s not hard to imagine the drinking school of codgers in Spoons dong the same for a fag break. What is more, the guidelines recommend that you should wash your hands before putting on a mask. But, in a pub, you can’t do that without visiting the toilet, for which you will need a mask. The whole way they will be used in pubs is completely at variance with the pious hopes of the official advice.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, rather than having any impact on disease control, this charade is basically a means of psychological manipulation intended to perpetuate a sense of crisis. Hopefully in practice many pubs will end up turning a blind eye to it, as plenty of shops already do, although obviously they won’t want to advertise the fact for fear of attracting a wave of censorious finger-pointing.

However, given that it has been reported that the legal requirement for masks will come to an end on 21 June, in line with the roadmap, it will be interesting to see how committed pubs remain to enforcing it, and customers to adhering to it, as the deadline approaches. This of course has now been cast into doubt by the Indian variant, but it remains to be seen whether this will actually throw the timetable off track. No doubt I will return to that subject in the coming weeks.

How would you like it, then?

Al fresco drinking gets off to a storming start in Scotland

Around the time of the implementation of the smoking ban, the question was often asked of drinkers who supported it whether they would be happy go outside to have a pint. The response was usually that it was a ludicrous and implausible scenario, and that the two things are entirely different.

However, that is exactly the situation that currently prevails in Scotland. You can go into a pub to eat a meal or have a soft drink (at least until 8 pm), but if you want an alcoholic drink you have to step outside. The same applied for a short period in Wales last year, and was mooted for England too.

Yes, it is only temporary, but it is a real-life example of consuming alcohol being seen as an undesirable activity. In a pub. Let that sink in.

Local Brew

People were recently asked on Twitter to name some of their favourite beer books, and one in my collection for which I’ve always had a high regard is Local Brew – Traditional Breweries and their Ales by Mike Dunn, published in 1986 by Robert Hale. It’s a small-format hardback with a traditional layout of pages of text dotted with line drawings and interspersed with sections of glossy black and white photographs.

Mike Dunn had previously been responsible for the Penguin Guide to Real Draught Beer, published in 1979, which I also still have on my shelves. The main part of this was descriptions of all the breweries then producing real ale, and in Local Brew he expands on this to concentrate on the independent family brewers. At this time, microbreweries were in their infancy and, while the “Big Six” national brewers did produce some well-regarded real ales, most of the beers that were enjoyed and celebrated by CAMRA members came from the family brewers.

After introductory chapters outlining the historical development of the brewing industry, the wave of mergers and takeovers in the post-war period, and the revival of interest in small-scale local production, the book goes on to provide a pen portrait of each of the surviving breweries spread over two or three pages. The author describes its historical origins, takeovers of other firms along the way, the current ownership structure, the extent of its tied estate and the various beers produced. The style is crisp and readable and interest never drags.

In total, there are over 90 breweries listed, over half of which are no longer with us today. However, it is important to remember that, while some such as Vaux were undone by family feuds, only one – Matthew Brown – fell victim to a predatory takeover. The author expresses his concerns over the future of breweries such as Hartley’s and Oldham, which were still in operation bu had been acquired by other family brewers, and Border, which at the time of writing was subject to a takeover battle between Marston’s and Burtonwood.

In my home region of North-West England, there are fourteen breweries listed: Boddington’s, Matthew Brown, Burtonwood, Greenall Whitley, Hartley’s, Higson’s, Holt’s, Hyde’s, Jennings, Lees, Mitchell’s, Oldham, Robinson’s, Thwaites. Theakston’s of Carlisle is listed under the owning company based in Masham, Yorkshire, although by that time it had been acquired by Matthew Brown, who themselves were soon to fall into the hands of Scottish & Newcastle. Yates & Jackson of Lancaster, noted for their superb pale bitter, had been a relatively recent loss to Thwaites, with local rivals Mitchell’s moving into their former brewery which was much better laid out than their own cramped premises.

Only seven of those fourteen plants are still in - existence five as independent companies, Jennings as a subsidiary of the Carlsberg-Marston’s joint venture, and Burtonwood in the shadowy world of contract brewing, having disposed of all its tied pubs to Marston’s and no longer producing any beers under its own brand. Border in Wrexham, also now defunct, can also be considered as an honorary member of the North-West breweries, as it was much closer to them than the other four Welsh breweries in South Wales.

Some eyebrows may be raised at the inclusion of Greenall Whitley but, although CAMRA for a while attempted to include them as a member of an expanded “Big Seven”, in reality they always had much more in common with the bigger family brewers like Wolverhampton & Dudley and Greene King, and of course their empire has now disappeared off the face of the earth. They were the biggest minnow in the pond, not the smallest shark.

By today’s flowery standards, the descriptions of the various beers are fairly terse, but give a general idea of what to expect. Robinson’s Best Bitter (now Unicorn) is described as “a magnificent beer, very pale, but full-flavoured and well-hopped”, but Hydes Bitter (now Original) is “a well-balanced if not especially memorable brew” while the long-defunct Oldham Bitter was “a light-coloured ale with an unusual taste – an acquired taste, in fact.”

The author goes to town with Holt’s Bitter, saying that it is “widely regarded as one of Britain’s truly great draught beers, very dry and bitter, pale straw-coloured and bursting with flavour, it shocks the tastebuds of those accustomed to bland, ordinary bitters, but it is well worth the effort of familiarisation.” I first enjoyed an extended acquaintance with it in 1985 and have to say that, while it was certainly much more bitter than it is now, even then I would have described it as mid-brown rather than straw-coloured. He also refers to Holt’s “extremely low prices”, which are another thing of the past.

In the thirty-five years since the publication of the book, a lot of water has passed under the bridge. Over half the family breweries listed have disappeared, and many of those that remain have sold off numerous smaller pubs and concentrated on an affluent dining trade. Finding a proper down-to-earth boozer tied to a family brewer is much rarer than it once was, although they still do exist, especially in the estate of a certain idiosyncratic Yorkshire brewery. It is much less the case now that your progress on a journey through the country would be marked by the changing brewers’ names on the pub signboards. “Ooh, there’s a Devenish pub, we must be in Cornwall”.

A few years ago on this subject, I wrote:

Of course we have gained something through the massive increase in both the number of breweries and beer styles being produced. But we have also lost something valuable in the way the link between beer and place has been eroded through the decline of family brewers and their tied estates. We should treasure the continued existence of quirky, independent companies like Donnington.

While the family brewery sector is much diminished from 1986, we are fortunate that we still have companies like Palmer’s, Hook Norton, Bateman’s and the two tiny Black Country survivors – Batham’s and Holden’s – who enhance the beer landscape through both their distinctive beers and the character of their tied estates, and provide a continued link with the traditions of the past.

There are plenty of copies of Local Brew available on eBay if you want to get hold of one yourself.

Pricking the bubble

This satirical craft beer skit from comedian Alistair Green has been widely circulated recently:

punk squirrel IPA pic.twitter.com/pztt7SNZCM

— alistair green (@mralistairgreen) April 7, 2021

It does pick up on two common themes, that craft brewing can be an opportunity to make a fortune from a big brewery buyout, and that it reflects a kind of midlife crisis neediness. I have to say I found it mildly amusing rather than laugh-out-loud funny, and it did come across as trying a bit too hard.

However, it certainly seems to have raised some defensive hackles within the craft beer community. It’s all been done before, it’s a bit reactionary and gammon-y, and surely craft beer is such a fragile fledgling sector that it doesn’t deserve such ridicule. But this kind of prickly reaction suggests that it has touched a nerve.

Surely satire should be punching up, not punching down, the argument goes. Up to a point, yes – it has always played an important part in challenging the powerful and entitled. But it isn’t exclusively political and, over the years, satire has also had a role in turning the spotlight on the currently fashionable, the humourless, snobbish, self-righteous and self-important, all of which are tendencies that can be detected to a greater or lesser extent within the sphere of craft beer. Maybe the key factor distinguishing satire from simply poking fun is that satire is identifying a moral failing in its targets.

Much criticism of craft brewers revolves around them supposedly being just in it for the money and not practising what they preach. The same charge is often levelled at climate campaigners. But, in both cases, surely the sense of unshakeable moral certainty is equally worthy of satire. Within craft beer there are strong elements of wanting to change the world and stick it to the man, and self-congratulatory mantras such as “beer people are good people” which are frankly inviting ridicule. If it was just a case of a bunch of geeks who liked weird beers but kept themselves to themselves nobody would be bothered. You can’t really satirise bellringers or metal detectorists.

A parallel could be drawn with the Real Ale Twats comic strip that has appeared for many years in Viz comic. However, this is more in the nature of an affectionate lampoon than biting satire, and obviously arises from fairly detailed knowledge of the community it refers to. It generally ends with the titular Twats getting their comeuppance from their misreading of the situation. While the strip only appeared in the present century, it often seemed to reflect the world of twenty years earlier. I can’t remember anyone in CAMRA getting particularly upset about it, and indeed many will recognise aspects of themselves or their friends. But somehow I can’t imagine The Craft Beer Wankers making an appearance any day soon.

On his Seeing the Lizards blog, Matthew Lawrenson used to come up with little satirical takes of fictional characters’ reaction to various items of beer-related news. While these were not to my mind malicious, they could be somewhat cutting, as he had a keen eye for people’s foibles and idiosyncracies. I never recall any outrage from the real life equivalents of Greg Steakbake or Mudgie Mudgington, but some of his craft parodies seemed to get a little too close to home and generate some kickback, leading to him discontinuing that aspect of the blog, although he did revive it to look at various characters’ reaction to last year’s lockdown. And Matthew himself is partial to the odd drop of craft beer.

But I think it’s fair to say that, if anyone takes exception to finding themselves the butt of satire, they probably deserve it.

Gold-plating the lock

On Monday, I wrote about how some local councils were doing their best to put a spanner in the works of pubs reopening their outside areas. Given that this was the first opportunity that pubs had had to trade for at least three and a half months, and that most were doing their best to give customers a warm welcome, I didn’t want to strike a sour note. However, inevitably there were some that did themselves no favours by adding new restrictions of their own.

The Angel in at Corbridge in Northumberland made the national news when they turned away a pensioner because he didn’t have a smartphone onto which he could download their ordering app. To the pub’s credit, they apologised and offered him drinks on the house, and hopefully it has also resulted in them changing their policy, but they certainly weren’t the only establishment to do this. It isn’t illegal as such, although given that, as the article reports, half of those aged 65 to 74 and 70% of the over-75s do not have a smartphone, a case could be made that it represents indirect discrimination against a group protected by equalities legislation.

However, surely it is rank bad business, as it excludes a large swathe of your potential clientele, especially considering that the over-65s are amongst the most enthusiastic patrons of rural dining pubs. Even if you have a suitable phone, you may not want to download an app for a one-off visit. I have the Wetherspoon’s app on my phone because I regularly use them, but I wouldn’t see the point of having any others unless I was going to be a frequent visitor. On my previous phone, which I replaced less than two years ago, I had run out of space for downloading any new apps anyway. And who is going to want to download an app and work out how to use it if they’re just popping in for a swift pint and are unlikely to return?

Then there have been reports of pubs, and other hospitality venues such as Costa Coffee, refusing admission to people without smartphones carrying the NHS track and trace app. This seems even more self-defeating, given that surveys have shown that a majority of people who even have a suitable phone haven’t downloaded it. It also won’t work on older smartphones.

Not only is this bad business, it is also illegal. The government guidelines on the use of the app specifically say: “Venues must not make the specific use of the NHS QR code a precondition of entry (as the individual has the right to choose to provide their contact details if they prefer).” “Must” in such documents, as in the Highway Code, signifies a legal requirement. However, you can’t imagine council staff being quite so assiduous about enforcing this piece of law as they are about applying tape measures to outside shelters.

This is nothing new, either. Last September, during that brief window of reasonably unfettered opening that pubs enjoyed last summer, I wrote about the tendency for some pubs to gold-plate the government requirements and add some extra on top, suggesting it had given free rein to licensees’ inner jobsworth.

Some of the policies pubs have introduced arise simply out a lack of thought, but others clearly come across as deliberate. If you’ve decided to do away with beermats and ditch the charity boxes on the bar, if you’ve stopped taking cash payments and make everyone download an app to order, if you’re insisting on people making an advance booking just to have a drink, if you’ve festooned your pub with yellow tape and half-baked one-way systems, it’s not because the guidelines expect it, because they don’t. It’s because, deep down, you want to. And customers will remember where they were welcomed, and where they were treated like something the cat dragged in.

One obvious example that has reared its head again is refusing to accept cash, which is encouraged by compulsory table service. I have written about this trend in the past. Hopefully when bar service is resumed, then pubs will be more inclined to take cash again, and may at the same time cease to mandate app ordering. Another one that didn’t apply last September is making the wearing of masks compulsory in outside areas, where they are certainly not required by law. This is an officious, unreasonable rule that is likely to alienate customers and creates a potential flashpoint.

Most pubs aren’t doing this sort of thing, but reports suggest that a significant minority are. And, if you are visiting unfamiliar pubs, it means you can never be quite sure whether you are going to walk into somewhere with a friendly, relaxed and welcoming atmosphere, or a privately-run version of Stalag Luft XIV.

Of course all pubs and other hospitality venues should abide by the law. But they have a choice whether to implement the requirements with a light touch, or a heavy hand, and that is something that customers will remember when (or if) we finally once again reach the sunlit uplands of full reopening.

Don’t you know there’s a pandemic on?

Today at last sees the reopening of pubs in England for outdoor drinking, although the weather isn’t ideally suited to it. Obviously, this is a sign of hope, but unfortunately it seems that jobsworths in several local authorities seem to be getting in first and doing their best to put a spanner in the works. First out of the blocks was one of my local councils, Cheshire East, who decided that the “Rule of 6” and the two-household rule would not apply, and that social distancing would need to be enforced within groups, not just between them.

Fortunately government minister Paul Scully stepped in and told them that this interpretation is incorrect. However, he is yet to do the same with several authorities, including Rochdale and Ribble Valley, who have decided all customers in pub outdoor areas will have to wear masks except when seated, something that most definitely is not required by law.

It has been reported that some local authorities have set up enforcement teams to patrol pub gardens to ensure that the regulations are being adhered to. It is hard to believe that, given the squeeze on council spending, this is a good use of scarce resources.

There have also been a number of cases across the country of local authorities deciding that outdoor areas that they have been happy to accept as smoking areas for years do not qualify as “Covid-safe”, even though the rules applying to both are exactly the same. Here is an example from Brighton:

6pm yesterday Brighton Council decided that with or without the temporary roof, my garden is not covid compliant and forced me to close.

Reason: garden is below street level, surrounded by 4 walls, so air cannot flow.

Stock bought. Absolutely devastated. Appeal is in. pic.twitter.com/O8PzQprKp7

— Brett Mendoza💙 (@BrettMendoza_) April 11, 2021

I can think of several outside smoking areas that effectively are surrounded by walls on all sides – the key determinant is whether they have a roof. Maybe on a very strict interpretation of the law some of these areas don’t qualify, but surely councils should be doing their best to encourage local businesses to reopen rather than putting obstacles in their way.

Then there have been a number of headlines that all customers in pub gardens would need to check in using the NHS track and trace app. This is absolutely not the case, and indeed the legislation specifically states that venues must offer an alternative means of providing details. Sometimes, this was corrected in the body of the article, but even so fit is putting across misleading information and spreading a climate of fear and doubt.

I wish every success to pubs who are able to open up outdoor drinking areas, but it seems that some in local government and the media do not share that feeling.

Edit 13/04/21: I have added the Telegraph cartoon at the head of the post, published in today's paper.

Moving the goalposts?

Back in February, I criticised the glacial pace of the Prime Minister’s roadmap for unlocking the country. Six weeks on, and pubs still can’t open even outdoors. However, I also said “If we are able to enjoy the second half of the year to the full, then we may look back on the preceding fifteen months as just a bad dream. A successful and prosperous reopening of the economy will erase a lot of bad memories.”

The promise was made that, subject to review, all the remaining Covid restrictions on hospitality would be removed from 21 June. I was truly looking forward to that first proper pub crawl of Stockport in the week of my birthday. And, if the restrictions on rail travel were removed too, there would be a lot of time to be made up in terms of pub days out. However, while I said I wasn’t making specific predictions, I did add the caveat that I wouldn’t count any chickens until they were hatched. In another post, I said:

There must then be a serious risk that the government would leave pubs in Tier 1 for a prolonged period. They could claim that the pubs had reopened, while ignoring the fact that they were still operating under such severe restrictions that both their ability to trade profitably and their appeal to customers had been seriously undermined. Tier 1 would be, for many pubs, a kind of living death.

I was criticised by several people for adopting an unnecessarily gloomy tone, although I could have pointed out that, so far in the pandemic, Cassandra had beaten Pollyanna about 10-2. And, when I threw down the gauntlet and offered a £10 each-way bet to a favourite charity to anyone who believed all the restrictions would go, not surprisingly, there were no takers.

Last week, the almost inevitable backsliding began, with the news that the collection of customer contact details for track and trace would continue at least until September. What is more, the requirement would change so that every customer was required to provide their details rather than just one person from each party. This is despite the revelation that, last year, the information collected was hardly used, so it was all a pretty pointless exercise. And, given that Covid is an easily transmissible disease that, in most cases, isn’t particularly serious, it isn’t even an effective method of infection control.

In itself, this is a relatively minor imposition and, as you were allowed to sign in manually rather than using the NHS app, it was in practice easy to spoof, so participation was in effect voluntary. However, on the margins it could be a deterrent to going to the pub – “Shall we have a quick one in the White Bear? Nah, can’t be arsed having to sign in again.” Plus some overzealous operators were insisting on use of the NHS app, thus excluding a large swathe of potential customers.

From the pub’s point of view, it imposes a significant administrative burden of collecting and keeping the manual records. Getting details from a large party arriving at a busy time probably needs dedicated door staff and could create a queue, not to mention a potential flashpoint. It’s easy to assume that most people will be using the NHS app, but this poll from a Cheltenham licensee suggests that is far from the case. And many tech-savvy people may choose not to use the app because they don’t want to have to suffer two weeks’ house arrest because a friend of someone who was in Spoons at the same time as them has had a false positive Covid test.

My own little bit of market research so answers appreciated...
Do you have NHS COVID-19 app on your phone?

— CheltPubChick (@pub_that) April 2, 2021

Given this, it’s easy to understand how many in the trade feel that the government are breaking their promises and moving the goalposts. What guarantee is there that they won’t let go on the other restrictions either? And it’s important to remember that these restrictions, especially as they affect capacity, make most pubs apart from those dedicated to dining unviable in the longer term. Many pubs would have been counting on a strong late summer and autumn to restore their finances. If this isn’t allowed to happen, a lot more are likely to go to the wall.

Then it was reported that “Johnson's 'roadmap' for lifting almost all restrictions by June 21 could now be dependent on a functioning vaccine passport programme,” which would have come as a bitter blow to the trade. This would in effect simply be replacing one regime of onerous restrictions with another, and again requiring pubs themselves to act as the enforcers.

I discussed this issue in depth last week. Fortunately, following an unprecedented level of opposition from across the political spectrum, it was announced late last night that the plans would be dropped for pubs and restaurants, and confined to large public gatherings. This was greeted with widespread relief, but on reflection it comes across as a classic bait-and-switch tactic, proposing a measure that goes well beyond what you actually want to achieve, and then being praised when you eventually announce something less extreme. Indeed, I said in my post “I suspect in reality this is something that won’t happen, as even if ministers wanted to press ahead with it, it would be derailed by the practical difficulties.” In an attempt to placate opposition, Johnson has stated that any passport scheme would only last for a maximum of one year. But where have we heard that kind of promise before?

I’ve not entirely abandoned hope of that Stockport pub crawl in my birthday week. But I’ve decided to temporarily change the blog title, and I won’t be changing it back until the day comes when I can again walk freely into a pub without being challenged or being required to provide any personal details, and order a pint at the bar. And I worry I will have a very long wait, although hopefully not until next summer.

Incidentally, the bet is still open if you think that, setting aside track and trace, the remaining restrictions of masks, table service, capacity limits and a ban on perpendicular drinking will go on 21 June. I’m not expecting my inbox to be overflowing, though.

Death of the Premium Bottled Ale?

Westerham Brewery have recently announced that they are progressively switching all their packaged beer from bottles to cans. They say that “The future is bright, the future is refreshing beer in cans” and that “that the days of the ‘Premium Bottled Ale’ are dead.” However, from what I can see it appears very much alive and kicking, occupying a substantial section of the supermarket beer aisle and seeing a steady trickle of new product launches.

Their statement that the sector has been “de-premiumised” also misses the point about how it came about in the first place. In the 1980s, the vast majority of off-trade packaged beer was in cans, typically brands such as Stones, Tetley’s and Younger’s Tartan. Premium Bottled Ales were launched to distinguish the product from that category and gve drinkers something they would more readily associate with the beers they found in the pub. And, initially at least, it mostly encompassed what were considered “premium”, i.e., stronger beers such as Abbot Ale and Directors rather than ordinary bitters. There remains a strong overlap between the drinkers of premium bottled ales, and the drinkers of cask in the pub, and indeed the PBAs are often colloquially referred to as “real ales” even though the CAMRA purists would insist that they aren’t.

There is price pressure within the sector, as there is in every other competitive market, but that is nothing new. It is certainly true that brewers need to produce something that can be sold in a 4 for £6 offer, but quite a number of the smaller new-generation brewers are quite happy to sell what to my mind are very good beers through this channel. The same is true of Timothy Taylor’s with the bottled version of Landlord, the one widely-distributed cask ale that really can command a price premium. And the 7.3% McEwan’s Champion also happily exists there, so higher strength alone is no barrier.

They are, of course, correct to say that cans are more environmentally friendly, being lighter, more compact and more easily recyclable than bottles. They are also significantly cheaper. But there is a lingering belief that bottled beer is superior to that in cans, which goes back to days when cans were associated with Skol and Tartan, not to mention Long Life, “the beer specially brewed for the can”. Some of the more popular premium bottled ales such as Abbot Ale and Pedigree are also sold in cans, but they always come in four-packs and there really is no move to introduce individual cans into the sector (which also opens up the minefield of selling beers at price points that appeal to problem drinkers). I also haven’t noticed any increase in the shelf space given over to cans rather than bottles and, if anything, the growth area seems to be in multipack boxes of bottles along the lines of “Classic Golden Ales”.

On the other hand, over the past few years the switch in the craft sector from bottles to cans has been very marked, and cans now dominate the craft section of the beer aisle. Part of the motivation for this has to been to create a point of difference from the premium bottled ales. This was why, a few years back, many craft brewers switched from 500ml to 330ml bottles. Thornbridge were perhaps the most prominent to do this, but more recently their star seems very much to have faded. It often seems that the British craft beer movement seems to define itself by doing things differently from the established family brewers rather than the industry giants. And note that those 330ml craft cans in the photo are also in a 4 for £6 offer.

But, in switching from bottles to cans, Westerham are not just changing the method of packaging, they are changing how they want their beer to be perceived. And, if they define themselves as “craft”, there will be an expectation that they will in some way be modern and innovative. If they, or other brewers, are putting beers in traditional British styles into cans they may find few takers.

Another problem with cans is that they are opaque, so that if beers are “can-conditioned” it is impossible to determine when they have settled clear or to pour them so that none of the sediment goes into the glass, whereas that isn’t difficult with a bottle-conditioned beer. I know that “murky beer is good” has become a high-status opinion nowadays, but the vast majority of drinkers still want their beer to be clear, so that is an obvious limiting factor.

In fact, Westerham’s true motivation in going for cans is probably that they believe that, by shifting to a different market sector, they will be able to gain a higher margin. This is similar to brewers contemplating a shift from cask to craft keg, as I discussed recently in considering the threat of Covid to cask. However, the higher margins are only obtainable because the beers are in a more specialist and niche sector which, over time, is vulnerable to attack. I wonder how long it will be before we see the first single cans of “premium canned ale” appear, and drinkers might start to wonder whether it’s worth paying twice as much for something with a fancy graphic of a spaceman.

Ihre Papiere, Bitter!

Over the past few days, there has been a lot of focus in the media on vaccine passports. These are not a single concept, and obviously if another country decides to require vaccine passports for any visiting tourists there’s not a lot we can do about it. However, last week, Boris Johnson stated that he would not be averse to the idea of pubs requiring them to gain entry.

Not surprisingly, this idea went down like a cup of cold sick with both licensees and pubgoers. I ran a poll on Twitter to gauge reaction, which was widely retweeted. This showed a strong majority against, but a disappointingly large minority who didn’t see a problem.

POLL: Regardless of your own vaccination status, would you be happy to visit a pub that demanded a vaccine passport?

— Missing-the-Pub Curmudgeon 🙂🍻 (@oldmudgie) March 24, 2021

We have had vaccinations of various kinds in this country for over a century, but they have never been compulsory, and nor have we ever sought to restrict the freedoms of those who have not been vaccinated, so this would be completely unprecedented. Indeed, Johnson’s former ministerial colleague David Davis has suggested it might well be illegal, and would be likely to lead to court cases. On the face of it, he certainly seems to be correct, both in terms of medical discrimination and indirect discrimination against less vaccinated groups. It would probably need to be implemented either under the emergency Covid legislation or by an amendment of the Equality Act to create a specific exemption.

People would be up in arms if it was proposed that pubs should be able to refuse admission to those who could not prove they were HIV negative. Of course some smartarse will pipe up that the two are completely different, and indeed they are. But if you accept the concept of passports for Covid vaccinations, you have accepted the principle of discrimination on grounds of medical status, you are just arguing about where the line should be drawn.

There also seems to have been a considerable amount of moving the goalposts. Back last Autumn, vaccine supremo Kate Bingham stated that the objective would only be to vaccinate the over-60s and the clinically vulnerable, not the entire population. In January, newspapers were suggesting that 15 million jabs would do the trick, whereas we have already done twice that. As a general rule, vaccines don’t require anything like universal take-up to be effective across the whole population and achieve “herd immunity”. And the evidence so far is that under 10% of people are declining vaccination.

Creating such a vaccine passport would involve considerable practical difficulties. It would have to be made very difficult to forge. How would people who do not own smartphones be catered for? It seems that those without smartphones are increasingly being relegated to the status of second-class citizens in contemporary society. Some method would have to be found of registering people who have legitimate medical exemptions from vaccination.

Would it also have to apply to pub staff, or to people coming in to make deliveries or service equipment? How about the customer from the beer garden who just wants to come it to use the toilet? How would it apply to food courts in shopping centres and motorway service areas served by numerous outlets? A means would have to be found to incorporate tourists and other short-term visitors within the scheme. And there are plenty of people living in this country who for various reasons are off the radar of the NHS, and would be even more excluded from mainstream society.

The comparison has been made with track and trace, which pubs operated last summer, but in reality the two things are very different. Track and trace only applied to one person in each party, not everyone, and it was completed once people had entered pubs. There was no requirement to prove identity and, in reality, it was easy to spoof if you were so inclined. Participation was effectively voluntary.

Having to check every single customer’s details would place an onerous administrative burden on pubs. How would a small bar with one member of staff cope? And remember it wouldn’t just apply to pubs, but to restaurants, cafés, coffee shops and even takeaways with a few inside seats and tables. And should pubs really be expected to act as the government’s enforcement agents?

After the initial suggestion, the government have to some extent rowed back on the idea, saying it would be entirely voluntary and would only come into effect once all adults had been offered a vaccine. Wetherspoon’s and Shepherd Neame have, to their credit, rejected the idea. However, it would be conceivable that pubs would be offered the carrot of relaxed social distancing rules if they implemented it.

If it did end up being adopted by some pub operators, I suspect it would tend to be just the high-end gastropubs and a few up-their-own-arse craft bars. It’s very hard to see backstreet boozers in industrial towns wanting to take it up. And it could end up with the two-tier pub trade that might have come about if the proposal to exempt wet-only pubs from the smoking ban had come to reality, with some being pious, dull and joyless, and others lively, fun and rumbustious.

I suspect in reality this is something that won’t happen, as even if ministers wanted to press ahead with it, it would be derailed by the practical difficulties. And surely, assuming that the vaccines are effective, by the Autumn the number of Covid deaths and hospitalisations should in any case be minuscule and it would seem unnecessary and disproportionate.

But the idea that you should require a government-issued pass to take part in normal everyday activities is profoundly totalitarian. And where is the guarantee that it would not be extended to other medical statuses, or even become a generalised Chinese-style social credit pass? It has been very depressing to see how, during the Covid crisis, so many people seem to have accepted or even positively welcomed a restriction of their freedoms that in some respects has gone beyond even that which applied during World War II. It becomes easier to understand how the Nazis were able to achieve such a level of public acquiescence in their totalitarian programme.

Turn of the tide?

Back in 2016, I reported on how the imminent introduction of the ill-considered “sugar tax” was likely to lead to some popular soft drinks brands being reformulated to bring them below the threshold. In a sense it is understandable, as otherwise the drinks would have had to suffer a price increase, but it was highly disingenuous of the manufacturers to pretend that it wouldn’t make any difference to the taste, and that they were even doing it in response to customer demand. This is similar to the weasel words of brewers who insist that the flavour will be unaffected when they reduce the strength of their products.

Christopher Snowdon was wrong in his prediction that Irn-Bru would be unaffected, as inevitably it was, with the accompanying guff from its makers A. G. Barr that nothing would change. However, this is a product that is regarded as something of a Scottish national icon, and its drinkers weren’t going to take it lying down. Whether or not the new version was actually better for you, there was no doubt that it didn’t taste the same.

So, after a long campaign, last year Barr’s released on a trial basis a product called Irn-Bru 1901, which claimed to follow the original recipe from when the drink was first introduced. This proved very successful, and so they have announced that it will become a permanent product. It will only be available in the classic glass bottle, not in slabs of cans, and I’d expect it will be sold at something of a premium, so it will remain a niche product. But there is clearly a demand there which the company have decided to meet. This shows that consumer pressure, if vocal and sustained enough, can change companies’ policies over moves like this.

The brand that really should now follow suit is, of course, Lucozade. This was specifically developed in the first place as a high-glucose drink and served a very specific purpose in helping Type 1 diabetics counter the effects of “hypos”, something that was lost when the sugar content was cut. Surely it would not harm them in the slightest to introduce a “Lucozade Classic” that met its original remit.

In recent years, a number of well-known beer and cider brands have had their alcoholic strength cut. In some cases, such as Stella Artois, the drinkers seem to have grudgingly accepted it, but I can think of others, mainly in the packaged sphere, which have lost their distinctive appeal and disappeared from the shelves. The only beer I can think of where a reduction in strength has been reversed is Bateman’s XXXB, which was cut, at least in the draught version, from 4.8% to 4.5%, but later put back up again. I can imagine a “Stella Classic” at 5.2% would find plenty of takers, even at a premium price, but somehow I can’t see AB InBev being keen to take that idea up.

Will Covid kill cask?

With the prospect of three long, dreary months still ahead of us before pubs in England (allegedly) return to anything like the normality we knew before lockdown, I have to say inspiration for blogging has rather dried up, unless it was to metamorphose into a general blog about Covid policy, which really isn’t my intention.

However, with a limited measure of reopening now in sight, the thoughts of some brewers and commentators have begun to turn to what role cask beer will play in the post-Covid environment. A particularly provocative take came from Ben Nunn aka Ben Viveur who, at the end of last year, asked Will it be COVID that finally kills off cask beer? A similar question was posed here by Beer Drive-Thru. I think the conclusion is very much that it is a classic “question to which the answer is no”, but it is certainly true that, in that brief window of opening last summer, cask ranges were very much trimmed to meet lower demand, and the chances of the beer ticker finding something rare or unusual on cask were greatly diminished. I didn’t notice any pubs dropping it entirely, though.

With the minuscule amount of business currently available from off-licences and pubs doing cask deliveries, some breweries seem to be falling over themselves to grab a share of that market and keep their name in the public eye, with reports of suicidal discounting which surely isn’t sustainable. The cask market has for some years been characterised by oversupply and fierce competition, and it’s hardly surprising that we have seen a revival of calls for the premiumisation of the category. However, as I have repeatedly argued, such as here, this is putting the cart before the horse and isn’t remotely realistic. It may be possible to secure a certain amount of price premium for specific brands or outlets, but for the sector as a whole it simply isn’t going to happen.

Some brewers of cask have cast envious eyes towards the superior margins enjoyed by “craft keg” beers. However, it doesn’t automatically follow that those returns would be available to them simply by switching their beers to keg. At present, craft keg only occupies a relatively small niche of low-volume brews, typically either of high strength or unusual flavour. It doesn’t go head-to-head with more normal quaffing beers, and there’s only a small grey area where brewers have a realistic option either to go for cask or keg.

Drinkers now tend to be loyal to cask as a category rather than to specific brands. At the time of the birth of CAMRA, many people might have seen themselves as a “Tetley Bitter drinker” and be prepared to drink it either in cask or keg form. Now, however, if a pub switched Taylor’s Landlord from cask to keg, pretty much all the people who previously drank it would either move to another cask beer or take their custom elsewhere. Few people see the two as directly competing alternatives, and the only pub operators I can think of who offer one or the other in their estates are Felinfoel and Sam Smith’s.

Nowadays, the pubs that don’t offer cask tend to fall into the categories of places that are effectively restaurants, down-at-heel boozers that only appeal to a local clientele, high-end trendy bars and some beer-focused places that think not selling cask puts across a modern image. Any pub seeking a wide appeal rather than just a captive market of locals will offer cask in some form. There is a huge amount of loyalty to the category that isn’t going to disappear any day soon. The day Wetherspoon's start dropping cask from some of their pubs in England and Wales is the day you really need to start worrying about its future. It’s not just changing a brand on the bar, it’s making a statement about what kind of pub you aim to be.

In fact, the continued health of cask is indicated by the fact that, contrary to many expectations, the number of breweries in the UK, far from falling, continued to increase during lockdown. However, it has to be questioned how many of those are really seeking to derive a full-time income from brewing, and how many are effectively “hobby brewers”. As Mike Hampshire says in this blogpost:

An interesting twist on the number of new breweries opening is that some are being run part-time, where owners and some employees have personal income from elsewhere. It’s a different kind of challenge for the full-time owners who will feel more personal financial pressure as well as the trading difficulties… My fear is, that although we have 3,000 breweries now, we will see many closures in the coming 12 months.

As I’ve argued in the past, the presence of a large number of players who have no imperative to make a proper financial return from their businesses continues to be a major problem for cask and prevents the market operating in a normal manner. Plumbers and carpet-fitters don’t have to contend with people doing it on the proceeds of a retirement lump sum or trust fund, but small-scale brewers do. It has often been suggested that a shake-out of brewery numbers, while painful for some individuals, might bring sanity back to the market. It was thought that lockdown might bring that about, but in fact the opposite seems to have been the case.

Home on the High Street

When it opened in the mid-80s, the branch of Sainsbury’s on Warren Street in the centre of Stockport, along with the ASDA directly opposite, was the first large, modern supermarket in the town. However, times change, and it closed in January of this year. Plans have now been lodged to use the 3½-acre site to construct 550 new homes.

Residential development is often viewed as a way of revitalising town centres, but in practice it doesn’t really work that way. Town centres developed into busy, bustling places not because a lot of people lived there, but because they acted as retail, employment, administrative, service and entertainment hubs for a wide surrounding area. These activities had a multiplier function, with each encouraging the others, and all providing business for hospitality. How many people actually lived within the town centre was largely irrelevant. While there may be thirty thousand people living in Manchester City Centre now, when thirty years ago there were only a few hundred, that is still only the population that would support the couple of dozen pubs in a typical medium-sized market town, and in terms of the centre’s overall pub trade is a drop in the ocean. The city centre has a thriving night-time economy because people travel in from a wide radius all around.

Being conveniently located for a large number of homes is no guarantee of success, and indeed one of the most typical patterns of pub closure is of stand-alone pubs in the midst of residential areas, or next to local shopping parades, which will often be the only pub within convenient walking distance for a large number of people. Going directly to the pub from home in the evenings is a far less typical pattern of pubgoing than is often imagined, and pubs themselves often seem to form clusters that feed off one another. The same is true of villages, where large housing developments in recent years haven’t provided any shot in the arm for their local pubs. Turning a town centre into what is basically a housing estate is likely to have a similar lack of impact.

It’s generally accepted that there is a severe shortage of housing nationwide, and therefore the redevelopment of land no longer needed for retail has to be welcomed. However, it’s questionable whether schemes of this kind are actually providing the kind of homes people want. Most people, especially those with families, aspire to live in self-contained houses with gardens, not in cramped town-centre flats. In the 1960s, there were high hopes for new tower blocks and deck access flats, but in the long term they often proved socially disastrous, and many have now been demolished. You do have to wonder whether developments such as that proposed for Stockport are in effect creating the slums of the future.

Obviously a lot of retail activity has now migrated to the Internet, accelerated by the lengthy closures during the lockdowns of the past year. Realistically, little of this is ever coming back, and so the retail function of town centres is going to be diminished. If land is no longer needed for shops, or indeed offices, it makes sense to redevelop it for housing. But, rather than being a shot in the arm for town centre economies, it is a symbol of their decline.

This does not mean that there is no future for town centres. I wrote here about the challenges for the revitalisation of central Stockport. Humans are social creatures and don’t want to spend all their time cooped up in their houses. However, town centres need to concentrate on those activities where physical presence is important or essential and that can’t be done remotely. And two of the most important elements that fit that definition are entertainment and hospitality.

A slow crawl to freedom

The contents of the Prime Minister’s announcement last Monday of the roadmap to unlocking were widely leaked in advance, so none of the contents came as a great surprise. Sometimes, these pronouncements contain some aspect that was rather better than had been trailed, but this was not to be this time, and so the hospitality trade is faced with a painful and glacially slow crawl back to full reopening in four months’ time. Not surprisingly, my Twitter followers weren’t at all impressed. Lord knows who the 8.7% were who responded “too fast”.

POLL: What is your opinion of the government's unlocking roadmap as it applies to the pub trade?

— Missing-the-Pub Curmudgeon 🙂🍻 (@oldmudgie) February 22, 2021

However, we are where we are, and the pub trade have to make the best of a bad job rather than crying into their beer. The first milestone is on 12 April, no less than seven weeks away from the announcement, when outdoor opening, including off-sales, will be permitted. It is hard to understand why off-sales weren’t allowed earlier, as they continued during the two previous lockdowns. That is still a long wait, and unless significantly more support is forthcoming in next week’s Budget no doubt many more pub operators will give up the ghost. Speaking personally, the thing I’m most looking forward to is a haircut, as I’m increasingly resembling a member of an early 70s prog-rock band!

Towards the end of Lockdown #1, the possibility of outdoor-only opening was mooted, and I wrote here about the issues it raised, an obvious one being the notorious fickleness of the British weather. The Morning Advertiser reports than only 40% of pubs will be able to take advantage, and Sacha Lord, the Greater Manchester night-time economy adviser, makes the point that it represents a kind of class distinction, as urban boozers are much less likely to have extensive beer gardens than dining pubs in leafy suburbs and villages.

This stage will require pubs to operate table service – it certainly won’t just be a case of serving people pints for perpendicular drinking in the street. This makes swift, responsive service a challenge even indoors, and if you’re in the far reaches of an extensive beer garden you may have a long wait for a refill. And customers will still need to go inside to use the toilets, unless pubs install a battery of portaloos in the garden.

The government have indicated that “outdoors” will be defined in the same way as under the smoking regulations, so a covered area with two out of four sides open will be judged acceptable. So we can expect a rush on suppliers of marquees, umbrellas and temporary shelters. Inevitably this will lead to demands for even further restrictions on smokers, ignoring the fact that for thirteen years they were forced to drink outside at times when nobody else wanted to.

The fickleness of the weather will also pose a challenge for selling cask beer, as it will make the level of trade far more variable than normal. A few days of cold, wet weather may leave you with several largely unsold casks, while a heatwave could clear you out. Having said this, if pubs are in a position to make good use of outdoor facilities, as many are, it does present them with an opportunity that they should make the best use of. And a sunny weekend could prove a goldmine.

Then, on 17 May, pubs will allowed to open indoors, but it is important to remember that this will effectively be under last year’s Tier 1 restrictions, with social distancing, table service and mandatory masks. As I wrote at the time, this results in a regimented, cheerless experience that largely destroys the pleasure of the swift, casual pint. A dining pub can cope without too much problem, but many smaller wet-led pubs reported that the atmosphere was totally gone, as was their profitability. When this came in last year, I largely stopped going to pubs, certainly not to make speculative visits, and I doubt I’ll be particularly keen to rush back in May.

We are told that all restrictions will be removed on 21 June, which fortunately is three days before my birthday. But, unless the requirement for masks on public transport is dropped at the same time, my celebratory pub crawl will definitely be confined to Stockport! This will mean that the pub trade has either been shut entirely, or operating under severe limitations, for a full fifteen months. However, this has been portrayed in some quarters as giving the green light to a kind of bacchanalia, so it’s not difficult to imagine the desiccated sociopaths of SAGE having kittens and decreeing that the Tier 1 restrictions need to continue throughout the summer. I’m not making a prediction, and I sincerely hope it doesn’t happen, but don’t say you haven’t been warned!

I have seen talk of this causing a “summer wave”, but surely, given that respiratory viruses always lose their effectiveness in warmer weather, and that by then a large majority of the adult population will have been vaccinated, this is very unlikely. If it does turn out that the impact of the virus has by then become trivial, and we are able to enjoy the second half of the year to the full, then we may look back on the preceding fifteen months as just a bad dream. A successful and prosperous reopening of the economy will erase a lot of bad memories. But only time will tell.