Led astray in Leeds

I haven’t done any travelogues on here for a while, but I thought I’d make an exception for my trip to Leeds on Tuesday of this week. Apart from a brief foray for the press launch of Tetley’s No.3 Pale Ale (and whatever happened to that?) I hadn’t visited the city since December 2016, so I thought it was time for another exploration.

I sat down on my train from Manchester Piccadilly, only for a message to come over the PA that it had been cancelled due the lack of a driver. The next train was one that look the longer route via Manchester Victoria, and would probably be very busy due to the transferring passengers, so I took the opportunity to get on a stopping train which arrived at Huddersfield just before the express. Indeed there were plenty of seats available on this. For some reason the regular stopping service on the Standedge route, previously operated by Northern Rail, has been discontinued, and replaced with a rather intermittent service operated by Trans-Pennine Express calling at the intermediate stations. But it does give a higher standard of rolling stock.

It was a morning of heavy rain and thick, lowering clouds, so as we travelled along the steep-sided valleys of the Tame and Colne, stopping at Mossley, Greenfield, Marsden and Slaithwaite (correctly pronounced by the conductor) it was rather like a train journey into the depths of Mordor. The connection at Huddersfield was duly made, and there were a few seats still available on the express, which arrived in Leeds on time. I duly submitted my claim for compensation to the train operator and am pleased to report I was promptly refunded a quarter of the fare.

My plan had been to have some lunch in the Wetherspoon’s on the concourse of Leeds station, but this must be one of their smallest branches, and was completely full, so instead I decided to go to the Cuthbert Brodrick, which is about ten minutes’ walk away on the north side of the city centre. It was pouring with rain, so I just took a quick glance at Google Maps on my phone to establish its general whereabouts. I was walking up a street and saw a large red-brick building on my left, with the Wetherspoon’s name displayed on the wall, so I dived in out of the rain, found a seat and placed my order via the app.

Twenty minutes later, nothing had arrived, so I mentioned this to a passing member of staff and was assured in a rather offhand way that the kitchen would still be making it. Another twenty minutes passed, so I went up to the bar to complain. “We’ve got no record of any order being placed from that table,” I was told. So I showed them the confirmation e-mail on my phone, only to be told that, while I had indeed placed my order at the Cuthbert Brodrick, the pub I was in was actually the Hedley Verity.

Feeling a touch embarrassed, I duly decamped to the Cuthbert Brodrick, which is in fact only about two hundred yards away. I explained the situation to the staff there, and in fact the drink I had ordered was still on the bar. I found a table and my food was served fairly quickly, so kudos to them for sorting matters out. Possibly they had noticed the table was empty when delivering the drink, and then not actually cooked the food, as it didn’t seem as though I’d been given something that had been warmed up again. I suspect I’m not the first person to make this mistake when two branches are so close together.

Named after the local Victorian architect, the Cuthbert Brodrick is a modern Wetherspoon’s with an unusual corner tower, built on the site of former public baths and overlooking the city’s Millennium Square. While wide, it’s fairly shallow, with the ground floor mainly occupied by posing tables, but more comfortable seating upstairs. Not the most memorable of Spoons, but it had served its purpose in the end. Last time in Leeds we had eaten at Friends of Ham, which I thought was very good, but I don’t think their formula works so well for a solo diner. And, as I said on Twitter:

Wetherspoon’s have become so well-known and ubiquitous that, in an unfamiliar town, it’s very easy to make them the default choice for a pub meal, rather than trying to find somewhere else.

— Pub Curmudgeon 🌸🍻 (@oldmudgie) October 26, 2023

So far, I had felt rather like Unlucky Alf from the Fast Show, but things were to get a lot better. Walking past the impressive classical façade of Leeds Town Hall, designed by the said Cuthbert Brodrick, brought me to the Town Hall Tavern. This is a Timothy Taylor’s tied house with a fairly functional one-room interior, offering the full range of their regular beers – Dark Mild, Golden Best, Boltmaker, Knowle Spring, Landlord and Landlord Dark. I went for the Landlord Dark (£4.50), as I’d never had it before on cask, and it was pretty good. In mid-afternoon, it wasn’t busy, but there were a group of lawyers talking shop. Perhaps not the most scintillating of conversations to eavesdrop on, but it’s good to see the tradition of professional people discussing business over a pint still being maintained.

There followed a long walk up The Headrow, the wide main street running through the middle of the city centre, although the rain was now easing off. The next pub was the Templar, which I had heard many good things about, and which didn’t disappoint. It’s a long, shallow corner pub with an elaborate tiled façade. Inside, while it has been opened out somewhat, it retains plenty of historical character, with wood panelling, seating booths and a cosy snug right at the far end. It was very busy, with the clientele leaning towards the older male end of the spectrum, although with both sexes and a variety of age groups represented, but I managed to find myself a seat with a good vantage point.

Although owned by Greene King, this isn’t at all obvious, and indeed I don’t think any of the eight cask ales on offer were their products. Apparently it regularly stocks Tetley Bitter, but I overhead a customer asking about it and being told it wouldn’t be available for a couple of days. I plumped for Acorn Barnsley Bitter, a bargain at £3.36, which was very good indeed. Apparently it’s one of the pubs that still uses Autovac dispense. A splendid pub with a great atmosphere, that’s certainly the best new pub I’ve visited this year and immediately shoots into my all-time Top 20.

Retracing my steps, I passed the Three Legs, which has an impressive façade and a reputation for being distinctly “lively”, although as it is reported to have no cask beer I gave it a miss. By this time the rain had fortunately stopped. Briggate, which runs North to South, was Leeds’ original high street, and still retains several Victorian shopping arcades together with four pubs on the west side situated in courtyards accessed via narrow alleyways. I had previously visited Whitelock’s and the Angel, so today decided to try the other two.

First was the Ship, which is the smallest of the four. This is reached by a very narrow passage, and is made up of a room containing the bar, and a further seating area at a slightly higher level. A good scattering of customers, and a decent drop of Black Sheep Bitter at £4.30. I walked straight past the entrance to the Pack Horse before realising I’d reached Whitelock’s and turning back. A Craft Union pub, this is rather more spacious, with the bar against the back right-hand wall. Again it was ticking over nicely, although not heaving, and offering Landlord at the bargain price of £2.90.

Neither of these are going to win prizes for historic interiors, but it’s good to see a couple of unassuming pubs hidden away down passageways thriving in such a central location. The gem of the four is of course the well-known Whitelock’s, which may well merit a visit next time. It might be nice if Timothy Taylor’s could acquire either the Ship or the Pack Horse to give them a better Leeds flagship than the rather ordinary Town Hall Tavern.

Continuing to the south, I crossed the bridge over the River Aire, somewhat swollen by the recent rains, to reach the Adelphi, an impressive Victorian pub with a curved façade, the neon sign on the roof of the former Tetley’s brewery clearly visible in the distance. This is the only pub that I also visited on my previous trip, but it features a stunning unspoilt interior that qualifies it for a three-star entry on CAMRA’s National Inventory, with four separate rooms ranged around the central part, and an abundance of frosted glass and wood panelling.

It wasn’t anywhere near as busy as the previous time, although that was later in the year in the run-up to Christmas, and I had no problem finding a comfortable seat. I had a pint of Leeds Pale and then, looking at the times of the return trains, slotted in another of Titanic Plum Porter. These were respectively £4.85 and £5.25, and this was the first time I have ever paid over £5 for sub-5% beer, although I’m sure it won’t be the last. I’ve seen the point made before that, while the Adelphi has stunning architecture inside and out, the actual pub experience doesn’t quite live up to it.

From here it was just a short walk along Swinegate, passing under the eastern throat of the station, to catch my train home, which fortunately was dead on time. After an inauspicious start it had turned out into an excellent day out. While comparisons are invidious, I always feel that Leeds has a more coherently laid out city centre than Manchester, which is somewhat disjoined, and has demonstrated more respect for its architectural heritage, as shown by the arcades and pubs off Briggate. It certainly has nothing on a par with the eyesore of Manchester’s Arndale Centre. It will certainly merit a return trip some time in the future.

A very Peculier beer launch

North Yorkshire brewery Theakston have announced that they are launching a new IPA as a brand extension of the celebrated Old Peculier. The description goes:

Made with all-British ingredients, it comes in at 5.1% ABV. English-grown Harlequin, Jester, and Olicana hops deliver a zesty fruitiness with a full-bodied malty undertone. It finishes with a pronounced hop-forward flourish.

It sounds very appetising, and I’d certainly give it a try. But it’s very different from the standard Old Peculier, which is a dark, sweet, rich, warming ale. And I can’t help thinking that this has the potential to dilute the image of the original beer. You have to wonder why it couldn’t simply be branded as “Theakston IPA”.

However, it seems to be an increasing trend to extend the brand name of a popular beer to others in the hope that they will benefit from a kind of halo effect. Something similar happened to Hobgoblin, where the original beer, another dark, sweetish brew, was joined by an IPA and a Gold. Wainwright, originally a pale gold beer, has now had an Amber version added, which looks suspiciously like an ordinary bitter. Several beers have had Gold spin-offs, including Shepherd Neame Spitfire and Brains SA and Reverend James, while Timothy Taylors renamed their Ram Tam as Landlord Dark.

Going back forty years, most beers were simply identified by the name of the brewer and the type of beer, such as “Bloggs’ Best Bitter”. But, increasingly, they came to be given distinctive names, which helped with recognition when there were more different beers on the bar, and the free trade grew in importance over tied houses. Thus Robinson’s Best Bitter became Unicorn and Taylor’s Best Better Boltmaker. The actual name of the brewer tends to be downplayed in favour of the brand.

Some of these have become so recognisable that the breweries felt it would be advantageous for other beers to piggyback on their reputation. But if you add the name to something very different, you run the risk of undermining the reputation of the original beer. Old Peculier was very well known as a distinctive rich, dark beer, but if the name is now also given to a pale, hoppy IPA it blurs that image.

An epidemic of loneliness

Last month, the Daily Telegraph published a very perceptive and poignant article by Melissa Twigg entitled The pub closures at the heart of Britain’s loneliness epidemic *, looking at how the decline of pubs was contributing to a worrying a rise in social isolation. This echoes many of the points I have made on this blog over the years.

Mikey Jones had been going to the Beehive pub in south London for a drink at least once a week since the 1960s. He usually ordered a pint of bitter, but on the night he met the woman who would become his wife, he had a gin and tonic to appear more sophisticated; on the afternoon his daughter was born, he had a stiff whisky.

The Beehive closed in 2018, as did another pub further up the road in South Norwood where Jones used to meet his friends. The latter is now a coffee shop serving flat whites and chai tea lattes and is crowded with young families and people with laptops – but for someone like Jones, who is 78, it doesn’t feel particularly welcoming. As a result, he mostly stays at home. “I’ve lived alone since my wife died,” he says. “My daughter does come to visit but other than that I am mostly by myself with the telly on.”

Jones is just one of the 3.83 million people in the UK who are chronically lonely – a figure that has increased by more than half a million since the pandemic hit, according to the Office for National Statistics. Technology is often treated at the bogeyman but around the country, the mass closure of pubs and community spaces is fuelling a health epidemic of epic proportions.

“Pubs are the archetype of third space – somewhere that isn’t home or work, but a place that brings people together beyond the immediate family or work,” says Thomas Thurnell-Read, an author and lecturer at the University of Loughborough researching the impact fewer pubs is having on British society. “Traditional pubs have faced very challenging trading conditions and the steady closure of them around the country rings a lot of alarm bells.”

The concept of the “third space” is a very important point. The pub provides somewhere you can get away from the constraints and responsibilities of the home and workplace, and to some extent allows you to let your hair down and lose your inhibitions. People often report that their best conversations occur in the pub. And, if you are retired or unable to work, it offers a “second space” where you can get out of the house and get and change of scene.

It isn’t necessary to have in-depth conversations, though. The simple act of going somewhere different and interacting with a member of staff to buy a drink provides some social contact. And in a pub it’s up to you to what extent you engage with others. I wrote about this back in 2016, when Red Nev made the comment that:

Pubs are the only institutions that I can think of where you can walk in off the street, buy a drink and be entitled to sit there as long as you like, with the option of talking to strangers or not, as you prefer.

However, the idea that people might want to go to the pub and simply chat, or just read the paper or sit in silent contemplation, is becoming increasingly unfashionable. People have to be doing something, whether eating a meal, watching TV sport, taking part in a quiz or listening to a band. I wrote a couple of years ago about how people less and less “just went out for a pint”.

Increasingly limited opening hours mean that pubs are often simply not open when lonely people want to visit them. Many older or vulnerable people prefer to drink during the daytime and are reluctant to venture out after dark. Yes, it’s a commercial decision, but it limits the social function of pubs. Another factor is the increasing reliance on electronic communications, whether app ordering or cashless payments, which reduces the level of human interaction in pubs.

Very often, the layout of pubs is remodelled to make them deliberately unappealing to casual social drinkers. Wetherspoon’s are often the last pub refuge available to people, but they typically have a regimented array of individual tables with loose chairs, rather than cosy alcoves of benches that encourage conversation. It’s not uncommon in Wetherspoon’s during the day to see whole rows of tables occupied by solo drinkers. If they were facing each other, they might be more likely to talk.

And one of the solutions suggested by Dr Thurnell-Read, while well-meaning, is likely to be anathema to many pubgoers just in search of a quiet drink:

…they include adapting them by day to create more of a café-like environment where women and babies and laptop workers are welcome, and by introducing innovations such as small lending libraries.

Of course pubs are commercial businesses and cannot be expected to operate at a loss to serve a social function. And the idea of a council-run mock pub would be enough to make many pubgoers run a mile. But it can’t be denied that widespread pub closures, and reductions in opening hours and changes in the offer of those that remain, have exacerbated the level of loneliness in society.

Unsurprisingly, though, there is no mention whatsoever of the smoking ban legendary elephant in the room, which has been one of the biggest factors in the closure of community pubs over the past sixteen years. The pub is hardly a welcoming refuge if you’re forced out into the cold.

* The Telegraph article is paywalled, but if you would like to e-mail me, I can send you a copy of the full taxt.

Creeping prohibition

A problem with writing a blog of this kind is that it can become a little tedious having to go over the same arguments again and again. There are only so many times you can explain why minimum alcohol pricing is a seriously counter-productive policy, or why cask ale premiumisation really isn’t going to fly.

Something of the same applies to the issue of progressively raising the minimum purchase age for tobacco, something I wrote about back in 2021 in relation to New Zealand, and again earlier this year referring to the British Labour Party. Now, not entirely surprisingly, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced that this is going to be applied in the UK.

It is an appalling, grossly illiberal policy that reduces responsible adults to the status of naughty children. Christopher Snowdon has already set out the case against it very clearly.

It would, over time, turn the entire tobacco industry over to the black market, and deprive the government of the associated tax revenue. Smoking has already been banned in all indoor public spaces, so the opportunities for younger smokers to stand out and feel stigmatised are now very limited. It’s already difficult to go far in cities and large towns without encountering the smell of cannabis, and that’s illegal for all age groups. Tobacco will be just the same. As I understand it, there’s no intention to ban possession or consumption, merely the legal sale.

It’s already difficult enough for shopkeepers to enforce the minimum purchase age of 18 for alcohol and tobacco, and this will be multiplied if the tobacco age rises every year. People in their 30s and 40s are going to need identity cards to prove their age. And a 36-year-old isn’t going to have any qualms about buying tobacco for their 35-year-old friend.

Of course smoking carries significant health risks, but that applies to plenty of other things do for pleasure, most of which are tolerated or even celebrated. And there is a total failure to appreciate that many smokers actually enjoy the habit and have no desire to quit. The government are looking to prohibit a leisure activity that gives people pleasure and, providing it is done in private, harms nobody else.

Smokers now represent only about 10% of the adult population, and come disproportionately from the more marginalised in society. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a distinct whiff of “othering” in this policy, in finding minorities to persecute and ostracise. Most prejudices against minorities are now rightly frowned on, but this one goes from strength to strength.

Unsurprisingly, every lobby group wanting increased lifestyle restrictions is jumping on the bandwagon and saying that this sets a precedent for their particularly bansturbatory hobby-horse.

The PM has announced a tobacco ban - but is skeptical about tackling the food industry. Why?

We need the same bold public health approach with respect to food - tighter regulations, and ensuring healthy unprocessed food is accessible to all

🔊 from 1h30https://t.co/sfM89fZpQD

— Soil Association (@SoilAssociation) October 5, 2023

And if you think it will never be used as a precedent to justify greater alcohol regulation, then I have a bridge to sell you.

This has not yet become law, and is unlikely to do so before the impending General Election. During that time, many articulate voices will be raised against it. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss has already stated she would vote against it. This, from Ian Dunt, is an example of an opposing view from the political Left. Don’t expect Labour to do anything to challenge it, though – they will do their usual nodding dog act when confronted with any authoritarian measure.

And, if it does come to pass, I will be able to sit back and just watch the inevitable and widely predicted policy disaster unfold. They haven’t banned Schadenfreude. Yet...

Cutting off your nose to spite your face?

I recently spent a few days in Exeter. Researching the pubs that might be worth visiting, one that stood out was the Turk’s Head right in the city centre close to the Guildhall. It’s a historic inn that was converted into a pizza restaurant but has now been restored to pub use, and won a CAMRA Pub Design Award for Conversion to Pub Use. It also operates its own brewery. So, it sounded like somewhere well worth a look, but I noticed on the door a sign saying that they only accepted card and phone payments.

Now, I strongly dislike this policy, and would normally give a swerve to any pubs applying it, but I took the view on this occasion that it would be interesting to see what it was like, and I didn’t really want to cut off my nose to spite my face. It’s a pub of some character, with a small historic façade on the High Street leading to a rambling interior on several different levels. They also brew their own beer, although the pint of £4.75 homebrew I sampled probably wouldn’t win any prizes. I’m also not going to be so dogmatic as to take the same view over, for example, must-visit tourist attractions.

I’m not aware of any pubs in my local area that I would routinely want to visit that won’t accept cash. But even if there were, there are plenty of others that I could give my business to, so I wouldn’t experience any hardship by avoiding them. Back in 2020, during the darkest depths of lockdown, I wrote about the importance of preserving the right to pay in cash.

Ultimately, the continued existence of cash represents a bulwark of freedom against both governments and corporations. Yes, many people may find contactless payments for everyday transactions convenient, but if we as a society allow cash to entirely disappear, we will have also said goodbye to a large measure of our liberties.

This is a theme amplified in this recent article entitled A true cashless society would be a dystopian nightmare.

If paying for everyday purchases by card is more convenient for you, that’s fair enough, although personally I find it makes life more difficult. But if you venture out of the house without any cash at all, then you leave yourself very exposed, as one participant on a pub crawl recently found when he encountered a cash-only (not Sam Smith’s) pub.

A few places say they have gone cashless after experiencing burglaries, but if there are other cash businesses nearby it doesn’t entirely ring true. For most venues, not accepting cash is exercising a form of social selection. You’re saying that you don’t want the business of the old, the poor or the non-conformist. Your target market is all the people who enthusiastically support the latest thing.

Incidentally, on two previous visits to Exeter, the best pub I encountered was the Great Western Hotel next to St David’s Station, but sadly this closed down earlier this year and it future looks uncertain. It’s an interesting and characterful city, but not really the best for pubs. I think people are spoiled by York! I also happened to visit during Freshers’ week, when many of the pubs and restaurants were thronged with students.

Not so grand

A couple of days ago saw a rather sad milestone when I posted the 1000th entry on my Closed Pubs blog. This was The Pagefield Hotel, a magnificent late Victorian or Edwardian edifice in a residential area just outside Wigan town centre. One or two of the pubs I have posted have subsequently reopened, but the vast majority haven’t, and it serves as a sad testimony to the decline of the pub trade.

I started this blog in August 2010, prompted by the creation of the Google StreetView app, which provided images of street scenes across the UK. Initially it was like shooting fish in a barrel, as I recorded all the closed pubs I was personally familiar with. In October 2010 I made 30 posts, virtually one a day. After a while, it slowed to a trickle, with only 4 posts in 2015, but after that I became more assiduous in seeking out new ones, and was helped by suggestions and photographs from various contributors.

Amongst these I will particularly thank the late Peter Allen, who was responsible for the Pubs Then And Now blog, Staffordshire resident Dan Bishop, and Yorkshire residents Luke H and Kyle Reed. In the past few years, Kyle has been a very prolific contributor, which helps explain the substantial number of entries in West Yorkshire. Yorkshire as a whole is about to overtake Staffordshire in terms of number of entries, and is not far behind Lancashire.

In general, I haven’t aimed to give any background, and just described what I see from the image, although in many cases I found about the pub from a news article which I have linked to, and which provides some more information. Many of these came from the Fullpint news aggregation Twitter account, which unfortunately stopped posting for some reason in May this year.

It was generally recognised thirty years ago that there were around 70,000 pubs in the UK, so 1,000 represents over 1% of the total, and that’s only a drop in the ocean. I have logged 117 pubs in (historical) Cheshire – assuming there were maybe 1,500 pubs in the county, that makes up 7.8%.

There can be no doubt that a slow-motion catastrophe has overtaken the British pub trade. There has been a profound change in the way people use pubs, which in most instances has meant that they no longer do any more. Most of this is down to changes in social attitudes, but of course the smoking ban was a wound deliberately inflicted by government. Some may respond that times have changed, and new pubs and bars have opened up, which is true enough. But they are on a much smaller scale than before, and overall there has undoubtedly been a huge contraction in the trade.

Ten years ago I wrote a post entitled Trying to make sense of it all which attempted to explain the tidal wave of closures. The conclusion was that pretty much all sectors of pubs were affected, with only a limited number of niche areas seemingly immune.

The most common category seems to be the post-war estate-style pubs, which for a variety of reasons never seem to have really worked, something I wrote about here. Possibly the whole concept was flawed from the start, and arose more from town planners’ tidy minds than actual drinkers’ needs. It would not surprise me if fully half the purpose-built, stand-alone pubs constructed after the war are no longer trading, in some cases lasting less than twenty years.

But the big inter-wars pubs, often built to much higher standards of design and construction, are in a sense the saddest. A prime example is The Beeches in Northfield, Birmingham, which resembles a magnificent Jacobean stately home. StreetView shows that it had been demolished by May 2011, and housing has now been built on the site.

Will there be another 1,000 pubs on the blog? Only time will tell, although there are certainly enough candidates out there waiting to be discovered. If you’re aware of any, please let me know, although I do need either a photograph or a StreetView link showing it in a boarded up or derelict state.

A matter of trust

It was recently reported that cask ale’s share of the on-trade beer market had fallen below 10% for the first time ever. At the same time, Greene King Abbot Ale was chosen as the runner-up in CAMRA’s annual Champion Beer of Britain contest, prompting a wave of outrage, including allegations that the contest had been rigged, and complaints that the award should not go to a beer from such a major brewery. And it’s not hard to see a connection between these two news items.

Back in 2019, I posted a list of the ten best-selling cask beers in the UK, taken from this article in the Morning Advertiser. Abbot Ale is #4 on the list. They’re probably much the same now, although the volumes will have diminished. But the notable feature of this list is that most of them are beers about which many “beer enthusiasts” won’t have a good word to say. They’re dismissed as dull, bland, dumbed-down, mass-market products. Landlord is probably the only one that would receive general approbation.

Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but if you want to promote a category of product, it seems self-defeating to disparage most of the leading brands within that category. For any product category to thrive, it needs strong, well-regarded flagship brands that people are happy to recommend. As Cooking Lager recently very perceptively said in the comments on one of my blogposts:

…It's an attempt to rationalize its decline that hints at the truth. Recognition & trust.

Drinkers are not enthusiasts, they are not thrilled by thousands of breweries dispensing beer you've never heard of.

Much cask ale, these days, is just that. It lacks trust and recognition that sees a drinker say "I know that beer, I've had it before, it's good, it's trustworthy, I like it"

The main consumer campaign for this category of ale have championed their own preference for an enthusiast cottage industry which to none enthusiasts is a commodity product they don't recognise or trust. A CAMRA micropub services their niche interest. Leave that there and let normal pubs serve a regular good quality beer drinkers trust, not 6 pumps of commodity indifferent pale ale.

Champion reliable national and regional brands, ensure those are consistent and good, and people will drink cask ale. A pint of Holts bitter is a decent pint. Remove the "when kept well", "in the right pub", and people will recognise and trust it.

It’s not good enough to grudgingly say “it’s not too bad if it’s kept well”, you need to be able to say unequivocally “This is a good beer. It’s a good example of real ale”. If you profess to be a real ale enthusiast, but if you’re asked to recommend a beer and all you can come up with is some obscure product intermittently sold in a handful of outlets, you’re not encouraging people to drink it. Maybe they’re not the absolute best beers in the world – the top selling products in any category rarely are – but to damn them with faint praise does the whole category no favours.

Some may point out that their local taproom or micropub does consistently good business without selling any of these beers, and that may well be true, but it is the acceptance of a niche existence. Most drinkers of cask beer are not enthusiasts, they just want a decent, reliable pint. If cask fails to deliver that, they will take their custom elsewhere, which is just as likely to be home drinking as another beer in the pub. A survey that I have quoted on here before found that 85% of cask drinkers want to see well-known, recognisable brands on the bar. They don’t want to have to negotiate a minefield of unfamiliar beers every time they go to the pub.

But it seems that some people are entirely relaxed about cask losing market share, provided they can still get hold of it in their local specialist outlet. If you disparage all the leading brands of cask beer, you’re disparaging cask itself.

Never-ending process

In recent weeks, there has been a wave of scaremongering in the media on the subject of ultra-processed food. The argument seems superficially plausible, that the further food is removed from its natural state the more nutrition is taken out of it. What is more, such foods are often heavily promoted for commercial gain. But do these arguments really stack up, or do they simply reflect nostalgia for a vanished pre-industrial age?

A key problem is that the net is drawn extremely widely. If you confine your diet to unadulterated fresh ingredients cooked from scratch, and snack on nothing but fresh fruit, then you won’t be eating any processed food. But as soon as you combine ingredients to make a curry or casserole, or bake a cake using flour, sugar and dried fruit, you are processing food to some extent. If this is done by a local artisan butcher or baker, it is one stage further removed from nature.

Move it into a factory, even if the ingredients remain identical, and it is magically transformed into UPF. The definition is drawn extremely widely, and everything ends up being tarred with the same brush. We have already seen campaigns against so-called HFSS foods (high in fat, sugar or salt), which at least has an objective definition, even if while it leads to numerous absurdities. But here everything ends up being demonised, regardless of any consideration of what actually goes into it, or what the process is. Anything that you buy commercially in a ready-made form, whether bread, biscuits, cakes, pies, pizzas, cooked meats, ready meals, breakfast cereal or yogurts, is deemed to be UPF and thus bad for you.

However, in the pre-industrial age, people often ate very restricted diets, and keeping food fresh was a constant challenge. The invention of canning and freezing brought about a huge improvement in the standard of people’s diets, and in the choice of food available to them. The idea that populous modern societies could survive on a system of small-scale artisan or home production of food from fresh ingredients is delusional. If nothing else, it would pose an insurmountable problem for the distribution and storage system. Wouldn’t it make more sense to try to improve the nutritional standards of industrial food rather than claiming everything that comes out of a factory is inherently bad?

Of course, living primarily on crisps and sausage rolls isn’t going to do you much good in the long term but, as often said, there are no bad foods, only bad diets. Eating a few indulgent treats from time to time isn’t really going to cause you much harm, and indeed there are many recorded cases of people maintaining reasonable health over a long period while eating an extremely restricted diet, often stemming from autistic spectrum conditions. The best dietary advice is to eat a wide variety of different food items and not overdo any single category.

There is also a huge amount of snobbery involved in this whole campaign. Anything that is bought in, rather than prepared from scratch, is seen as inferior. This is especially true of hot takeaway meals. Very often, of course, the people doing the judging are those who have servants to do the hard work for them

An ironic aspect of this is that the meat-free alternatives to dishes like burgers and fried fish, which are often portrayed as a “healthier” option, involve much more processing than the original items, so the two agendas find themselves in conflict with each other. And beer is pretty highly-processed, isn’t it? Should we confine our alcohol consumption to products made from natural grape and apple juices spontaneously fermented by wild yeasts?

In reality, the proportion of the food market accounted for by UPF isn’t going to significantly diminish, let alone disappear entirely, but it will always provide a way for those who regard themselves as superior to make ordinary, budget-conscious people feel guilty about their food choices.

Out of sight, out of mind

If you asked younger drinkers what deterred them from drinking cask ale, most people would expect the replies to be a mixture of a fuddy-duddy image, inconsistent quality and too often appearing in the form of beers you’ve never heard of. However, according to new research carried out by the Drink Cask Fresh campaign, a key reason is that, unlike keg beers, cask is dispensed out of sight of the drinker. “Cask is the only beer poured beneath the bar where you can’t see what’s going on and this greatly adds to the uncertainty around it.”

I have to say I’m a little sceptical about this, as people responding to surveys often give superficial reasons for things that sound plausible but conceal their underlying motivations. But, let’s assume there is something to it. It’s certainly true now that pretty much all keg beers are served at eye level, either through T-bars or fonts that rise well above the bar. It would be possible to design a handpump with an extended neck that did the same, but it would look ungainly, create an excessive length of pipe for beer to linger in, and force bar staff to adopt an awkward posture.

Might it be more the case that this is a rationalisation of an underlying wariness of cask ale per se? Nowadays, pretty much all cask ale is served through handpumps, but if you go back a generation it was dispensed, especially in the North and Midlands, through a wide variety of bar mountings, many of which were hard to tell apart from pumps for keg beers. All of these also dispensed the beer just below bar level. But increasingly the handpump was adopted as a universal and unambiguous symbol of real ale. However, this can cut both ways – what is a clear positive indication to one drinker can be a sign of something to avoid for another.

A few years ago, Molson Coors carried out an experiment with serving cask Doom Bar through bar mountings of the type typical used for keg beers. As I said at the time, I’d certainly give it a go, and it would eliminate the risk of a poor pint being dispensed due to incompetent pulling technique on the part of the bar staff. But it suggests you don’t have much confidence in your product if you’re trying to disguise it as something else. I never saw this kind of dispense in action, so obviously it’s something that never took off.

But there does exist a historically authentic form of cask ale dispense that originally was introduced with the specific objective of serving the beer in full view of the customer, namely the Scottish tall font. These were originally associated with the traditional Scottish air pressure dispense system, but more recently have been adapted to work with electric pumps. They do have a very distinctive appearance and arguably have more bar presence than handpumps. So there’s the answer to this problem, if indeed it is a problem, but somehow I can’t see them taking off south of the Border.

It’s an ill wind...

Most of the discussion about the new 3.4% beer duty cut-off has centred around brewers reducing the strength of their beers to bring them below it. However, it also provides the opportunity for brewers already producing 2.8% beers to increase their strength and make them more appealing to drinkers.

Back in March, when I was discussing the possible implications of this change, I prophetically said “It will also be interesting to see if Sam Smith’s nudge up the strength of their 2.8% kegs by a few points,” and indeed so it has proved. As shown by the graphic below (courtesy of Matthew Thompson), they lost no time in increasing the strength of their Dark Mild, Light Mild and Alpine Lager from 2.8% to the full 3.4%, and giving them new and more attractive bar cowls at the same time. The Light Mild has been renamed XXXX Best (which is what it used to be in the 1970s) which may persuade some drinkers to view it more as a light bitter. The actual cowl for Dark Mild is of a more elaborate Victorian-style design than the one shown, although obviously I wasn’t able to get a photo to show it.

I have now managed to taste all of these beers in a couple of pubs. I don’t think I’d ever tried the 2.8% Alpine Lager before, but the 3.4% one is a decent low-strength lager with a little bit of flavour to it. It probably compares favourably to Bud Light (which will surely be reduced from 3.5 to 3.4%) and the new 3.4% version of Carlsberg Pilsner. At the same time, Sam’s have withdrawn the 4.0% Double Four Lager, presumably feeling that there is no longer a gap in their range to be filled. A half-and-half split of Alpine with the 4.5% Taddy will give you a 3.95% lager at the bargain price of £2.90 in their Northern pubs.

I’ve had the 2.8% Dark Mild a few times when cask Old Brewery Bitter was unavailable and found it not unpleasant, but fairly thin and bland. The 3.4% version is a great improvement, with much more body and flavour. In contrast, I think I only had the Light Mild once and found it fairly tasteless. The XXXX again is much better, with a distinct rounded malt flavour. This pair could be regarded as equivalents of Hydes’ Dark Ruby and 1863. Both of these are currently still declared at 3.5%, but surely they will be dropping a point too to come below the threshold.

These are both nitrokeg beers, although they don’t have the soapy character you associate with beers like John Smith’s Extra Smooth. In fact, are there any non-craft keg ales still available that aren’t nitrokeg? They’re also served too cold. They’re not a match for a well-kept pint of cask, but they’re palatable enough and certainly preferable to stale, tepid cask. The question does occur how cask would have fared if the keg beers available in the 1970s had been of this standard. In summary, Sam’s have turned what were a trio of very lacklustre also-rans to entirely credible beers that are available at a bargain price.

In other Sam Smith’s news, they have recently reopened the Swan in Holmes Chapel, Cheshire, which had been closed since 2019. This is a well-situated pub right next to the station in a small town or large village where large numbers of new houses are being built, so it has the potential to attract a decent trade. However, when it was open before, I expressed concern that its refurbishment had left it too compartmentalised for its own good, and the layout didn’t really work in terms of how people moved around the pub.

Needless to say, there were the predictable responses expressing shock at Sam’s arbitrary house rules. It was amusing to see people complaining about the pub saying “well-behaved children welcome”, as if any pub would actively welcome badly-behaved children. It also prompted this article in the Daily Telegraph by philosophical beardy Christopher Howse, which I have to say read rather more into it than it deserved. Despite him waxing lyrical about the availability of dark mild, the landlord said that when he called he actually had a gin and tonic.

Shield burial

Molson Coors have announced that they are “resting” production of their iconic Worthington White Shield brand, something that has caused a certain degree of anger amongst the beer writing community. In the early years of CAMRA, White Shield was, along with Guinness, one of only two widely-distributed bottle-conditioned beers in the UK. It came in half-pint bottles and was mostly sold in pubs, including those of Bass themselves, but also several independent brewers such as Greenalls, Hydes and Robinson’s.

It mainly appealed to an older demographic, who would often add one to a half-pint of draught bitter to liven it up, or have one to round off the end of a session. Most preferred to pour it carefully to leave the sediment in the bottom of the bottle, but some would deliberately put it in the glass with the aim of keeping themselves “regular”. A few would even pour the beer clear and then consume the sediment separately.

In the early 80s, I was working in Surrey and my parents came down for the weekend and stayed in a nearby hotel. The bar had no cask beer, but they did have a stock of well-aged bottles of White Shield. (Not sure whether this was before the days of best before dates on beer). These had really enjoyed a thorough secondary fermentation and, while some were distinctly lively, they tasted delicious.

However, the old-style half-pint bottles in pubs were a declining sector, and at some point, from memory around 1990, Bass, noting the interest from beer enthusiasts, decided on a big relaunch. They jacked up the price and put it in fancy 33cl bottles with an information leaflet on a little string around the neck. However, as so often happens, they had misjudged the market and failed to realise that it was predominantly drunk by old boys, not by the beer cognoscenti. Its traditional market was destroyed, while there wasn’t remotely enough interest from enthusiasts to take up the slack.

After a while, the decision was taken to move it into 500ml bottles to align it with the growing “premium bottled ales” sector, but it seemed to suffer from a rather schizophrenic approach to production and marketing. At one point, brewing was contracted out to the now-defunct King & Barnes brewery in Horsham, Sussex. While they were capable brewers, their interpretation followed their own house style and was far too sweet to properly represent its traditional Burton character.

After a while, production was brought back in house by what became Molson Coors, and it established itself as a something of a flagship product, albeit a low-volume one. At one point it even spawned a cask “little brother” called Red Shield that was intended to compete with beers like Bass and Pedigree. I also recall having a rather nice drop of cask White Shield in the Dog in Burton-on-Trent just before the 2020 lockdown.

However, distribution of the bottled product, never particularly extensive, seemed to steadily contract. Tesco stopped stocking it, and I think the last time I ever saw it was in Booths, again just before the lockdown. Now the company have decided to “pause” production of a brand that had become virtually invisible anyway. Perhaps they could have done more to promote it, but it takes two to tango, and maybe the retailers were coming back and telling them that it simply wasn’t shifting. This Twitter poll showed little enthusiasm for it:

POLL: Did you drink Worthington White Shield (assuming you could find any)?

— Pub Curmudgeon 🌸🍻 (@oldmudgie) August 14, 2023

No doubt it suffered from the same problem as other bottle-conditioned ales, that buyers saw little benefit in them over their brewery-conditioned counterparts, and were deterred by their inconsistency. I wrote recently about the withdrawal of bottle-conditioned Pedigree, and indeed the segment now seems to have virtually disappeared from major retailers, despite all the exhortations of the beer writers.

This one is particularly regrettable, as it was one of the original bottle-conditioned beers, and one where the process did confer a real benefit. When it worked, it produced an excellent, highly-distinctive beer, but unfortunately all too often the yeast didn’t really seem to take hold and you ended up with a bottle of flaccid glop. It’s a beer that I used to buy fairly often, but the high ratio of duds meant that I ended up doing so less and less.

It does seem to be the case that the multinational companies who now control what were once the crown jewels of British brewing pay scant regard to its heritage. We have seen this with the way Draught Bass has been marginalised. Hopefully Molson Coors will find a way to keep the brand going and also get to grips with the quality control issues. But there are parallels here with the fate of the Crooked House, in there has been widespread anger at the demise of something that previously fewer and fewer people were actually buying or visiting.

Up in smoke

During the last week there has been a lot of media attention over the fate of the Glynne Arms (aka “Crooked House”) at Himley on the fringes of the West Midlands. This well-known pub was severely damaged by fire and then the following day was completely demolished by its new owners in blatant contravention of planning regulations. On the face of it, it is a glaring example of the phenomenon of the “mystery fire” which can be a very convenient way of getting rid of closed pubs and, unsurprisingly, it has become something of a cause célèbre and triggered a national wave of outrage.

However, when the news was first announced that Marston’s had sold the pub off and it had closed, the general response was one of philosophical resignation. While it was a distinctive and quirky building, the actual pub operation wasn’t anything to write home about. I visited it once about ten years ago and, while it was one to tick off the list, it wasn’t a place I would go out of my way to use as a pub. Plenty of pubs close, and this was just another one to add to the total. If the new owners had simply left it to rot for a year, it would have faded from the public eye. But instead they have jumped the gun and left themselves open to prosecution.

As shown by the map extract above, the Crooked House is located at the end of a dead-end track in an unprepossessing area of disused mine workings, some of which have now been converted to a landfill site. Realistically, it’s somewhere that the vast majority of its customers will need to drive to. Over the years, pubgoers in general have become much less inclined to drive out to “character” pubs of this kind, and this will have made it less viable as a business. A similar process happened to the Royal Oak (th’Heights) in the hills above Oldham, which closed just before Covid and later received planning permission to be converted to a private house.

“After running the public house for almost three decades it has become increasingly difficult to continue running the business due to its remote location. Most customers travelled by car and as such their stay was only short due to drink driving laws. It attracted occasional walkers and people who live in and around Heights.”

Realistically, these are not good times for pubs located at the end of rural dead-ends.

Marston’s have rightly attracted opprobrium for selling the pub to the company with which they were already in dispute over access rights to the neighbouring landfill site. They can have been under no illusions about its likely fate. Possibly some other more enterprising owner might have been able to make a success of it as a pub, but realistically if there hadn’t been a pub there already it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to build one.

In the past, many family breweries may have kept on one or two pubs for sentimental reasons, being the first pub they ever bought or one that looked good on the company calendar. But nowadays a more hard-headed attitude tends to prevail, and every pub in a tied estate will be expected to earn its keep. In recent years, my local brewers Robinson’s have disposed of quite a few pubs that once might have been regarded as jewels in the company crown, such as the Cat & Fiddle in Cheshire and the Bull i’th’Thorn at Hurdlow in Derbyshire.

Pub closures are commonplace, and generally go through without anyone batting an eyelid apart from a few in the immediate vicinity. Only this week, the Manchester Evening News reports on 13 in the area that have closed permanently this year and 38 more that are long-term closed. Many once familiar landmarks such as the Saltersgate Inn on the North York Moors have gone. But people seem to have projected all their feelings about the closure of pubs on to this one particular case.

Over the past forty years, the pub trade as a whole has been in a long-term decline that has led to tens of thousands closing down. The reasons for this are down to a variety of changes in social trends and attitudes, although certain government actions such as the Beer Orders and the smoking ban have exacerbated matters. There is undoubtedly a profound sense of loss about this, even from people who never used pubs much, which is very perceptively explained in this article by Rowan Pelling from 2014.

At times this can turn into a kind of vaguely-directed anger, as we are seeing here, and people are keen to look for scapegoats such as pubcos, developers, supermarkets and government. But the reality is that pubs have mainly been undone by social change, not by some malign conspiracy, and there is no remotely credible alternative course of action that would have made it permanently 1978.

The suggestion has been made that the Crooked House should be rebuilt as an exact replica, as happened with the Carlton Tavern in London. However, the Carlton Tavern is in a well-populated urban area, whereas rebuilding the Crooked House would in effect be creating an expensive white elephant. If it was to be rebuilt at all it would be better located in the Black Country Living Museum at Dudley. And you have to wonder how many of the people bewailing its fate will make the effort to go out and visit a wet-led rural pub this weekend.

Fade to black

Guinness announced last week that they were investing €25 million at their Dublin brewery to increase production of the 0.0% version of the beer by 300%. I’ve written about alcohol-free beers several times in the past, generally taking the view that, while they had a place in the market, it was difficult to produce one that was particularly palatable, and the industry and media were prone to greatly exaggerating their potential for growth.

However, I’d heard a few good reports about this one, so I bought a four-pack to try it for myself. Draught or canned Guinness is certainly a very distinctive product in terms of its appearance, mouthfeel and taste, and the canned zero-alcohol version does a pretty good job of replicating that. From its look, and the first gulp, it’s just like a glass of standard Guinness. It’s only as you get further down that you realise something is missing, and by the time you reach the bottom of the glass you’re left with something rather dull and forgettable.

However, in a sense it’s too convincing an imitation for its own good. I don’t normally buy canned Guinness to drink at home, so why should I buy an alcohol-free version except as a curiosity? Other people may take a different view, but personally I tend to see alcohol-free beers as a soft drink alternative, not a beer alternative, and thus tend to look for something, probably a lager, that is palatable but not particularly challenging. One of the best I’ve come across is actually the alcohol-free Stella Artois, which is available in Wetherspoon’s, but which I haven’t come across in the supermarkets.

I’ve tried a few of the alcohol-free British-style ales, but in general I’ve found them pretty revolting, coming across as unfermented wort laced with hop syrup. And I recently tried an alcohol-free Stowford Press cider which just tasted like standard cider severely watered down.

Canned alcohol-free Guinness is certainly a triumph of the brewing technologist’s skill, but I can’t see it becoming a regular purchase. Although “widget” bitter is now very much a declining market, it would be interesting to apply the same technology to something like John Smith’s Extra Smooth.

I see no slops

I’ve recently had a couple of discussions, both online and face-to-face, with people who I would consider fairly knowledgeable and enthusiastic about beer and pubs. Both of them have said something to the effect of “I think you’re exaggerating the problem of cask quality, Mudgie. Pretty much everywhere I go it’s pretty decent.”

Now, from their own personal drinking habits that may well be entirely correct. But it’s a common logical fallacy known as “selection bias” to seek to extrapolate general principles from personal experience, as clearly there’s no guarantee it will be representative. If you’re a beer enthusiast, by definition you are in general going to choose to drink in pubs where you know the beer is well-kept, or which others have recommended to you. My local CAMRA branch, to its credit, does organise regular monthly “Staggers” that aim over time to visit most of the cask-serving pubs in the area, but even here Friday nights are when the beer is most likely to be turning over quickly and in decent nick.

The issue is even greater if you are a beer writer. Pretty much everywhere you visit will be somewhere that has been recommended to you because it’s interesting, or new, or different, or a place with an established reputation for quality, because you want to report on it. You’re not going to waste your time going in those gastropubs, sports boozers or town-centre bars that are half-hearted about cask. “I went in the Pickled Artichoke and had a rather dull and tired pint of Greene King IPA” is not going to sell many copies.

CAMRA’s WhatPub online guide claims to list 32,189 cask ale outlets. There are currently 4,500 pubs in the Good Beer Guide, and maybe the same number again that are credible contenders. That leaves a further 23,000 that in practice never get on the radar. Some of them, particularly family brewer tied pubs, may consistently serve decent beer, but on the other hand many of them realistically won’t. In this article, Matthew Curtis reports that cask sales have fallen to 8.6% of the on-trade beer market, which is less than a million barrels a year. That’s about 24 pints a day on average for each of those 32,189 outlets.

Maybe a fair number of those 23,000 outlets would be better off dropping it entirely, but cask is still perceived as something that looks good on the bar even if few people actually drink it, and culling outlets has the effect of reducing its profile overall. I saw the question raised on Twitter (or should we now be calling it “X”?) as to why someone should give up on a product purely because of one bad example. And, of course, they shouldn’t, but on the other hand if you regularly go in a pub and the cask is rarely much cop it’s understandable why people reject it.

I have to say in recent years I’ve become much less dogmatic about ordering cask whenever it is available. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t spend my entire life single-mindedly seeking out good beer and pubs, and sometimes I will find myself somewhere where the choice of beer doesn’t particularly inspire confidence. For example, I was recently in a pub where the choice was just the standard range of kegs plus a solitary Ruddles handpump. I passed on the Ruddles and had a Carling. It might have been good, but frankly it probably wasn’t. Although not always reliable, I’ve developed a kind of “spidey sense” about whether the beer will be decent or not.

The biggest enemy of cask quality is slow turnover and, while overall volumes have fallen, the number of lines hasn’t dropped to follow suit. There’s nothing like quick sales to paper over a lack of cellarmanship skills. But, while they may be fully aware of the problem, if the people who write about beer seldom experience poor quality themselves, it won’t seem particularly urgent to them. The battle for cask quality is being fought in the outlets that the beer writers and enthusiasts never visit.

No doubt this Autumn there will be the usual round of hand-wringing about cask beer quality and declining sales. But, as usual, the industry will sagely nod, dismiss it as someone else’s problem, and move on.

Toe the line

I recently walked into my local Wetherspoon’s and approached the bar to order a pint, only to be somewhat taken aback to be told to join a queue which hadn’t been immediately obvious. And when I eventually was served, I had to walk half the length of the bar to point out the guest ale I wanted to an inexperienced member of bar staff. I’d heard of this phenomenon happening in other places, but this was the first time I had experienced it myself. (I have been in one or two other pubs where queues tend to form because of a very short serving counter). It wasn’t even a particularly busy time of day, To be honest, had I not been wanting to exchange a CAMRA discount voucher I would have found a table and used the Wetherspoon’s App.

Queuing is something that seems to be have become much more common in pubs over the last couple of years, and indeed a Twitter account called Pub Queues has sprung up to document and bewail it. Here are a few examples, not exclusively from Wetherspoon’s:

Pub Queues Greatest Hits Volume 1 pic.twitter.com/itiGuKX476

— pub_queues (@QueuesPub) July 6, 2023

This trend has undoubtedly been exacerbated by the impact of Covid and lockdowns. Customers have become more used to standing in line, and somewhat nervous about a crush at the bar. At the same time, pubs have often been left short-staffed by recruitment difficulties, with the staff they do have lacking the experience to know whose turn it is from a sea of faces.

It undoubtedly does detract from a traditional pub atmosphere, taking away the opportunity to chat with staff or other customers at the bar, and making it difficult to scan the pumps or the top shelf to see what is on offer. I don’t like it, and I’d be much less inclined to give my custom to pubs where it’s in operation. It’s just turning a pub into a retail outlet where the prime objective is the efficient processing of customers.

But, given the issues listed above, for a big, busy pub with a lot of customers who aren’t pub regulars, it may be the lesser of two evils in ensuring everyone gets dealt with fairly. Tandleman recently wrote perceptively about how it was a sensible option in a London Wetherspoon’s with a large tourist contingent.

I wrote about this back in 2017 when it was just a tiny cloud on the horizon.

No, it’s not how a traditional pub works, and you do lose the contribution to pub atmosphere of interaction between staff and customers. But Wetherspoon’s aren’t really traditional pubs anyway, and in terms of how their business operates, queuing is likely to make things more efficient when it’s busy. If it takes off, you could even see the interiors of their pubs being redesigned with shorter bar counters divided into identifiable serving points, and display boards alongside the queue showing the food and drink menus. Maybe you could even separate ordering and collecting drinks, as in a McDonald’s drive-thru, so your drinks are ready when you actually reach the bar.

Queuing is a waste of a long bar counter, and also leads to a line of customers snaking through seating areas, which isn’t ideal. So if you did decide that it was here to stay, it would make sense firstly to put up prominent “Please Queue Here” signs so nobody was left in any doubt what was going on, and rearrange the bar area so things worked more efficiently and people didn’t get in each other’s way. But it would remove a lot of the traditional pub experience.

* When I mentioned this on Twitter, I got the usual tiresome responses of “wHY DIDn't YoU GO TO thE FunKy indEpEndEnt Craft baR?” which totally ignored the fact that said establishment wasn’t open at that particular time.