The cold light of day

This story about Zara Phillips’ boyfriend Mike Tindall being banned for drink-driving should give a salutary lesson about the dangers of the “morning after”. Alcohol is only metabolised by the body at a rate of about one unit an hour, so if you’ve had a skinful, you may well not be under the limit again for twenty hours or more. All the claims about him having an unusually low rate of alcohol absorption seem like special pleading – surely if you’ve consumed four beers (which I doubt were ordinary bitter strength), seven glasses of champagne and a vodka and Red Bull, you must expect to be at least nudging the limit the following day. And surely someone such as Mike Tindall could have afforded one of the personal breathalysers that are now available for around £50, especially given the fact that he had been banned in the past.

But this is something on which the official government propaganda keeps very quiet. “Don’t drink anything at all immediately before driving” is a clear message, even if it is dishonest in terms of real risk. But, if you have had a few drinks, how are you supposed to know when you are OK to drive again? Even saying “if you have had anything to drink, don’t drive again for twenty-four hours” wouldn’t cover everyone, and would represent ludicrous over-caution for most people. The only way to do this is to teach people unit-counting – how much alcohol each drink contains, and how quickly it is metabolised by the body. But they refuse to do this, on the grounds that it would allegedly encourage people to “drink up to the limit”. This head-in-the-sand attitude is costing lives, and causing responsible people to lose their licences. Why shouldn’t the annual drink-drive publicity campaign one year focus on the morning-after risk, as I asked here ten years ago? I have come across a number of people who ostentatiously claimed never to even have a half of mild before getting behind the wheel, but whose overall alcohol consumption must surely have meant they were often well over the limit on the morning after. They may have believed they were being ultra-responsible, but they weren’t.

It's 1988 again

There has been a predictable outcry from anti-drink pressure groups about Wetherspoon’s decision to offer Greene King IPA at 99p a pint. But this is a beer of moderate strength that generally appeals to an older male customer base who typically may only have a couple of pints anyway. The idea that their pubs are suddenly going to be inundated with binge-drinkers swilling gallons of the stuff is not really credible – if nothing else, it would be fairly hard work getting drunk on IPA anyway.

In reality, this is just a headline-grabbing initiative by Wetherspoon’s that will heighten the public perception of their pubs as places offering good value – which in a recession is no bad thing. It’s unlikely to make much difference to overall consumption patterns, or even prompt many drinkers to switch pubs. People will continue to pay a lot more to drink better beer in more characterful pubs. But, as I’ve said before, if you’re running a bog-standard pub company outlet within shouting distance of a Wetherspoon’s, charging £2.50 a pint for ordinary bitter looks increasingly like a wilful denial of reality.

Spreading your wings

Wetherspoon’s are clever pub operators, and, although they make the occasional mistake, weigh up the potential of their pubs very carefully in advance. But pretty much all of their pubs essentially derive their trade from people who are already in the vicinity – no Wetherspoon’s pub is a destination pub.

In Exeter, though, there’s a Wetherspoon’s pub called the Imperial which I assume occupies a former hotel. But there’s a distinctive difference – it’s about three quarters of a mile from the city centre (although nearer to the University) and has a large car park. Therefore that pub, unlike the vast majority of other Wetherspoon’s, can be a destination venue. On my visit it seemed to be thriving and the car park was full.

Over New Year, I took my elderly parents out for a pub meal. Wetherspoon’s have an extensive, good-value menu, but, in the absence of a car park or convenient nearby parking, they couldn’t be considered.

I’ve suggested this in the past, and it has come to nothing, but there must be scope for Wetherspoon’s to expand their estate by taking over failing suburban pubs that are often situated at public transport interchanges and alongside a parade of shops. Such pubs surely aren’t beyond redemption and, while they may draw a substantial car-borne trade, aren’t primarily dependent on it. A thriving Wetherspoon’s could revitalise many suburban centres, and they might be surprised how far people would travel for their food offer.

Maybe they’re anticipating an eventual cut in the drink-drive limit, but Wetherspoon’s seem to shy away from any site that has a car park.

The best place for children is not in the pub

I can't help thinking that this regrettable incident would not have happened if we still had the traditional restrictions on children in pubs.

In my view under-14s should only be in pubs if accompanied by their parents or guardians and eating a meal. Full stop. Drunken parents should not be able to take their offspring on pub-crawls.

As pubs should be

Had a wander round Stockport this lunchtime and ended up in the Boar’s Head, a Sam Smith’s pub. Old Brewery Bitter at £1.35 a pint, the other drinks in proportion. Between 4 and 6 pm it was heaving, with a predominantly male, over 40 clientele, in other words pub customers as they always have been. Absolutely superb atmosphere. Surely this sends a message to all the pubs charging £2.30+ a pint and wondering where all the customers are – provide a proper, traditional drinking environment and charge reasonable prices, and the punters will find the way to your door.

Distress purchase

At times, any beer drinker with a social life beyond the ticking circuit is likely to find himself in an establishment where no cask beer is available. Does he cut off his nose to spite his face and ostentatiously refuse to drink any non-real beer at all, and thus end up being branded by the rest of the company as a prize prat? Or does he go for something else, and, if so, what?

Personally, I find nitrokeg “smooth” beers utterly revolting, with the character of dishwater. I can stomach Guinness, though, although if I drink too much of it, it can have unfortunate after-effects. In general, though, I tend to see if there are any imported lagers on the bar. Heineken and even Beck’s Vier are palatable enough, although a genuine German draught like Warsteiner or Krombacher is preferable. In extremis, I may even end up on British-brewed Stella, but the British-brewed standard lagers such as Carling really are beyond the pale. Sometimes I even feel it would be worth bringing back the old-fashioned keg beers, which were a bit fizzier than cask but avoided the soapiness of nitro.

You can also look at the bottle shelf, although in general a pub that has no cask beer will have no decent bottles either. There seems to be a direct relationship between the number and quality of cask beers available, and the number and quality of bottled beers.

The point must also be made that many people are “repertoire drinkers”, who may well drink cask beer and appreciate it on occasions but also at other times enjoy lager and Guinness. The view that any draught product other than cask is the spawn of the devil really does the overall appreciation of beer no good at all.

Three folk singers in a pub near Wells...

This song - Roots by Show of Hands - is a superb and pointed expression of true English patriotism:

Getting the price right

I’ve never been wholly convinced by the view that supermarket alcohol prices are killing pubs. Yes, off-trade beer is cheaper, and has been for thirty years. But the experiences of going to the pub and socialising with your friends, compared with sitting at home and drinking a few cans of Stella while watching telly, are not really interchangeable.

However, this is not to say there’s nothing in it, and I can’t help thinking that over the years the pub trade has shot itself in the foot on the pricing issue. There has been an assumption that, year-on-year, prices can be increased by a bit above inflation, and the customers will put up with it. But every other sector has been subject to severe price competition, so why should pubs be exempt? This point has been underlined by the rise of Wetherspoon’s, who aren’t as cheap as the off-trade, but in general are much cheaper than the local pub competition. A Wetherspoon’s pub may be devoid of character, but you need a strong incentive to go somewhere else that is charging 50 pence a pint more. Arguably Wetherspoon’s are doing to the pub trade what ASDA and Morrisons have done to food retailing.

Surely the generality of the pub trade should at least give some impression that they are doing something about prices – maybe, for example, offering one draught beer a week at 50p a pint off. You don’t need to discount everything you sell, or even very much of it, to give an impression of being price competitive, a lesson the supermarkets have learned very well. The current recession is only going to underline this point.

Back to 1948

A couple of months ago, I was told about how the owners of Samuel Smiths’ brewery had apparently acquired a financial stake in a company making pies. The result was that the conventional pub menus in their managed houses had been replaced by new menus predominantly featuring pies of various kinds, something which had not gone down too well in the leafier parts of Cheshire. I don’t routinely go in any Sam’s pubs that serve food, so I had half forgotten about it, but the other day encountered it for myself in a pub not too far from some of the most up-market residential areas in the North-West.

Unfortunately, it was just as bad as I had feared – a listing of unappetising, old-fashioned stodge that was even illustrated with little pictures of some of the dishes to make your gorge rise even more. It was as though Elizabeth David had never lived and we were back in 1948. There weren’t even any sandwiches or similar for those who didn’t want the full 1000 calories. A robust defence of tradition is one thing, a wilful refusal to accept the realities of the present is something else entirely. This is an extremely short-sighted measure that will do nothing for the long-term success of Sam’s outlets and will simply serve to confirm the widely-held view that pubs have nothing to do with good or imaginative food.

Edit 26/12/08: today I have spotted a detailed write-up of this story in the excellent CAMRA magazine Out Inn Cheshire entitled Sam Smith’s Culinary Suicide. Apparently the piemaker in question is called “Sarah Brownridge” and all the dishes on the menu are capable of being cooked in a microwave in eight minutes. An instruction from Chairman Humphrey Smith to all managed houses reads:

The new menu is out and I would make it absolutely clear on behalf of the company that we desire 100% Sarah Brownridge and no other food (with the possible exception of of a roast only on Sundays and only in a minority of our catering houses) to be sold in all pubs. No sandwiches, nothing else, just the food shown on the menu we have sent you.

The article goes on to say, “Needless to say, this has killed the food trade in our local Sam Smith’s houses.”

Minimum pricing canned

Realistically, minimum alcohol pricing was never going to be introduced. There was a major potential conflict with competition law, the effects were uncertain and it would not look good in a recession to be raising the price of a staple purchase of working-class households. Nevertheless, it's good to have a clear confirmation from the government that they have no plans to bring it in at present.

It's interesting how the more extreme ideas of the anti-drink lobby, such as this, a 21 minimum age for off-sales and separate tills for alcohol, are being knocked off one by one. However, it would not pay to be too complacent, as they could all too easily be revived if the climate of public opinion changed, as we have seen in the case of anti-smoking measures. And the slow but steady attack on drinkers through ratcheting up duty rates is likely to continue unabated.

Psst, want a fag?

So, within a few years, retailers of tobacco products will have to keep them under the counter or in closed cabinets. As is often the case, the Filthy Smoker deals with this far more eloquently (and profanely) than I could ever do. It also raises the question of exactly how smokers are meant to know which outlets stock cigarettes, what brands are available and at what prices. The tobacco manufacturers won’t really be that bothered, as it will do little to cut smoking rates and effectively kill price competition stone dead.

And is this a chilling vision of how pubs and off-licences will be in twenty years’ time, with no alcoholic drinks on display and customers having to ask for them by name? In such a climate, the opportunities to launch new products or set up new breweries would be absolutely zero.

Forcing Britain to sober up

Excellent article here from the estimable Sp!ked about the present government's Puritanical, miserabilist attitude to pubs and alcohol.

The section about how out-of-touch ministers are with how ordinary people actually live their lives is particularly good.

Nevertheless, the sheer relentlessness of these measures and proposals helps legitimise the notion that it is perfectly acceptable for government to restrict public space and personal freedom. That assumption is also based on the poisonous and corrosive notion that British citizens are inherently problematic, especially when we’ve had a few drinks. It is this genuine fear and barely concealed disgust for us that propels New Labour to carry on restricting our autonomy at every opportunity.

That fear and loathing is itself a product of New Labour’s peculiar development in British politics, as a self-referencing clique of managers and technocrats with no genuine roots or connections in wider society. As such, their isolation from ordinary people has generated a succession of Labour ministers who are, at best, embarrassingly unworldly about adult life or absolutely petrified of the city they live and work in. One minister, Caroline Flint, said she ‘couldn’t believe that people actually go out to get drunk’; Harriet Harman couldn’t face touring the London district of Peckham - an area she has represented in parliament for 26 years - without wearing a stab-proof vest. This would be funny if New Labour’s jittery nerves didn’t have such destructive consequences on our freedoms and our lifestyles.

Missing the target

In a classic case of unintended consequences, it seems that the government’s plans to restrict alcohol promotions will hit middle-class wine drinkers hardest, hardly a group noted for causing drunken mayhem on the streets. Consumers of cheap lager and cider will be relatively unscathed. And surely all those offers of “4 for £5” or “3 for £4” have done a great deal in encouraging people to sample premium bottled ales, another sector that typically appeals to moderate, responsible drinkers.

Cheaper than water

This blog posting makes the point very clearly that newspaper claims that beer is being sold by supermarkets for less than water are grossly misleading, as they are not comparing like with like. The comparison is between a very cheap bottom-end lager and a premium branded water. However, the average price of beer sold in supermarkets would still be far higher per fluid ounce than the price of water.

This is similar to the oft-repeated canard that pubs sell soft drinks for more than beer, whereas in reality, especially when you consider the actual quantities purchased, beer is on average considerably more expensive, drink for drink.

Peetered out

I foresaw back in July that the launch of 4% ABV Stella Artois would lead to the demise of Stella's existing little brother Peeterman, and so it has proven. I don't expect it will be much missed.

Inbev's efforts to develop a "family" of beers around the core Stella brand have proved a dismal failure, and you also have to wonder how Stella itself is faring now its alcohol content has been cut from 5.2% to 5.0%, just the same as every other "premium" lager. No doubt it would attract the ire of the anti-drink lobby, but some other brewer might clean up if they launched a rival brand in the 5.3% to 5.5% strength band.