Who reads this anyway?

A couple of weeks ago, I made the comment that “I always picture most of the readers of this blog as middle-aged blokes.” A commenter suggested I set up a survey to analyse the readership and demonstrate whether or not this was true, so I did. This has now closed, and with 102 responses it seems I have been proven right.

The age and gender breakdown was as follows:

Female under 35: 6 (6%)
Female aged 35-54: 2 (2%)
Female 55 or over: 3 (3%)
Male under 35: 18 (18%)
Male aged 35-54: 46 (45%)
Male 55 or over: 27 (26%)

So, not unsurprisingly, a strong male bias (89%), and a strong weighting towards the over 35s (76%). I think the male predominance is typical of pretty much every general discussion forum on the Internet, and I suppose quality beer is one of the finer things in life you only come to appreciate after the first flush of youth.

Hiding your light

There’s a thread on the CAMRA forum started by the indefatigable Richard English entitled “Some pubs don’t deserve to succeed”. And, regrettably, even in this marketing-savvy age, too many fall down on the basics of promoting themselves. I have written before about how pubs fail to advertise what is on offer within, which in locations where there is pedestrian footfall and a choice of venues, is crucial to bringing customers in.

I recently found myself in an attractive little Borders market town around lunchtime. It’s not a prime tourist trap, but clearly somewhere that does attract a fair number of visitors. There are six pubs on the main street, some remarkably attractive half-timbered buildings. One, although clearly still trading, wasn’t open at 12.15, another was closed and boarded and up for sale. Of the other four, two made no mention outside of offering food at all, one had a blackboard saying “see menu inside” and the fourth clearly had menus set out on the tables inside, although not displayed by the door.

From the general look of it, I chose the fourth, and went in and ordered a (somewhat lacklustre) pint. I picked up a menu and went to the bar to order, only to be told that, because of a flood in the kitchen, they weren’t serving food. The barmaid recommended a café-bar down the street, which as it turned out provided a perfectly decent light lunch, and also – surprisingly – had a handpump serving real ale, although that wasn’t very good either.

Surely it is basic common sense that if you are serving food, you display a menu outside and indicate the times during which food is served. And if you’re not serving food, how much effort does it take to write a notice saying “No food today” and stick it on the door?

Incidentally, the entry for the one Good Beer Guide pub in the town, which is just off the town centre, says bluntly “No food”. While I’m not naming names, the picture will give you a good clue as to where it was - looks wonderful, doesn’t it?

Doomed

Across much of the South-West, Sharp’s Doom Bar seems to be the current cask beer of choice to put on the bar. If any pub wants to do something just a little bit “different”, Doom Bar seems to be the beer they go for first. The brewery must have some very good salesmen, because I have to say I find it one of the dullest brown beers around, with nothing distinctive or memorable about it at all beyond a generic “beery” flavour. Other bloggers such as Tandleman have commented on this before. Butcombe would be infinitely preferable, and to be honest I’d personally much rather have a pint of Courage Best.

It also seems to be very likely to crop up in the kind of pub where it ends up being served just a bit too warm, and with just a slight haze on it, which can’t do its reputation any good. The last example I had in the North-West fell into exactly that category.

Black Beauty

There’s always a worry, when visiting a pub you’ve enjoyed many years before, that you will find it changed beyond recognition and no longer worth the trip. But I was greatly reassured recently when visiting the Black Horse at Clapton-in-Gordano close to the M5 in the northern tip of Somerset. This is a country pub as country pubs should be. Outwardly, it’s an unassuming, whitewashed building of local stone. Access to the main bar is gained by a passageway that runs right through the pub from front to back. Inside, it’s all stone-flagged floors, ancient beams and creaking settles. There’s a main bar area with a cosy snug opening off. The servery also has an outside window allowing direct service to drinkers in the beer garden.

It once featured on CAMRA’s National Inventory of historic pub interiors, but apparently was taken off because a wall was removed in about 1850. But it’s still one of the most traditional pub interiors I can think of.

On my visit, it had Courage Best, Butcombe Bitter and Exmoor Gold on gravity, and Otter Bitter and Wadworth’s 6X on handpump. Not the selection of a cutting-edge craft beer exhibition, but all beers either brewed in the West Country or having a strong local tradition. Prices were between £2.60 and £2.90 a pint, similar to country pubs around here. The casks stillaged behind the bar had cooling jackets, and my pint of Butcombe was served at the right temperature and had no shortage of condition. When done well, gravity dispense has much to be said for it.

Food is mostly rolls and baguettes with a wide choice of hot and cold fillings, with the menu augmented by a small selection of specials. One of these was Jamaican Jerk Chicken on a bed of rice, so clearly they’re not rigidly wedded to Ye Olde Traditional Meate and Two Vegge style of pub food. This is how pub food should be done – provide a decent meal or snack to visitors, but don’t pretend to be a restaurant. No food is served in the evenings, or on Sundays (the latter something of a failing, I think).

It remains very much a proper pub – just after noon on a weekday there were old boys in there drinking pints of bright orange cloudy cider. Well worth a visit if you’re ever anywhere remotely close. And why can’t more operators of rural pubs realise that championing tradition, with a nod to the contemporary, makes much more sense than chucking it out of the window? The Black Horse is a truly memorable pub – how many knocked-through, stripped-pine establishments offering “contemporary dining with a strong emphasis on local seasonal produce” can say the same?

So don’t let anybody say there’s never anything positive on this blog!

The Faff & Fluster

One fascinating aspect of people’s behaviour in pubs is the extreme difficulty elderly couples seem to have in deciding where to sit. Of course, we’ll all get there eventually (with a bit of luck) but it’s still amusing to watch.

“Where do you you want to sit, Ethel?”

“Oh, I don’t know, anywhere, George.”

“Here then?”

“No, not there.”

“How about here by the window?”

“Oh, all right.”

...two minutes later...

“Ooh, there’s a draught here, shall we move over there?”

I recall one occasion in a Cornish pub where I had bagged what was obviously the best-placed table in the room, and an elderly couple came in and tried out each one of the six or seven other vacant tables before settling on one.

Maybe there is something to be said for the restaurant practice of in effect telling customers where to sit and putting the onus on them to refuse.

Fair outlook for Robinson's

There’s an interesting article here on the Morning Advertiser website by Roger Protz discussing Robinson’s, our local independent brewer here in Stockport. It’s quite amusing how the former Trotskyite Protz has now become a cheerleader for the famously conservative-minded and indeed sometimes quasi-feudal family brewers. The Robinson family do give the impression of having a clear vision for taking the company forward and certainly aren’t willing to let it stagnate. But Oliver Robinson is surely correct when he says “Of our 400 pubs, 20% are doing well, 60% could do better and 20% are struggling.” It should be pointed out that, while the Arden Arms, which is something of a showpiece pub, may be busy on a wet Monday lunchtime, it’s unlikely that you would find anywhere near as many customers at that time in any of Robinson’s other pubs in central Stockport.

Worth a read

A couple of good articles on Sp!ked this week:

A licence to interfere in our everyday lives – Josie Appleton says the Lib-Cons’ proposed reforms to the licensing laws would make them even more authoritarian and killjoy than they already are - no mean feat.

Decent drinkers vs demon drinkers – Tim Black reckons the campaign to ramp up the price of booze is an unspoken class war by wine-quaffers against cider-consumers.

Analysing pub closures

Last week, I referred to a study by CR Consulting demonstrating how the smoking ban had been the primary cause of pub closures over the past three years. Dave Atherton has now written about this at more length on the blog of the Institute of Economic Affairs.

While in-depth research would be required to ascertain accurately the relative impact of various factors, the statistical evidence certainly appears to support the view that the smoking ban is playing a pivotal role in the rapid decline of Britain’s pubs. If this is the case, the policy implications are clear: to reduce the rate of closures, pubs and clubs should at the very least be allowed to provide separate ventilated smoking rooms.

Turning in his grave

I can’t imagine that the great economist and philosopher Adam Smith would be very impressed by the plans to implement a 45 pence per unit minimum alcohol price in his native land. But the arguments against it are very well summed up here by Dr Eamonn Butler from the modern-day institute that bears his name.

Even if cheap alcohol were the problem, how should you deal with it? Putting up the tax would at least be defensible economics. Minimum pricing isn’t. Price controls just mess up the market system and produce all sorts of perverse results which may be hard to predict. And once the politicians have started to regulate one price on the supermarket shelves, where do you think their public-spirited intervention will stop?

Shame about the food

Pete Brown says here in The Publican exactly what I’ve argued about pub food on several occasions in the past – that pub menus haven’t significantly changed in a quarter of a century, and the vast majority of menus are, with a few exceptions, pretty much the same as each other. Indeed, there was more originality in pub menus in 1980, when there was more of a spirit of experimentation and “suck it and see”, than there is now. When there is so much innovation and variety in the restaurant sector, even down to the everyday “family restaurants” on your local retail park, pubs remain mired in a hackneyed, old-fashioned world of “hearty fare” and meat and two veg.

This represents a crushing lack of imagination, innovation or listening to customers. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with these dishes per se, but they form such a tiny, narrow sliver of what we now like to eat as a nation, and when they’re all identical, and when there is simply no option of a nice, tasty meal that is going to be less than 75 per cent of your daily recommended intake of fat and calories, I suddenly realised why I find eating in pubs to be largely a depressing experience.

I’m not saying I want sashimi platters with my pint of ale. I’m not saying there is no merit in hearty fare, or traditional British dishes.

But when you look at almost any other aspect of pubs – décor, beer selection, ambience – there is incredible diversity as you roam the country, even within a single town.

Beyond snacks and sandwiches, I rarely eat in pubs now because the food is so consistently dull and unappealing. Traditional English gristle and stodge blighted my childhood – it’s the last thing I want to eat today.

Yet on the same website we have Jessica Harvey praising “retro nostalgia pub grub” which surely is the last thing forward-looking pubs should be promoting.

Greyhound put down

A pub not too far from me – the Greyhound in Adswood, Stockport – has joined the recent trend of closures I have illustrated on the Closed Pubs blog. Like so many others that have closed, it is a large, 20th-century pub on a free-standing site. A former Greenall’s house, it was never the best pub in the world, and there’s a Hydes pub – the Cross Keys – just down the road, but on the other hand it managed to remain viable for decades, and there’s no shortage of potential customers nearby. Many years ago, we even had a CAMRA social there.

The scale of the steel shutters and fencing suggests there’s little prospect of it reopening as a pub. Google Street View still shows it as open. It looks to be 1930s from the architecture, although it could be early 50s – the wings look more modern than the central core. In this case, the style is that associated with inter-wars post offices and telephone exchanges rather than Brewer’s Tudor or Art Deco.

Sitting pretty

Although it’s effectively an advertising feature, this piece from the Morning Advertiser very much agrees with me on the benefits of fixed seating in pubs, and the dismal space utilisation of sofas.

Fixed or built-in, made-to-measure seating has come to be seen as the pub owner’s most practical option, says Barry Revell, of Breachview Interiors. It may be more expensive than loose furniture, but is the better business choice.

“Fixed furniture is less flexible, but in a way it’s a much better option. It will seat more people, because it uses all the available space — a length of wall with tables and chairs has too many unused gaps. And fixed furniture always looks more comfortable.

“I am not a lover of sofas,” says Revell. “Comfortable as they may be, if one person sits down on a sofa, nobody else will sit next to them.

“It is strange, but on a bench seat, people are more likely to sit next to someone they don’t know. So, on a 12-seat bench you may well seat a dozen people — on 12 sofa seats, you may have six people and the rest is wasted.”

The reluctance to use fixed seating – which is clearly a company policy – continues to puzzle me about Wetherspoon’s, as it would allow them to fit more customers in and improve the ambience of their pubs which all too often now resemble works canteens.

Loaded

“Pre-loading” – that is, fuelling up on cheap off-trade alcohol before going on a night out – is often seen as a major factor behind drink-related disorder, and this is used as a justification for increasing the price of drink. Now, I’ve no doubt that a certain amount of pre-loading does take place, but overall it must only account for a tiny proportion of off-trade consumption, so to use that as a reason for an overall price hike seems like punishing the majority for the sins of the minority. And even if the price of a bottle of vodka was raised by 50%, it would still be much cheaper than drinks in the pub.

But I thought it would be interesting to ask readers of this blog whether they ever indulged in pre-loading themselves. The question was “Have you ever “pre-loaded” before going out for a drink?” and there were 72 responses, broken down as follows:

I currently do it often: 4 (6%)
I currently do it occasionally: 8 (11%)
I used to do it often: 5 (7%)
I used to do it occasionally: 9 (12%)
No, never: 46 (64%)

Perhaps a little surprising, given that I always picture most of the readers of this blog as middle-aged blokes, that as many as 17% of respondents claim to currently do it – maybe some of those who gave that answer would like to comment on the circumstances.

You’d never have thought it

New research by CR Consulting shows that the smoking ban “is demonstrably the most significant cause of pub closures” over the past three years. The article describes it as “shock proof”, whereas I would have thought it was more a case of demonstrating the bleeding obvious, but there are still Gillian Merron-type deniers around who wilfully refuse to believe the evidence of their own eyes. The report predicts pub numbers will continue to fall, with another 1,700 to close in England before the fourth anniversary of the ban in July 2011.

It makes the point – raised more than once by commenters on this blog – that pubs cannot justify a price premium if all they can offer is expecting their customers to stand out in the street. It also explains how the impact of the ban on trade is not a one-off hit, but a slow, gradual process of the “loss of sociability”. It is still closing pubs today, and will continue to do so for many years to come.

Left hand, meet right hand

The drinks trade certainly seem to be putting out conflicting messages about alcohol taxation at the moment. On the one hand, we have the British Beer & Pub Association saying that the tax system should be set to favour beer, which is the weakest mainstream alcoholic drink, the mainstay of the pub trade, and overwhelmingly home-produced. On the other hand, we have Diageo saying that the tax system should be rebalanced so that all alcoholic drinks are taxed purely on their alcohol content, which would result in a reduction of duty on spirits in comparison with that on beer and wine. Of course, it’s all special pleading, and the anti-drink lobby will no doubt find it amusing that the industry are unable to come out with a consistent message on alcohol taxation.

On balance, I would say that the BBPA are more right than Diageo. The current relative levels of duty do at least serve to roughly balance the selling prices of the different forms of alcohol, and compensate for the fact that spirits, at least at the lower end of the market, are cheaper to make than beer or wine. Also, while it is invidious to claim that one form of alcohol is “better” than another, it is less like hard work to abuse spirits and therefore there is a case for the tax system sending a message that they need to be treated with a certain amount of respect. Tim Martin of Wetherspoon’s isn’t too impressed by Diageo’s stance either.

The Wine & Spirit Trade Association are surely quite right to point out here that:

“It is not possible to single out particular types of alcohol which are consumed by problem drinkers for targeted tax measures. Problem drinkers have access to, and consume the same products as moderate drinkers – it is their drinking patterns which make their consumption harmful.”

Trying to discriminate between different categories of alcoholic drinks on the grounds that some are disproportionately consumed by problem drinkers is a policy doomed to failure, as these drinkers will just move on to something else. While wine is often perceived as the drink least tainted by alcohol abuse, it is worth remembering that cheap red wine was the staple drink of the archetypal French alcoholic of a generation ago.