Taxed to death

Sad news from Boston, Lincs that five men have been killed in an explosion on an industrial estate. Police are investigating claims that they were engaged in distilling illegal alcohol.

It’s a fact of life that, the more you increase taxes, the more incentive it creates to evade them. Obviously someone has judged that it is worthwhile taking the risk to produce illegal vodka, and these five men have paid with their lives. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were Eastern European migrant workers who would not have stood to gain significantly from the scheme.

If the anti-drink lobby have their way and push through further swingeing increases in alcohol taxes, then stories like this – and people being poisoned by moonshine – are going to become increasingly common.

Non-smokers’ survey

As a counterpoint to the survey of smokers, I have put together a similar survey about current non-smokers’ experience of pubs and pubgoing since the smoking ban.

Striking a pose

One of the key elements of the modern “oh we’re not a traditional boozer” design language for pubs and bars is high-level posing tables. They are a favourite of Wetherspoons, at least in entrance areas, and I recently went in a pub local to me where in the front area near the bar there was nothing but. It is beyond me how anyone could find them more comfortable than conventional chairs and tables (let alone bench seating) and they send out a clear message to any customers over 40 that this isn’t a place for them.

Smokers’ survey – the results

I recently carried out a survey of smokers and their experience of pubs and pubgoing since July 2007. This achieved its 100 maximum responses within four days, which is quite impressive.

Now, before anyone pipes up (as it were) let me make it clear that this survey makes no claims to be representative or scientific, and readers of this blog who responded to it will by definition be somewhat self-selecting.

But it does underline the point that, four years on, there remain very strong feelings of anger, rejection and alienation about the smoking ban. It’s not going away as an issue, however much the antismokers and denialists might wish it to.

There’s no suggestion from what I can see that any antismokers have spammed the survey with misleading responses.

Is it worth me doing a broadly similar non-smokers’ survey, do you think?

The results are given below. Obviously the number of responses equate to percentages.

1. How much do you smoke?

Occasional/social smoker: 2
1-10 cigarettes per day: 14
11-20 cigarettes per day: 43
21-30 cigarettes per day: 20
31-40 cigarettes per day: 7
41-60 cigarettes per day: 7
Over 60 cigarettes per day: 1
I am a cigar smoker: 4
I am a pipe smoker: 2

2. How often did you visit pubs prior to 1 July 2007?

Daily or most days: 30
2 or 3 times a week: 43
Weekly: 15
Fortnightly: 3
Monthly: 2
Occasionally: 6
Never: 1

3. How has the frequency of your pub visits changed since 1 July 2007?

More: 0
About the same: 6
A bit less: 11
A lot less: 25
Only when I have a really good reason to go: 36
I never go to pubs now: 22

4. How do you feel about having to go outside for a smoke?

I don’t mind: 5
I put up with it: 14
I really don’t like it, but sometimes accept it: 19
I hate it: 43
I just won’t do it: 19

5. Have you noticed any pubs closing in your area since 1 July 2007?

No: 3
Yes, a few: 45
Yes, a lot: 52

6. Have you noticed pubs in your area providing improved smoking facilities?

Not at all: 26
Yes, a few have: 69
Yes, quite a lot have: 5

7. Have improved smoking facilities increased your frequency of pub visits from a low point?

Yes: 13
No: 87

8. How has the amount of your smoking changed since 1 July 2007?

More: 18
About the same: 72
A bit less: 9
A lot less: 1

9. Any other comments?

Reproduced verbatim as received:

• I'm a single parent, so don't get out much. But, I used to take every chance I got prior to the ban, even if it was only once every couple of months. Since the ban, every night out has been bloody awful, particularly going to the pub to watch football (absolutely NO atmosphere). Worse still, idle sunday afternoons in the pub with a paper, a pint and the option of lunch have gone too. I'd rather stay at home.
  
  
• While I visit pubs about as often as I did pre-ban, I tend not to stay as long.
  
  
• As I now live abroad, I've had to tailor my responses to the fact that I am now a visitor to the UK, and extrapolate my pub visits from that. However, I'm pretty sure that if I were living in UK still, I would now be a very occasional visitor to the pub, whereas I was previously a pretty regular regular! There is no pleasure in going to the pub if I have to be subjected to the ignominy of standing outside if I want a smoke. I'm not a heavy smoker, but I do enjoy a fag with my pint. If they won't allow me that pleasure, then they won't get my money over the bar.
  
  
• Simply make a % of pubs smoker-friendly pubs - 25% maybe. That will soon show up the busybodies - we're still waiting for them to pack the pubs out
  
  
• i would prefer to grow my own tobacco and brew my own beer than pay to be in an establishment where I am not welcome for who and what I am
  
  
• We will only go to the pub these days when the weather is good. Although I've never enjoyed smoking outdoors, at least when it's warm it feels 'normal' to be outside as opposed to 'denormal'! Thanks for this opportunity to have a moan!
  
  
• Only go to the pub for the occasional meal. Ant to meet an old mate about once every 6 months. Beer prices are way too high. Easier to buy some Becks and stay indoors - even though i tend to smoke outside.
  
  
• Since the ban, my social life is almost non existent, I have bought no new clothes and do not go to concerts any more. I feel very angry that because I use a legal product ASH et al have been allowed to succeed in ruining my life.
  
  
• Smokers should boycott pubs - it's the only thing we can do that stands any chance of forcing a change!
  
  
• We tend to have smokey/drinky gatherings with friends at my home or theirs. Most of them don't smoke but say it's pleasant not to have us smokers having to disappear outside to have a cigarette. I have been confronted three times by anti-smokers while smoking outside. I'm a woman and sometimes I'm stood outside by myself and it doesn't sit good with me at all. Especially when some burly thug thinks he has the right to tell me what I should or shouldn't do in his view. My hubby is a non-smoker and has seen first-hand what I've had to put up with. He wants a compromise in the pubs too. I only of one person who doesn't want this compromise.
  
  
• The economic effects of the smoking ban can be seen in the tens of thousands of decisions made by many smokers every day. Fancy a pint or two after work? Fine, if the weather's good. If it's bad, will the smoking shelter protect me adequately enough? During bad weather, pubs will lose tens of thousands of potential sales as smokers decide it's not worth it whereas before the ban, the weather would not have been a consideration. Separate smoking rooms now please!
  
  
• Don't go to the pub unless it's extremely good weather. Go abroad for ALL holidays
  
  
• summer ok to sit in yard, winter, (this winter) - forget it. Will leave UK for good come this winter. Shame really Was a great place.
  
  
• Many pubs I still enter have ONLY smoking customers. Often the entire pub is outside smoking. Utterly stupid.
  
  
• I only go to the pub a little less often than before, but I stay less time. And I'm a lot more inclined to have drinking buddies round my place, where we can smoke!
  
  
• I avoid pubs now - feel nagged
  
  
• Comment is within the criteria of the questionnaire. Pub visits are a weekly thing ...every weekend...for the best part spring, entire duration of summer and partway through autumn. I refuse to go in winter and stand in the cold for a ciggy. All of our friends follow this pattern and I suspect it is the same for many others across the country who are of a certain age (mid-thirties up). This has proven over time to be a pattern of survival for pubs who have smoking facilities...by good weather trade somehow evening out the bad. Thing is though...prolonged bad weather through the warmer months could be enough to close a pub down through lack of smokers trade. It's unacceptable that pub owners and customers alike should be dictated to as to how they earn a living/spend their free time by a bigoted few.
  
  
• I find myself going outside to enjoy the company of friends and as a result smoke far more than I used to when all my friends, smokers and non-smokers, were inside.
  
  
• Its not so much the ban I hate as much as the lies that accompanied it.
  
  
• I'm enraged that this social manipulation has occurred as a result of flat lies disseminated by the anti-smoking industry.
  
  
• Pubs are boring and sterile now.
  
  
• I was invited to three pub closing down parties in the first 12 months of the smoking ban, I think I was invited to a similar number in twenty years before the smoking ban. I no longer know any publicans personally so I don't expect to get invited again.
  
  
• Stop the world, I want to get off. And keep up the good work on the site!
  
  
• Not so many pub closures in Swindon BUT the landlords in the pubco owned ones change a lot more frequently than before 7/7
  
  
• Background: Work in central london. Just as the ban introduced pretty much all my regular after work pubs installed heaters/awnings. Pub going is heavily linked to weather. Being central london hot weather means the streets outside the "shoebox" pubs are packed, and this hasn't changed much. On a tangent moving on to a club, post pub is even less common, the hassle of negotiating getting out and "stamped" so you can get back in to stand in a grubby square metre next to the entrance is even less apealling than standing outside a pub on a wet day.
  
  
• Used to spend £800 a month in pubs. clubs, casinos and lap dancing clubs prior to the smoking ban and was out 4 or 5 times a week. Now I go to the pub maybe once every two months and I haven't been to any of the other places at all since the Ban.
  
  
• I have adjusted but not accepted the ban.
  
  
• I hate the smoking ban.
  
  
• I no longer go into cafe's or restaurants either since the smoking ban.
  
  
• I will now only frequent pubs that either have a smoking area with seating, or a beer garden!

A weak argument

Something I’ve been hearing more often recently is that beer should be given more favourable tax and legislative treatment than other alcoholic drinks because it is “a low strength product”. Well yes, of course it is, but consumers generally make up for that by drinking larger quantities of it per glass. People don’t drink 4% bitters out of wine glasses, they drink pints.

There is a good argument for setting alcohol duties so that the actual purchase prices of the main product categories work out roughly the same in terms of pence per unit, which the current alcohol duty regime in the UK, whatever you may think of its absolute level, broadly does. The counter-argument that duty should be charged on a strict per unit basis would give an advantage to cheap spirits with a short maturation period, which could lead to adverse wider consequences.

But, even though I’m very fond of the stuff, overall there’s no real reason why beer deserves special favour. It’s undoubtedly responsible for more alcohol-related disorder than any other category of drinks and, while spirits are probably the favoured tipple of the true problem drinker, I’ve come across a few beer-drinking alcoholics in my time, and plenty of others whose level of beer consumption was clearly doing their health no good. If you had to pick out the alcoholic drink that, in a UK context, was least harmful in terms of both public disorder and long-term health problems, it would be wine.

What is more, one particular category of beer – super-strength lagers – has a very strong association with problem drinking. They’re entirely different, of course, from Old Tom and Duvel and American double IPAs and weird shit produced by BrewDog and sold in stuffed polecats, even if they’re the same strength. But to the health zealot, one 9% beer is much the same as another, even if it costs twice as much to buy.

This whole line of argument is doomed to failure as it is accepting the terms of debate constructed by the health lobby. “Our sort of alcohol isn’t that bad, really” doesn’t cut much ice. And, now that the line that “there is no safe level of alcohol consumption” is increasingly gaining traction, it is blown out of the water. Best, surely, to defend both beer and pubs in robust terms for what they actually are.

It’s much the same as the rose-tinted bleating about the benefits of community pubs. As I said in the post, most pubs, even very good ones, don’t really qualify as “community pubs” in the way the term is meant, and the vision that is conjured up of people sitting around drinking their regulation one-and-a-half pints of 2.8% pisswater while discussing ways of raising money for disabled kids bears little relation to what goes on in real-world pubs.

The 50 best beers?

Pete Brown has produced a list of the 50 Best British Beers for the Morning Advertiser. As with all such lists, it will inevitably provoke much discussion and a few raised eyebrows. “Draught Guinness! What’s that doing there?”

I counted them up and reckoned that over the years I had drunk about half the beers he lists. It’s perhaps disappointing that there’s nothing on the list from either family brewers or micros in Greater Manchester and Cheshire, not even Robinson’s Old Tom.

More surprising is that nothing is included that could broadly be described as “mild”, which fifty years ago was the staple drink in English and Welsh pubs. Bateman’s DM or Brain’s Dark could surely have been included, or even, to annoy the tall poppy haters, Banks’s.

If he’d wanted to be really mischievous he could have included Carling too ;-)

Do as we say, not as we do

You couldn’t make it up.

A charity which criticised the Government for accepting money from junk food companies was itself secretly paid £50,000 by Coca-Cola to promote low-calorie sweeteners.

The National Obesity Forum signed a deal with Coca-Cola in January, a few months after trustee Tam Fry had said he was ‘horror-struck’ at plans for such companies to provide cash to back public health campaigns.

Mr Fry, 75, is understood to have brokered the Coca-Cola deal, despite accusing the Government last July of being ‘bribed’ by fast food giants.

And there have been various reports recently that artificial sweeteners can actually lead to weight gain by messing around with the body’s natural response to eating and drinking.

(h/t to Leg-iron)

A touch of class

Sit in any pub, watch a group of blokes come in, shaven heads, footie shirts, bit of jewellery. And you know what’s coming. “Wot lagers you got on, mate?” “OK, two Stellas and three Carlings then.”

On a similar note, last week I was in a market town pub in the Welsh Marches at lunchtime. There was a good group of male regulars in, aged between maybe about 40 and 75, with some lively banter. The kind of classic pub atmosphere that seems to be rapidly disappearing. But, although the pub sold cask beer, every single one of them was drinking either Carling or Stowford Press cider.

It seems to have become a fact of life nowadays that the working classes drink keg beer. Even if they drink ale, it’s John Smith’s Extra Smooth. Cask is now a middle-class affectation. Around here, there is still a strong residual customer base of older drinkers for the cask products of the four local family brewers and Samuel Smith’s, but in general across the country the cask=middle class link very much holds true. Sometimes you can almost feel the locals thinking “wanker” when you walk into a strange pub, peer along the bar past the forest of T-bar taps and order a pint of cask by name.

How did that happen, when real ale used to be the working man’s pint, and keg beer was promoted as an aspirational drink?

Bottling a premium

The recent discussion about the growing divergence in strength between cask ales in the pub, and premium bottled ales in the supermarket, prompted me to run a poll on the popularity of the best-known PBAs. This was purely an exercise in curiosity and I didn’t have any particular axe to grind. The beers listed were my subjective assessment of the most widely available beers in the category. It is notable that none are produced by the international brewers, who seem to have pretty much entirely withdrawn from that market segment.

There were 81 responses. 10 didn’t drink bottled ales at all, and 16 said they had drunk other bottled ales, but not the ones listed. So 55 people had drunk at least one. Hobgoblin was the most popular, with 28 votes; Cumberland Ale the least popular with 14.

There were inevitably one or two comments along the lines of these being “boring brown beers”, but, as I replied, Tesco are only going to stock what they can sell. Even if you brew the most wonderful beer in the world, you still have to persuade drinkers to buy it and retailers to stock it. It would be interesting to try to construct an alternative list of “higher quality” bottled beers that do have some profile in the off-trade. For starters I might suggest Hop Back Summer Lightning, Butcombe Bitter, Thwaites Indus IPA and Samuel Smiths Old Brewery Pale Ale.

In my view all of those listed are actually quite decent beers, although I don’t personally care for Bombardier, Hobgoblin and Spitfire, and can never really get to grips with Fullers’ distinctive rather “biscuity” house character. On the other hand, I think the much-maligned Abbot Ale is actually a very good beer. Unless you have access to a specialist off-licence, these beers are about as good as you’re going to get for drinking at home.

As I said in the comments on an earlier post, I have more than once heard people referring to PBAs as “real ales” which, of course, strictly speaking, they aren’t.

The poll results and associated comments can be seen here.

Smokers' survey

I’ve created a survey here to analyse the experiences of smokers following the smoking ban. It’s only intended for smokers, so if you’re not a current smoker please ignore it. It is limited to 100 responses and so will be closed once that figure is reached.

A fair-weather business

Something that has often been commented on is how, over the past four years, the drinking trade in pubs has become much more dependent on the weather. If it’s warm, and the sun is shining, customers magically appear out of nowhere and fill up your beer garden. When it’s cold and wet, they just vanish into thin air.

This was brought home to me last week in the Barrels pub in Hereford. This is Wye Valley Brewery’s flagship pub, a spacious establishment with four separate rooms which has a lively, slightly Bohemian atmosphere and a noticeably younger and more female clientele than the typical “specialist beer pub”. It’s an excellent pub that clearly “works” when many others don’t. The 3.7% ABV Wye Valley Bitter was a bargain £2.10 a pint, well below typical Greater Manchester prices.

The pub also has a spacious rear drinking courtyard, partly open, partly covered by smoking shelters. Last Monday – typically the quietest night of the week – the weather was warm and dry, and the courtyard was absolutely rammed with customers. Not all smoking, but probably two or three smokers in every group. Inside it was fairly quiet. Had it been raining, I suspect most of those courtyard customers simply wouldn’t have been there.

This must make planning of staff rotas and stock turnover much more difficult for pubs, as customers will descend on them as soon as the sun shines, but once it disappears so will the punters.

Local character

As a means of combating climate change, CAMRA’s “Locale” campaign is nonsense. But as a way of encouraging local character and distinctiveness it has much to be said for it. The UK has a huge variety of local cask beers, and a tourist expecting a taste of the area should have a reasonable expectation of finding one on venturing into a pub.

But, hang on, I walk into an attractive half-timbered pub in a popular tourist town somewhere vaguely South-West of Birmingham. And the beer choice is: Bombardier and Theakstons Best. Two beers often decried as bland, and which have no connection with the area. It might be understandable if these were beers such as Draught Bass and Pedigree that had a long history of being distributed in the area, but they weren’t.

The Severn Valley has a wealth of respected micro-breweries such as Wye Valley, Hobsons and Salopian. Why couldn’t they serve one of those? It is noticeable that the popular Stockport multi-beer pubs, the Crown and Magnet, both make a big point of featuring local beers as well as those from further afield.

I went in another pub that made a proud proclamation that all its cask beers were sourced within 35 miles. I might substitute “all but one” to include the likes of Draught Bass, but as a tourist and business traveller within the UK I would applaud that principle. You don’t go to Scotland to drink Tetley Bitter and Old Speckled Hen, both of which I encountered as the sole cask beer in a pub last year.

Cig war won, on to beer

Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. How many times have I said that?

Australian health campaigners are now urging that draconian restrictions applied to tobacco should now be extended to alcohol.

"The Cancer Council of Australia argues even one drink is dangerous, a view similar to its position that even one cigarette can injure health."

So goodbye to the convenient fiction that moderate amounts of alcohol are beneficial to health. And yet more evidence that Australia, once a byword for rugged individualism, is fast becoming the world’s foremost Nanny State.

And some of you thought that the anti-tobacco campaign was something that could be entirely separated from the anti-alcohol campaign?

This has already been mentioned by Dick Puddlecote and Chris Snowdon, amongst others, but many visitors here won’t be readers of the political blogs.

Trial of strength

In response to reports of various beers having their strength reduced, I thought I would ask blog readers “What is your preferred strength for draught beer in the pub?” There were exactly 100 responses, broken down as follows:

3.5% or below: 2
3.6 – 4.0%: 26
4.1 – 4.5%: 31
4.6 – 5.0%: 26
5.1 – 5.5%: 6
5.6% or above: 9

Obviously those numbers translate exactly to percentages. So a strong clustering of responses around the usual strength range, with the biggest number in the 4.1 – 4.5% range which is where beers tend to be concentrating. Quite a number favoured the stronger beers, but there were very few of the archetypal “mild drinkers”.

A point I made in the comments was that possibly the clustering of beer strengths in pubs may have something to do with the breakdown of the tied house system. If you’re competing with other brewers on the bar, you don’t want to have your beer ruled out because it's too strong or too weak. On the other hand, in tied houses, you can afford to present a wider strength range to punters because they only have a choice of strengths, not of brewery. For example, in a tied house Fullers can offer Chiswick Bitter at 3.5%, Discovery at 3.9%, London Pride at 4.1% and ESB at 5.5%, but in the free trade or pub company outlets you’re far more likely to see London Pride than any of the other beers.

The poll, together with associated comments, can be viewed here, but I won’t be logging any further votes.

None so blind

Well, four years of this blog and four years of the smoking ban, the two of course being very closely related. What a glorious achievement of public policy – over 8,000 pubs closed, on-trade beer sales down by more than 25%, social lives stubbed out, livelihoods wrecked.

I have never claimed it is a single-cause explanation, but the sheer scale of pub closures over the past four years is absolutely unprecedented, and only the most extreme and self-deluding antismoker will deny that the smoking ban has been a major cause.

And, of course, the argument against it is not just a utilitarian one that it has closed thousands of pubs. It is morally abhorrent - an obnoxious policy of intolerance, founded on hatred, bigotry and junk science, described by Lord Stoddart of Swindon as “one of the most restrictive, spiteful and socially divisive pieces of legislation imposed by any British Government.” It also sets a very clear precedent for what is increasingly happening to the alcohol industry. Anyone who claims to have the interests of pubs at heart who supports it is, frankly, either a fool or a knave. But there are none so blind as those who will not see.

In past years Pete Robinson has given us a few trenchant home truths on the subject in The Publican, but unfortunately that publication is now defunct and the Morning Advertiser doesn’t seem to have retained his services as a contributor, more’s the pity. Note the particularly vile comments from one antismoker on that thread.

One or two of the usual suspects have been whingeing about me harping on about this subject. Well, sorry, but the creation of this blog was prompted by the smoking ban and that, more than anything else, is at heart what it’s about. Are they going to go on the Daily Kitten and start saying “Hey, enough of all the moggies”?