Brand identity

For once, my survey on how many branches of Wetherspoon’s people had visited produced something like a normal distribution rather than a U-shaped curve. The conclusion seems to be that most people had visited quite a few, but not many had sought them out to the extent that they had gone over the 50 mark. My personal score comes to around 40 – they’re often useful if you’re after reasonably-priced food in an unfamiliar town, but they’re not places that otherwise I’d actively seek out.

This was prompted by the question of pub branding and what benefits it brings. The financial difficulties of Punch Taverns have been widely reported recently, and it’s noticeable that Punch, while they may have some managed brands within their estate, do nothing to put their name over the door. This seems a rather odd way of doing business and reinforces the frequent charge that pub companies of this kind are basically about financial engineering, not retailing.

Branding works on the obvious level of allowing you to identify an establishment with a particular style of menu and drinks offer wherever you are in the country, but it also operates in a more subtle way to reinforce people’s perceptions through news and general conversation. You may in practice only ever visit one branch of Tesco, but you still get a good idea of what Tesco are all about. Pubs more than most other types of businesses are very much dependent on a particular combination of geography and opportunity to attract customers, but even with that if you have a recognised brand you have won half the battle of letting people know what it’s like before they venture over the threshold.

Most of the pub brands around are ones like Chef & Brewer and Brewer’s Fayre which are very much related to dining – Wetherspoon’s are about the only non-brewing company who have sought to develop a common brand identity across a whole estate that are much more than just dining pubs. While the buildings do differ, as do the clientele, all of them have a very similar style and effectively the same offer. So far they have done very well with it – you always know where you are with a Spoons – but there is the risk that if public sentiment turns against you it can rapidly snowball, which would not be the case with a more heterogenous estate. There is also supposed to be something of a reaction against corporate identities, but I’m not sure how much that percolates though to the average Spoons customer.

While it is less so now due to the drop in the number of pub-owning family brewers, it was always the case that most independent brewers had a distinctive house style, so that while their pubs did vary you usually knew if you were in a Brakspear’s or a Holt’s house without needing to look at the pumps on the bar. This remains very much the case with Sam Smith’s even though, ironically, they don’t put any sign of ownership on the outside of their pubs.

Secret history

The lifetime of CAMRA has seen the history and development of real ale in general very thoroughly documented. But other aspects of the British beer market haven’t received anything like the same attention. A good example came up recently on Tandleman’s blog – which breweries used to produce tank beer, and when did it finally disappear from the market? Or is it still going in some obscure parts of the club trade?

Which of the early own-brand lagers were top-fermenting “bastard lagers” (Robinson’s Einhorn certainly was) and which were actually more genuine bottom-fermenters? And when did the once commonplace sight of half-pint/275ml bottles at room temperature on shelves behind the bar disappear, and when did the brands involved bite the dust? I vaguely recall Robinson’s dropping their own bottled beer range around 1990.

Maybe it’s areas like this that beer historians need to be turning their attention to in the future.

And, even looking at the current situation, five-sixths of the British draught beer market isn’t cask beer. Which brands does that cover, who brews them and where can they be found? Do they include some rare and threatened obscurities now confined to dingy working men’s clubs and forgotten council estate boozers? There’s a remarkable dearth of information on the subject in the public domain. Perhaps for a new challenge some geeks should venture into uncharted territory and become “keg tickers”.

Here we go down the slippery slope

The Grocer reports that the Home Office is “poised to hold talks with police chiefs about a nationwide rollout of ‘voluntary’ retailer bans on high-strength booze”.

I’ve written about this at length before, but going nationwide is a deeply worrying expansion of the scheme. It is an obvious restraint of trade in aiming to prevent the sale of lawful products, so the Office of Fair Trading is quite right to take an interest.

And if you try to separate out “responsible” from “irresponsible” products, where do you draw the line? Are Duvel and Old Tom high-quality craft products consumed by discerning connoisseurs? How about Henry Weston’s Vintage Cider? And much of the production of farmhouse cidermakers is well north of 6.5% ABV and is primarily consumed by rural pissheads, not aficionados.

Don’t forget that Special Brew started out as a premium product and was only later adopted as the tramp’s drink of choice. Cooking Lager has reported seeing a Belgian tramp necking Chimay Bleu from the bottle.

This is also a tacit admission that High Strength Beer duty has been a complete failure in achieving the effects that were claimed for it, and has only served to discourage the production and consumption of low-volume “craft” products.

I did it my way

Something that differentiates Marks & Spencer from most of their competitors is that pretty much everything in their stores is produced to their specification and sold under their own brand. Whether or not you like what is on offer, it sets them apart from the herd. In the pub world, the same is true of Sam Smith’s – all the beers, whether draught or bottled, are their own production, and pretty much everything else, cider, wine, spirits, soft drinks, even crisps and nuts, is specified by them rather than being well-known brands available elsewhere. Some casual customers may bemoan the lack of Stella or Bell’s, but it makes drinking in a Sam’s pub a distinctively different experience from anywhere else.

Nobody else went quite as far, but certainly in the past many independent brewers sold a much higher proportion of their own products than they do now. They had their own lager brands, their own premium keg, their own standard bottled beers and in some cases their own Scotch whisky from bonded stocks built up over a long period of time. Holts still do this to some extent, with their own Crystal and Diamond lagers, although they sell Foster’s and Kronenbourg alongside them at a higher price.

However, most of their competitors have steadily retreated from these sections of the market. The standard 275ml bottles of brown and light ale, and sometimes sweet stout, that used to sit at room temperature on shelves behind the bar have long since bitten the dust. And, if you considered your pubs as profit centres in their own right rather than just outlets for your beers, it made no sense to stock own-brand lagers such as Einhorn and Slalom which just put some customers off, rather than heavily-advertised, well-known national brands. Nobody ever went in a Robinson’s pub because they stocked Einhorn rather than Heineken.

Some, such as Boddington’s, decided that there was no longer any point in remaining in brewing at all, and turned themselves into pure retailers. We all know what happened to them. Very recently, Hyde’s have moved to a new, smaller “craft” brewery which involved them concentrating solely on their cask ales. They have stopped brewing Harp Irish Lager under licence, and the smooth ale you will get in a Hyde’s pub is now Tetley’s, not Hyde’s own.

But, while this approach may have made commercial sense looking at pub estates in isolation, in the longer term it was eroding the volume and viability of the associated breweries, and there are signs now that things are starting to change. In the past few years we have seen BrewDog reinventing the concept of the tied house – while they do offer a range of other brewers’ products, the core of their appeal is their own beers. Fullers, having long ago axed their own K2 lager, have re-entered that section of the market with a new “craft lager” called Frontier. Now that there is a growing interest in, and acceptance of, distinctive British-brewed lagers, maybe it’s time for the likes of Robinson’s to re-enter that market rather than just being happy to stock Carling, Stella and Peroni.

If you run a brewery and have a tied estate, surely it makes sense, within commercial reality, to have as much of the throughput as possible in those pubs being beers you’ve brewed yourself, and to make the fact that they are places to drink Bloggs’ beers a unique selling point. It is the one thing that you can do, but no-one else can. You won’t get anywhere in business nowadays just by running a me-too operation that offers customers no specific reason to use it, and the brewery and pub estate need to be considered as an integrated whole, not two separate outfits with conflicting interests.

Not so super Trooper?

There has been a great deal of publicity about the new Trooper beer developed by Robinson’s brewery in conjunction with legendary heavy metal band Iron Maiden. While singer Bruce Dickinson is someone who always seems to have steered well clear of the excesses of the rock and roll lifestyle, he is described here by Pete Brown as “one of the most passionate beer advocates I’ve ever met”. How this collaboration actually came about remains something of a mystery, but it’s certainly proving good business for Robinson’s, who have been brewing three times a day, six days a week to keep up with demand.

Clearly this is a beer aimed at a wide international market, and was never going to be the headbanging hop monster that some seemed to expect. However, all the indications were that it would be towards the pale and hoppy end of the spectrum, and Bruce says in the report I linked to that “I wanted a beer that’s full-flavoured and punches above its alcoholic weight”.

This is a beer that I very much wanted to like, but having now sampled it in both cask and bottled form I have found it distinctly underwhelming. The cask was a pleasant beer with a bit of body to it, but which didn’t really drink its 4.7% ABV alcoholic strength, while the bottled version was just downright bland and I struggled to find much flavour at all. No doubt it will be on the bar when the local CAMRA branch holds a meeting in Robinson’s visitor centre this coming Thursday so I’ll get the opportunity to form a second opinion.

It must be said that I have also found the bottled version of Robinson’s staple beer Unicorn to be very disappointing in comparison with the cask, which to my mind can be excellent when well-kept. This distinction seems to be greater with Robinson’s than with many other breweries.

Time for a drink?

Not maybe the best-supported poll I’ve ever run on here, but still an interesting result. Predictably, “weekday lunchtimes” comes last, but I would have expected “later evenings” to come top, as that’s when most of the pubs I know are clearly busiest. However, it was comfortably beaten by “early evenings”, a drinking pattern I’ve never really got into at all. Unless possibly people were interpreting “later evenings” as meaning “after 11 pm” rather than, as I intended “after around 8.30 pm”. Even “weekend lunchtimes” only comes slightly behind “later evenings”. This doesn’t really accord with figures I’ve seen that 50% of all pub trade is on Friday and Saturday nights, two-thirds of the remainder on other evenings, and only one-sixth at lunchtimes.

Hang that thief!

Here are three photos of the Davenport Arms at Woodford, locally known as the “Thief’s Neck”, taken earlier today when I called in to deliver the local CAMRA magazine Opening Times.

This is one of the few “country pubs” within the boundaries of Stockport MBC, and retains a characterful multi-roomed interior. It’s a long-standing entry in the Good Beer Guide and today had on Robinson’s 1892, Unicorn, Dizzy Blonde and the Iron Maiden beer Trooper. It also has an extensive menu of mostly home-made food. It’s one of my favourite pubs. I have previously written about it here.

No pub is perfect, though, and it would be an improvement if the plants along the front were cut down somewhat, and the access directly from the road rather than via the car park restored. Currently it seems too cut off from the main road. It also could do more to provide a decent covered outdoor smoking area, although today the awnings at the front would have been fine.

Hope springs

I’ve been very critical in the past of the inconsistency of bottle-conditioned beers from micro-breweries, to the extent that buying them constitutes a lottery you’re more likely to lose than win. Amongst the beers I have found disappointing is Marble Lagonda.

However, hope springs eternal in the human breast, as they say, so from time to time I give it another try. At the Stockport Beer Festival, you are allowed to use staff beer tokens for British bottle-conditioned beers to take out and so, at last week’s event, alongside one or two reliable stalwarts from Fuller’s and Young’s, I picked up a bottle of Marble Manchester Bitter, which is a very good beer on cask.

I stored it upright in a dark place for six days and made sure it had fully cleared, and then gave it a go. Just to be on the safe side, I’d put a reserve bottle of something else in the fridge in case it turned out to be a “sinker”. However, I was pleasantly surprised. It opened with a reassuring hiss and there was a little cloud of gas in the neck, but no sign of fobbing. So far, so good.

I poured it carefully, making sure I left the yeast in the bottom of the bottle, and it came out clear, with a dense, uneven head and visible spires of carbonation rising through the liquid, just as you would hope for from a good bottle-conditioned beer. Indeed it was so lively that I couldn’t quite get all the clear beer in the glass. It’s a very distinctive beer, intended to recreate some of the character of the Boddington’s and Holt’s bitters of old, with a uncompromising dry English flinty bitterness rather than a New World citrus character. If I could rely on it being this good, I might well buy rather more of it, but I’m still not at all sure I can.

The minimalism of Marble’s labels is commendable, but I do wish they wouldn’t use ones that wrap completely around the bottle, which make it more difficult both to check whether the beer has cleared and to monitor the progress of the yeast when pouring it.

(Picture courtesy of the Ormskirk Baron)

Thin end of the wedge?

Interesting news today that Marston’s have launched a new 4.0% ABV Revisionist Craft Lager, which is to become the first in a new range of “craft keg” beers. The range is to be expanded to include a wheat beer and a saison, will be packaged in smaller 30 litre kegs to ensure freshness, and will be cold conditioned and micro-filtered, but not pasteurised.

For a while, some traditionalists have been painting “craft keg” as some kind of threat to cask beer. While I know it has made inroads in London, and in urban bars outside the capital, I have to say I just haven’t seen this in the regular round of pubs I visit. It hasn’t even made much of an impact in Stockport’s specialist beer pubs.

This move by Marston’s could be seen as an example of it “going mainstream”, but on the other hand it may be more of a case of them trying to get a slice of that particular pie. It’s significant that these beers are not direct equivalents to existing cask beers – they’re styles that you wouldn’t find on cask in the first place.

But it’s certainly true that there is a slow but steady move to see a more interesting range of beers available on keg in a growing number of pubs, with lager leading the way. And I get the impression that craft keg is seen as trendy in a way that something with a sheepdog on the pumpclip is never going to be.

It’s also still the case that a lot of pubs attempt to stock too many cask beers, resulting in inadequate turnover and tired, warm pints. Maybe it would be a good idea for them to replace some of their slower-selling lines with unusual craft kegs which will keep for longer even if the volume isn’t there.

The sun sets on the pub

Here are a couple of pictures taken in today’s elegiac evening sunlight of the Four Heatons pub just down the road from me, which has now been closed for over two years. Compare it with these shots taken when it had recently shut. All the signage has been removed, boarding replaced with metal sheets and the balustrade has started to crumble away.

Planning permission has now gone through for it to be demolished and replaced by a small Co-op supermarket with flats above, so it shouldn’t be with us for that much longer.

It may not look the most appealing of pubs, but I’ve had plenty of good times in there over the years.

One for the road?

Three months ago, I reported how Wetherspoon’s had applied for planning permission to build a pub at the Beaconsfield service area on the M40. These plans have now been approved and they expect to open before Christmas. Not surprisingly, this news has attracted a wave of ill-informed and often hysterical comment, so it’s worth getting a few facts straight.

For a start, this is not a service area that can only be accessed from the motorway, like Knutsford and Keele. It’s off a roundabout at the motorway junction and can be reached from the general road network. If you look at the location, it’s close to a number of substantial built-up areas from which, like any dining pub, it is likely to draw much of its custom. I’d say it’s likely that a majority of customers won’t be long-distance travellers. Wetherspoon’s would not be interested in a service area right out in the country.

There are already large numbers of pubs in out-of-town locations that are mainly dependent on car-borne customers. While this blog may express regret over the extent to which they have become dominated by the food trade, they are not, by and large, responsible for substantial levels of either drink-drive offending or antisocial behaviour. Take, for example, Robinson’s Windmill at Tabley which is right next to Junction 19 of the M6. And there’s already a pub, the Cherry Tree Farm, at Derby and Burton Services which, although it is at the crossing of two major A-roads, effectively fulfils the same function as a motorway service area.

It also must be remembered that, while some may wish it otherwise, it remains legal for drivers to consume some alcohol provided they remain within the legal limit. You would be perfectly entitled to eat your Gourmet Burger, down your pint of Ruddles, and be on your way, just the same as millions of people up and down the country do lawfully and safely every week. Mind you, I suspect the location, and the fact that it will probably be one of Spoons’ more trendy and less “pubby” designs, will act as something of a deterrent to consuming alcoholic drinks anyway.

The Wetherspoon spokesman was quite right to place the emphasis on individual responsibility by saying “We believe the majority of people that use the pub to drink will be people that aren't driving - coach parties or people travelling with others. We won't be asking them whether they are driving. It's up to them.”

The catering at motorway service areas has long been notorious for its high prices and low quality, and surely this introduces a welcome element of competition. The idea that it will result in the widespread drink-driving problems that some fear is quite far-fetched and simply not borne out by the experience of the many similar pubs that already exist.

It’s ironic that the news comes shortly after it was announced that the once-iconic Little Chef roadside dining chain is finally to be put out of its misery. Rather than trying to keep a failed brand going, it must be a good idea to give one of Britain’s most successful eating-out operators a crack at the market. If it proves a success, I can see it being rolled out to other service areas in similar locations such as Hopwood Park on the M42 near Reddish. If it fails, then Spoons have the muscle to stand the loss and will deserve credit for having tried.

The unquiet pint

Throughout my drinking career, piped music in pubs has been a perennial source of complaint. It is, by and large, wholly unnecessary and intrusive, and even if you like it the odds are that other people won’t. What is music to one person’s ears will be an unholy racket to someone else. While it is claimed to create instant “atmosphere”, almost invariably it detracts from a pub.

In the 1990s, a guide to pubs without piped music was produced entitled The Quiet Pint. I have a copy from 2000, produced by the Daily Telegraph and sponsored by J. D. Wetherspoon.

Like many such guides, it features a rather random selection of pubs and the overall coverage is too sparse to make it of much practical use, although it might occasionally lead you to a worthwhile pub that you weren’t aware of. The only pubs around here are the Devonshire Arms and Oddfellows in Mellor, the Grapes at Gee Cross near Hyde, Stalybridge Station Buffet and the Station in Didsbury (which I doubt is “quiet” nowadays and may have an uncertain future). Bizarrely, the Devonshire Arms is listed under “Lancashire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside” and the Oddfellows, in the same village, under “Cheshire”.

It would, however, lead you to such Cheshire gems as the Bird in Hand at Mobberley, and the two Blue Bells at Smallwood and Tushingham.

The sponsorship by Wetherspoon’s means that a few of their pubs gain main entries, but there is a complete listing at the back. Given their expansion since 2000, such a listing would now overwhelm the book. While the main Wetherspoon’s chain remains music free, I doubt whether many could really be regarded as “quiet”.

The last edition of the book seems to have been published in 2004, so it must have died a death. However, the problem hasn’t gone away, and if anything seems to be spreading. I can think of at least three pubs on my regular rounds which have a generally traditional character, but within the past few years have introduced piped music where there was none before. Indeed, sometimes the bar staff have been playing what sounded like Radio 1, which was totally inappropriate for the clientele. It has even spread to my local Co-op convenience store.

Having said this, at lunchtime today my local pub, which at times has been one of those suffering from the blight, was gratifyingly music-free, and all the better for it.

Strangely, a while back a regular commenter wondered what “piped music even means”. I would have said it’s a common English phrase, and provided him with the following definition: “music piped or relayed around a building or room which people have not chosen and which they may not be able to escape. In short, it is involuntary music, forced on listeners”.

It’s good to see that the Pipedown campaign against piped music still seems to be going strong.

A pub with potential?

On the face of it you would think this pub, the Estuary in Llansanffraid Glan Conwy, North Wales, has a lot going for it. Formerly known as the Conway Vale, it’s an attractive gabled building, in a good situation on the main road next to the scenic Conwy estuary, and not far from the major population centres of Llandudno and Colwyn Bay. But, when I recently passed the site, it’s been completely flattened.

And, a couple of miles down the road, the once-popular Tal-y-Cafn Inn, also well-situated by the river, is closed and boarded too.

A whole world of beer out there

The last thirty or so years have seen a dramatic upheaval in the world of beer, with huge numbers of new breweries springing up and often pushing the boundaries in terms of strength, flavour and ingredients. This began with the micro-brewery movement in this country, but has found its spiritual home and greatest expression in the United States.

Now this “craft beer revolution” has been celebrated by Mark Dredge, author of the Pencil & Spoon blog, in his new book Craft Beer World – a Guide to Over 350 of the Finest Beers Known to Man, published by Dog’n’Bone Books at £16.99, although you can get it at a substantial discount on Amazon.

This differs from well-known beer bibles such as Michael Jackson’s New World Guide to Beer in unashamedly passing by the classic beers from established breweries in favour of an emphasis on “evolution, creativity and interpretation”.

It’s an attractive, chunky hardback lavishly illustrated throughout in colour. It begins with forty pages looking at the brewing process and other general topics such as beer and food matching, and then goes into a detailed look at examples of the various beer styles to be found around the world. For some of these, the author picks classic beers which in a sense epitomise the style, before going on to the various ways modern brewers have interpreted them, but there are some styles that are so new that classic examples simply do not exist. The descriptions are often enlivened by accounts of the occasions when Mark found himself drinking the beers.

At times the style may come across as a little gushing and over-enthusiastic, but it’s meant to be a celebration of beer, not a dispassionate survey, so that is part of its appeal. It is also, it must be said, very much oriented towards US craft brewing, and I’d say at least half the beers listed come from the States.

If there’s one criticism, it’s that the world of craft beer moves on so quickly that in a few years’ time it will seem out-of-date, while Orval, Pilsner Urquell and Adnams’ Southwold Bitter will still be going strong. But the constant spirit of innovation is in a sense key to the concept.

You may think “this isn’t really your bag, Mudgie, is it?” and you might well be right, as I’m a great respecter of tradition who tends to see beer in its wider social context and has never really “got” American craft beer at all. But it’s an attractive, intelligent, stimulating book that is well worth reading in its own right. If you’re someone who has got into the appreciation of beer via the world beer shelves and the BrewDog bars rather than quaffing murky pints of Old Snotgobbler in some bare-boards alehouse, it will be right up your street.

It’s interesting how the world of beer blogging is now translating across into the printed word, with Boak & Bailey also having their own book on the slipway ready for a launch next year. Don’t hold your breath for The Decline and Fall of the British Pub by yours truly, though.

Oh, and I bought this with my own money...

It just keeps on happening

There are some stories that seem to crop up in the media with depressing regularity. One is supermarket cashiers refusing to sell alcoholic drinks to adults because they have children with them. Each time it’s reported, there’s a muttered apology, and an insistence that it isn’t company policy and was only an isolated incident. And then, a few months later, it happens again.

Last year, I reported how a bar in Coventry had refused service to a group of soldiers in uniform who had been acting as pallbearers at a military funeral. The owner of the bar said, slightly grudgingly, “I can only apologise again to the family and anybody else who was upset during the funeral service. Just that I'm sorry and that it wouldn't have happened if we had been aware of the funeral at the rear of Brown's, in the cathedral."

Just a one-off, you might think. But only this week, the Ensign Ewart pub on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh refused service to a group of Royal Navy personnel in uniform who had been attending a ceremony to mark the decommissioning of the destroyer HMS Edinburgh. This was particularly ironic as the pub in question bears the name of a Scottish hero of Waterloo. Not to mention particularly shameful in the week that saw the barbaric murder of Drummer Rigby in Woolwich.

This also underlines another feature of these cases, how the guilty parties often fall back on the law even when there’s patently no legal justification for their actions.

A spokeswoman for the Ensign Ewart claimed staff had been following licensing regulations which she said made it illegal to serve people in full dress uniform. She said: “We work within the confines of licensing laws.”


However, council officials said there were no licensing laws banning people in military uniform from being served alcohol, and although in the past such a ban had applied to policemen, that law was no longer in force. 

You have to wonder if the barperson had any connection with the rentamob morons who, failing to see any irony, recently told Nigel Farage to go back to England because (alleged) racists such as him were not welcome in Scotland. But there does seem to a tendency amongst a minority of extreme nationalists to regard the British armed forces as an occupying power, even if the personnel themselves are Scottish or, as in this case, their ship bears a Scottish name. Indeed, although this ship was built at Birkenhead by Cammell Laird, her successors are being built on the Clyde.

Maybe pubs should start displaying signs saying “We are proud to serve British service personnel in uniform”.