The twenty-year itch - Part 1

The Lancashire city of Preston is well-known for celebrating its Guild Festival every twenty years, and it occurred to me that the last time I had been drinking there was in fact nearly twenty-four years ago. Back then, it still had numerous Thwaites pubs, and it wasn’t that long since the other major local independent brewer Matthew Brown had been taken over, but a great deal has changed on the pub scene in the intervening years, although one or two things refreshingly hadn’t. It therefore made a good venue for our latest Beer & Pubs Forum Proper Day Out. It was a poignant thought that my last interaction on social media with the late Richard Coldwell had been discussing arrangements for this trip, which he hadn’t been able to fit in anyway.

We met up just after 11 am on the morning of Friday 23 August in the Old Vic, a large four-square pub conveniently situated right opposite the railway station. While the interior has been much opened out over the years, it retains a number of areas of comfortable seating ranged around the central bar counter, with plenty of dark wood in the decor. I’d actually say it’s a better pub than you might normally expect in such a location. There were seven of us, including a number of the usual suspects plus local boy Matthew Lawrenson of “Seeing the Lizards” fame in his trademark Paisley shirt.

For such an early hour, the pub was ticking over nicely, with a variety of customers. The Test Match was showing on various TV screens, fortunately with the sound down, and Jason Roy’s dismissal at 11.16 am proved to be the first of many throughout the day. Indeed, for the next three hours, England were averaging no less than three wickets per pub. There were four beers on the bar, including Timothy Taylor’s Knowle Spring, White Rat, Bombardier and Reedley Hallows Beer O’Clock. The Knowle Spring proved the most popular and was in pretty good nick. Martin Taylor’s liver was still suffering from his GBG-ticking exertions in Scotland over the previous couple of days, and he restricted himself to an alcohol-free Heineken, which was available here on draught, something I had not seen before.

On the map, the route to the next pub, the Continental down by the riverside, looked a straightforward one along the west side of the railway station, but in fact we ended up taking a wrong turn into a postal delivery depot, in contrast to some earlier trips where unpromising-looking cut-throughs turned up trumps. Don’t blame me, I wasn’t navigating. We had to retrace our steps a fair distance, and ended up about a quarter of an hour behind schedule. The pub is indeed situated right by the river in the shadow of the railway viaduct, although there is no view of the river from the extensive beer garden. By this time, after an overcast morning, the sun had come out, and it was starting to get pretty warm.

It’s a former Boddingtons pub, and still retains their characteristic external lettering. Internally it was been much modernised and extended, with a variety of seating areas, including a large conservatory. There were perhaps seven beers on the bar, including Pendle Witches’ Brew, the very hoppy Northern Monkey English Pale Ale, Ossett Treacle Stout and the hazy Pomona Island Pale, declared as such on the pumpclip. Although situated in something of a backwater, one would imagine the pub becomes pretty busy on sunny summer weekends. Here we picked up some copies of the newly-produced Preston Real Ale Trail leaflet.

Compared with many other towns and cities, Preston perhaps doesn’t make much of its river, and you could easily visit the centre without realising it had one at all. However, our walk to the next pub took us along an attractive promenade on the northern bank of the Ribble through Miller and Avenham Parks. It no doubt looks better when the tide is in, as it was today. A steep and rather lung-bursting climb followed, taking us into a area of handsome late Georgian and Victoria housing in the Avenahm district of the city, much of which now appeared to have been converted into offices. We spotted the cat shown above sunning itself in a precarious position on a window ledge.

The Wellington was our scheduled lunch top, although as some members of the party were either not particularly hungry or fancying something a touch more crafty to drink, there was a split in the camp, and it was a depleted group that crossed the threshold. The Good Beer Guide says that it is popular at lunchtimes, but even on a Friday, and close to the city centre, it plainly wasn’t, with virtually no other customers. Significantly, it didn’t appear on the Preston real ale trail leaflet, and a little birdie told us that it had failed to make it to the 2020 edition.

There’s a central bar with three distinct areas opening off it, plus a small room at the front right with a door marked “Hotel”, where we chose to sit. Of four handpumps, the only one in use dispensed Marston’s EPA, a beer that seldom rises above lacklustre; on the reversed pumpclips were Cumberland Ale and two Rosie’s Pig fruit ciders. Peter Allen couldn’t really be blamed for choosing Carlsberg instead. There’s an extensive food menu at reasonable prices, plus a range of pensioners’ specials at £4.95. From these were chose cottage pie, lasagne and a ham salad, but unfortunately they took around thirty-five minutes to appear, putting us even further behind schedule. The food was actually decent enough, but the overall experience was distinctly disappointing.

We couldn’t help overhearing the Eastern European barmaid having something of an altercation with the manager. In retrospect, this pub probably wasn’t the best choice, but realistically the pub lunch options in this, or any other part of, the city looked rather limited unless you wanted to resort to Spoons.

Just to the north, we emerged on to Churchgate in the heart of the shopping centre, making the Wellington’s lack of customers even more surprising. Heading east past Preston Minster, the street turns into more of a “bar district” and develops a more down-market atmosphere, most noticeably with the distinctly seedy-looking Bear’s Paw pub. Just past here, but on the other side of the road, was Sam Smith’s Olde Blue Bell, with a lively group of drinkers sitting at the outside tables. I remember this pub as having been white-washed, but in more recent years this has been removed to reveal the original brickwork.

We encountered the other members of the party just as they were leaving. They were able to tell us that England were now all out for 67, although due to Sams’ mobile phone ban we were unable to confirm this for ourselves. Of course Ben Stokes was able to make amends a couple of days later. The interior has been remodelled at some time in the post-war era, with a central bar serving a long room on the left and two smaller snugs on the right, but it retains some original stained glass in the doors to the toilets. It’s all in Sams’ characteristic style, with plenty of dark wood and comfortable fixed seating. As always, there was only the one cask beer, Old Brewery Bitter, which I found pretty good, but Paul Mudge felt wasn’t quite up to the standard you might find in the Boar’s Head in Stockport. Peter Allen once more went for the lager in the form of the premium Pure Brewed.

To be continued...

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Last week, Boak & Bailey defended people’s right to make subjective judgments about beer without having their sincerity questioned. It was a post that raised a number of interesting issues. But one question that arose from it was whether it is possible to define in any objective sense which beers are good and which are not, something that prompted some debate on Twitter. One person thought it was in general pretty obvious, but I’m not so sure.

For a start, beer isn’t solely or even mainly a functional product. We don’t judge it in terms of the maximum alcohol content at the lowest production cost, and indeed beers that score highly on those criteria tend in general to be judged pretty poorly. Beer is, broadly speaking , evaluated in generally subjective terms.

For draught products, the influence of cellarmanship needs to be discounted. This applies particularly to cask, but to sme extent to keg beers as well. Even the finest beer in the world will be pretty unpleasant if it is served flat, stale and warm, but some people who comment on beer seem to have difficulty in distinguishing between how well it is kept and its intrinsic qualities.

In business terms, quality is generally defined as consistent adherence to specification. It’s not about how good a product is an absolute terms, but whether it achieves what it’s supposed to do. If you don’t think much of it, blame the specification. In brewing, there are a range of production faults that will mar the character of the finished product, such as diacetyl, oxidation, lack of clarity (in intentionally clear beers) and obvious off-flavours. These will be obvious to anyone with much knowledge about beer, and should manifest themselves in the taste as perceived by the drinker, although some people insist on finding redeeming features in beers that to most are blatantly off.

However, I’m not aware of any regularly-produced beers that consistently manifest such obvious brewing faults. If they do, there’s something wrong with them. But, looking at it in more fundamental terms, what makes a poor beer as opposed to a good one?

A rough correlation is often drawn between the strength of a beer, and the cost of the ingredients, and its quality, but it doesn’t necessarily always work that way. After all, Harvey’s Sussex Best, which is what prompted this discussion in the first place, is a beer of relatively modest strength that retails in pubs for normal prices; it isn’t some eyewateringly expensive, mega-strong show pony.

The mere fact that something is a mass-produced, “industrial” beer doesn’t automatically make it a bad product. It is made to satisfy a different demand from a salted caramel quadruple IPA, and needs to be judged in those terms. In absolute terms, a Rolls-Royce or Ferrari is no doubt a better car than a Toyota Corolla, but it also costs hugely more to make, and possibly doesn’t offer anything like as good value for money. For most drivers, the Corolla will meet their requirements.

There has long been a tendency in some quarters to allow your opinion of the brewer to sway your judgment of a beer – they may be plucky independents challenging the industry giants, or standing up for fashionable causes. There may be entirely valid reasons for this, but it’s always a mistake to mix up the worthiness of the brewer with the intrinsic quality of the beer. There should be no “marks for effort” in assessing beer. Nor should a beer be dismissed out of hand purely because it’s popular, or lauded for obscurity.

Much of the above may suggest that there are really no absolute standards in judging beer, and that everything is entirely subjective and a matter of personal preference. Clearly this isn’t the case where beers demonstrate obvious brewing faults, even if some people are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But, if you assemble people with some knowledge of beer and brewing, they are likely to reach a broad consensus on how good or otherwise a beer is.

They will look at the ingredients used, the malt and hops, and whether inferior adjuncts have been used to reduce costs. They will consider the production process, such as the nature of the fermenting vessels and how long a bottom-fermenting beer has been lagered. And they will assess the overall flavour profile – is it bland, or harsh and one-dimensional, or is it complex and well-rounded ?

Yes, of course it is possible in broad terms to say that some beers are better than others. But, as with literature or music, it’s an art, not a science, and personal taste plays a large part. It’s by no means as obvious as some seem to imagine. Beers also need to be viewed in the context of their market segment – few would dispute that Pilsner Urquell is a better beer than Carling, but Carling is a well-made, consistent product that satisfies its customers; it’s not in any sense a “poor beer”.

And ignorant blanket statements such as “all keg is piss” or “macro lagers are crap” really say much more about the people making them than the product under discussion.

Typecast

Last month, I wrote about how it was becoming ever harder to find pubs whose decor and general offer hadn’t fairly recently been put under a corporate microscope. One result of this process is that, over the years, pubs have become much more differentiated in terms of the type of clientele they’re aiming to attract.

Of course, going back forty years, there were plenty of different types of pub – rough boozers and genteel middle-class haunts, those with youth appeal and those frequented by the older generation, those that did a healthy food trade and those that made a speciality of live music. And, given the typical lack of external cues, it could be all too easy to end up in the “wrong” type of pub and feed distinctly out of place.

However, they also had much more in common. The vast majority were owned by breweries and offered that firm’s standard beer range regardless of their customer base. They tended to have names like the Dog & Duck and the Northumberland Arms. Hardly any brand-new pubs had been opened since the war apart from those on new housing estates, or replacements for pubs lost to the Luftwaffe or to redevelopment schemes. There was much more commonality of interior design, with most pubs still having public and saloon or lounge bars with a distinction in furnishings. Nobody had ever heard of posing tables, and the only televised football was Match of the Day and the FA Cup Final.

Since then, though, whenever brewers and pub owners had money to spend on their estates, they started to look much more closely at exactly what kind of customer they wanted to attract. One of the first manifestations of this in the 1980s was the youth-oriented fun pub, which has now pretty much died the death but for a time was all the rage. By definition, the older person wanting a comfortable seat and a quiet pint felt excluded.

There have been a variety of other trends pulling the pub trade in different directions. The rise of satellite TV sport, especially football, has led to many pubs where that is the core of their appeal. In contrast, others have concentrated on ever more ambitious food to the extent where dining becomes their prime or even sole purpose. The growth of innovation in beer has resulted in more and more pubs and bars that deliberately set out to appeal to beer enthusiasts who may often pass many others to visit them. And the relaxation of the restrictions on opening new licensed premises has allowed venues to spring up that make no pretence to a generalist appeal, many of which entirely lack the “body language” you associate with a pub.

The result is that we now have different types of pub with very little overlap in clientele. There is the lively, sports-oriented boozer, the upmarket gastropub, its more plebeian family dining cousin and the specialist craft beer bar. When people are planning a pub visit, there are many more places that they won’t even consider. I’m always struck by how, in the Stockport suburb of Heaton Chapel, the Heaton Hops, a small modern craft bar, stands directly opposite the George & Dragon, a big Edwardian boozer majoring on TV sport and cheap and cheerful eating. I wonder how many customers ever go out unsure as to which one they plan to visit. It was once the case that, in many smaller towns and suburbs, having a wander round the local pubs was a popular Friday or Saturday night activity. That’s much less common now, and even if people do it many of the pubs will be ruled out because they don’t fit the bill.

Pubs with a broader appeal across different categories of customer do survive, but they tend to be the smaller and less high-profile ones, and nobody is opening new ones. The one category that is missing from the selection being developed is those specifically catering for the traditional core purpose of pubs, simply meeting and socialising over a few drinks. There is, of course, one pub operator for whom that is their USP, but at present they rather seem to be contracting rather than expanding.

It could be argued that Wetherspoon’s fill that niche, and they certainly attract a much wider range of customers than many of the other pub categories. But they are also themselves a very carefully targeted proposition that is deliberately pitched to be nothing like traditional pubs, and whose design militates against cosy conviviality.

One benefit of this segmentation is that it reduces the chance of inadvertently wandering into the “wrong” type of pub, but it doesn’t entirely eliminate it, and many independently-run dining pubs don’t obviously advertise that fact. It’s still entirely possible to end up in a pub and think “Oops, I’m the only one in here not eating!”

Pubs are often viewed through rose-tinted spectacles as hubs of the community where all classes and types of customer happily mingle together. That was always a somewhat optimistic view, and the ever- greater fragmentation of the trade further undermines social cohesion. How can a pub be the heart of its community when its business formula deliberately excludes whole sections of people?

Very early doors

The determined band of drinkers who assemble in Wetherspoon’s at 9 am are often viewed with a mixture of amusement, derision and pity. There’s sometimes even a whiff of moral panic about it: “just look what 24-hour drinking has led to!” However, Tandleman recently found himself in a branch of Spoons at this hour and took a considerably more sympathetic view:

By ten past nine when I leave there is a noticeable air of contentment and the genesis of a conversational buzz... Some spend quite a few hours there, but by four even the most hardcore will be gone, many resting for a repeat performance the next day. This is an interesting sub culture of pub goers. Good luck to them I say.

The last is an important point. They’re not settling in for an all-day session; many will be gone at lunchtime, and pretty much all by mid-afternoon. And is it really all that different from the regular sessions straight through from 5 or 5.30 to 11 pm that used to be commonplace and hardly remarked upon? I’d also suggest that in many cases they will only be drinking at a leisurely pace too.

The Eastern Daily Press reports how the phenomenon has spread well beyond Wetherspoon’s in Great Yarmouth, with pubs even offering happy hours for early morning drinkers. There seems to be a general feeling of conviviality and sociability. One customer said “I love the atmosphere in here and it's great to catch up with my mates. The pints are cheap and everyone is in good spirits”, while a barmaid commented “Everyone knows each other in here and they just have a laugh. There's no trouble.”

Other customers gave safety as a reason for coming out earlier. One said “I don't feel safe coming into the town any later. There are too many yobs on the streets and who knows what might happen”, and another added “It's not safe for someone like me who has health problems to come to the pub in the evening.” These fears may seem a touch exaggerated, but many towns that encourage a lively nightlife do develop a distinct “atmosphere” later in the evening that makes older drinkers feel uncomfortable.

It may not be something that appeals to you or me; it’s unlikely to meet with the approval of the public health lobby, and it’s certainly not compatible with holding down a job. But isn’t this really just a case of the liberalisation of licensing hours opening up opportunities for people to go to the pub at times that suit them? In this respect it’s similar to the busy sessions now seen in some pubs in the late afternoon when tradespeople knock off, a time of day when, before 1988, the pub doors would have been firmly shut.

Rather than laughing or sneering at the early-morning drinkers, shouldn’t we just accept that they’re taking advantage of longer opening hours to drink in a way that suits their particular pattern of life? It’s also usually going to be a calmer, more relaxed and sociable way of drinking than is typically associated with late nights. That surely is what pubs should be all about.

Under pressure

The Morning Advertiser reports on a survey which claims that Millennials feel five times more likely to be pressurised into drinking alcohol when socialising than older generations. Now, this has to be taken with a considerable pinch of salt, as it has been produced on behalf of a maker of low- and zero-alcohol punches, but it completely flies in the face of my own experience.

I would say that, over the past twenty years, the pressure to drink alcohol on social occasions has greatly reduced, and in many situations not drinking has become the norm. This is particularly the case with anything connected with work, after hours as well as at lunchtime. Indeed, it is often the person who chooses an alcoholic drink who stands out and ends up being stigmatised. When visiting friends and relatives, you are much less likely to be routinely offered an alcoholic drink than you once were.

Back in 2002 I asked Can a responsible person ever be seen with an alcoholic drink in their hand?

Twelve people from my workplace went out to the pub one Friday for someone’s birthday. Apart from myself and one other, it was a round of ten Diet Cokes, including one for the person who was supposed to be celebrating. Anyone would think that a pint of bitter or a glass of wine would have them throwing up over the boss or copying their backsides on the photocopier. Is it any wonder that the licensed trade and the brewing industry are in such a bad way?

And it certainly hasn’t got any less so in the intervening years.

It would be interesting to be given examples of precisely in what kind of situations people do feel pressurised into drinking, as I really don’t see this at all. One area where this is often mentioned is in social life in higher education institutions, but they provide a huge range of activities, most of which don’t involve drinking in any way. The fact that someone has organised a Carnage pub crawl doesn’t mean you’re under any obligation to go on it.

The article says that people don’t drink alcohol on two out of three social occasions, so the pressure can’t really be that intense. If they truly were having their arms twisted to drink, surely we wouldn’t be seeing so many pubs closing. And, if you really don’t much care for drinking, but most of your friends seem to do nothing else, maybe it’s time to find some new friends.

In reality, this is an example of the common phenomenon of something attracting more criticism as it becomes less popular. We have seen exactly the same happening with smoking. Forty years ago, there undoubtedly would have been more social pressure to drink, but nobody complained about it back then.

Stubbing out the habit

The government have, perhaps rashly, pledged to end smoking in England by 2030, as part of “a range of measures to tackle the causes of preventable ill health.” If this was some kind of infectious disease, that might be a reasonable objective. However, let’s think about this a little more deeply. While it is known to carry significant health risks, smoking is a legal activity that large numbers of people enjoy. Many of them don’t actually want to quit, as Pat Nurse explains in this article. And, if they are adults in full command of their mental faculties, why should they? Many commentators seem to forget that, whatever the risks, smoking is a very soothing and relaxing activity.

There are plenty of other activities people engage in that carry substantial risks of death, injury and ill-health, but the government seems happy to tolerate them, possibly because it would be seen as politically incorrect to criticise them. Prejudice against people on a wide range of grounds has now rightly become socially unacceptable, but it seems that much of that bile has now been redirected against smokers.

The plan doesn’t seem to involve outright prohibition, just an ongoing campaign of denormalisation and exclusion of smokers from more and more public places. However, while that may apply a continuing downward ratchet on smoking levels, it’s not going to eliminate it entirely. People would still be able to import tobacco or buy it on the black market, and smoke it in private homes or secluded areas. Even outright prohibition wouldn’t really work, as it has been so notably unsuccessful with various kinds of illegal drugs.

Of course we now have the means at our disposal to achieve a substantial reduction in smoking, by encouraging vaping as an alternative. However, this tends to be pooh-poohed by the public health lobby, both because of “not invented here” syndrome, and because it is often espoused as a recreational activity in its own right rather than simply a smoking cessation therapy. Indeed, some countries such as Australia have banned vaping altogether while continuing to tolerate smoking, which by any reasonable calculation is surely considerably more dangerous.

As has often been said, the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stone, but because something better came along. The same could be true of smoking and vaping, but it’s not going to be achieved unless the government takes a markedly more positive attitude towards vaping. The licensed trade could also play its part by ceasing to take such an absolute and dim-witted attitude – Wetherspooon’s, I’m looking at you! But it’s much easier just to continue to demonise smokers, and all too readily lump vapers in with them.

There’s currently a lot of talk of legalising, or relaxing the prohibitions, on cannabis, but it would be interesting to know how many of those who support these campaigns at the same time also want to see a further crackdown on smoking, something that comes across as a distinctly hypocritical stance. Apparently the US state of Colorado, which has legalised recreational cannabis, has passed an ordinance preventing employers from discriminating against cannabis users. But they haven’t done the same for smokers, or drinkers.

Of course, some will say, smoking is a special case, something uniquely harmful, and these tactics are never going to be turned against any other activity. Or are they? The cartoon at the top is borrowed from this blogpost by Christopher Snowdon, but it seems that nowadays the tables have been reversed. If we can eliminate smoking by 2030, then why not fatty and sugary food by 2040, and then alcohol by 2050?

A whiff of intolerance

It happens as regular as clockwork at this time of year. A few days of hot, sunny weather bring people out into beer gardens for the first time since last summer, and they discover to their horror that they are already populated by filthy, smelly smokers. This results in the inevitable cries for smokers to be banned from outdoor areas of pubs. The latest to jump on this bandwagon was radio presenter Jeremy Vine, although fortunately 50% of respondents to his Twitter poll were prepared to stand up for tolerance.

Having just been pushed off a table in the sun by a smoker’s lack of consideration ...

Should smokers be banned from pub gardens and outdoor restaurant tables in this weather?

— Jeremy Vine (@theJeremyVine) June 28, 2019

Frankly this attitude displays one hell of a cheek, when these people have presumably supported the legislation that forces smokers to be in the beer garden in the first place. You have a choice as to whether to be inside or outside, while they don’t. They have no alternative but to go outside, regardless of how unpleasant the weather is, but on the few hot days a year you think they should be banished just for your convenience. Vine talks of smokers’ lack of consideration for others. Well, if you had been more considerate to smokers, you wouldn’t have compelled them to go outside in the first place.

It’s sometimes argued that, even after the ban, pubs can still cater for smokers. Yes, this is true to a limited extent, but they are still treated as third-class citizens. Yet, despite this, smokers on average still spend more time and money in pubs than non-smokers, presumably because many non-smokers are prissy, health-obsessed people who would never be seen dead in a pub in the first place. To prevent smokers even using outdoor areas would do severe damage to the business of pubs.

I have noticed an increasing numnber of pubs designating a section of their outside drinking areas, often the most attractive part, as non-smoking, and banishing smokers to a grotty yard round the back. Yet, on 330 days a year, these non-smoking areas are completely unused. And no doubt even with this arrangement the antismokers will moan that “there’s someone smoking 50 yards away! I’m going to die!” Pubs like this really don’t deserve smokers’ custom.

Woken from slumber

In the early years of my drinking career, one of the most interesting aspects was visiting new pubs and finding so many that seemed to have been little changed for many years, both in their fabric and the way they were run. Indeed many could have to been said to be stuck in something of a timewarp. Some of them were pubs that fell into the category of Classic Basic Unspoilt Pubs featured by Rodney Wolfe Coe on his famous list. The Sun at Leintwardine, pictured right, was the only one to merit five stars, although since then, while the original core remains unchanged, it has received a large modern extension at the rear. I did have the privilege of seeing it in its original form in the late 1980s.

But there were also plenty of pubs that, while not meeting those standards, didn’t fall far short, and quite a lot of them were within brewery tied estates. Often it was actually the Big Six brewers who had the least spoilt pubs, as they had acquired huge swathes of pubs from often moribund family brewers over the preceding couple of decades and had not yet got round to doing much about many of them. Some of the independent brewers had, in contrast, been pretty assiduous in upgrading their pubs – I was struck in the early 80s by the contrast between Greenalls’ estate in Cheshire, and the unimproved nature of many Allied Breweries and Courage pubs in Surrey. Even at the bottom end of the size scale, most Donnington pubs had received a significant makeover in the 60s or early 70s in a style that was fashionable at the time. On the other hand, some independents had estates that seemed barely touched for decades – Brakspear particularly springs to mind.

To me, and many others, one of the key aspects of the 1970s “real ale movement” was the preservation of our beer, brewery and pub heritage, and there was certainly plenty out there to explore and discover. Back in those days, there was much less of a spotlight on the performance of individual businesses, and it was a lot easier just to plod along for many years ploughing your own furrow. But that is now all in the past, and to find any pub that can remotely be described as unspoilt is far more difficult.

Since then, a huge amount has changed. Large numbers of pubs have been drastically altered, and still more have seen their offer totally revamped, often to accommodate the seemingly inexorable advance of food. At the same time, pubgoing has become much less of a default activity for the general public. Many thousands of pubs have closed, especially in the present century, and those have often been the smaller and less altered ones. And, even when some of the classic unspoilt pubs survive, they have become in effect museum pieces owned by people with deep pockets rather than a living tradition. The original fabric of the front rooms of the Sun at Leintwardine has been preserved, but they have become little more than a curio attached to a much larger modern pub.

No more can pubs just moulder away with little attention as part of sprawling tied estates. Since the Beer Orders, pretty much all the pubs previously in the hands of the Big Six have been churned and rechurned several times through the hands of various pub companies, with each one being put under a spotlight and the less lucrative allowed to fall by the wayside. The surviving family breweries have also in most cases taken a long hard look at their estates and disposed of those pubs that don’t fit in to their desired business model.

There has also been a distinct change in public attitudes. Back in the 1970s, the fact that a pub was quirky, old-fashioned and unspoilt was often reason in itself to visit it, but that has now largely reversed, with the new, glossy and trendy finding favour. In their 1989 book, The Quest for the Perfect Pub, Nick and Charlie Hurt wrote that the Barley Mow at Kirk Ireton “is often packed with young people from the nearby cities of Derby and Nottingham, where most of the pubs are now amusement arcades. They learn how to play dominoes, love the beer and the atmosphere, and revel in the quiet simplicity to be found here.” Their modern-day counterparts don’t do that, and would look at you in bafflement if you suggested they should.

Of course there are still plenty of good experiences to be had in pubs, and the mere fact that one is modern, or has been dramatically remodelled, doesn’t meant it isn’t worth visiting. But it’s now much harder to find one where you get the impression that the decor and the food and drink offer haven’t been fairly recently put under a corporate microscope. And, all too often, in the rush to promote various “activities” in pubs – dining, watching sport, listening to music, doing quizzes – their original core purpose of just providing a space for people to meet and have a drink seems to be forgotten.

Often now, the best chance of finding genuinely unspoilt pubs is in long-established free houses, which by definition are more likely to be in market towns and rural areas rather than large towns and cities. Family ownership through multiple generations is often a factor. In my experience, the Welsh Marches (at least south of Llangollen) and Mid and West Wales are some of the most fertile hunting grounds. But, even here, it’s possible to walk into an outwardly traditional-looking pub in a small and sleepy town and be confronted by a monstrosity of chrome and mirrors.

Some may say that none of this really matters so long as the food and drink are good, but that’s rather missing the point. Pubs are far more than just retail businesses, they are part of our heritage, and it can’t be denied that something valuable has been lost in the march of progress over the past forty years.

But where are the customers?

At the end of June, I spent a few days in Cornwall, and on the way back stayed for a night in Gloucester. While I was there, I called in to Sam Smith’s Robert Raikes’ House, which is situated on one of the main shopping streets in the city centre. This is a magnificent 16th century half-timbered building that in recent years has been very carefully and lovingly converted to pub use.

It was a sunny Saturday lunchtime, and the pub looked very appealing with boards outside advertising that it was serving food. Yet it had no more than a thin scattering of customers, when Sam’s pubs in similar central locations in Stockport, Leeds or Chester would be heaving. This has also been observed by Martin Taylor. Boak and Bailey have described Sam’s William IV in Bristol, another impressive historical building, as “a pub which rarely has any atmosphere at all.” So you have to ask what is the trick Sam’s are missing.

First is the question of price. While Sam’s are noted for their low pricing policy, they apply a set of three or four fixed price bands dependent on geographical area, which don’t necessarily correspond to how affluent a particular place is. Old Brewery Bitter in this pub was £2.80 a pint, which may be about the cheapest in central Gloucester apart from Wetherspoons, but isn’t the outstanding bargain that £2 is in the North. Gloucester isn’t by any means the most well-heeled of cities, and overall is probably less prosperous than Chester.

The low prices aren’t just a matter of luring customers in purely on value for money. Once people have been tempted over the threshold, they find a distinctive ambiance that creates a critical mass of like-minded drinkers and that particular Sam’s atmosphere. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but in many places in the North it’s a very successful formula – you know what a Sam’s pub in going to be like.

There is also the issue of the unfamiliarity of the brand. In the North, Sam Smith’s is a well-established company that has been around for decades if not centuries, and the name will be familiar to most pubgoers. In the South, they’re not known at all, something that is compounded by their policy of only offering their own brand products across the entire range of drinks and snacks. The barmaid in the Robert Raikes very carefully and accurately explained to a customer the difference between the four Sam’s lagers, but in most pubs you don’t even have to ask because you will recognise some of the brands on the bar.

Plus you have to consider how the building actually works as a pub. I have written previously how Sam’s very careful remodelling of the Swan in Holmes Chapel had actually ended up too compartmentalised for its own good, with the bar tucked away in one small room right at the back of the pub. And in fact that particular pub is currently closed, and has been for some time.

Of course there is much to be said for pubs having a variety of distinct areas, but they also benefit from a substantial circulation and seating area close to the bar to promote a sociable feeling. The Robert Raikes isn’t as bad as the Swan, but even so the servery is situated in one room in the centre of the pub that doesn’t directly open on to any other rooms apart from the central corridor. It also has the toilets up a flight of stairs that Wetherspoons would be proud of, which could be another factor that older customers find offputting.

Sam’s deserve praise for taking on premises like Robert Raikes’ House and converting them to pub use in a manner that respects their fabric, and where no expense has clearly been spared. There are examples in a number of other cities – the Wortley Almshouses in Peterborough spring to mind. But, for their own sake as much as the customers’, they also need to have a look at their pricing policy and the circulation of people within the building, to make sure they actually succeed as pubs and not just as pieces of architectural restoration.

Dispensing wisdom

I recently made a couple of posts that touched on issues of beer dispense. These spurred me to look at what was going on in pubs more closely than I had before. The first explained the development of the “swan neck” nozzle for serving cask beer, which originated as an attempt to emulate te creamy texture of beers dispensed using the “economiser” that was once commonplace in West Yorkshire.

These are often seen as something distinctly Northern, but when we went to Rugby in May pretty much every pub with handpumps seemed to be using them. Since then, I have had holidays in Bath and the surrounding area, and in Cornwall, where I observed that swan-necks seemed to have become pretty general as far south as you can get in the country. The only exceptions were pubs using gravity dispense, and those with very old sets of handpumps. A noticeable difference, though, was that they seemed to be of a thicker gauge than those usually found in the North, and were generally used without sparklers.

Someone made the point that dispense equipment was generally provided by brewers, not the pubs themselves, so the pubs had little alternative but to go along with the trend. The only exceptions would be some free houses which owned their own pumps. Swan-necks mean that, for most of the pull, you are dispensing beer in the midst of the liquid rather than on to the top, but in the absence of a sparkler it’s hard to see what difference it makes, or what advantage it offers. I would have thought it made it harder to bar staff to influence to final presentation of the head, which may or may not be a good thing.

Swan-necks by definition involve inserting the pump nozzle into the beer, but in this post on beer presentation it was strongly argued by Pete Brown that keg beers should ideally be dispensed without the nozzle touching the beer at all, a point echoed in this video:

I have to say I expressed scepticism at the time as to how often this was achieved in practice, and this was certainly borne out by my observations. Most keg beers nowadays are dispensed either from T-bars or tall fonts standing well above the bar top. The old-fashioned bar-top illuminated boxes have pretty much entirely disappeared except in Sam Smith’s pubs. They have a stainless steel nozzle about three inches long.

From what I saw, the nozzle was almost invariably inserted into the beer to a greater or lesser extent, and sometimes the pint glass was moved up and down, or swirled around, to achieve the desired final appearance of the head. So clearly the ideal is scarcely ever being achieved there and, to be honest, with brim measure glasses and nozzles of that length, it would be extremely difficult to do so.

Unavailable at any price

Three weeks ago, as part of our day out in Uttoxeter, we were very kindly given a lift by Paul Mudge’s wife Jacquie to the outlying Plough. She wanted a soft drink, but not being a lover of artificial sweeteners, asked for one of the full-sugar varieties. However, the pub didn’t have anything available in this category, although it was eventually able to dig out some expensive premium drink.

The sugar tax has been in the news recently, and one fact that has emerged is that it has only raised one-third of the revenue that it was predicted to. This is due to a mixture of manufacturers reformulating their products and, as in this case, outlets simply ceasing to stock the full-sugar versions. It’s certainly not just confined to pubs – in Subway, all of their draught soft drinks are diet versions, while I was recently in a branch of Waitrose where only diet drinks were included in “meal deals”. Fortunately you can still get a full-sugar Pepsi with your burger in Wetherspoon’s.

Now, as someone with Type 2 diabetes, this is academic to me, but it still represents a significant denial of choice. Some people simply don’t like the taste of artificial sweeteners, while others are allergic to them, and there are also concerns that they may lead to long-term health problems, as we have found with replacing butter with various kinds of artificial spreads. Plus there is the fact that full-sugar drinks can be a life-saver for Type 1 diabetics experiencing a “hypo”.

It is one thing to seek to deter people from consuming certain products through higher taxation, although whether that in itself is proving effective is highly questionable. But it is something else entirely to simply, through a form of official arm-twisting, make those products completely unavailable. Surely adult consumers should be treated as informed, empowered people who have the right to make their own decisions about their diet. And, if price is an issue, why can’t retailers simply include smaller measures in all-inclusive deals, such as 375ml bottles rather than 500ml?

There’s a parallel with the schemes that, not content with imposing additional duty on higher strength beers and ciders, seek to remove them from the shelves entirely.

In the land of Bass and Pedi – Part 2

We pick up our story in the back room of the Vaults in Uttoxeter. The next pub on the itinerary was the Plough on Stafford Road, but this was the best part of a mile out of the town centre, and generally in an uphill direction, which didn’t look a particularly appealing prospect on a showery afternoon. However, our luck was in as Paul Mudge had managed to persuade his wife Jackie to drive out from Stafford to give us a lift, which was extremely generous of her. He said that he was fortunate to be married to someone who literally drove him to drink!

The Plough is a white-painted roadside pub that presumably was there long before the suburban housing that now surrounds it. Inside there’s a narrow area with a few posing tables in the centre by the bar, a dining area at a lower level to the left and a plainer public bar-type area to the right, where we managed to find a table. It’s a pleasant, although not strikingly plush, pub, and taking a look at the menu some of the prices seemed rather steep, especially compared with those in the Bank House. “Carry on Wayward Son” by Kansas was playing as we walked in.

There was a little more choice of cask beers here, with Pedigree being joined by Hop Back Crop Circle, Wainwright and the local Uttoxeter American IPA. The American IPA and Pedigree were both pretty good, although the latter fell a little short of that in the Bank House. While it’s a decent pub, we weren’t convinced it would have really justified the walk out of town. Reading the description on WhatPub, it was rescued from a period of closure by new owners at the end of last year.

We were duly decanted back in the town centre and made our way to the Old Star on Queen Street, a narrow street that is separated from the main part of the market place by a block of buildings. This has been altered rather more than some of the previous pubs, but retains a rambling interior with various different areas including a pool room with a tiled floor and bench seating at the rear. The atmosphere seemed a little more lively, and we were greeted by loud music which seemed to be majoring on the Cure’s Greatest Hits. One of us changed the mood by putting “Back in Black” by AC/DC on the jukebox.

On the bar were Doom Bar and Jennings’ Cumberland Ale alongside Bass. The Bass was pretty good, but the person who chose the Cumberland found out that in Uttoxeter it’s best to stick to Bass or Pedi as they’re likely to turn over much quicker. It wasn’t returnable, but rather lacklustre.

Our next call was the Horse & Dove which is just around the corner on the aforementioned island block of buildings. While it claims to be Uttoxeter’s first micropub, it doesn’t conform to the purist Herne model, being a fairly spacious single room that in fact is larger than the front two rooms of the Vaults, with all the seating at a normal height. It has lager, spirits, piped music and separate gents’ and ladies’ WCs, so realistically is just a smallish modern bar. It was fairly busy, as you might expect at teatime on a Friday. There were six cask beers in total on the bar, from which we selected Wantsum Yellowtail, Uttoxeter Groundbreaker and S43 Raven from Country Durham, all of which were rated good.

There now followed the longest inter-pub walk of the day, taking a full four or five minutes up the pedestrianised High Street to the Smithfield. This is a substantial redbrick street-corner pub with a public bar at the front and a larger lounge stretching a fair way back along the side of the building. This was still pretty basic, with a bare wooden floor throughout, and had a distinctly lively atmosphere. This was the busiest pub of all those visited on the day.

The soundtrack seemed to be “Hits of the 70s”, including “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond and “Wig Wam Bam” by The Sweet. It could be said that Uttoxeter’s musical tastes are another aspect of the town that are stuck in something of a time warp. We encountered a very large, friendly retired greyhound, which must count as best pub animal of the day. The sole cask beer was Pedigree, which again was pretty decent.

We then returned to the market place to the Black Swan, which is on a side street very close to the Old Star. The pub names in this part of town must be a source of confusion. This has a side passageway running the length of the pub, with a single door giving access to two rooms, both of which are labelled “Bar” and contain a dartboard. We chose the small and cosy front one; the one at the rear is much more spacious, with extensive bench seating around the walls.

“Fire and Ice” by Pat Benatar was playing as we walking in; Peter Allen later put “Stay With Me Till Dawn” by Judie Tzuke on the jukebox, as he was going to see her in concert in Birmingham the following night. There followed a predictable discussion about various singers’ ages – Judie Tzuke is, I was pleased to learn, three years older than me. More very palatable Bass, although Peter had by this time had his fill of BBB and plumped for that other classic product of Burton, Carling.

We thought we would finish off the day by calling in the only pub in the town centre we hadn’t yet done, the Steeplechase. Previously called the White Horse, this is a modern pub closing off the eastern end of the market place, which internally has been knocked through into a single cavernous room. However, the two pumpclips on the bar had been turned room, and the barman seemed to sense what we were looking for and told us without prompting that there was no real ale. So we returned to the Vaults for a final drop of Bass before the short walk back to the station. Unlike our last trip to Rugby, all the homeward trains were on time.

So another very enjoyable day out, with good beer, good pubs and good company. Some may balk at the limited choice of beer available, but it’s rare that you get to sample two of Britain’s classic ales on their home territory, and get to compare them between different pubs. It’s also unusual to get the opportunity to visit every pub in a town centre which gives much more of a feel for the place than just dipping in to a select handful of highlights. Obviously they were all different, and catered to some extent to a distinct clientele, but every one had something to be said for it, and, as long as you stuck to Bass and Pedi in the pubs that served them, we didn’t encounter any sub-standard beer. Uttoxeter seems a fairly prosperous place and there was little evidence of vacant shop premises on the main streets.

Thanks to Peter Allen of Pubs Then And Now for all the photos used in this post.

In the land of Bass and Pedi - Part 1

The Staffordshire market town of Uttoxeter is best known for its racecourse and being the home of JCB and Elkes Biscuits. The name will also be familiar to travellers from the roundabout creating a bottleneck on the A50 between Stoke and Derby. It has a reputation for being somewhat insular and behind the times, which is reflected in its pub stock still being mainly composed of traditional boozers, and dominated by the Burton classics of Draught Bass and Marston’s Pedigree. This made it a contrast with some of our earlier Beer & Fubs Forum Proper Days Out, which have aimed to cover a wide variety of beers and types of pub.

Our numbers were somewhat depleted, but four of us managed to meet up on Stoke Station, where Paul Mudge had time for a swift drop of Titanic Cherry Mild in their Bod bar on the southbound plaftform. We then had a 25-minute train ride through the lush but rather waterlogged East Staffordshire countryside to Uttoxeter, where the station lies between the racecourse and the town instelf. A short walk past Waitrose and the long-closed Wheatsheaf pub brought us to our first port of call, Wetherspoon’s Old Swan just off the market place.

The name suggests it may have been an old coaching inn, but in fact a little research reveals that it was previously a furniture store. It has a fairly typical Wetherspoon interior, with the bar along the left-hand wall, and a variety of comfortable seating areas at a slightly higher level spreading out to the right. It had a rather elegant carpet in a wavy pattern, and pictures and photos by local artists on the wall. Even just after 11 am, it was reasonably busy, although the clientele seemed to be more gentlefolk enjoying a morning coffee than the hardcore morning Spoons boozers on the John Smith’s Smooth.

It avoided the frequent Wetherspoon’s problem of having too many beers on the bar by sensibly limiting the number of cask lines to six – the usual suspects of Doom Bar, Ruddles and Abbot, together with the local Lymestone Foundation Stone, Rudgate Ruby Mild and Pheasantry Mikado Mild. Despite reports of declining beer quality in some Wetherspoon’s branches, both the Foundation Stone and Ruby Mild were in very good nick.

We then moved on to the Olde Talbot, which dominates the market place from the western end. It’s an old gabled inn claiming to date from the 16th century, with a projecting ground floor. The interior is L-shaped, with three comfortable seating areas along the front and a more Spartan public bar area to the right which seemed to be set up for live music. The wood-panelled section to the left by the bar counter was particularly congenial. There was a sign saying “Cash Only”, which the friendly barmaid told us could cause problems on race days, although there are a couple of banks with cashpoints within fifty yards.

The beer range was Doom Bar and Bass, so not surprisingly it was a round of four pints of Bass, which came to £14.20, £3.55 a pint seeming to be the going rate for that beer in the town. Perhaps surprisingly, Peter Allen, who had spent most of his life as a confirmed lager drinker, revealed that it was his first ever taste of Bass. It proved to be in excellent condition and indeed turned out to be the best Bass of the day. The soundtrack included Marianne Fathfull’s version of “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”.

Apart from Wetherspoon’s, there seems to be very little pub food on offer in Uttoxeter town centre, although there are a couple of modern dining pubs on the outskirts near the bypass. We had therefore arranged our lunch stop at the Bank House, a seventeen-bedroom residential hotel just to the east of the market place opposite the parish church. It’s an impressive redbrick thre-storey Georgian building dating from 1777, which in fact was the town’s first bank. Through the front door, there is a dining room on the left and a long, congenial bar area on the right with bench seating along the front windows. There was a golden retriever belonging to one of the customers asleep in the middle of the floor.

There were two cask beers on the bar, Pedigree and Bates Pale Ale from Little Eaton Brewery just north of Derby. A couple of us went for the Bates Pale Ale, but unfortunately it was well past its best. However, it was changed without demur for the Pedigree, which really was in very good form, and proved to be not only the best Pedigree of the day, but the best beer of all. This proved that this beer, although sometimes dismissed as not being what it was, can still shine when properly looked after. This was also Peter’s first ever tasting of Pedigree.

The menu featured a range of traditional British dishes, from which we selected fish, scampi and rump steak, all coming with chips, and all priced at £10 or below. We also managed to squeeze in a couple of starters and one dessert. The food was also very good, and was possibly the best we’ve had on these trips, where finding pub lunches that rise above the adequate can be difficult. We had a chat with the chef who was very keen to make us welcome.

We then returned to the market place to the Vaults, which is perhaps Uttoxeter’s classic pub. A narrow, shop-like frontage conceals a pub of great character running a long way back from the street. There’s a front bar area where most of the drinkers seem to gather, a middle room with a devil amongst the tailors game, and a larger lounge at the rear with bench seating and a dartboard. The outside toilets are yet further back on a passageway running along the side of the pub. It was fairly busy for early afternoon, with an all-too-familiar discussion about ailments taking place amongst some of the customers. “There’s no point in having Challenge 25 in here,” said the barmaid, “you wouldn’t even need Challenge 50!”

It’s renowned as a stronghold of Bass, and in the past proudly displayed a row of five Bass handpumps along the bar, as shown in the photo (not mine) above. Guest beers have been introduced in recent years, and my Twitter header photo shows one pump for Robinson’s Wizard flanked by four for Bass. Today’s guest beer was Marston’s EPA, but all of use plumped for the Bass, which didn’t disappoint, although it was slightly shaded in quality by the Olde Talbot. The jamjars to show the colour of the beer, including one for each Bass pump, seemed rather superfluous.

To be continued...

Watering down the proftis

A Bristol licensee has recently complained that her profits were being adversely affected by customers choosing just to drink tap water with their meals. At first sight, this just comes across as sour grapes. Free tap water is a legal right, and indeed on several occasions recently I have been given a carafe of water in restaurants without even asking. A business needs to adjust its pricing to ensure it makes a profit on what customers actually order, not what they think they should order.

However, on reading between the lines, it seems that the food in question is being provided by pop-up vendors, so the bar is probably making little or nothing from it. Maybe in this case the answer is to charge the pop-up businesses more commission for the right to sell their food on your premises. Or you could adopt the Wetherspoon’s approach of meal deals combined with drinks. You would have no problem getting a free glass of tap water in Spoons, but you wouldn’t get a discount off the “with soft drink” price because the two come together as a single offer.

My recollection is that the right to free tap water was introduced to give drinkers, especially in nightclubs, the opportunity to rehydrate without being charged for the privilege. Some publicans complained about it at the time, but I don’t really see that it represents a threat to anyone’s business, and indeed have occasionally taken advantage of it myself to wash down tablets. There is perhaps scope to abuse it, for example by groups of thirsty cyclists or hikers demanding rounds of water, but I doubt whether that’s at all common, and a decent licensee should be able to make it clear that is basically taking the piss if they’re not going to spend anything.

If you’re running a restaurant, you are able to insist that your customers do actually buy something, and once their meal has finished its course you can encourage them to leave. However, it’s not quite as simple in a pub, and I’ve written before about the potential for the abuse of hospitality by customers who put little or no money across the bar. One example given in the comments was people coming in the watch TV sports but not buying anything.

However, unless your pub is full, you’re not really losing any money from non-drinking customers, and if one member of a group spends all evening on tap water you will still be making money from their companions. If you really do feel that people are taking advantage, there are various tactics available to a competent licensee to make them unwelcome, and of course at the end of the day you are legally entitled to refuse to serve anyone, and ask them to leave, without giving a reason.

Sheep in wolf’s clothing

In the early days of CAMRA, a substantial proportion of cask beer, especially in the Midlands and North of England, was served via electric pumps of various kinds. However, there was a problem with this that it could be well-nigh impossible to identify what was real and what was not. So, progressively, with a certain amount of encouragement from CAMRA, breweries replaced them with handpumps, which gave an unmistakeable sign that the beer was real. I wouldn’t want to suggest that increasing profits by, in many cases, exchanging metered dispense and oversize glasses with brim-measures ever entered into their heads. There were a scattering of cases of keg beer being dispensed via handpumps, but those now seem to have pretty much entirely disappeared. If you see a handpump, you know that the beer will be real.

However, this can cut both ways. It can also be a clear sign of something you wish to avoid, and for many drinkers it may be once bitten, twice shy with anything coming out of a handpump. Anoher problem is that handpumps may be perceived as dull and old-fashioned in comparison to the brightly-illuminated keg taps that adorn many bar tops, not to mention harder to see. As I wrote last year:

Maybe it is also time to question whether handpumps can be more of a hindrance than a help...

...However, what allows you to clearly identify something also allows people to instantly reject it as something not for them. In many pubs, there’s a binary division between stuff on T-bar taps (including craft kegs) and stuff on handpumps, and many drinkers just won’t consider the beers on handpumps. So, just a thought, but might it be an idea to try dispensing cask beer though the T-bar taps (obviously with the word “cask” on the label) so it is not immediately marked out as something “other”. There’s no technical reason why it can’t be done as, in the past, many cask beers were sold using freeflow electric dispense.

This was really only a speculative thought experiment, but Nathaniel Southwood reports that Sharp’s brewery have tried just such a thing in an experiment at the Royal Cornwall show, as pictured above. It’s in conjunction with an attempt to introduce a chilled version of Doom Bar, but it also offers the normal-temperature version alongside it. It does state clearly on the font that it is cask beer.

Sorry we’re late to the party! Thanks @NateDawg27 this is indeed cask beer (the photo is from the Royal Cornwall Show where we’re asking people at the bar what they think). As well as at a few events, we’re trialling both the keg-style fonts and the extra chilled variant in.. 1/3

— Sharp's Brewery (@SharpsBrewery) June 9, 2019

I’m not saying that it will work, and there’s always the possibility that drinkers are so wedded to the concept of handpumps that it will deter more than it attracts. But it must be worth a try, to see whether it helps to make cask look more like everything else on the bar rather than something “other” that is to be avoided at all costs. It might eliminate some of the variability caused by incompetent bar staff having little idea how to use handpumps. Plus I would certainly be interested to see how the head and condition turn out in the absence of a swan neck and tight sparkler. However, it’s definitely not going to cover up faults in beer that has been allowed to become flat and stale. And it would probably be too much to ask for them to get some oversize glasses and attach meters to these new pumps.