Beer Drinker’s Charter
A beer drinker's charter will probably be introduced within the next 12 months, Dyfed County Council’s Public Protection Committee was told by Chief Trading Standards Officer, Mr Edwin Nicholl.
Five recommendations of the charter are:
1 Beer, ale, stout or lager should be so labelled and its original gravity indicated in X symbols in varying form - one X to five X, denoting one of five specified original gravity bands.
2 All beers to be required to show the malted barley content a percentage of the total cereals and sugars used,
3 Descriptions ‘Malt Beer' and ‘All Malt Beer' to be restricted to beers containing respectively 70 per and 95 per barley.
4 The words ‘heavy’ ‘export, 'strong' etc to be restricted to beers of specified gravity bands.
Mr Nicholl reminded the Committee that in 1975 the Authority carried out a survey in conjunction with other authorities into the original gravity, alcoholic content and cost of a variety of beers, lagers and stouts.
This confirmed that not in all cases was cost directly related to its quality and strength and the details of the survey were referred to the Food Standards set up by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.
Mr. Nicholls said "As a result their report has been published which contains radical recommendations which should be implemented by statutory regulations”.
Mr. Nicholls said in reply Councillor D.R. Johns that the regulations had not come into force yet but possibly they would be introduced in 12 months time.
Carmarthen Journal - Friday 24 June 1977, page 1.
So it turns out there was a XXXXX bands. Which majkes it look even more like the WW I price control bands. Which were these (When abolished in 1921. I've missed off the bottom two, which were for stupidly weak beers which no-one brewed in the 1970.)
4d 1027-1032
5d 1033-1038
6d 1039-1045
7d 1045-1053
8d >1054
From what we learnt of the Batemans beers, something very similar could have been used for X to XXXXX.
The stuff about malt content and the restrictions on some words implying strength smacks very much of CAMRA demands.
The big question is: why were the recommendations never put into statutes?
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Why were the recommendations (for indication of beer strength) not put into law?
The breweries weren't in favor. The US started allowing alcohol content on all labels after Coors won a lawsuit challenging the prohibition in 1987. Certain states had previously overridden some of the prohibition, for example, by differentiating "3.2" beer (under4.0% abv) from "strong" beer. It's not clear to me why Coors would have gone to the trouble since their regular Coors beer was probably not much different from the other standard American lagers (usually 4.4% to 4.9% abv).
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