UK beer as seen from the DDR

I was recently given an interesting little DDR book, "Rund ums Bier". Published in 1986, it's from very close to the end of the DDR period. 

In addition to looking at beer in Germany, it also has short sections on brewing elsewhere in the world. Including the UK. Which is  the part I'm going to reproduce here.

Great Britain: It tastes best in the “pubs”.
Britain's lovers of good beer are getting restless. The reason: the quality of the barley juice is declining - a result of the monopolisation of beer production, which is no longer controlled and determined by brewing experts but by financiers. The small, traditional breweries are disappearing more and more and with them the variety of beers.

In 1977 UK production was over 65 million hectolitres. Every citizen in the UK drank around 117 liters a year. Statistics show a decline in production. While there were 64.8 million in 1980, the number fell to 59.8 million hectoliters in 1982. Beer consumption also fell to 107 liters (1982).

Almost three quarters of beer production have been taken over by seven trusts or corporations, showing a further growing trend towards concentration of production. In addition, they own around 50 percent of the beer sales outlets, so-called “pubs”. The majority of sales are realized in these beer bars. The attractiveness of these establishments, which also serve food, ensures the increase in beer consumption. Advertising slogans praise “pubs” as places where beer tastes the best.
"Rund ums Bier" by Emil Ulischberger, Leipzig, 1986, page 60. 

That's a very Marxist view of UK brewing in the 1980s. But not totally wide of the mark. Seven large  companies were doing their best to monopolise the beer market. I'm not sure there's much I would argue with in their analysis. Except they fail to mention the emergence of dozens of new breweries. Something which was having an impact.

What does get mentioned is home brewing. Though that was more about the price of commercial beer than its quality. 

In the meantime, however, the dissatisfaction of beer drinkers has been expressed in the increased purchase of home-brewing equipment and also beer ingredients. The English are now starting to brew their own beer again, just like in the old days. They have no confidence in attempts to get beer out of a test tube, so to speak. Chemists are even experimenting with fruits, such as bananas, to bring flavored beer to the market.

A society for the protection of English beer has been formed, whose members visit pubs to find out where good beer is served. These “pubs” are included in lists that guide beer lovers to a good drink. What is telling is that a small London brewery was constantly awarded the title “Pub of the Year”. The traditional local breweries are also defending themselves against the corporate influence. What use is it? Small companies do not have the economic power to stop the concentration process of corporations, which is dictated by the pursuit of maximum profits and which local breweries stand in the way of. At best - for advertising reasons - the name remains.
"Rund ums Bier" by Emil Ulischberger, Leipzig, 1986, page 61.

Fascinating to see CAMRA get a mention. Though not by name. And without mentioning the considerable success the organisation had in getting the big brewers top produce cask beer and in encouraging new brewers.

The description of UK beer styles is, er, a bit weird.

But now to the peculiarities of barley juice on the British Isles: The classic English beer is top-fermented. However, the “ale” tastes flat to our tongue. It is light, low in carbonic acid and lightly hopped. (Heavily hopped ale is a long-lasting stock ale for export.) "Porter" and "Stout", which actually only differ in their name and whose origins have already been discussed, have an original gravity of over 16 percent. “Burton” is a particularly strong stout; like our bock beer, it is drunk in the winter months around Christmas time.
"Rund ums Bier" by Emil Ulischberger, Leipzig, 1986, page 61. 

I'm not sure that I would describe UK beer as lightly hopped compared to the beer of the DDR. I  can only think of a couple of Stouts with a gravity as high as 16 Plato. Not sure where the author got the idea that Burton was a type of strong Stout. I'm guessing that the author had neither set foot in he U nor ever drunk any UK beer.

Revealing beer gravity

UK brewers were extremely cagey when it came to the strength of their beer. Resisting attempts to make them reveal OG or ABV.

There had been an unsuccessful attempt in in 1954 to pass an Act of parliament forcing brewers to reveal gravities. The topic came up repeatedly in the 1950s, without anything actually happening.

In the 1970s, CAMRA tried to provoke the government to take action As this article reveals.

They want beer gravity revealed
BRITAINS brewers will have to disclose the gravity of their products from the Campaign for Real Ale are accepted by the government.

The Ministry of agriculture the recently asked the Food Standards Committee to look into all of aspects of the definition and labelling of beer.

Camra’s report suggests that beer stored casks, kegs or tanks should be defined underone of four headings - draught, bright, keg or lager drawn or pressure. should be defined as either drawn or pressure.

All counter mountings should clearly state the type of beer and the methods of dispensing.

Bottled and canned beers should be described as pale or light ale, brown or dark ale, stout, strong ale or barley wine.

Ingredients
Terms which imply standards of quality, should be governed by the minimum original gravities or alcohol percentages.

Camra recommend that both original gravity (the measure of solid materials mixed with water to make beer) and the percentage of alcohol by volume should be publicly stated for all beers, either on bottle or can labels or at points where cask, keg or tank beers are dispensed.

Emphasis is also laid on the ingredients of beer and the report puts forward proposals for limiting the use of materials other than malted barley and sugar or sugar substitutes used should be stated on all labelling.
Coventry Evening Telegraph - Thursday 27 June 1974, page 32.

In the end, CAMRA forced the brewers' hands. By analysing beers and publishing the results, gravities were no longer a secret. Even before legislation compelled them to, some brewers started voluntarily putting gravities on labels and pump clips.

Note that CAMRA also wanted beer pumps to specify if beer was cask, bright or keg. That never happened.  But revealing beer gravities was helpful for everyone.

Beers I miss (part one)

When you get to be as old as me,  inevitably many of the things you loved in your youth - or middle age - have disappeared. That's certainly true of beer, in my case.

Where to start? At the beginning, I suppose. And that means Barnsley Bitter. The first really good beer I tried. And which disappeared forever not long after I had come to love it. How did it taste? That's been blurred by the passage of time. firmly bitter and dry is about all I can come up with.

Funny thing is: I only ever drank it in two pubs. The Wing Tavern in Newark and some pub in Grantham. Which I only went to once. (And where it was served through a metered electric pump.) For my first CAMRA branch meeting. Possibly my last, too. Despite being a member since my 18th birthday, I've never been very active. Other than volunteering at the GBBF. I've mostly supported cask beer in a drinky sort of way.

The Wing Tavern was an odd pub. With no street frontage. Which may explain why it was the last pub in Newark with working handpulls. And the last serving Barnsley Bitter.

Why, when Newark had its own Courage brewery, was Barnsley Bitter being served? It's all to do with exactly how the takeovers of the two Newark breweries went down. Warwick & Richardson was first bought by John Smith. Who branded the pubs, and served them from, their Barnsley brewery subsidiary.

A couple of years later, Courage bought the other Newark brewery, Holes, and also John Smith. With closure of Barnsley in mind, Newark's former Warwick & Richardson pubs swapped over to the bright beer from the former Holes brewery.

The Wing Tavern, as one ow Newark's least fashionable pubs, wasn't top of the list for conversion. And sold Barnsley Bitter.until the brewery closed in 1976.

Lots more to come. If I can be arsed.

Men in white coats

I'm finding that reading old issues of the Brewers' Guardian is conjouring up the mood of the 1970s even better than my music playlist. At least when it comes to the point of view if industry insiders. It's very much a technocratic view.

The writers are very gung ho about all the latest technological developments like continuous fermentation and tank beer. Which are portyaed as the future of brewing. There's rarely any mention of beer flavour. Other than claiming the new proceses had no impact on it.

And it the photos of all the gleaming stainless steel, the brewers are always wearing white coats. Like laboratory workers. It's telling of the way brewers were regarded at the time. Oh so different from today's hippy rock stars.

I've only got to June 1970. But already so much really useful material. Going through the whole decade is going to be so much fun. I'm really looking forward to the reaction to CAMRA and the Real Ale movement.

A national beer festival for the UK

I’d assumed that the concept of a national UK beer festival originally came from CAMRA in the mid-1970s. But I recently discovered that the idea had earlier been kicked around by people involved in the brewing industry.

This comes from an opinion piece in the Brewers’ Guardian in 1970:

"Comment
For an industry that is always seeking new outlets - even to the extent of buying small concerns lock, stock and barrel to obtain them - we appear to be rather slow in putting some of the more obvious and attractive sales-boosting schemes into operation.

Take, for instance, a Beer Festival. Such an event could be of enormous financial benefit not only to brewers but to the tourist industry and the country as a whole.

There are many such festivals held throughout the world. The tremendous success of events such as the Munich Oktoberfest need no elaboration, but even the smaller affairs, like the one in Kilkenny, have proved to be just what the public want.

Considering that beer plays such a large part in the British way of life, it is regrettable that in this respect we are even lagging behind wine-drinking countries like Cyprus, who will be holding their first beer festival next year.

Such an idea has often been mooted by individual brewers here, but nothing concrete ever seems to emerge, so surely the time has come to investigate, possibly through a Brewers’ Society committee, the viability of a British Beer Festival on a co-operating company basis.

Objections will come in thick and fast, no doubt, but if planned correctly in conduction with bodies like the British Travel Association and with a balanced programme of traditional dancing, music and good British food there is no reason why it could not become an important annual event.

Choice of venue would be another problem, with Northern and Midland brewers showing a strong preference for a town like Burton-on-Trent instead of London, but inclement weather need present no difficulties, as such a project could very easily be staged in a large exhibition hall like Earls Court or Olympia.

An obvious choice of time would be during one of the off-peak tourist seasons, like early spring or late autumn, when hotels are not overcrowded with holidaymakers and brewers are not faced with peak production difficulties. Why not stage the first one to coincide with Brewex?

With such a heavy burden of continually mounting overheads, the industry must search out new fields for increasing sales and a National Beer Festival might well go a long way to help. The organisational difficulties would be sizeable, but the rewards, in terms of both finance and prestige, would more than compensate."
Brewers' Guardian, Volume 99, March 1970, page 33. 

Nothing came of this proposal and the task was left to CAMRA. Interestingly, Earl’s Court and Olympia were suggested as possible locations. Something which, a couple of decades later, would come to pass.

Real Ale pubs in the 1970s

When CAMRA started to really take off in the mid-1970s, a new type of pub started to appear. Free houses where, rather than just serving the Mild and Bitter of whichever brewer gave them the best deal, they would sell cask beer from several different breweries.

In those days, it was very unusual for a pub to sell draught beer from multiple breweries. Even “free houses” were usually committed to the draught products of a single brewer. Bottled beers were a different matter. Some big bottled brands – Guinness and Mackeson, for example – were available in other brewers’ tied houses. Bass was the only draught beer that broke out of the tie.

Having grown up in a region where brewers mostly had a very limited draught. Mild and Bitter. With no Best Bitter or Old Ale, seeing more than two operational hand pulls was an occasion. Entering a pub with six or even eight beer engines, all dispensing a different beer, was like a punch in the face. In a good way.

I did learn to be wary of pubs with lots of hand pumps. Sometimes more than their trade could sustain. Selling two cask beers was sustainable for most pubs. Six or more? Only a pub with a large number of committed cask drinkers. I preferred tied houses with just a couple of casks. If there was a decent landlord.

And here’s one of the great things about cask beer. A mediocre beer can be polished and made to shine by a good cellarman. The downside is that an idiot landlord can ruin the most wonderful beer.

CAMRA, in my opinion unwisely, set up their own real ale pub chain. There was nothing wrong with the pubs themselves. They had a range of cask beers from different brewers. One, The Eagle, was in Leeds. And in an area I regularly pub-crawled. All the other pubs on the crawl were Tetley houses, so it did offer a little variety.

The problem was more a conflict of interest. A consumer organisation that was dabbling in the trade? Too many places the aims of the campaign and the pub chain wouldn’t be in sync.

Brewery visits

Oddly, the first time I ever entered a brewery was to work, not to have a look around. Ever since, it’s been as a visitor. Not usually on a tour, but still a visitor. Though the particular smell of a brewery - that mixture of fermentation and disinfectant - always takes me right back to my time at Holes.

The CAMRA brewery trips I went on were pretty boozy affairs.

At Bateman they put on a lovely cold spread, along with as much Bitter and Mild as you wanted. We got to chat with the brewer and everyone was dead friendly. Then back to the brewery-owned hotel for some more pints.

As we were guests at the hotel, the pints didn’t need to stop at closing time. When I was young, opportunities for pints after 11 PM were as rare as flamingos in Leeds. I never passed them up. Which is a problem when you’ve paced yourself to end at “normal” closing time.

I wasn’t feeling great when I rose after far too few hours’ sleep. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me eating the full English that I’d paid for.

On the way back to Newark, we stopped at a Kimberley pub for a few pints. I was a bit overenthusiastic, as I rarely got to drink their beer. I was already feeling a bit unwell when we picked up the hitchhiker. About 10 minutes later I really needed to spew. Being considerate, I pushed past the hitcher, opened the rear door and puked on the road. What a hero I was.

For some reason, the hitcher decided to get off at the next roundabout. 

Anyone else have memories of boozy brewery trips in the 1970s? Let me know.

Real Ale pubs in the 1970s

When CAMRA started to really take off in the mid-1970s, a new type of pub started to appear. Free houses where, rather than just serving the Mild and Bitter of whichever brewer gave them the best deal, they would sell cask beer from several different breweries.

In those days, it was very unusual for a pub to sell draught beer from multiple breweries. Even “free houses” were usually committed to the draught products of a single brewer. Bottled beers were a different matter. Some big bottled brands – Guinness and Mackeson, for example – were available in other brewers’ tied houses. Bass is the only draught beer that broke out of the tie.

Having grown up in a region where brewers mostly had a very limited draught. Mild and Bitter. With no Best Bitter or Old Ale, seeing more than two operational hand pulls was an occasion. Entering a pub with six or even eight beer engines, all dispensing a different beer, was like a punch in the face. In a good way.

I did learn to be wary of pubs with lots of hand pumps. Sometimes more than their trade could sustain. Selling two cask beers was sustainable for most pubs. Six or more? Only a pub with a large number of committed cask drinkers. I preferred tied houses with just a couple of casks. If there was a decent landlord.

And here’s one of the great things about cask beer. A mediocre beer can be polished and made to shine by a good cellarman. The downside is that an idiot landlord can ruin the most wonderful beer.

CAMRA, in my opinion unwisely, set up their own real ale pub chain. There was nothing wrong with the pubs themselves. They had a range of cask beers from different brewers. One, The Eagle, was in Leeds. And in an area I regularly pub-crawled. All the other pubs on the crawl were Tetley houses, so it did offer a little variety.

The problem was more a conflict of interest. A consumer organisation that was dabbling in the trade? Too many places the aims of the campaign and the pub chain wouldn’t be in sync. 

As always, your memories are welcome.

All the young dudes

There's been talk on the internet about craft beer running out of steam. Of enthusiasm lost and an ageing group of enthusiasts. As an early CAMRA member, I say welcome to the club.

There are so many parallels with the real ale movement. Kicking off with, mostly, very excited young people who want to change the (beer) world. Slow beginnings, followed by intoxicating, seemingly never-ending, growth.

Then you look around and you're all in your forties. And those young people, they just don't understand what good beer is. They like some new nonsense, that isn't proper beer. Not like the stuff you love.

"Your beer is boring." Youth says. "We want something new and exciting. Not that old man beer."

And so it endlessly goes.  

I say this as an old bloke in the corner nursing a half pint of Dark Mild.

Beer Festivals in the 1970s

The age of modern beer festivals began with CAMRA’s Covent Garden Beer Exhibition in 1975. At least that’s how I remember it, I’m sure it was the first to be anything like national scope. It made an impression on me. And I think many others.

I went down to London with my school friend Martin Young. Also, a CAMRA member. We had to queue for a while to get in, which surprised me. As I think it did the organisers.

How many beers did they have? Fifty or sixty? I doubt that it was any more. It still seemed enormous to me. More beers than I could possibly hope to get around. I went for Mild and hard to get. Embodied in the only beer I can remember drinking: Yorkshire Clubs Dark Mild.

Why do I remember that? Because soon after the brewery was bought up and closed. A shame. The Mild was pretty much black and from what I can recall, fairly nice.

It was like a wonderland of beer for someone living in a town where only three cask beers were available. Not having travelled much, pretty well all the beers on offer were new to me. Most of all, it was a demonstration of the richness of the UK’s brewing culture, despite the best efforts of some in the Big Six to destroy it.

Covent Garden was the template for future CAMRA festivals. It morphed into the Great British Beer Festival and inspired scores of local events.

Do you have memories of early beer festivals? Then get in touch.

Northeastern Bitters in 1978

Thank you the Mirror. Both Daily and Sunday. For analysing beers in the 1970s and publishing the results. At a time when beer strengths were a closely guarded secret.

But, you might say, CAMRA had started publishing gravities in the Good Beer Guide. However, that was all they published. They didn't include the ABV or the price. Information which the Mirror did provide. Using the ABV, I've been able to calculate the FG and the degree of attenuation. The type of stuff I lap up. CAMRA also only concerned themselves with cask beer. So there was nothing about the strength of keg beer.

The first article I'm consulting has 81 analyses. Mostly draught Bitter, but, for some reason, also including Old Peculier. They come from all over the UK. I thought it would be more manageable to split them up by region.

I'm starting with the Northeast, which I've defined as everything East of the Pennines from South Yorkshire to the Scottish border. It's pretty arbitrary, but what the hell.

If you're wondering why the prices are missing for some beers you can blame the newspaper archive. The right-hand edge of one of the pages has been clipped, cutting off the prices.

I almost forgot another handy thing about the Mirror articles. They include some rudimentary tasting notes. Something that wasn't very common in the 1970s. Oh, and there's also a score out of 12. So you can see which beers the two journalists who compiled the report liked best. All useful stuff.

It's interesting how high the rate of attenuation is. It averages a whisker short of 80%. 

The average gravity of 1037.3º is about exactly the same as average UK beer gravity overall. The spread of gravities is quite small, from 1032º to 1042º, but with most between 1036º and 1038º.

I've excluded Old Peculier from averages because, well, it isn't a Bitter. 

Northeastern Bitters in 1978
Brewer	Beer	Price per pint (p)	º gravity per p	% ABV per p	OG	FG	ABV	App. Atten-uation	score	Flavour
Theakston	Old Peculier				1056.2	1014.8	5.38	73.67%	11	Rich, fine & deceptively mellow.
Timithy Taylor	Landlord Bitter				1042	1008	4.42	80.95%	10	Full bodied, hoppy taste.
Cameron	Strongarm				1041.2	1011.7	3.82	71.60%	10	Rich flavoured brew. Great value.
Federation	Federation Special				1040.9	1009.5	4.08	76.77%	11	A member ot Beer’s yalty. Excellent.
Newcastle	Newcastle Exhibition				1040	1007	4.29	82.50%	10	Crisp, nutty flavour, Very good.
Stones	Best Bitter	29	1.33	0.14	1038.6	1007.1	4.10	81.61%	8	Fruity & nicely balanced.
Timithy Taylor	Best Bitter	32	1.19	0.14	1038.2	1004.8	4.35	87.43%	8	Real “Bitter”. Unusual flavour.
Ward	Sheffield Best Bitter	28	1.35	0.14	1037.9	1006.8	4.05	82.06%	10	A beautiful nutty bitter.
Vaux	Sunderland Best Bitter	29	1.29	0.13	1037.3	1008.95	3.68	76.01%	8	Nice, smooth and hoppy.
Webster	Pennine Bitter	31	1.19	0.13	1036.8	1006.65	3.92	81.93%	10	An excellent beer needing an acquired taste.
Hull	Old Traditional Bitter	31	1.17	0.12	1036.2	1007.55	3.72	79.14%	9	Creamy, nicely hepped bitter.
Tetley	Cask Bitter	29	1.25	0.13	1036.2	1006.3	3.89	82.60%	11	Real ale. Truly supurb.
Tetley	Keg Bitter	31	1.16	0.12	1036.1	1006.95	3.79	80.75%	8	Last survey champion, but not quite my palate.
John Smith	Best Bitter	33	1.09	0.11	1036	1007.3	3.73	79.72%	8	Creamy, tasty. Good flavour.
Cameron	Best Bitter	27	1.31	0.13	1035.3	1008.7	3.45	75.35%	9	Nice fruity taste. Good head and lively.
Federation	Federation Ordinary	23	1.40	0.14	1032.1	1007.35	3.21	77.10%	9	Refreshing. Lacks guts but no complaints at the price.
Newcastle	Newcastle Amber	26	1.23	0.13	1032.1	1005.4	3.47	83.18%	6	Party beer. Nice hut you can’t come to any harm.
Average		29.1	1.25	0.13	1037.3	1007.5	3.87	79.92%	9.1
Source:
Sunday Mirror - Sunday 17 September 1978, pages 22 - 23.

When I'm 94

I've been kicking around a though in my head for the last few days. What sources would I use if, 30 years from now, I decided to write a followup volume to "Austerity!".

Initially, foremost in my mind were concerns, such as, would the RateBeer information be available? And would any breweries have bothered archiving their brewing records? Would archived versions of brewery websites be accessible?  (I assume that the British Newspaper Archive will continue to exist in some form.) Then I couldn't help starting to think about the details of exactly how I'd do it.

1971 to 2021 is far too long a period.It would need to be split into two books. The first kicking off with the foundation of CAMRA. Where to end it, though. What's a meaningful, break point? 

I pondered that for a couple of days. It was obvious, really. When the Big Six crumbled into dust. 2000 - 2001. Which followed on logically from my decision to call the book "Cask!". And the one after "Evil Keg!".

Digging an ever larger pit for myself, I wondered how much material I already have. For 1971 to 1980, a reasonable amount. Some brewing records. Not enough, but some, at least. Whitbread Luton records must have survived. They'd be interesting to look at. I'd need a shitload of others as well. Thousands of hours of work.

For the whole period I've OGs or ABVs from the Good Beer Guide. Usually only one of the other. Making them much less useful than Whitbread Gravity Book entries. Better than nothing.Big problem: only cask beers. I've far less information on keg and bottled beers. Not sure where I could find that. A bit of scanning and OCR work. Nothing too crazy. A couple of hundred hours, maybe.

I've statistics galore, courtesy of the BBPA Statistical Handbook. Beer production, % sales by style, number of breweries, number of pubs, imports, exports. Everything I could possible need. Maybe more numbers on tied estates. Very little to do. I could use the Good Beer Guide scans to harvest tied house numbers, which were often included in brewery entries.

Far too much for me to even contemplate taking on anytime soon. I haven't finished writing about the periods I have researched fully. More or less. 

I already have my next few books planned out. Should I ever manage to finish "Blitzkrieg!". 

First is "Free!" covering the Golden Age of UK brewing - 1880 - 1914. 

Moving back in time to 1830 - 1880. I can't remember if I thought of a title for that one. "Beerhouse!", perhaps. 

Finishing at 1780 - 1830. About as far as I dare go back, cowardly time-traveller that I am. Plenty of time to think about what I'll call that, given how long it's likely to take me to complete the other two.

I'm hoping "Free!" won't take anything like as long as "Blitzkrieg!". Despite covering a far longer period, much less was going on. Wishful thinking, probably.

An early CAMRA member writes

about the pricing of beer in pubs.

It does read a bit like a letter you'd find in What's Brewing from the beery equivalent of Angry of Tunbridge Wells:

"A PUBLIC HOUSE GRIEVANCE
To the Editor of "The Citizen."
Sir, —In some cases, where an extra penny per pint is charged, the latest public house racket is to serve only in the best rooms and close the public bar. Just how a publican can be permitted by the authorities to close the bar when the best rooms are open beats me. Surely if a public house open at all the whole place should be? I have heard it suggested that the reason for this is the shortage of beer. All things being equal, I maintain that the so-called "roughs" of the bar are much entitled to be served in the public bar as are the elite who patronise the best rooms! How can it be said that there is a shortage of beer when the best rooms are open and the bar closed? Isn't it the extra pennies the brewers or licensees are after? I see that quite number of front doors remain cloned whilst the side doors are open. Also, secret "knocks" still prevail.

Yours faithfully,
"DISGUSTED."
Gloucester Citizen - Saturday 11 April 1942, page 4.

Profiteering brewers and landlords. No wonder Mr. Angry is disgusted. Sorry, Mr. Disgusted is angry.

To put that extra penny per pint into perspective, it had remained the same since beer was 4d to 8d per pint in pre-war days. Though the cheapest beer - watery 4d Mild - would never have been sold in the posher rooms. In 1942, when this article was written, the prices had risen to 9d to 15d. In the public bar.  Making drinking posh much less relatively expensive.

When I were a lad, and Mild and Bitter were 14p and 15p a pint, beer was 1p dearer in the rooms with a carpet. Money thrown away, in my eyes. Pubs in Leeds, where I spent most of my formative drinking years, mostly retained a multiroom layout. And differential pricing.

The knocking through of bars into one room has mostly removed the possibility of this weird relic of the class system. Though, obviously, it just meant that prices were levelled up to those of the the lounge.

It must seem odd to anyone under 30 that pubs once had different prices in different rooms.

NEIPA, CAMRA and Wetherspoons

Thanks to Boak & Bailey for explaining the best beer clickbait terms. Now I just have to construct a post that somehow lives up to its title.

NEIPA. A hot topic currently. Some have suggested it represents a seismic shift in beer culture. Others that it's just a passing fad. This is where it's great having your head stuffed up the past's arse as much as I have. Only time will tell. Speculation now is just, well, speculation. 23rd December 2022, to be precise. Until then, anything written about the historic significance of NEIPA is just waffle.

In the 1950's, British beer geeks would have assumed Brown Ale, Milk Stout, Keg Bitter and Light Ale were the drinks of the future. And we all know how that turned out. By the 1990's these styles were as cool as Rick Astley and as sexy as scabby tramp.

Forty years, that took, I hear you complain. True, but the geeky internet world has speeded trends up a treat.

Right, just need to work in CAMRA and Spoons now.

Returning to the theme of the long term, forking out for a CAMRA life membership was one of my best decisions ever. How much dosh has that saved me? Not to mention all the free tokens at beer festivals over the years. Best investment ever.

When I first took my kids to Wetherspoons, I was also thinking long term. About what I could do with them in the UK once they were adults. Take them to Spoons, obviously. Getting them accustomed to the unique atmosphere was one of my key aims in our visits to Britain. Cola light for Alexei, cranberry juice for Andrew, strongest cask beer they have and two double Bells, no ice, for Dad.

Now they ask: "Dad, can we go to Wetherspoons, please?" And, "If you're getting youself whisky, can I have a vodka?"

That was easier than I thought. Constructing a post around three randon clickbait terms. Could be a new theme. Throw some more clickbait at me and I might write more crap like this. Or not, depending on my mood.

Cornbrook Brewery and tank beer

Cornbrook  was a Manchester brewery bought by United Breweries, the successor to Hammonds, in 1961. It was a mid-sized brewery like many others. But one thing made it special: replacing cask with tank beer.

DCM was David Constable Maxwell, managing director of Cornbrook,

“Under DCM's tutelage, Cornbrook had pioneered their system of handling draught beer through delivery by motor tanker wagon into bulk containers in the outlets and dispensing it by measuring pumps on the counters. It was popularly called tank beer, and had its origins in a system used by Hull Brewery company in that city from the 1920s. It had been updated in the light of modern scientific application and was manufactured by a Lancashire company Porter Lancastrian, with which DCM was connected, although, unusually for him, he did not reveal this until actually asked. As stated, bitter beer was taken from the brewery by tanker and filled into metal tanks in the cellars of public houses and kept under carbon dioxide pressure, and thence through a measuring pump into the customers' glasses. The principle was good, in that all responsibility for quality was removed from the licensee, as was the necessity to ensure the scrupulous cleanliness of all utensils in the retail outlet exposed to the atmosphere.”
"The Brewing Industry 1950 - 1990", by Anthony Avis, 1997, page 75.

The Hull Brewery used large ceramic jars to store beer in pub cellars. There was a bit of a controversy back in the 1970’s whether their beer counted as cask or not. It was rough filtered and the ceramic vessels it was served from weren’t pressurised, unlike Cornbrook’s metal tanks. I seem to remember CAMRA accepting it nationally, but the Hull branch not putting any pubs in the Good Beer Guide that sold it.

Just checked the 1978 and 1980 Good Beer Guides. Hull counted as cask in 1978, but not in 1980, when the GBG notes that all their beer was filtered. Obviously CAMRA had a change of heart.

Obviously, for the free trade Hull didn’t use tanks. The Town Hall Tavern in Leeds used to sell their Bitter, presumably from a cask, but filtered. I don’t recall it standing out in either a good or a bad way.

The move to tank beer was prompted by a recurring theme in the 20th century: publicans messing up the beer in the pub cellar. Keg and tank beer were seen as a way of taking a landlord’s incompetence out of the equation. Foolproof beer was the aim. Of course, it never quite worked out like that. 

The enthusiasm of some management for tank beer saw United Breweries rather rashly rush into adopting it more widely in the group.

“DCM sang the praises of the system extravagantly, as did his general manager, Joe Barlow, when Cornbrook came into the UB group. Lightning and carefully controlled tours of the brewery and as carefully controlled inspections of selected pubs, were arranged to make its virtues known more widely to other executive managers in UB. Since the system was new, it had not been tested on a large scale - of time, dimension or its tolerance of draught beers brewed differently to that of Cornbrook. Apart from the assertions of the system's success by the Cornbrook directorate, independent actual and factual statistical evidence was hard to come by; it was therefore difficult for an objective assessment of its merits to be made. However, WTD [William Tudor Davies] who had advanced his career from being the outside management consultant from Urwick Orr & Partners to being the managing director of Hammonds, and then the sales director of UB, was convinced the system should be adopted, despite doubts within the company that it still had to be proved. The compromise was to have a field trial of the system on a grand scale, in that all the group's outlets in the Bradford area were converted to the "tank beer" system.

WTD was convinced it was a significant breakthrough in brewing technology and product service to the customer.”
"The Brewing Industry 1950 - 1990", by Anthony Avis, 1997, page 76.

No-one really understood the technology that well. But went ahead anyway. You can probably guess what happened. But I’m saving that for next time. I will leave you with a couple of Cornbrook beers:

Cornbrook Brewery beers 1927 - 1961
Year	Beer	Style	Price	size	package	OG	FG	ABV	App. Atten-uation	colour
1927	Flagon Ale	Mild		pint	bottled	1028.2
1927	Barley Stout	Stout		pint	bottled	1049.3
1959	Barley Stout	Stout	12.5d	half	bottled	1046.3	1013.8	4.21	70.19%	250
1961	Keg Mild	Mild	16d to 17d	pint	draught	1035	1002.3	4.09	93.43%	20
Sources:
Whitbread Gravity book held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number LMA/4453/D/02/001.
Whitbread Gravity book held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number LMA/4453/D/02/002.

Note that the Keg Mild is pale in colour.

Paying for take-overs

Take-overs have been very much talked about lately. You must be getting fed up with me saying this: it's nothing new.

The apparent motive may vary - acquiring brands with a cachet, expanding capacity, grabbing more pubs - but the underlying one is always the same. Making more money.

I was so happy when I found a copy of "The Brewing Industry 1950 - 1990" by Anthony Avis. Not because it's rare* as a book. But because it's a rare insider's view of the crazy consolidation of the 1950's and 1960's.

I'd almost said something above about being a materialist**. But in my, albeit fairly shallow so far, research into the whole merger thing, individuals have been more important than I expected.

Anyway, back to the topic. And a quote. Which could easily be a CAMRA text from the 1970's. But it isn't. The author was in brewery management, Hammonds to Bass Charrington.

"Take-overs and mergers had to be paid for, and this took two forms - the obvious step was an increase in the price of beer, and the other was the removal of good trading houses out of tenancy into direct management by the brewery, in order to secure both wholesale and retail profit. Increasing the price of beer enabled the brewery companies to increase the rents to tenants, on the specious argument that increased prices meant higher retail profits and therefore the tenant could afford to pay higher rent, and that too was based on the trade the tenant was doing in his house - the harder he worked and the more he increased his trade, the greater his rent. He effectively paid for his own success. By taking good trading houses under management, the brewery companies also effectively took away the incentive from a tenant to work hard to be in line for promotion to a better house. It took some years of this devious thinking on the part of brewery companies to get through to the tenants, accustomed to benevolent and paternalistic treatment by the brewery. The traditional, if unwritten, promise of a brewery to its tenant, that so long as he increased the trade of his present public house and sold ever increasing barrels of beer, he would be in line to get a bigger house when it came up for letting, and that the brewery would look after all his business problems to allow him to concentrate on the retailing, quite suddenly and within a few years vanished. A whole new ball game, with new rules, started up."
"The Brewing Industry 1950 - 1990", by Anthony Avis, 1997, page 28.

Opinions?




* My copy is no. 94 of 200.
** In the fucking philosophical sense.

Let's Brew Wednesday - 1959 Watneys Brown Ale

Now here's a special treat: a beer from the legendary Watneys. Unfortunately, they're legendary for all the wrong reasons. Maybe notorious would be a better word.

I thought I'd never get to write any Watney recipes. Because their brewing records don't appear to have been preserved. However those of one of the breweries they took over, Usher's of Trowbridge, have. And they brewed some Watney brands in addition to their own beers.

Watney acquired a terrible reputation in the 1970's for producing crap beer. Their name got so bad, that they eventually removed it from the exterior of their pubs. As a brand, Watney became unusable.

CAMRA was to a great part responsible. Watney produced no cask beer for many years and were an obvious target. Grotney was what they called them. And with good reason: their beer was crap.

John Keeling told me how when he worked at Wilson's, another Watney subsidiary, the Cream Stout they produced was for a large part made up of ullage - returned beer - pasteurised and coloured up with caramel. It sounded disgusting. I now realise that this wasn't an isolated example.

Because the Watney's Dairy Maid Stout, Brown Ale and XX Mild brewed at Ushers are exactly the same. There's all sorts of drecky beer added at racking time to the stuff that was brewed and fermented.

In the case of Brown Ale, this was added to the 734 barrels brewed the normal way:

BB 30 barrels
Bottoms 40 barrels
RB 93 barrels
finings 9 barrels

That's 172 barrels, in total. Bottoms is the sludgy stuff left behind in vessels. RB I assume stands for returned beer, or ullage. Not sure what BB is, but it's definitely not Best Bitter.

I can't imagine that lot improved the quality of the finished beer.

The recipe below is for the beer as brewed. If you want to go all authentic, I suggest collecting dregs and the gunk left after racking, filtering it, boiling it for a while to kill any bugs, then add it to the beer when you rack. Not that I would recommend such scummy practice.

The recipe itself doesn't look too bad. A mild malt base, a bit of crystal for body and roast barley for colour. At about the standard gravity for Brown Ale back then, around 1030º.




Time to pass you over to me (again - though Kristen will be back in a couple of weeks) . . .

1959 Watneys Brown Ale
MA malt	5.50 lb	81.06%
crystal malt	0.33 lb	4.86%
flaked maize	0.33 lb	4.86%
roast barley	0.25 lb	3.68%
No. 2 invert	0.25 lb	3.68%
caramel	0.125 lb	1.84%
ginger	pinch
Fuggles 45 min	1.00 oz
OG	1031
FG	1007
ABV	3.18
Apparent attenuation	77.42%
IBU	14.5
SRM	30
Mash at	152º F
Sparge at	170º F
Boil time	45 minutes
pitching temp	60º F
Yeast	WLP023 Burton Ale

Toronto airport

I'm stuck hanging around in Toronto airport for a delayed flight. And annoyingly they don't sell any booze until 11:00.. Should I be thankful that my flight is so late that time has now passed?

It's all very high tech. There's an iPad at very seat from which you can order without having to catch a waitress's eye. You can also use the iPad for other things. Like writing blog posts.

I'm having a Wellington Imperial Russian Stout. Canned, but pleasant enough. And a double Maker's Mark.

I wouldn't want the Stout to feel lonely, would I?

The delay means that I'll be late for my afternoon appointment in Chicago. I would tell you what it was, but the project is in a very early stage. Another of the 5 drillion projects I have in some phase of development. Like my book on malting, which might have been out by now, had I not been off gallivanting again.

I had some pretty decent beers in Toronto, most of whose names I can't remember. Cask caknucklehead is one I can recall. Excellent stuff, of which I drank several pints.

My reading matter is Brew Britannia. Been pretty good so far. And strangely unnerving when it describes events, such as the first big CAMRA festival in Coventry Garden, which I attended. Am I now part of history?

Bottling in 1914 - Chilled Bottled Beers

Relief is at hand for those disappointed by the final drawing to a close of my series on bottling in 1901. I've found another article in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing about bottling from a few years later, 1914. It was written by Arthur Hadley and entitled "Chilled Bottled Beers".

That tells you that it's about non-deposit, artificially-carbonated beers. The boom in bottled beers was mostly of this type, despite big names like Guinness and Bass sticking with bottle-conditioning for their flagship products. The public liked the new type of bottled beer because there was no waste, it was always clear and always fully carbonated. Brewers weren't so keen on the flavour of non-deposit beers, but could see their potential for their business.

"I THINK that all brewers will agree with me when I say that whilst chilled and filtered beers are in all ways (save brilliancy) inferior to draught and naturally conditioned beers, circumstances economic and otherwise have brought the former to the forefront, and there can be no doubt that they have come to stay. Those brewers only who have not been forced by competition still stand aloof, yet many of them, so fortunately situated, are contemplating commencing chilling and filtering in a tentative sort of manner. To this latter class my advice is not to commence in too small a way, since many have found to their cost that beers which are "drunk with the eye" are the beers which sell, and, having discovered this, have been compelled to double and redouble the plant at great expense, and this expense might have been saved to a great extent had they commenced with less doubts or profited by the experience of others.

Twenty years ago a very small percentage of brewers bottled their own beers, to-day the great majority have their own bottling stores, more or less adequately fitted. To those who still contemplate the adoption of chilled beer bottling, a safe way is, I think, to estimate the probable output and put down a plant in a sufficiently large store capable of an output double their most sanguine estimate."
Journal of the Institute of Brewing, Volume 20, Issue 6, November-December 1914, page 504.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of chilled bottled beers. Apart from being clearer, they were inferior in every way to the older forms of bottle beer and draught beer. It's all sounding very CAMRA-like, 60 years before their arrival. It's a fact many have forgotten or never known, but much of the terminology used by CAMRA - naturally-conditioned, cask-conditioned, bottle-conditioned - originated within the industry. Many brewers privately shared CAMRA's belief in the superior flavour of naturally-conditioned beers.

The article was written at a very precarious time for the brewing industry. WW I, which would bring with it unprecedented challenges for British brewing, had just started. The decade running up to the war had filled with difficulty and attacks from the government and temperance groups. An industry which had boomed in the 1880's and 1890's was facing stagnation and decline. The threat of further reductions in pub numbers and opening times hung over brewers. That's the context of the next parragraph:

"Whatever legislation may have in store for us, be it a Licensing Bill, Sunday closing, or what not, it is very evident that the beer drinking of the future will go more and more in the direction of bottled beers, and unfortunately the flagon appears to be the size most favoured. Flagon beers are cheap; they are always in condition, and being screw-stoppered a flagon, if not entirely consumed, may be re-stoppered and so retain its brilliancy to the last drop."
Journal of the Institute of Brewing, Volume 20, Issue 6, November-December 1914, pages 504 - 505.

It's also worth pointing out that in these early days of mass bottling there was little standardisation in terms of bottle sizes and shapes and even in the method of sealing them. The author is arguing that, with pubs likely to be shut when drinkers wanted beer, flagons - quart bottles - were the simplest way of supplying a relatively large quantity of cheap beer. This didn't turn out to be true in the long term, with first pints and then half pints becoming the most common package size.

Hadley explains the two methods of producing non-deposit bottled beers:

"To deal with the process itself. There are two accepted methods of chilling (with variations with which I shall deal later), Cold Storage and Quick Chilling. Both achieve the same result, and all things taken into consideration the resulting beers differ but slightly. At one time it was thought that slow chilling produced a beer which stood longer in bottle without sediment, but brewers who have tested both processes side by side now admit that the quick chilling process, which can be carried out at considerably lessened cost (provided always that the beer be properly conditioned), gives a result quite equal to the slow chilling process.

The beer is run or pumped from the skimming vessels to glass-lined copper or wooden tanks to "condition." Here it is dry-hopped "if considered desirable" or necessary, primed if customary, and usually partially fined. By these means we obtain a conditioning which is quite impossible in casks, whilst there is far less waste and the beer is invariably cleaner and brighter after having settled a few days. This naturally reflects on the filters, which run far longer than happens when the beer is conditioned in cask, and also very materially affects the economy of production. In my own case I have found that the adoption of the tank system has raised the runnage from 22.6 dozen per barrel to 23.1 dozen per barrel, which on the year means some hundreds of barrels saved."
Journal of the Institute of Brewing, Volume 20, Issue 6, November-December 1914, pages 505 - 506.

The trend in bottled beer production was to reduce the time required. That was the financial incentive that prompted brewers to move away from natural-conditioning to chilling and filtereing. But that was just the first step. The next was to shorten the time for chilling.


It's unclear what the author means by "properly conditioned" - does it mean that the beer has been matured before chilling or just that it's carbonated?

You can see that brewers were moving away from the old system to racking beer after primary fermentation into casks for maturation. They'd started to use tanks instead and to only leave the beer a short time before bottling. It sounds like they were only leaving it to drop bright in the tank, soemthing that wouldn't take long if, as suggested, the beer had been fined. There was a good deal in the discussion after the paper had been presented about dry hopping. We'll be returning to that later.

22.6 dozen, assuming he means pints, comes to 33.9 gallons per barrels of 36 gallons. Or a loss of 5.83%. 23.1 dozen is 34.65 gallons, a loss of 3.75%. A saving of 0.75 gallons per barrel would certainly add up, if you were bottling hundreds of barrels a week.

Next time we'll be looking at the options for sealing bottles.