March/April 2020

Very Early Doors

Extended licensing hours give people the freedom to use pubs at times that suit them

THE DETERMINED band of drinkers who assemble in the average Wetherspoon’s at 9 am are often viewed with a mixture of amusement, derision and pity, and singled out as an example of the downside of extended licensing hours. However, if you actually look at what they’re doing, they’re not settling in for an all-day session: many will be gone at lunchtime, and pretty much all by mid-afternoon. This isn’t all that different from the regular sessions straight through from teatime to 11 pm that used to be entirely normal. In many cases they will only be drinking at a leisurely pace too.

There was recently an outbreak of moral panic in the media when it was reported that a non-Wetherspoons pub in Great Yarmouth was even offering a happy hour from 9 am to 11 am. But the reality, as reported by the “Eastern Daily Press”, was more a general feeling of conviviality. 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.” Isn’t that what pubs are supposed to be all about?

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 full-time 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? Rather than laughing or sneering at the early-morning drinkers, shouldn’t we just accept that people now have the freedom to use pubs in different ways, and at different times of day?

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Measure for Measure

Even if you don’t drink it in pints, price per pint is still the way to compare beer prices

YOU SOMETIMES see stories in the media expressing shock over some rare, mega-strong craft beer being sold in a bar for the equivalent of £22 a pint or thereabouts. This inevitably results in some people saying “why are you expressing it as a price per pint when it isn’t going to be drunk in pints?” Well, probably it isn’t, but that isn’t the point. For any commodity, if you’re making price comparisons, it’s still desirable to have a consistent yardstick, and given that the pint is the standard unit for draught beer then it seems sensible to use it. This line of argument comes across as trying to cover your embarrassment.

Wine prices are generally quoted by the bottle, even though you drink it by the glass. You often hear of expensive wines being "£100 a bottle" or suchlike. Likewise, in the supermarket, the prices of various cuts of meat are quote as price per kilogram, although nobody eats a steak that size. Anyone with any knowledge of beer is well aware that stronger beers cost more because of the higher duty and the greater amount of raw materials needed. But, locally, you can buy Robinson’s 8.5% Old Tom for the equivalent of £7 to £8 a pint in pubs, so in comparison anything over £20 still seems pretty eyewatering.

January/February 2020

Charge More, Sell Less

A premium pricing strategy will do nothing to help the long-term prospects of cask

LAST AUTUMN, the latest edition of the annual Cask Report was published. It recorded cask sales falling more quickly than beer volumes in total, with a 5% drop over the past year, and cask now only accounting for one in seven pints sold in pubs, whereas only a few years ago it was one in six. The report argues that the way to combat this trend is to move towards “premiumisation”, in terms of quality, price and strength. But is that a realistic strategy, or just wishful thinking?

Quality should be taken as a given, and it’s certainly true that inconsistent and often downright poor beer is one of the key reasons deterring people from drinking cask. It is sometimes argued that higher prices will give brewers and pubs more to invest in quality, but that really is putting the cart before the horse. You can’t command a price premium until you have achieved that consistent quality, and at present drinkers won’t pay top dollar for a product that is often something of a lottery. Plus, by charging more, you will inevitably sell less, which may well make the quality issues even worse. Cask is a perishable product that is critically dependent on turnover. It is ill-suited to occupy a low-volume niche.

The historical reason that cask sells at a discount to keg ales and lagers is that it was originally the standard beer in pubs. Keg beers commanded a premium both because they were new innovations and because they incurred more processing and storage costs, with pasteurisation, cooling and CO2 cylinders. Although cask is often portrayed as “better”, it doesn’t inherently cost any more to make than keg, and, while it does take a little more care in the cellar, it isn’t really that difficult to keep well so long as you stick to a few simple rules.

Most cask is consumed by ordinary drinkers, not beer enthusiasts. It is usually the staple ale brand in pubs and is compared with lagers and smooth ales, not with craft keg. Many cask drinkers are people on a limited budget who have little scope to absorb hefty price increases. If cask goes up by 50p a pint, they will switch to smooth or lager. The report says that 59% of drinkers agreed in a poll that cask should cost more, but in practice would they be happy to pay it? In any case, cask beer isn’t exactly cheap at the moment, with the £4 pint very common now. The major exception is Wetherspoon’s, who are the single biggest retailer of cask beer, and an aggressive discounter, which makes it very difficult to shift the perception of the market.

The aspiration to move cask to a higher strength band also seems unrealistic. Yes, in general stronger beers are perceived as “premium” and can command higher prices, but there’s a limit to how much of them people want to drink. Most pub customers want to pace their drinking over a few hours, or will be going on to do something else later, and so don’t want anything too mindblowing. Pubs find it difficult to sell much cask beer above 4.5% ABV: if stronger beers are drunk at all, it’s often just one at the end of the evening.

With effort, premium pricing can certainly be achieved for individual brands and pubs, and for some this may represent a sensible business plan. But it’s just not going to happen for the category in general, and I get rather tired of commentators arguing that cask should cost more while displaying a failure to appreciate the reality of the market on the ground.

November/December 2019

Drying Out

There’s a limit to how far pubs can go in appealing to non-drinkers

A MAJOR problem for the pub trade is the growing proportion of young people who have chosen not to drink alcohol at all. In response to this, a recent report has said that 70% of “Generation Z” believe that pubs need to become “more inviting” to those who do not drink. This has to be taken with a pinch of salt given that it was sponsored by a coffee company, but it does make an important point.

Clearly it makes sense for pubs to widen their appeal so that they can be more inclusive of non-drinkers. Customers are increasingly likely to consist of mixed groups of drinkers and abstainers. This can be achieved by providing higher-quality tea and coffee and soft drinks, offering food and putting on events like quizzes and live music. And, to be honest, they have been doing these things to a greater or lesser extent throughout my drinking career. It’s nothing new or exactly a startling revelation.

However, there’s an important caveat here. The core purpose of pubs is, and always has been, socialising centred around the consumption of alcoholic drinks. Yes, over the decades they have needed to evolve and change in various ways, but that fundamental fact remains unchanged. If nobody drank alcohol, there would be no pubs. Non-drinkers may enjoy various activities and services provided by pubs, but they wouldn’t exist in the first place without drinkers. It’s rather like non-alcoholic beer – it’s only there to mirror to some extent the taste and experience of drinking alcoholic beer.

If they go too far down the road of changing their offer, pubs may well find themselves evolving into something entirely different – a restaurant, a music venue or a community centre. It also has to be questioned to what extent all this diversification is actually going to bring new customers into pubs. It may make non-drinkers happier when they are there, but will it encourage them to visit more often?

The reason that the pub trade has declined so much over recent years is essentially because, due to a combination of social and legislative changes, the demand for their core product has fallen. There’s a limit to how far they can go in catering for other needs. Realistically, the fortunes of the pub trade are closely linked to the proportion of people in society who enjoy drinking alcohol in a social setting.

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Under Pressure

It’s hard to believe that twentysomethings now feel more pressure to drink than previous generations

IN A SIMILAR vein, another survey has claimed that Millennials feel five times more likely to be pressurised into drinking alcohol when socialising than older generations. Again this was produced on behalf of a company with a vested interest in the results, but I find it very hard to believe.

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. We also have initiatives like “Dry January” where not drinking is presented as virtuous.

Maybe one area where this does happen is in higher education institutions, but they provide a huge range of social activities, most of which don’t involve drinking at all. The fact that someone has organised a Carnage pub crawl doesn’t mean you’re under any obligation to go on it. This is an example of the common phenomenon of something attracting more criticism as it becomes less popular. Forty years ago, there undoubtedly would have been more social pressure to drink, but nobody complained about it back then.

September/October 2019

The Beer That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Bitter needs to stop pretending to be something other than what it really is

A COUPLE of decades ago, there was a trend for brewers to start calling their milds anything but mild, in the belief that the name itself came across as old-fashioned and was putting drinkers off. Now this tendency has spread to bitter as well. At first it was mostly confined to beers at the stronger end of the scale, with Young’s Special and Marston’s Pedigree dropping the “Bitter” and just going by their one-word brand name. But it has now extended to the classic “ordinary” bitters, such as Hook Norton Hooky, with many of them denying that they are any kind of bitter at all, often just calling themselves “amber ale”.

It has been suggested that one reason behind this us the undesirable flavour connotations of the word “bitter”, but I’m not convinced by that. After all, we’ve been happily drinking it for decades, and “sours” have become popular in the craft world without anyone finding that term offputting. I’m sure it is more the case that “bitter” is seen as the beer your dad drank.

But “amber” itself is just a colour, and in fact is generally described as a rich gold, whereas many beers calling themselves such are copper or even chestnut. And nobody ever, when asked the question “what type of beer do you enjoy drinking?” replies “Oh, I like amber ale”. At least, round here, if you go in a Holt’s, Lees or Sam Smith’s pub, you can still ask for a pint of bitter and that is precisely what you will get.

Whether you like it or not, Bitter, while it covers a wide spectrum of colours and flavours, is perhaps the quintessential English beer style, and stands in the pub alongside other major categories such as mild, stout and lager. To try to deny its existence and break it down into a myriad of sub-styles just sows confusion and leaves drinkers adrift as to what it actually is. So maybe it’s time for brewers to say, loud and proud, that what they’re producing is Bitter, and stop trying to suggest that it’s just some fuzzy, ill-defined category of “Ale”.

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Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing

Might handpumps be putting people off real ale as much as attracting them?

HANDPUMPS have become an unmistakable symbol of real ale; if you go in a pub and see them on the bar, you know exactly what to expect. However, this can cut both ways, and, for many drinkers who have had too many bad experiences, they may mark it out as something not even to be considered. So it’s interesting to hear that Sharp’s Brewery are trialling a keg-style tall font for cask Doom Bar. There’s a clear statement on the mounting that it is cask beer, so nobody can claim that they are being deceived.

Thirty years ago, plenty of real ale was dispensed via electric pumps of various kinds, so in a sense it’s a case of the wheel coming full circle. There may be a strong association between real ale and handpumps in the public mind, but it no more needs to be served through them than it has to be delivered on horse-drawn drays or kept in wooden barrels. And the fashionable “keg-conditioned” beers are dispensed through taps indistinguishable from those used for normal kegs.

Of course 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” to be avoided at all costs. It could also eliminate some of the variability caused by incompetent bar staff having little idea how to use handpumps. I’d certainly be keen to try it if I saw it.

July/August 2019

When is a Pub not a Pub?

It’s hard to pin down the difference between a pub and a bar, but you know one when you see one

WHEN it’s a bar, of course. While there’s no specific legal distinction, the two carry very different connotations. This is not to say one is better than the other, but they’re certainly not interchangeable. However, it’s notoriously difficult to come up with a hard-and-fast definition separating one from the other. Beer writer Martyn Cornell has recently had another stab at it on his Zythophile blog, where he suggests that a key distinction is that pubs tend to have a bar at right angles to your path when coming in through the entrance door, whereas bars have their counter running along a side wall. Often, this is indeed the case, but it rather breaks down when you have a multi-roomed interior with different entrances. But perhaps bars don’t tend to have multi-roomed interiors anyway.

In general, while you can point to various characteristics that pubs usually have, and bars don’t, it’s always possible to come up with exceptions to the rule. Overall, it’s often a case of “you know one when you see one”. Pub names usually start with “The”, but bar names seldom do. Pubs are often specific buildings designed for the purpose, while bars tend to be part of a larger building. Pubs make use of the upper floors of the building, while a bar may be underneath something entirely different. The licensees of a pub are likely to live on the premises, but with a bar they hardly ever do. Bars are often aimed at a specific, identifiable “crowd”, while pubs seek a wider and more general clientele. And, at least outside urban centres, pubs often have car parks, but I can’t think of a single bar that does. A pub retains its identity through various changes of ownership, while that of a bar is very much tied up with its current trading format.

Sometimes it’s less a question of physical aspects but how businesses choose to define themselves. On Stockport Market Place there are two recently-opened establishments right next door to each other – the Angel and Project 53. Both have a somewhat “crafty” ethos, but the Angel definitely comes across as a pub, whereas Project 53 is unquestionably a bar. With a new name and different decor, the Angel could be considered a bar, though.

The different connotations of the two categories will often influence how an establishment wants to be seen. One well-known London craft beer place took exception to being considered for a “Pub of the Year” award, because they identified themselves a bar. To them, a bar was modern and progressive, while “pub” suggested something stuffy and old-fashioned and very possibly belonging to Greene King or Punch Taverns.

Some Wetherspoon’s, particularly those in their more modern design idiom that are conversions of former retail units, do very much say “bar” rather than “pub”, whereas others that are in existing pub premises, such as the Gateway in East Didsbury, are definitely pubs. However, their general atmosphere and wide customer mix are very much those of pubs regardless of their design. And, while their name says otherwise, I’d say that the vast majority of micropubs, going by the criteria set out above, are in reality small bars little different from the keg-only “box bars” often found in similar premises.

At the other end of the scale, there’s also the vexed question of when a pub actually turns into a restaurant. Most restaurants obviously aren’t pubs, but quite a few have the outward appearance of pubs and indeed might once have been one. Strictly speaking, if anyone can come in and have a drink without needing to buy a meal, it doesn’t qualify as just being a restaurant. However, I’d say there also needs to be a test of whether any meaningful number of people actually do, and whether non-diners are made to feel welcome.

May/June 2019

The Squeezed Middle

If we are concerned about their long-term survival, mid-sized brewers deserve a little more love

THE SALE of Fuller’s brewing interests to Asahi underlined the exposed position in which many of the established, medium-sized firms find themselves. As a mid-sized brewer, Fuller’s said, it was being squeezed between the global giants and the 2,000 smaller brewers across the UK. The tax breaks given to microbrewers and the power of the big global drinks firms have left little space at the bar for those in the middle.

Progressive Beer Duty was introduced in 2002 by Gordon Brown with the aim of stimulating the number of small breweries in the UK. It has certainly succeeded in this objective, with over 2,000 now in operation. However, as with many such well-intentioned measures, it has had unintended consequences. The 50% duty relief on offer starts to be clawed back above an annual production of 5,000 hectolitres (3,055 barrels), and entirely disappears at 60,000 hl (36,661 barrels). Many of the established family brewers are above this figure, or only just below it. Fuller’s, who were one of the biggest, were producing about 200,000 barrels a year.

In practice, some of the new small brewers have used the duty relief not to bolster the finances of their business, but to sell beer more cheaply, putting the established brewers at a severe price disadvantage. The overall market share of these small brewers is relatively small, and to the likes of AB InBev they are no more than a pinprick on an elephant’s backside. But they have a much higher share of the market for cask beer in the free trade, and if you go in any pub that is able to buy beer on the open market it is likely that most of its cask lines are from microbreweries. Many of these beers are very good, but the main reason some of them are there is that they are cheap to buy.

The mid-sized brewers found that the general decline of on-trade beer consumption and the rise of lager greatly reduced the amount of beer they were producing from their own breweries. But, at the same time, the rise of up-market dining provided an opportunity for some of the pubs in their tied estates, and many of them bought more as cast-offs from the debt-ridden pubcos. This essentially turned them into pubcos with an under-utilised brewery as a sideline. Fuller’s reckoned that 85% of their profits came from their pubs and hotels, so it is perhaps understand­able that they decided to concentrate on that part of their business and accept an attractive offer for the brewing side.

It’s also debateable whether you can make such a clear distinction between the brewing and pub sides of the business, as to some extent they support each other. If you separate them, both will be diminished and their viability undermined. A brewery produces a unique, identifiable product that is recognisable to customers and may command a great deal of loyalty, but a pubco is, well, just another pubco, and in the long-term that must make them more vulnerable to takeover. Fuller’s stood out from the crowd both because of the high profile of their beers and the valuable redevelopment potential of their site. But the announce­ment of this deal will certainly have given many directors of family brewers cause for thought about their long-term future.

It’s often the case that people attract warm tributes when they die while having a much more equivocal reputation during their lives, and it’s hard to avoid the feeling that some of those shedding crocodile tears over the sale of Fuller’s were happy a year before to dismiss London Pride as “boring brown beer”. Maybe if we want to help the prospects of the family brewers, beer enthusiasts should give them a bit more love as upholders of a unique British tradition, rather than constantly chasing after the novel and trendy.

March/April 2019

Sense of Place

We have lost something valuable with the erosion of the link between beer and locality

WHEN I first became interested in real ale, perhaps what fascinated me most was how there was a patchwork of independent breweries the length and breadth of the country, ranging from regional giants such as Vaux and Wolverhampton & Dudley to tiny firms like Bathams and Burts. Each had its own territory, its own distinctive beers and very often its own style of pub. It was a lesson in geography, with strongholds, heartlands and outposts.

To visit an area and sample the beers of one of the more obscure breweries for the first time was a voyage of discovery. You could go to a city only fifty or sixty miles away and be presented with an entirely different selection of beers, such as Home and Shipstone in Nottingham or Mitchells and Yates & Jackson in Lancaster. One of the pleasures of going on holiday was sampling the local brew such as St Austell in Cornwall or Adnams in Suffolk. Progress on a long road journey was marked by the changing brewers’ names on the pub signs.

It wasn’t confined to the independents, either, as all the Big Six national brewers retained some kind of regional identity in their beer range and pub branding. Indeed, in the early 1980s we saw a revival of local names, something especially marked with Allied Breweries, who created dedicated pub estates for old brands such as Peter Walker, and Benskins. Overall it provided a rich tapestry of local and regional identity in beer.

Since those days, the number of independent family breweries has more than halved, with ten being lost in the North-West alone. Very often, those that remain see themselves more as pub companies that happen to have an ale brewery as a sideline. The disruption following the Beer Orders resulted in the transfer of the former tied estates of the Big Six to pub companies and the loss of their distinct identities. Increasingly, pub company outlets have come to offer the market-leading beers regardless of supplier, and the drinker of mainstream kegs and lagers has less choice overall than there was prior to 1990. .

Against this has to be set the dramatic rise in the number of microbrewers, and in the sheer variety of beer styles being produced. In theory, there is more choice than ever before, and for many beer enthusiasts it has opened up a cornucopia of delights. But each pub is limited in the number of lines it can stock, especially of cask beer, and what you’re actually going to find in the pub often becomes a lottery. You can’t exercise choice in a meaningful way if you don’t know what to expect, and in effect, “beer range varies” has in itself become a single option.

Some of the new generation of breweries have established a strong regular foothold in pubs, but there’s no sign outside to say so, and thus the visible identification between brewery and pub is broken. In 1978, if you wanted to sample an obscure beer, you might have a long journey, but you could probably find it in one of its brewer’s pubs, whereas now it can become a wild goose chase. Of course we have gained something through the massive increase in both the number of breweries and beer styles being produced. But we have also lost something valuable in the way the link between beer and place has been eroded through the decline of tied estates.

On a brighter note, it is good to see the trend being reversed in a small way by brewers such as Joules, Titanic and Wye Valley building up their own pub estates, And of course that is exactly what BrewDog are doing by opening a chain of bars in big cities majoring on their own beers.

January/February 2019

What Goes Around, Comes Around

After ripping out all the internal walls, compartmentalised pubs are coming back into fashion

SIXTY years ago, most pubs in the UK had a compartmentalised interior layout. Typically, they would have the standard demarcation between public bar and “best room” – the term “lounge” was not yet in general use. Some had a three-level division between public, saloon and lounge, with subtle gradations in clientele and ambiance between the three. Plus, there could be a whole variety of other rooms such as news rooms, tea rooms, games rooms and, at the time, ladies’ rooms.

But, since then, pretty much all this has been swept away by knocking pubs through into a single-bar layout. The main reason always given for this was that it reflected a more democratic and egalitarian society in which the old class divisions no longer applied, and there’s certainly some truth in that. But it also made pubs easier to manage and supervise, plus in the 1960s and early 70s there was the factor that public bar prices were subject to government price control, which could be circumvented by turning the entire pub into a lounge.

However, it didn’t always work out quite as intended. In many cases, rather than everyone happily mixing together in the same pub, the class division moved from one between different bars to one between different pubs. The middle classes used one pub, the working classes another. But, according to a recent report, a growing number of pub operators are realising that there is a need to cater for different audiences within a single venue, and are thus returning to the concept of pub “zoning”. It’s all too easy if you’re not careful for one aspect of a pub to take over the whole place and alienate many potential customers.

There are two obvious divisions between different customer groups that often rankle in pubs today. One is showing big-screen TV sport, which brings in a specific crowd who may well put a lot of money across the bar, but deters those who just want a quiet drink. And allowing children, while key to the concept of family dining, is something that that those who prefer an adults-only environment feel uncomfortable with. Plus, if legislation permitted, there would be a strong argument for a division between smoking and non-smoking areas.

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Cashing Up

There are dangers in the rush to relegate cash to history

A GROWING trickle of pubs and bars are deciding to go entirely cashless and stop accepting any payments in cash. Cashless payments are a growing feature of the financial landscape, and obviously it makes business sense for many pubs to accept them. But to refuse to take cash entirely is something entirely different, and comes across as an attempt to practice social selection of your clientele.

This may not be a problem in a rural gastropub, but in inner-city boozers it’s a common sight to see the pound coins being counted out on to the bar to pay for a pint. It is estimated that there are 1.6 million unbanked workers in the UK, and there must be many more pensioners and benefit claimants, not to mention people who simply prefer to avoid using cards for routine transactions. It’s effectively saying that you’re not interested in the business of the poor or the old.

There are other reasons to be wary of adopting cashless payments. They make budgeting more difficult and make you vulnerable to power cuts and computer failures. You are also putting yourself in the hands of corporations that may not have your best interests at heart. And someone is able to track exactly where you have been and what you have spent your money on. By all means use cashless payments where they are convenient, and allow them in your pubs, but there are dangers in the headlong rush to relegate cash to history.

November/December 2018

A Mixed Blessing

All-day pub opening is undoubtedly a good thing, but it has had its negative side

THIS YEAR saw the thirtieth anniversary of the introduction of all-day opening for pubs, which came in on 22 August 1988. From the perspective of today, it is hard to believe that pubs were required to close for two or three hours every afternoon. Originally introduced by Lloyd George as an emergency measure during the First World War, it lingered on for over seventy years.

There were predictions of mayhem in the streets after people had been drinking for hours, but needless to say nothing of the kind occurred. However, it’s important to remember that pubs didn’t immediately fling their doors open. For quite a few years, most stuck to the old pattern of opening. I remember it being well-nigh impossible to find anywhere open in central Manchester on a Saturday afternoon after 3 pm. It was only the pressure from Wetherspoon’s and other pub chains that forced the generality of pubs to follow suit. It also initially didn’t apply to Sundays, which were only brought in to line in 1995.

However, it’s now become well-nigh universal for pubs in urban centres, and for food-led pubs in general. Overall, it’s hard to dispute that it’s greatly benefited pubgoers, allowing pubs to tailor their hours to what their customers actually want. It makes trips out to sample the pubs in a different area much easier, and has also led to a noticeable trend of pubs having a busy session around four in the afternoon when many tradespeople knock off.

While many pubs with footfall throughout the day benefited from the extended opening times, others found that they were spreading the same amount of customers over a greater number of hours, and thus increased costs. Therefore they had to look critically at when it actually would be financially worthwhile to be open, something that has become even more of a priority in the current century when there has been a steady decline in the overall business of pubs.

We now have a growing number of pubs that don’t open at all on one or more days of the week, while outside town centres, wet-led pubs are more often than not deciding not to open at all at lunchtimes, either on weekdays or even seven days a week. I’d guess that, if you took a set of pubs in a typical area that have been trading throughout the 1988-2018 period, the total amount of opening hours would actually be markedly less now than it was thirty years ago. Allied to this, there is much greater uncertainly as to when pubs will actually be open, which is made worse by the fact that so few pubs display their hours outside.

The old system also created a routine of drinking times, where the approach of either closing or opening concentrated the mind, whether it was the prospect of the shutters going down in the early afternoon, the early doors opening for that after-work pint, or the narrow two-hour window of Sunday lunchtime. If the pubs are open anyway, the incentive to have a drink at a specific time rather fades away, and sometimes leads to not bothering at all.

All-day opening, or the possibility of it, has now been with us for thirty years and has become accepted as a fact of life. Overall, it’s been greatly beneficial to pub users, and I’ve certainly taken advantage of it on a huge number of occasions. Most of the negative trends that have affected the pub trade would have happened anyway regardless of what had been done with hours. It’s certainly dramatically changed the landscape of how pubs actually function throughout the day, but it has to be accepted that change, even when generally beneficial, is rarely an entirely unmixed blessing.

September/October 2018

Pie in the Sky

Despite prophecies of doom, there’s still a bright future for wet-led pubs

EVERY so often, someone comes up with a report predicting the death of the wet-led pub and claiming that food is the future. The latest is someone called Christel Lane who has published a book entitled “From Taverns to Gastropubs” which seeks to “contextualise the rise of the gastropub through an exploration of food, drink and society over the past 500 years.”

Of course, the importance of food to pubs has greatly increased over the past few decades, and in many it is now the major part of their business. However, it’s important not to get carried away. These analyses always seem to reflect a very partial experience of pubs confined to city centres and prosperous commuter belts. Go to any ordinary town and you will still find plenty of pubs, and not just in obscure locations, where the food trade is limited or non-existent, and the bulk of their business is done after 9pm. How pubs like that are meant to adapt to a brave new world of wall-to-wall dining is difficult to fathom.

In fact, in recent years, in less prosperous areas the tide has been flowing the other way. Many pubs that used to serve weekday lunches for workers from local businesses have now dropped the food and often stopped opening at lunchtimes completely. In many of the smaller satellite towns of Greater Manchester, it’s now difficult to find any pub food whatsoever apart from in Spoons.

And, of course, earlier in the summer, many pubs were packed with punters watching the World Cup, and certainly not sitting down to a meal. Yes, wet-led pubs may have declined, but they’re not going to disappear or anything like it. Indeed, there are now specialist operators like Amber Taverns who are concentrating on the sector rather than regarding it as a poor relation to the upmarket food houses.

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Hotting Up For Lager

Lager offers a huge potential market for craft brewers if they can get it right

WHILE there’s no reason why you can’t serve a cool, refreshing pint of cask beer in hot weather, the summer heatwave tested some pubs’ cellarmanship skills, and so drinkers’ thoughts inevitably turned to lager. That raises the question of why craft brewers can’t get more of a share of lager sales, which are currently dominated by the large international brewers. Lager accounts for two-thirds of all beer sold in British pubs; cask only a sixth, so there is a huge untapped market out there that seems ripe for the picking.

Lager has long since taken over from bitter as the default beer in British pubs, the one chosen by people who aren’t really that interested in beer. What is important to its drinkers is something that is accessible, consistent and refreshing, not something with strong or unusual flavours or wild variability. While there are plenty of craft lagers around, it’s noticeable how, at present, they are more often chosen by those who usually favour cask or craft ales, not the drinkers of Carling and Stella.

The challenge for craft brewers is to progress beyond just being one of a row of rotating craft kegs on the back wall, where they will inevitably be overshadowed by beers with louder, showier flavours. They need to become permanent fixtures on bars, so they attract regular, loyal customers, to be consistent, and to be distinctive, but not to the extent that people find them offputting. It needs to be perceived as a cooler choice while not marking the drinker out as being a bit weird. There is already a model to follow in Camden Hells, which is now a very common sight in more upmarket pubs and bars in London. Yes, it is now owned by AB InBev, but the foundations of its success were laid when Camden was an independent company.

July/August 2018

The Great Craft Sell-Out

It’s a fact of life that most successful start-up breweries will end up being bought by bigger competitors

THE PAST few years have seen a growing trend of successful craft breweries founded in the modern era being acquired by the major international brewers. We have seen such well-known brands as Goose Island, Lagunitas and Ballast Point being taken over in the US, plus Meantime and Camden in this country. As “Opening Times” went to press, there were reports that Heineken was planning to buy a stake in craft favourites Beavertown.

This has resulted in widespread disappointment, even a sense of betrayal, amongst craft beer fans. Selling out to “the man” is, for many, hard to forgive. On the other hand, if the owners are offered well over the book value for their company, they can’t really be blamed for seizing the chance of a comfortable retirement. It also contains an element of railing against fate. It may be regrettable, but it’s simply a fact of business life that the most likely outcome for a successful start-up is to be taken over by a larger competitor. Very few go on to spread their wings and fly independently in the way that BrewDog has done.

There’s a strange reluctance to recognize any merit in beers produced by the major breweries. In the 70s and 80s, CAMRA was very critical of the market dominance of the then “Big Six”, but it always accepted that they did produce some excellent real ales. Yet many craft fans are unwilling to touch anything in which the big boys have had a hand. But surely it’s entirely possible for a big company to produce a good beer, just as a small company can make a poor one. This comes across as an exercise in cutting off your nose to spite your face.

This wave of takeovers is significantly different from those that occurred in the British brewing industry in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Then, the prime objective was to get hold of smaller competi­tors’ tied estates and distribution networks. Promises may have been made about maintaining production at original sites, and keeping brands going, but they were rarely worth the paper they were written on.

The more recent ones, however, are about acquiring beer brands, not outlets, and so there is much more of an incentive to maintain the brand equity. Inevitably, in many cases, it will end up being eroded over the years by changes in recipe and production methods, but if they’re not careful the buyers end up destroying the value of their own purchase. It’s also hard to see the takeover of a start-up only a few years old as quite as much of a loss as that of a business that has been established for several generations and become part of its local community.

Every small business start-up has a life-cycle, and there will come a time when the owner wants to move on. Most micro-breweries eventually just shut up shop because the owner has become too old, or unwell, or has lost interest, or isn’t making a worthwhile profit. If you look at the micros from the first couple of decades of CAMRA, few are still in existence in any form. Companies like the remaining family brewers, who have been in existence for a hundred years or more, are very much the exception, not the rule.

Brewing remains an industry where, compared with many others, the barriers to entry are very low, as shown by the fact that over 1,500 new breweries have been set up in this country in the present century. The loss of some favourites may be regretted, but we are likely in the future to see the cycle of cool new start-up turning into corporate acquisition repeated over and over again.

May/June 2018

You Could Be Next

It is short-sighted in the extreme for anyone involved in the pub trade to welcome minimum alcohol pricing

ON 1 MAY, Scotland became the first country in the world to introduce a system of Minimum Alcohol Pricing, with the rate initially set at 50p per unit (10 ml) of pure alcohol. The claimed justification for this is that it is a way of reducing problem drinking but, given that it is estimated that it will affect 70% of all alcohol sold in the off-trade, it is an extremely blunt instrument. It is in effect punishing ordinary people of limited means for the problems of a minority. A couple could easily be made £200 a year worse off without even exceeding the very low official consumption guidelines. Recent figures from the Office of National Statistics have shown that the UK is the fourth most expensive country in Europe for alcohol, so it’s not exactly cheap in the first place.

It also comes across as a fundamentally patronising and élitist measure, implying that it is fine for the well-heeled to continue swigging single malts, claret and craft ales, but that the irresponsible proles are not to be trusted with an abundance of Carling, Glen’s Vodka and Lambrini. As the famous Victorian liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill said, “Every increase of cost is a prohibition to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price.”

It’s questionable to what extent it will affect the consumption patterns of problem drinkers anyway, and some may end up sacrificing other areas of expenditure. As the old Russian saying goes “Daddy, now that vodka is more expensive, will you drink less? No, my son, you will eat less.” It is also likely to lead to a whole raft of undesirable consequences, such as cross-border smuggling, bootleg brewing and distilling, and a switch to illegal drugs. Not so long ago, a Sheffield student had her eyesight permanently damaged by drinking counterfeit vodka, while five Lithuanian men were killed in Boston, Lincolnshire, by an explosion at an illegal vodka distillery. Minimum pricing could lead to more such tragedies.

Some in the licensed trade have welcomed the move as a way of redressing the price imbalance with the off-trade. However, it isn’t going to give anyone a single extra penny to spend in pubs, and it is hard to see how increasing the price of a can of lager from 60p to 90p is going to encourage anyone to spend £3.50 or more for a pint in the pub. It could even damage the pub trade by constraining household budgets and leaving people with less discretionary spending money.

It’s also an unedifying spectacle to see one part of the alcohol industry lining up alongside the anti-drink lobby in a misguided attempt to gain some short-term advantage over another section. As Winston Churchill said “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last.” Surely all producers, retailers and consumers of alcoholic drinks should be united in opposing the neo-Prohibitionists rather than squabbling amongst themselves.

At a level of 50p per unit, it’s unlikely to affect any drinks sold in the on-trade, although it could hit some of the stronger guest ales sold in Wetherspoon’s after applying the 50p CAMRA discount vouchers. But the pub trade should bear in mind that the study by the University of Sheffield used to support the policy actually concludes that the most “beneficial” results would come from setting differential minimum prices for on- and off-trades, with that for pubs and bars more than twice as high. Any advantage gained from minimum pricing could turn out to be short-lived, as the spotlight turns to on-trade pricing. So, if you’re remotely inclined to support this measure, don’t forget that you could be next on the list.