Keith Flett gets the round in again, tracing the political impact of Mrs. T on bright fined beer with his usal wit and clarity (geddit?). 

It’s not often talked about but there is the issue of what Mrs Thatcher did to your glass of beer.

The ‘free choice’ capitalism where the market ruled, didn’t really do a great deal for the profitability of British industry, indeed it managed to destroy a fair bit of it. It did however open an era of choice in consumer goods, whether you wanted the choice or not.

You might think, for example, that what you want in a telephone, these days often a mobile, is one that works reliably, you can make calls on and access the internet and do so at a reasonable cost. In reality there are many, many phones to choose from, mostly not all that different from each other.

The same is true for beer.

Pre-Thatcher there were mainly regional brewers, with a few (by comparison with 2017, very few) smaller independents. They served a mainly tied pub estate. What they served in terms of beer were pints or half pints (definitely not thirds or two-thirds, though both are legal measures) of amber or brown beer.

That beer was, or should have been, fined and crystal clear. Whether it was in good condition - that is to say whether it tasted fresh and had some limited natural sparkle to it, and depending on whether you were north or south a big or a small foamy head - was another matter.

Very often, before the rise of the Campaign for Real Ale in the 1970s, cellar skills of landlords were not great, and nor was the condition of the beer. When I first started drinking around in the early 1970s - under age of course, quite possible in London then - a common drink was a ‘light and bitter’. That is to say, a half of cask ale and a bottle of brewery conditioned beer (not real ale) poured in to give the cask beer some life and often mask its less than great taste.

If you stuck with drinking pints from the handpump, clarity in your beer was important and the beer you drank was likely to be much the same in, week in, week out. Hence the expression you can hear in old films ‘a pint of the usual’.

The beer was of course ‘fined’ with fish bladders to ensure clarity. There are now alternatives, though many beers will still use this method unadvertised to those who may prefer not to ingest such things.

Hence the first thing you did when you got your pint was to look at it - and then sometimes sniff it - to check that it was clear. If it wasn’t it might well go back.

Of course there were barpersons across the country who would respond that since real ale was a living product, it was ‘meant to look like that’ and if there was also a twig sticking out of the murky liquid that just proved how natural it was. That last bit by the way, is, as far as I know apocryphal. I’ve never seen an actual pint with a twig in it.

It was the work of CAMRA to rescue living cask beer from old style, poorly served murk, and get across the point that the beer in the glass was meant to be clear.

Was it the case that if the beer was cloudy it tasted awful? Sometimes it was particularly if the haze was due to a yeast infection or some other off-note in the beer.  But not always. Sometimes cloudy beer tasted fine, if not in the most desirable condition. Most who drank pints like that though knew that it was like consuming liquid All-Bran – with very similar results.

Then along came Mrs Thatcher and market choice. Guest beers were allowed in pubs owned by large breweries – this the work of CAMRA – and in due course another exponent of the free market, albeit in a rather different format to the Iron Lady appeared. Gordon Brown as Chancellor changed duty on beer to make it much easier for small brewers to set up and turn a profit.

And many did, hundreds and hundreds of them. Ten years ago in London there were less than ten breweries. Now there are over one hundred.

This expansion of breweries coincided (perhaps it was a bit more than coincidence, the jury is still out) with a vast expansion of the types and ranges of beers brewed.

Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, not all of these beers were clear in the glass and nor were they meant to be.

To underline how far the process has gone with what some might call London Murky, at the end of July I was in a well-known craft beer pub in central Hackney drinking a half pint of a 5.9% beer on key. It was in fact a keykeg beer- another way of serving real ale, not in a cask but in a plastic container where gas is used to force the beer to the pump but does not come into contact with the beer, so it is not ‘fizzy’.

The beer was crystal clear. All concerned were not happy. It used to be unfiltered and murky and everyone thought it had tasted much better when it was served like that.

At CAMRA beer festivals you will still see signs saying that a beer is not ready, often because it has not ‘dropped bright’ that is, it’s not clear. These days this is often more to do with it not being in the best condition and needing a little more time. You may also see signs warning that a beer is a little hazy - that is it tastes fine, but check where the nearest toilet is, and also signs pointing out that beer is meant to be cloudy.

This is the world of beer that Mrs Thatcher ushered in. Is it a step forward? Again I’d say the jury is still out on that one, but what a great time to be interested in sampling beer!

Keith Flett continues his selfless quest at beer festivals to identify the economics of producing craft beer in a competitive, capitalist market - and what tastes nice.

Further to my earlier thoughts on craft beer I travelled to Manchester in early October to attend the Independent Manchester Beer Convention (IndyManBeerCon). This event, held in an old swimming baths a short distance from the centre of Manchester, has become one of the key events of what might (or might not) be called a craft beer movement.

It takes place over 4 days and contains (currently almost exclusively keg) beers from well-known and up and coming ‘craft’ breweries in three large spaces. It is not particularly cheap. While the entry price is modest (and tickets highly sought after) this year a beer token cost in the region of £2.25 for which you could buy a third of a pint of beer. That was irrespective of strengths which ranged from 3%ers to above 10%. Even so on the two days I attended there was a mixed crowd there both gender and age wise.

IndyMan is not just about the beer though- interesting as it is. There are also beer tastings and discussions about the industry. A relevant debate on the Thursday evening was about Craft Beer where it is now and where it is going. The panel included Paul Jones, an owner of the Manchester based Cloudwater Brewery, Ian Garrett from CAMRA, Sue Hayward from the Welsh brewery Waen which has just closed its brewery in favour of 'cuckoo' brewing at other sites, Jenn Merrick the brewer at Beavertown in Tottenham, the beer writer Matt Curtis and Claudia Asch from the IndyMan organising team.

I didn’t quite last for the entire debate (I had to visit the toilet- this does happen at beer festivals) but it must be said that a good deal of the discussion was quite familiar to me. Not just the beer bit but also questions about what makes businesses tick and what doesn’t. As a trade union officer in the private sector I often have these discussions with employers.

I wasn’t taking either minutes or notes so my discussion of what was said is firstly only a summary (not in order) and secondly unreliable. Not however hopefully so unreliable as to attribute to someone something they didn’t say.

While I wouldn’t be quite so evangelistic about craft beer as Matt Curtis, preferring to see the world in neither black or white but shades of grey, he did make a very good point that in the US even the most depressing of bars usually offered a good range of craft beer. That is far from the case here. But is beer drinking so different in the US that this could not reasonably be expected to happen here?

Paul Jones noted that Cloudwater had never styled itself as a ‘craft’ brewer focusing instead on brewing ‘modern’ beer- styles that appeal to changing tastes in the beer world.
Jenn Merrick, previously the brewer at Dark Star, one of the UK’s most well-known producers of cask beers such as Hophead, took a broader view. Beavertown produce mainly keg beer but she felt that they were very much in the same marketplace as the large scale producers of cask beer. Further she didn’t think cask was particularly on its way out (Sue Hayward argued that the future was keg) and that there was a possibility that new developments in cask could put current trends towards keg in the shade. Interestingly she also noted that the largest selling beer in Fuller’s pubs was often a Beavertown brew- probably Gamma Ray which is unpasteurised but sold under light gas pressure.

Ian Garrett added an important corrective by underlining that the vast majority of beer currently drunk in the UK is in cask and this can’t simply be ignored. The point was made during discussion that larger and better capitalised ‘craft’ brewers were one thing but many smaller, microbreweries found difficulty in getting on bar tops in a very competitive market. Sue Hayward felt that many smaller brewers struggled to get by, but this is often the case with small businesses in general. They are squeezed out by larger competitors.

In the case of beer we have been here before. It was in large part what led to the formation of CAMRA in 1971. A Company like Grand Metropolitan which had no history in brewing managed to acquire both Trumans and Watneys breweries, merge them and in due course destroy them. No doubt the thirst of shareholders for value was satisfied. Drinker's thirsts were not.

An attempt at a Craft Brewers Alliance a couple of years back- with some of the larger brewers at its core- has not been taken forward. Perhaps not least because one of the brewers, Camden, sold to mega-giant ABInBev. The reality is that without a sustained campaigning effort to keep and protect breweries that produce good beer- however defined- rather than good profits with an industrial product tasting vaguely like beer as the commodity concerned- the pressure for takeovers and closures will remain.

The elephant in the room was of course the now completed takeover/merger of SABMIller by ABInBev to create mega giant brewing concern operating in 70 countries across the world. SABMiller is quoted on the London Stock Exchange and it was the largest ever takeover deal there.

The Editor of the Good Beer Guide, Roger Protz, is certainly right that the big picture in beer is the battle between ABInBev and much smaller breweries whose concern is making excellent beer not huge profits (welcome as the latter obviously are).

Views on the matter of craft beer are as numerous as those who drink it. CAMRA has decided to delay the decision of its Revitalisation Project because there is so much to consider.
As someone who stays resolutely on the drinking side of the bar, I have a simple test though. If a beer tastes good (looking good is another matter) then I’m not too bothered how it's dispensed or what it’s called. This should be about enjoyment.

Keith Flett continues his series with a question: is there a link between class and what you drink?

The upper classes are supposed to drink fine wines and champagne but these days both are available at prudent prices in supermarkets. Besides, as Nye Bevan famously proclaimed, nothing is too good for the workers. Yet when it comes to beer, there are often attempts made to link class and what is to be found in the pint or half pint glass. Beer, mild, bitter, and stout have been seen as the drink of the working man (but certainly not the working woman who may prefer gin according to stereotype).

Refinements on this, what nowadays the Campaign for Real Ale persists in calling ‘speciality beers’ - one, Bingham’s vanilla stout, was voted Champion Beer of Britain in August - are held to be for the middle classes. Beer and class and the link between the two is a constant refrain. The beer writers Boak and Bailey have uncovered a 1960s comment about the time when cask beer was removed from pubs in favour of keg beer. A docker had noted that nearly all of his fellow workers in the East End had immediately preferred the keg. More recently in the Morning Star this summer, a correspondent claimed that pubs were being taken over and ruined by men who wore their hair in buns. The implication here is that they were middle class individuals, no doubt sipping ‘craft’ beer.

Before tap water became safe to drink beer with meals ‘table beer’ was a common drink for all classes. Table beer is available today usually at around 3%. In Victorian times it would mostly have been a little stronger. The rise of heavy and manufacturing industrial production was what really underwrote the link between beer and the working class.

A glance through Raphael Samuel’s classic History Workshop article, Workshop of the World, makes the point. Samuel emphasises that the introduction of machinery into British industry was a lengthy process. Machines are expensive and labour power can be cheaper for an employer. But whether involved in heavy manual labour – mining for example – or industrial processes based on machinery such as steel, the amount of liquid lost by labour had to be replaced. The replacement was often quantities of beer. The link between beer and class therefore had a strong material basis to it, and hat has now mostly disappeared in the UK. In the former industrial heartland of South Wales for example, where there is no deep coal mining left and steel is just hanging on, some of the beers that were popular are in something of a decline. Brains Dark, a relatively low strength, but classic and award winning dark mild, is rather harder to find in bars than it was even 20 years ago.

This leads us to the, in some senses, modern issue of craft. On a train returning from the (craft) Leeds beer festival recently I noticed a group of young men drinking train beers which the can described as ‘crafted’. The beer was Fosters which is produced in a mega industrial brewery. It no doubt has very high quality control to ensure consistency and hence profits, but you might struggle to find a definition of ‘craft’ that covers a mechanised industrial process.

Indeed the beer writer Pete Brown has noted that the Oxford English Dictionary does in fact already have a definition of craft beer:
craft beer (also craft brew) noun (US) a beer with a distinctive flavour, produced and distributed in a particular region. - OED 2003 Edition.

Brown points out that most of those who have a problem with craft beer are not really that interested in a dictionary definition. The idea of a craft beer is often focused on a small scale production of a specialist beer style. It might be a strong double IPA or a low-alcohol Berliner Weisse but it’s not something you are likely to come across in the beer aisle of Tesco.
Except of course confusingly it is. Tesco have long sold an own brand double IPA at 9.2% which is produced by Brewdog, who are generally held to be one of the leading craft brewers.
I prefer ownership as a better benchmark of craft beer. For example Camden Brewery, a well-known North London craft beer producer, was bought by the giant ABInBev last year. The beers are still decent enough and it may be that the accountants and bottom-line watchers of ABInBev don’t focus in too much detail on Camden’s brewing activities. But across industry that does tend to be what happens after takeovers, sooner or later.

To take another example: the UK distributor for the well regarded US craft brewer Brooklyn is Carlsberg. That may well just mean more efficient distribution, but it underlines the point that independent, smaller craft beer production, where the beer comes first, is under constant pressure from those for whom profit matters above all.

How does that fit into class? Craft beer tends to be drunk in third, half or two-third measures rather than pints and would typically in a pub be more expensive than cask beer. Breweries will often suggest that the more expensive price for craft beer more accurately reflects production costs and that the market squeezes margins on cask. All this, it might be said, tends to make craft beer – at least that served in keg – the drink of the middle classes.

Yet that is far from the reality. Many of the new wave of craft breweries have taprooms where they sell their beer direct to drinkers, on and off the premises. At my local Tottenham brewery, Beavertown, the beer is unfiltered and unpasteurised and sold under light gas pressure for £2.50 for two-thirds of a pint. Unsurprisingly, those attending are young and old, the well off and less well off. In short – a beer drinking democracy.