Good Beer Guide 2022

Good evening.

I am a CAMRA member of many years’ standing and also the editor of the Peterborough and District Branch newsletter, Beer Around ‘Ere. I must stress that what follows are my own views and not necessarily those of the Branch.

The Good Beer Guide has long been recognised as the ale drinkers’ bible, particularly when visiting uncharted territory, and a reduced edition, with 900 deserving pubs missing, CANNOT accurately be described as a Guide.

In our Branch area, the seven South Lincolnshire-based pubs in the 2021 Guide are to be “culled” to five; the five East Northamptonshire pubs to four. I regard the landlords and ladies of the pubs near my Stamford home as personal friends, so please don’t expect me to look three of them in the eye and tell them that, while they have grafted for years to attain GBG status, they are to be excluded from the 2022 issue on a whim – “but don’t worry, you’ll be back in next year!”

The reasoning that we don’t know what pubs will be reopening after lockdown doesn’t hold water – as long as the Guide has been going, we’ve NEVER been able to state, with any certainty, that ANY pub will still be open as the Guide goes to press.

Equally, the recommendation to submit “plenty of reserve entries this year” is pointless – surely all the pubs that didn’t survive the “cull” would be the reserves, wouldn’t they?

No, CAMRA! I urge you in the strongest possible terms either to press ahead with an edition as usual – it did, after all, work last year under equally strange and restrictive conditions – or have a “fallow” year, with no Guide (understandable under the jackboot of COVID) – or publish an online Guide, which could presumably be updated regularly and would not incur printing costs.

I cannot – and indeed will not – have a hand in a reducedsize Good Beer Guide. If the proposed cull – and I don’t believe that to be too strong a description – does go ahead, I won’t be cancelling my CAMRA membership (and therefore having to resign as Beer Around ‘Ere editor), but there wouldn’t be much in it. A bit like the proposed Good Beer Guide 2022, in fact….

Regards Alun Thomas