BEER Autumn 2022

Regulars

05 Welcome

Plenty to raise a glass of great beer to this summer 15 Roger Protz

Celebrating 150 years of brewing on the North Sea coast 28 History

Why newly planted orchards resemble the cross-section of an apple 29 Action stations

We must act now to save pubs facing cost of living and business crises 36 Food

Jane Stuart reports on Blackpool’s transformed pub food scene 41 Your shout

Memories of dubious ‘fizz appeal’ 44 Ukraine: charity fundraising

UK brewers, pubcos and MPs help raise money for Ukraine 48 Get quizzic-ale

Knowing your Champion Beer of Britain winners will help solve our quiz 49 Bottled beer

Des de Moor heads for England’s second city in search of top beer 50 Last orders

Chef Benjamin Palmer shares his love of Cornish produce and beer

06 Big Six back?

The Big Six brewers once dominated the British beer industry. Laura Hadland asks if there is a modern equivalent 12 Enduring appeal

What’s the secret of Simon and Nicky George’s 30 years at the Bhurtpore Inn? 16 World War II aftermath

Many London pubs survived the bombs, but did they survive the developers? 20 High road

Martin Ellis explores Scotland’s burgeoning brewing scene

Real ale hero

The lady with the beer – Annabel Smith

My Local John Westlake visits some of his favourite haunts in Nottingham

Learn and discover Jeff Evans digs into Keller Pils

Will Hawkes uncovers Thai, Korean and Nigerian cuisine at desi pubs

Heritage Joint project sees heritage pubs get greater protection

If you were served a short pint in a pub, would you be happy to ask for a top-up?

From the editor

Over the summer, thousands of CAMRA members joined in with the Campaign’s Summer of Pub celebrations and raised glasses to say cheers to good pubs and great beer.

A glass or two should also be raised to celebrate 50 Years of CAMRA being named the Gourmand Awards Best Beer Book in the World.

The book’s author, Laura Hadland, writes the lead feature in this issue. Laura draws on her research for 50 Years of CAMRA and brings it up to date by asking the question: is there an equivalent today of the Big Six who so dominated the beer culture in the 1970s?

Laura finds the brewing industry has almost turned full circle since 1971, and the Big Six of previous decades has gone, but its legacy lives on and a small number of breweries and pubcos still have a tight grip on where and which beers are sold throughout the country.

In that typically cyclical way of things, we find ourselves in a similar position to 1971. We have found a Big Six reboot. Access to the market remains restricted, if not totally blocked, for thousands of small but exciting breweries. A comparatively small number of behemoths – both breweries and pubcos –are the gatekeepers of our nation’s pubs. As a consumer group, together we have the power to challenge companies that shun customers. And the greatest power we have is our money and how we choose to spend it.

Elsewhere, Emma Inch talks to Annabel Smith, who has spent a good part of her career in the brewing industry by challenging the stereotype that cask beer is a man’s drink. Women drink beer, too. And Phil Mellows takes us back to the end of World War II and the 1950s to discover how the pubs of today were shaped by the planners and developers of the early post-war years. Then, as now, vigilance is essential if we are to protect our glorious heritage of pubs.

l In the What’s Brewing section, you will find seven pages of the latest news from the Campaign. More news can be found on our dedicated online platform at wb.camra.org.uk

GUEST CONTRIBUTORS

In her first feature for BEER, Jane Stuart reports on her favourite Blackpool pubs.

Steve Hobman finds out what makes the Bhurtpore Inn a rural paradise for cask beer.

Martin Ellis travels to Scotland to explore the burgeoning brewing scene.

BEER

Editor: Tim Hampson (tim.hampson@camra.org.uk)

Sub-editors: Kim Adams and Rica Dearman

Published by: CAMRA Ltd

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Design: Matthew Ball, George Walker

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BEER is the quarterly magazine of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). CAMRA campaigns for real ale, real pubs and consumer rights. It is an independent, voluntary organisation with more than 180,000 members and has been described as the most successful consumer group in Europe. BEER is available online to all CAMRA members. To receive a hard-copy version every three months, members need to opt in. Our campaigning newspaper, What’s Brewing, is now online at wb.camra.org.uk. To join CAMRA, help preserve Britain’s brewing and pub industry, get BEER and What’s Brewing updates – and a host of other membership benefits – visit camra.org.uk

CAMRA is a company limited by guarantee, run at a national level by an elected, unpaid board of directors (the National Executive) and at regional level by its regional directors, both backed by a full-time professional staff. CAMRA promotes good-quality real ale and pubs, as well as acting as the consumer’s champion in relation to the UK and European beer and drinks industry. It aims to: 1. Protect and improve consumer rights; 2. Promote quality, choice and value for money; 3. Support the public house as a focus of community life; 4. Campaign for greater appreciation of traditional beers, ciders and perries, and the public house as part of our national heritage and culture; and 5. Seek improvements in all licensed premises and throughout the brewing industry. BEER will not carry editorial and advertising that counters these aims and we only accept advertisements for bottle- or cask-conditioned products.

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Tim Hampson

Big Six rebooted

While researching CAMRA’s biography, I wondered whether there is a modern cask ale equivalent of the Big Six breweries. And if there is, what is their relationship to the real ale lover and are they friend or foe? Laura Hadland investigates

Who were the Big Six?

When CAMRA began, the founders and early members observed cask ale losing real estate on bars around the country. Bland but easy-to-serve keg beers were taking their place, pushed by aggressive marketing campaigns. The large breweries behind these beers bought out (and usually closed) rival breweries and sought to expand their tied pub estates.

By tying up both the means of production and the route to market, the so-called Big Six had a stranglehold on what beer was available to the average punter. A small network of freehouses, the historic family brewers and a handful of new breweries were the last lines of defence against this purge of caskconditioned ale.

In 1989, CAMRA enjoyed a fleeting moment of celebration when the Beer Orders were published. Thanks in no small part to the Campaign’s evidence, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (now known as the Competition Commission) acknowledged the “complex monopoly” the Big Six had built accounting for a staggering 75 per cent of UK beer

production, 74 per cent of breweryowned pubs and a whopping 86 per cent of loan tied pubs.

Loan tied venues are interesting because while the pub is nominally a freehouse, the publican agrees to be predominantly supplied by a specific brewery in return for loans and discounted products, increasing that brewer’s monopoly over the market.

By limiting the number of tied pubs that one brewery could own to just 2,000 and making provision for a guest ale within them, it looked like the brewers of cask beer had more of a fighting chance to get their product in front of consumers. Arguably, it did help, but there were also unintended consequences that have echoed deeply down the years to today.

Instead of creating a utopian landscape of truly freehouses, a new wave of pub chains arose. The pub companies hungrily gobbled up premises that the big brewers were forced to offload.

“The changes were meant to usher in greater competition among brewers and improved choice for drinkers, but they have had the opposite effect… Today, the tie remains. But it’s no longer operated by gentlemen brewers with a Victorian veneer of paternalism when dealing with their tenants. They have been replaced by ruthless companies prepared to throw landlords and their families on to the streets if they fail to meet the terms of their draconian contracts.”

Roger Protz writing on his website, Protz On Beer.1

ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR SHAKESPEARE

Big changes for one-time Big Six

Who brews your big brand beer?

The Beer Orders were a watershed moment for the pub industry. The Big Six were fundamentally weakened. Just as they had aggressively swallowed up their rivals, so were they overwhelmed as the beer industry went global. They were increasingly small fish in the international pond. However, some of their cask ales have survived to the present day in one form or another.

1 Watney Mann and Truman, which had already been under the ownership of Grand Metropolitan since 1972, merged with Guinness in 1997 to form the global beverage powerhouse Diageo.

Arguably, as one of the Big Six, its time was already up much earlier than that, since its brewing interests had already been disposed of, selling to Courage in 1991. The majority of its remaining tied pub estate was ditched in 2002, being picked up by Enterprise Inns. Enterprise is now part of the Stonegate Group, the UK’s largest pub company.

Manns Brown Ale (2.8 per cent ABV) is now brewed by Marston’s, while both the Truman brewery and Watneys have undergone rebirth as new independent brands in recent years.

2 Allied Breweries, made up of Ansells, Ind Coope and Tetley’s, announced a merger with Carlsberg in 1991. A subsequent merger with Marston’s in May 2020, moved the remaining Allied beers into the sphere of the Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company (CMBC), including Tetley’s amber ale (3.7 per cent) and best bitter (3.6 per cent).

3 Whitbread left the brewing game in 2001, selling its brewing concerns (including Boddingtons) to AB InBev so it could focus on hotels and restaurants instead. It had been steadily increasing

‘The Beer Orders were a watershed moment. The Big Six were weakened. Just as they had swallowed up their rivals, so were they overwhelmed as the beer industry went global’

its portfolio of venues since the Beer Orders, including buying up the 3,600-strong pub estate of Allied (then Allied Domecq) in 1999. This left Allied Domecq with a portfolio mainly focused on spirits brands until it was bought out by Pernod Ricard in 2005.

4 Courage went on a long and winding journey of sales and acquisition, being owned by rivals Scottish & Newcastle for a period, but now all of its remaining beer brands belong to CMBC by virtue of the acquisition of Charles Wells’ Eagle brewery in 2017. Director’s amber ale (4.8 per cent), Courage Best Bitter (3.6 per cent) and its Light Ale (3.2 per cent) are still in production. The sale also brought Wells Bombardier (4.7 per cent) and Young’s Bitter (3.7 per cent) within the CMBC sphere.

5 Scottish & Newcastle itself was finally acquired by a consortium of Heineken and Carlsberg in 2008 and operates as a subsidiary of the two. Its assets were split, so John Smith’s and Newcastle Brown Ale (4.7 per cent) went to Heineken,

Widely distributed Sharp’s Doom Bar and Greene King IPA are bringing new drinkers to the world of cask beer

for example. Scottish & Newcastle had previously enjoyed a majority holding in Theakston, but four of the Theakston brothers had bought the majority back in 2004 and returned the brewery to overall family control.

6 The CMBC has therefore become the chief successor to the original Big Six, brewing many of the legacy beers. It is the biggest producer of cask ale in the UK and also contract brews one of the most historic – Draught Bass (4.4 per cent). The ownership of the Bass brand, along with responsibility for its distribution and marketing, sits with Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), which is perhaps best known in the UK for global brands like Stella Artois (5 per cent).

According to Ian Thurman’s excellent online directory, Draught Bass is available, whether permanently or occasionally, in more than 460 UK pubs.2 That’s approximately one in every 100 pubs in theory, although that number is in steady and noticeable decline. Bass also appears to have been experiencing significant distribution problems since the end of 2021. Commentators have long lamented AB InBev’s apparent and quite baffling disinterest in promoting its much-loved brand.

Phew! Keep up at the back!

Modern Big Six

It’s pretty clear that the CMBC would be included on any list of the successors to the Big Six, however you slice it. But who else earns a place on the list? When considering which other businesses and what beers might qualify, I turned to the Morning Advertiser’s list of the bestselling cask ale in 2021.3

So, who is brewing the biggest sellers in the UK today?

l Sharp’s Doom Bar (4 per cent)

l Greene King IPA (3.6 per cent)

l Timothy Taylor’s Landlord (4.3 per cent)

l Fuller’s London Pride (4.1 per cent)

l Greene King Abbot Ale (5 per cent)

l Wainwright

l St Austell Tribute Ale (4.2 per cent)

l Marston’s Pedigree (4.5 per cent)

l Ruddles Best (3.7 per cent)

l Draught Bass

As luck would have it, this provides us with six breweries. We have a Very Big Four: CMBC, which brews Wainwright, Pedigree and Draught Bass under licence; Sharp’s being owned by Molson Coors; Greene King under the ownership of CK Asset Holdings; and Asahi-owned Fuller’s.

Then there is the Quite Big Two: family brewers Timothy Taylor’s and St Austell. Relatively speaking, they are absolutely miniscule in comparison to global conglomerates like Molson Coors. St Austell commanded a very healthysounding £13m operating profit in 2019, but that becomes very small potatoes indeed in comparison to Molson Coors’ $764m in the same year.

The fact these two companies compete so closely in a list such as this speaks volumes (pun intended) about the scale of cask ale production in the UK, which has been shrinking for at least 20 years.

I realise some of the beers on this list won’t impress CAMRA members at first sight. It’s easy to get stuck in the beer bubble and forget that the overwhelming majority of beer drinkers that like to enjoy a decent pint at the pub would do so without once considering which brewery produced it. They do not have any preconceptions about what these beers are, or are not, and may not even be aware of the full range of caskconditioned ale that the UK can offer.

Abbot Ale is an original GK beer

Understood and protected – Landlord

Concern for London Pride’s future outside family ownership

Pedigree of Pedigree

All of the brews on the list are good beers. Bad beer doesn’t sell as consistently well as these do. Greene King IPA has a venerable history of nearly a century under its belt. Bass Pale Ale is knocking on the door of 200 years of popularity. Their success is based on a long-held reputation for quality and immediacy of brand recognition.

The only relative newcomer is Wainwright. Released by Thwaites in 2007, it made great waves in Lancashire. By the time the brand was bought by Marston’s in 2014, Wainwright accounted for one in every 19 pints of cask ale sold in the county.4

That’s not to say these beers are the same as when they were first formulated. The obvious example is Ruddles Best, which is now brewed to a different recipe and in another place. The beer was afforded Protected Geographical Indication in 1996, but that designation can no longer be used, since the closure of the Langham brewery by Greene King.

Some 40 or so years ago, Draught Bass stopped being brewed using the traditional Burton Union System –another notable and oft-lamented change in the crafting of our classic cask ales. The union set is said to have added a fuller taste with a sulphury note, although it also threw a heavy sediment,

so casks had to be carefully settled for longer than other live ales to achieve proper clarity.

Equally, some of the brewers on my list put a lot of stock in not having deviated from the original recipes and ingredients for their beers. One of the most widely recognised and most highly decorated

“Landlord is a premium product, so we aren’t going to raise the price and lower the quality to make the margin. We won’t compromise. I’ve got to stay with all the principles”

is Timothy Taylor’s Landlord. Tim Dewey, the chief executive at Timothy Taylor’s, tells me quality is king:

“It’s an enormous responsibility, because Landlord has been able to gain its position because we have remained true to how it was produced in the 1950s. Although I came into Taylor’s to bring the culture up to date, the foremost thing in my mind was not to touch the crown jewels. I’ve got our brewers to thank because they know their brief – the beer is paramount.”

Those same brewers heave bales of whole-leaf hops up three stories during the brewing process because they do not believe that pellets – the lighter, cheaper option – would give the same depth of flavour. They are happy to move with the times, but not just for an easier life or to increase margins.

Tim told me that if the brewery was ever bought out by a bigger company (don’t worry – it’s not on the cards), he’d expect them to change to hop pellets within weeks.

“I was hired because I understand premium brands,” he says. “Landlord is a premium product, so we aren’t going to raise the price and lower the quality to make the margin. We won’t compromise. I’ve got to stay with all the principles that were there when Taylor’s was founded.”

Wainwright is a relative newcomerFamily favourite – St Austell’s Tribute

Marston’s Pedigree now fights for attention alongside Draught Bass at CMBC

Cask complexity

Cask-conditioned beers look quite vulnerable when you take the wider view. They often sit within an international portfolio of far less complicated products. Beer writer Melissa Cole considered Asahi’s ownership of Fuller’s: “There seems to be an extremely laser focus within Asahi on London Pride [4.1 per cent], but you’ve also got these incredible heritage brands: London Porter [5.4 per cent], 1846 [6.3 per cent], Golden Pride [8.5 per cent] and Vintage [8.5 per cent].

“How long will all of that survive when there isn’t necessarily the wholly embedded cultural understanding of the product? It is an outlier in the business where everyone else has a very simple product to sell. You’ve got to rely on every level of leadership understanding that cask ale is a bit of a sod.”

We have to trust that breweries like Fuller’s are purchased because of brands like London Pride, and not despite them. The evidence certainly suggests that is the case so far, but as Tim points out, making good beer is only half the battle. Cellar management is also fundamental.

“A key part of our sales effort is helping the publicans understand how to treat our beer,” he says. “We recommend a minimum of 48 hours of conditioning, and ideally, if you have the cellar space,

leave it for a week before serving, because we have very vigorous secondary fermentation. Outlets won’t know that unless we go in and explain it.”

I got an interesting insight into why the multinationals are happy to invest in cask-conditioned ale despite its difficulties by talking to CMBC’s director of brewing, Emma Gilleland.

“Cask ale drinkers typically bring others to pubs with them, so it’s not just the money they themselves spend, but it drives the sales of other drinks, too. Cask ale, therefore, has a key role to play in the [post-pandemic] recovery of our beloved pubs and of the wider sector.”

It’s reassuring to know that cask ale drinkers are worth investing in as customers, but producing and serving good cask ale is not going to get any easier or cheaper over the next few years. Brewery overheads are increasing dramatically, putting smaller enterprises at risk. It falls to my new Big Six to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to preserving the general public’s access to, and appetite for, cask ale.

The future survival of cask beer is inextricably linked to the available route to market. We only need to look at the continuing success of big brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s to know that familiarity breeds demand. Out of 47,200 pubs in the UK in 2019, 9,900 were

brewery owned – more than half by our contemporary Big Six.5 Around one in 10 UK pubs is owned by the Stonegate Group, which offers all of the top 10 cask ales to its publicans.6

New generations of drinkers are being introduced to live ale because beers like Greene King IPA and Doom Bar are so widely available. The Big Six 2022 can be thanked for their role in live ale’s continued presence on bar tops all over the UK. But thanks to the threat of monopoly, it’s a double-edged sword. Of course, the whole debate is relative, too – even pre-pandemic, only one in nine pints sold in the UK was cask ale.

In that typically cyclical way of things, we find ourselves in a similar position to 1971. We have found a Big Six reboot. Access to the market remains restricted, if not totally blocked off, to thousands of small but exciting breweries. A comparatively small number of behemoths – both breweries and pubcos – are the gatekeepers of our nation’s public houses.

As real ale consumers, we have the power to break that monopoly. We can actively choose to put money behind the bar in support of the entire diverse spectrum of cask-conditioned ale. We can choose to take direct action and stem the decline in on-trade sales by going to the pub and drinking great beer. Are you up for the challenge?

1 protzonbeer.co.uk/comments/2014/12/27/ tied-hand-and-foot-the-sad-and-sorry-saga-ofthe-rise-of-britain-s-giant-pubcos

2 thewickingman.wordpress.com/?s=bass

3 morningadvertiser.co.uk/Article/2021/11/29/ What-is-the-best-selling-cask-ale-in-2021

4 effectivedesign.org.uk/sites/default/files/ Wainwright%20dba%20entry_

ButcherGundersen.pdf

5 researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/ CBP-8591/CBP-8591.pdf

6 www.stonegatepubpartners.co.uk/documents/ publican-price-list.pdf

Laura Hadland is a food and drink writer, and author of 50 Years of CAMRA. She writes about beer, among other things, on her blog The Extreme Housewife

Different recipe for Ruddles Best

Draught Bass – harder to find in pubs

Three decades at the helm of a unique pub with beer at its heart

It is most singular: the Bhurtpore Inn. There is no other. It stands, inconspicuously, in a quiet Cheshire village – little marks it from many other rural inns. Yet, it is most singular.

The Bhurtpore dates from 1778 at least, when it was then known as the Queen’s Head and later the Red Lion. The present moniker harks back to Britain’s colonial days in northern India. In 1825, the Iron Fort of Bhurtpore was causing some bother. The Indians considered Bhurtpore indestructible. However, Lord Combermere – a toff from the Cheshire estate that owned the pub and the commander-in-chief – masterminded a successful siege in January 1826. The pub was renamed to mark his victory.

Another most singular thing: this April, licensees Simon and Nicky George celebrated 30 years presiding over the Bhurtpore, with cask ale at its heart. The years have seen 21 beer festivals, many top CAMRA accolades and inclusion in the Good Beer Guide (GBG) for 29 of those 30 years. Simon is – hopefully – still counting. He awaits the GBG publication with anticipation each year.

There’s been wide acclaim from other leading guide books, too, not least for excellent traditional British pub fare

using much local produce and – in line with its Asian heritage – the renowned curries cooked by Indophile Simon. How about Lamb Apocalypse Later with Thornbridge Jaipur (5.9 per cent ABV)?

Entering the portals of this rambling multiroom pub, maybe catching a slight scent of bubbling vindaloo, you are immediately struck by something singular: a feeling of cosy, homelike comforts. It could easily be a rural version of George Orwell’s urban The Moon Under Water.

There’s dark, polished-wood furniture, colourful oriental-style carpets and rugs, real fires, family and pub photographs from bygone days, Indian artefacts and,

of course, the very regal grandfather clock happily chiming these days after repairs by a regular from Manchester. There’s a spacious garden, too. Dining is important as it’s about 45 per cent of trade, but this is no gastro. Simon kept a pool table in the bar until Covid-19 forced it out. There’s a TV for locals watching sports events, and games.

Simon ardently believes beer is the lifeblood of a pub. The impressive cellar can hold 60 firkins, allowing time for beer to ‘round off’ and to feed 11 handpulls with a cornucopia of quality independent brews: often, Yorkshire’s Acorn or Roosters Brewing Co, Derbyshire’s Derby or Thornbridge,

Left: Cask beer remains at the heart of what the Bhurtpore is all about and attracts visitors from far and wide to the tiny Cheshire village of Aston

What makes a pub with a curious name in deepest Cheshire a long-running success story?

Simon and Nicky George have run the Bhurtpore Inn for a remarkable 30 years with real ale front and centre. Steve Hobman looks closer

Staffordshire’s Titanic, Shropshire’s Salopian or Cheshire’s own RedWillow and others. On our visit the stars were the Imperial Russian Stout LeninRat (9 per cent) from Ossett’s Rat stable, along with Titanic Plum Porter Grand Reserve (6.5 per cent). And now there’s draught cider from Wrenbury Cider, too.

If that’s not enough, craft and international beers on tap crowd the bar with a raft of 150 bottled beers backing them up. The Good Beer Guide Belgium (UK section) features the selection. There’s a healthy list of new-wave low-/non-alcohol beers, too, such as Vandestreek Playground IPA (0.4 per cent). What’s more, with a 140-strong choice, the Bhurtpore has been hailed as one of the UK’s top whisky pubs – there are even two from India and a Swedish malt. Then there are the 150 gins, many from local producers such as Nantwich Gin and Henstone of Oswestry.

All this in the tiny village of Aston, buried deep in the Cheshire countryside, and itself part of the parish of Newall –population 669 according to the 2001 census. That may have been boosted a little since, probably by people moving nearer to the pub.

Taking on the Bhurtpore was atavistic for Simon. The pub was in the George family from 1849 until 1901 after Simon’s great, great, great, grandfather James moved in with his mother Joyce and Sarah Parker, mother to their infant Philip and, fortuitously, the previous landlord’s daughter. They brewed beer and had a small holding.

Rented by James, Philip bought the pub from an ailing Combermere estate in 1895. Records described it as “the best pub in the area”. In 1901, he sold out to Crewe’s Woolf’s brewery and eventually it became a Tetley’s house. Simon is proud that seven generations of Georges have poured beer in Bhurtpore, including his parents and two sons, Will and Tom.

‘Serendipity knocked. Chatting with a local solicitor friend, they discovered the Bhurtpore was up for sale. They paid £170,000 in November 1991’

Clockwise from main: Hidden gem tucked away in rural Cheshire; Bhurtpore was named after the siege in India; food is a key part of the Bhurtpore’s offering

Passionate about beer from his youth, as a young man in the 1980s, Simon worked in the local pub trade despite having studied chartered surveying. He and Nicky then went off to experience pubs in the Midlands and South. But Simon hankered for their own place. Like many seemingly wild ideas, the inspiration to take on the Bhurtpore was alcohol-fuelled.

Simon and brother Jeremy visited the Ind Coope brewery and afterwards Jeremy floated the idea that they get the family pub back to turn into a real ale destination. The idea quietly gestated for several years. Then Simon and Nicky were back in Nantwich to discuss business opportunities with Simon’s dentist father. Serendipity knocked. Chatting with a local solicitor friend, they discovered the Bhurtpore was up for sale.

They paid £170,000 to secure the keys on 15 November 1991. The pub had been stripped following the previous licensee’s money troubles. Simon

and Nicky, who married that December, faced an uphill struggle, spending some £30,000 on renovations and fittings. This included £300 for the Whitchurch-crafted grandfather clock and £6,000 on cellar work. The 1980s pink plastic renovations of the previous incumbent had to be dismantled, strip lighting torn out and new furniture found.

Opening day was 9 April 1992, with just two beers on the bar: the muchlauded Boddingtons Bitter (3.5 per cent) and Mitchell’s of Lancaster Dark Mild (3.3 per cent). They expected a quiet day. But again, serendipity called. It was General Election day – John Major was victorious over Neil Kinnock. For Simon and Nicky, it was a surprise winning night, too. With the polling station only minutes away, voting villagers swarmed in. Simon recalls: “It was a very busy and very tough initiation, but wonderful.”

Simon quickly built on that success and within a month, five cask ales were on and inside the year, seven. In three years, Hanby’s Drawell Bitter (3.9 per cent) was the house beer alongside 10 guests.

In 1993, South Cheshire CAMRA bestowed its Pub of the Year accolade and the Bhurtpore was on its way. Twice hailed the National Beer Pub of the Year,

most recently it was voted Regional Pub of the Year for Merseyside, Cheshire & North Wales for a second time (2005 was the first). Simon acknowledges the awards have greatly helped: “Without the many plaudits from CAMRA, I think we would have run out of steam.”

Over 21 years, the five-day beer festivals, selling some 200 real ales, became quite legendary. The last was in 2014. “We had to ease back… beer festivals demand a lot of work both before and after,” says Simon.

It is believed the sheer number of visitors pouring in off the CreweShrewsbury line via the threatened Wrenbury railway station saved the request stop from closure. “It didn’t get the chop, so we were delighted to do something for the community,” says the rather self-effacing Simon. More recently, a local call-up bus service began. Simon was pleased to hear a significant proportion of trips are to his pub.

Simon and Nicky built relations with several clubs – both the Vintage Sports Car Club and the Vintage Japanese Motorcycle Club (VJMC) meet every month at the pub. Traditionally, every August, the VJMC holds a rally, thought to be the biggest in the UK. Then there is the Folk Night and the Wobbly Wheels Cycle Club.

Reflecting on the years, Simon says Covid-19 was the lowest point, the 2010 financial crash not far behind. Recently, meeting tough new fire regulations for the cellar and upstairs has imposed an added strain on finances.

“Covid meant falling back on savings to keep going. It left us struggling for staff, so much so that we had to start closing on Monday and Tuesday,” says Simon. But he also recalls the highlights. “The reaction of the villagers on that first night was really unforgettable. Otherwise our beer festivals and many awards. And bringing up the family.” Paying tribute to Nicky, who over the years has worked both kitchen and front of house, he says: “Without her, none of it would have been possible. She has been a wonderful ally.”

These days, Simon, now 63, still enjoys working on the bar: “I don’t like a lot of jobs behind the scenes, but I love being on the bar and talking to customers. They are friends. The quick return of loyal locals and regulars was a real boon for our Covid recovery.” One loyal couple, he says, travel the 30-plus miles from Liverpool for Sunday lunch 52 weeks a year. Yes, really rather singular.

Steve Hobman is the founder and lead consultant for Beer Tours UK, formed to showcase British brewing and pubs. beertoursuk.com

‘It is believed the sheer number of visitors pouring in via the threatened Wrenbury railway station saved the request stop from closure’

Clockwise from top left: Garden is popular in good weather; 11 handpulls ring the changes; Simon still loves working the bar

150 years of Adnams

It might have an impressive history, but the Suffolk brewer is not looking back but forward with its anniversary collaboration brew

Beer-related anniversaries are coming along as regularly as red London buses. CAMRA celebrated a half century of campaigning in 2021 and this year the Brewery History Society chalks up 50 years of research into the centurieslong roots of brewing in Britain.

And 2022 also marks 150 years of brewing by Adnams, the Suffolk-based family brewery. It’s based in the seaside town of Southwold, famous for its inshore lighthouse and brightly painted beach huts. In fact, brewing has been going for far longer than 150 years. The plant that was bought by Ernest and George Adnams behind the Swan Hotel in 1872 had been making beer since 1345. It was one of the first British breweries to use hops that were brought across the North Sea from Holland in the 15th century.

It’s a much-changed brewery today, with production running at 115,000 barrels a year along with a distillery that makes gin, vodka and whisky. Chairman Jonathan Adnams has won deserved plaudits for his commitment to green brewing with recycling programmes for grain, hops and water.

To mark the anniversary, Adnams joined forces with the celebrated American brewery Sierra Nevada in California to produce a beer called Eastern Edge, a 4.8 per cent ABV pale ale. The name marks the fact that Adnams has the North Sea on its doorstep, while the American brewery has as its backdrop the mountain range from which it takes its name.

The collaboration is underscored by the use of two hop varieties grown in both countries. Cascade and Chinook are two American hops but they are now grown here as well. East Anglian pale

‘Tolly’s head brewer, who was nicknamed Mr Pastry, made no bones about the fact he could make beer from any starch’

malt and rye give a honey and biscuit note to the beer that balances the powerful citrus character of the hops.

The beer spotlights the changes at Adnams in recent years. The brewery built its reputation on its two main beers, Southwold Bitter (3.7 per cent) and Broadside (4.7 per cent), which have a solid underpinning of such traditional English hops as Fuggles and Goldings.

But a young and enthusiastic head brewer, Fergus Fitzgerald, introduced new pale ales Ghost Ship (4.5 per cent) and Mosaic (4.1 per cent), which have a pronounced fruity American hop appeal.

Fergus makes an annual pilgrimage to the hop fields of the Yakima Valley in Washington State where he samples the hops from the harvest and brings back the best for his new range of beers. Ghost Ship, brewed with American Citra and

Chinook hops with Motueka from New Zealand, has been received with such enthusiasm that it has overtaken sales of Southwold Bitter and is now the brewery’s biggest-selling beer.

Adnams has a special meaning for me. It featured in the first article I wrote about beer in the late 1970s when I compared it to the biggest brewery in Suffolk. Back then, the dominant beer maker in Suffolk wasn’t Greene King, but the Ipswich-based Tolly Cobbold, which had notched up 256 years of brewing when it closed in 2002.

The closure was the result of mismanagement, takeovers and rank bad beers. In the 1970s, visitors to the brewery reported seeing sacks of pasta flour and potato starch in the brewhouse. The head brewer, who was nicknamed Mr Pastry, made no bones about the fact that he could make beer from any form of starch.

Not surprisingly, Tolly beers had a terrible reputation. The company passed from pillar to post in a series of sell-offs and finally closed when it was bought by the Essex brewer Ridley’s.

In sharp contrast, Adnams blossomed due to the quality of its beers. In recent years, it has caused some controversy by making craft keg beers. Both Ghost Ship and Mosaic are available in keg, but there’s no doubt they are fine beers, as they are neither filtered nor pasteurised and served with low levels of carbon dioxide.

Adnams is a great survivor and Eastern Edge shows it’s looking with confidence to the future.

Roger Protz’s book, World Beer Guide (2021), is on sale from CAMRA’s online book store. Follow him at @RogerProtzBeer

After the bombing

Picking their way through the bomb-blasted ruins of post-war London come two men, looking for a pint. One is the journalist Maurice Gorham, former editor of the Radio Times and director of the BBC Television Service, his hopeful drinking companion the illustrator Edward Ardizzone.

Together they are charting what’s left of the capital’s pub trade, resulting in 1949’s Back to the Local, a collection of little essays and sketches celebrating the value and values of the pub. You never appreciate something more than when you feel you’ve nearly lost it – as we’ve lately rediscovered.

There were parts of London where one pub in every three had been flattened by the Luftwaffe. Others traded on in semi-derelict premises, opening the doors being a condition of retaining a licence at the time.

Beer shortages, which were worst after the war, meant licensees rationed their supplies, keeping unpredictable hours. Maurice and Edward might trek miles to find that pint, and report “syndicates of drinkers” employing “men on bicycles to follow the drays through the streets and spread the glad tidings as soon as they stopped at a pub”.

At the Dive Bar near Alexandra Palace, a popular haunt of BBC TV staff, “a row of chalk marks on the bar” were one by one wiped off as each pint was served and

“when the last mark went you knew you would get no more beer”.

Yet somehow pubs had survived the bombs. The worry now was whether they would survive the ambitions of brewers and town planners.

Back to the Local was, as the title suggests, a sequel to The Local, a book the pair had produced on the eve of war (most copies were destroyed in an air raid). Maurice was by then already concerned for what he calls “oldfashioned” pubs, anticipating later polemics against modernity such as

Christopher Hutt’s 1973 The Death of the English Pub.

The 1930s had brought an acceleration in the development of brewers’ estates on the model we now call the improved pub – large, open-plan, food-led new-builds offering a variety of entertainments, which appeared at the cost of the demolition of small, traditional boozers.

Maurice discovers the changes wrought in the decade between the two books “are not so drastic now as they were before the war, when the brewers were pulling down houses in all directions”.

“If you find a really modest pub, old-fashioned, unaffected, small, where you are given a welcome and can quickly get served, you may be almost sure that it is slated for demolition, though it may have been reprieved by the war.

“Brewers,” he goes on, “would rather have one modern pub than three old-fashioned ones. We, on the other hand, would as a general rule trade one modern pub for one old-fashioned one, let alone three.”

For Maurice, the war seems almost to have been a respite from the wrecking balls of the brewers, providing time to reflect on what, exactly, we are losing when we lose a pub, and in doing so stage a defence to keep it.

Back to the Local can be seen as a companion to

Many London pubs survived the bombs of World War II, but would they survive the ravages of town planners and brewery developers? Phil Mellows reports

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDWARD ARDIZZONE, FROM BACK TO THE LOCAL BY MAURICE GORHAM (FABER & FABER), REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF DAVID HIGHAM ASSOCIATES

George Orwell’s more famous 1946 essay

The Moon Under Water, a description of an imaginary pub that possesses all the qualities that the author, then working on the dystopian novel 1984, also felt were in danger of being lost.

Both Orwell and Maurice worked at the BBC during the war, and a lazy biographer might envisage them comparing notes about the state of the pub over a lunchtime pint. But it’s probably more useful to understand them as expressing a wider mood in British society.

Attitudes to the pub in World War II contrasted sharply with World War I. This time around, social drinking was an enemy, as David Lloyd George had regarded it, but viewed as boosting morale on the home front.

In July 1940, for instance, licensed trade daily the Morning Advertiser reported on the building of three new pubs in the London suburbs,

commenting: “Such houses are particularly needed now, for among all British institutions, inns and taverns are of the greatest value in the fostering of an optimistic and balanced outlook on life and the counteracting of the twin evils of depression and defeatism.”

The war years had also seen the publication of The Pub and the People, Mass Observation’s fly-on-the-wall anthropological study of what the working classes got up to when they weren’t working.

Orwell had used his 1943 review of that book to complain that “the whole trend of the age is away from creative communal amusements and towards solitary mechanical ones. The pub, with its elaborate social ritual, its animated conversations and – at any rate in the

North of England – its songs and weekend comedians, is gradually replaced by the passive, drug-like pleasures of the cinema and the radio”.

What we’re seeing here is a reassessment of the public house, and a repositioning away from being merely the purveyor of dangerous alcohols and towards it being a valuable social space. That idea is, of course, pertinent today as pandemic lockdowns and restrictions continue to threaten pubs. But ideas have a history, and we can see in Maurice and Orwell the working up of the modern perception of the pub.

And we have to add, paradoxically, that the improved pub project played its part in that. The three new houses celebrated by the Morning Advertiser were, of course, “modern”, and improvements such as indoor toilets undoubtedly elevated the image of pubs.

At one point Maurice concedes that they might be “better”, but they are not, he insists, “nicer”. Instinctively, we

Illustrations by Edward Ardizzone appeared in Back to the Local and captured the pubs that had survived the war

‘It is a repositioning from merely being the purveyor of alcohols and towards a valuable social space’

know what he means. But defining a nice pub is a slippery business. Design is one aspect covered in Back to the Local (and Maurice was to return to the subject a year later in Inside the Pub, co-authored with architect H McG Dunnett), principally the way in which an oldfashioned pub is zoned into different spaces.

But there is a problem with this as, originally, the partitions between bars were physical class structures, undermining the notion that pubs bring together the whole community, rich and poor.

Maurice tells the story of the sudden fashion for darts among the middle class “when higher civil servants began carrying their own set of arrows about in their waistcoat pockets and young women who wanted to do what was being done pursued the dart-board into the Public Bar. For a time the long-established rigid stratification of the pub was knocked sideways”.

The simple solution, licensees found, was to move the oche into the saloon until the craze died down.

Supporters of the improved pub strongly argue that removing partitions between bars helps weaken the class system, but for Maurice it was important for working people to have their own space, even though, hardly a proletarian himself, he was an outsider, an enthusiastic and respectful tourist, drinking in other people’s locals.

He cares deeply about “the regulars”, “the chief victims of the bombing as well as of the rebuilding craze”.

“Wherever a nice old-fashioned pub has been pulled down and turned into a cross between a roadhouse and a sanatorium, wherever a bombed site has taken the place of a pub, it is the regulars who suffer.”

He also cares about the beer. In words that prefigure the concerns of the Campaign for Real Ale a quarter of a century later, he feels depressed about “the forest of Watneys and Charringtons and Taylor Walkers all over London” and welcomes the ales of smaller brewers when he can find them.

The war has “narrowed the field of choice”, he complains, and “the weakening of beer all round has taken the edge off many fine distinctions.

“The merging of breweries goes on, and it takes some time to realise that the name you see over the house is not always the name that goes on the casks.”

His interesting conclusion is that the “keeping and serving of the beer make

almost more difference now than the brewery”, making the quality of the pub even more important to drinkers.

Maurice approvingly witnesses the emergence of a new dispense technology.

“Draught Stout owes its revival mainly to Guinness, who are now sending it out in ten-gallon metal containers which stand on the bar… The container keeps it under pressure and makes it easier to serve… Mackeson’s are doing the same thing, and I have even seen Simonds’s bitter served in this way.

“I do hope the trade will soon evolve some nice name for the novel device.”

How about keg?

Of course, Back to the Local shows its age at moments like this and when Maurice talks about Burton ale, known to London drinkers as Old, and firmly declares that IPA is “now becoming obsolete”.

But Maurice’s concern and sensibility feel like they belong with the fight to save pubs today, and the argument that their value lies considerably beyond their commercial worth.

Every pub is somebody’s local, as he says, and his heart is with “the people who use the pubs; who meet their friends there, talk there, exchange the news there and prefer the cheerful company of the bar to the strait confines of their home.

“For those of us who feel sad whenever a pub vanishes, this is a sad life.”

Phil Mellows is the grandson of an East End publican whose tenancy, the Nag’s Head in Stepney, was lost to the Luftwaffe in World War II. For the past 35 years, he has worked as a journalist specialising in pubs, brewing and alcohol policy. Find out more at philmellows.com and follow him on Twitter at @philmellows

‘He feels depressed about “the forest of Watneys and Charringtons and Taylor Walkers all over London”’

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDWARD ARDIZZONE, FROM BACK TO THE LOCAL BY MAURICE GORHAM (FABER & FABER), REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF DAVID HIGHAM ASSOCIATES

When I first started drinking, Scotland wasn’t a great place for beer lovers. Scottish & Newcastle dominated, choice was limited, high-quality beer was rare. Fortunately, in recent years there has been a complete turnaround. There are now many Scottish breweries, brewing exceptional beer with an international outlook. Whisky, the national drink, isn’t ignored, as I discovered many breweries using old wooden whisky barrels to age beer.

The Black Isle is a peninsula north of Inverness in the Scottish Highlands; it isn’t an island nor is it black, however, the soil is dark and fertile. Surrounded on three sides by the North Sea, it’s a haven for wildlife.

Black Isle brewery is a short distance from Inverness, at Allangrange (Gaelic

for a fertile field of corn) farm. The first record of barley cultivation dates back to 1790 when it was noted that the land was of “superior quality for the brewer and distiller”.

In 1998, David Gladwin started the brewery in a cowshed byre with the aim of making world-class beer using barley and hops grown on an organic farm. The brewery has expanded since then and is now in a converted Dutch barn.

David has achieved his aim – he runs a successful brewery on an organic farm, drawing water from his own borehole, using organic ingredients with significant input from his farm. Waste gets fed to sheep and cattle on the farm, which in due course, fertilise the land.

The brewing team is drawn from across the world: Germany, Australia, Italy as

well as the Scottish Highlands.

David tells me: “We are quite cosmopolitan and like different influences.” The beers are also exported across the world. When I visited, an order was being prepared for Black Isle’s biggest export market, Japan.

When it comes to the beer styles, David says: “We are always doing something with a Scottish distillery.” Black Isle uses whisky, sherry and port barrels and pipes (big barrels) to age beer. David is also enthusiastic about global beer styles and Black Isle regularly collaborates with international brewers such as Sweden’s largest organic brewery, Poppels.

The beer is unfiltered and unfined –a centrifuge is used instead. It is moving

Beer takesthe highand low roads inScotland

Scotland is becoming a brewing giant with a reputation for quality and innovation, as Martin Ellis discovers

away from bottling (apart from short-run beers), preferring to can the beer.

Cromarty Brewing Co is also located on the Black Isle, up the hill from the small village of Cromarty (until my visit, Cromarty was no more than a name in the shipping forecast to me). It was set up by Heriot-Watt graduate Craig Middleton, who first started brewing in student accommodation and flat basements. After working at a number of breweries, gaining useful experience, Cromarty launched in 2011. His parents (Jenni and Chap) are key members of the team. The family history goes back centuries, with Craig’s ancestors working on the land in the Cromarty area.

Cromarty’s first beer, Happy Chappy (4.1 per cent ABV), a new-wave pale ale with citrus hops from the United

‘None of its beers are pasteurised or filtered. Craig’s passion for brewing can be seen in his company slogan: Beer Worth Believing In’

States and tropical ones from New Zealand, was named after Craig’s father; it continues to be its most popular beer. Cromarty’s third beer, Red Rocker (5 per cent), won a World Beer Cup Gold medal in 2018 in the Rye category. It is brewed with American hops during the boil, then dry-hopped with US and New Zealand varieties.

Whiteout (3.8 per cent), a session white IPA, won bronze at the 2018 World Beer Awards. AKA IPA (6.7 per cent), a West Coast

IPA, won its category at the 2016 World Beer Awards. So, it comes as no surprise to hear that Cromarty uses a lot of American and New Zealand hops. Craig tells me he is experimenting with new English hop varieties and says: “The hop market is always doing something new.”

Cromarty started as a brewer of cask beer and normally has six available. Its beer has been stocked by CAMRA beer festivals including the Great British Beer Festival. It supplies two local outlets in picturesque fishing village Cromarty and many outlets in Edinburgh. None of its beers are pasteurised or filtered. Craig’s passion for brewing can be seen in his company slogan: Beer Worth Believing In.

Top and left: Ageing in whisky barrels is a key part of Black Isle production

Right: Founder Craig works with his parents at Cromarty Brewing Co

Windswept Brewing Co is at Lossiemouth on the Moray coast. When pilots Al Read and Nigel Tiddy left RAF Lossiemouth, they started home brewing in a serious but haphazard way. Nigel says: “We were playing with beer, home brewing in the garage. Our kit was homemade and rather Heath Robinson, but it enabled us to learn a lot about brewing.”

A group of local Americans formed a home-brew club and held regular competitions. “The Americans had expensive kit, but our beer often won in blind testing competitions,” says Nigel.

Encouraged by their success, Al and Nigel decided to set up a brewery. It was launched in 2012, and the first beer was Accidental Pale Ale – APA (5 per cent). The beer was intended to be a 4 per cent blonde, but the new brewery kit was more efficient than the small-scale trial equipment. The following year, APA won a SIBA Scotland gold medal. In the same competition, Wolf, a dark 6 per cent Scottish ale, also won a gold medal. Over the years, Windswept beers have won many awards at SIBA Scotland and SIBA

nationally. Weizen (5.2 per cent) winning CAMRA’s Champion Beer of Scotland in 2019 was a proud moment.

Windswept puts all of its beers through a rough filtration process and doesn’t use fining agents. Its local CAMRA branch considers its keg beer to have enough live yeast to be considered real ale. All Windswept’s bottled beer is bottle-conditioned and filled in-house, so the process can be closely monitored and controlled. Cask beer, though, remains the biggest proportion of its output.

The brewery has expanded over the years, taking over neighbouring units on its site. It has an in-house lab, which is invaluable for the different yeasts that are used – seven English ale yeasts, Kölsch for beers with a lager profile, Weizen for wheat beer, plus other strains. It also uses wooden casks used for ageing some of its beers.

‘Windswept’s local CAMRA branch considers its keg beer to have enough live yeast to be considered real ale’

Windswept has become a large microbrewery, but Nigel says: “The experience of learning how to brew in a garage has given us an understanding and flexibility, which is invaluable.”

Futtle brewery aroused my interest after reading it was also a bar, bottle shop, record outlet and music label. Stephen Marshall and Lucy Hine set up Futtle in 2019, based in a former stable block next to an occasional market that could be considered to be rural Scotland’s version of London’s Borough Market.

I was surprised by the answer to my opening question about how they started a brewery. Stephen says: “We started by reading books.” After learning about beer and brewing, they took on people who had studied at Heriot-Watt, then consulted David Smith, who has trained and advised more than 200 breweries.

Stephen and Lucy discovered they “absolutely love brewing beer” and the days when they do are the highlights of the month. I was told they now know their brewing equipment like the back of their hands. Lucy creates and records the recipes. All the ingredients are organic and they know the provenance of

Windswept is a former Champion Beer of Scotland winner with Weizen Futtle’s Stephen and Lucy love brewing

everything that they use. They brew twice a month and the beer is canned by a mobile truck. It is then left for two months or longer to condition before it is available for sale. The beer that goes into kegs doesn’t have any additional CO2 added and is still live.

Stephen took me for a guided walk around the brewery, but it didn’t take long as it is small and compact. We stepped into the backyard and he pointed out a common weed growing between paving slabs. He said it was Pineapple Weed and used in Futtle’s Table Beer (3.2 per cent). I took a can home and was blown away by the initial citrus aroma on opening the can; the matching flavour from the Pineapple Weed dominated but wasn’t overpowering – I loved it. It’s an understandably popular beer.

Futtle uses foraged ingredients in some of its recipes, collecting what might be considered to be a weed, plus seaweed

and other plants when in season. Futtle is quirky – its beers are not only interesting, they are also full of character and flavour.

In contrast to Futtle’s small-isbeautiful approach, Stewart Brewing, south of Edinburgh, is now producing on quite a large scale. I have visited a couple of times on trips with my CAMRA branch (Tyneside & Northumberland) and have seen the brewery expand over the years. It was formed by Heriot-Watt brewing graduate Steve Stewart. After graduating, Steve worked for a number of breweries before following his dream and establishing Stewart Brewing in 2004.

Cask beer was central from the start; it supplies pubs in Scotland’s central urban belt, and there are local preferences. Marketing manager Sarah Stirton says: “Obviously, we don’t sell much Edinburgh Gold [4.8 per cent] in Glasgow. Masterplan [5.4 per cent] an American IPA [part of its Hop Series] is a big seller in Glasgow.”

Stewart runs what it calls a craft beer kitchen – a series of workshops and

classes where people can learn how to brew their own beer. After brewing the beer they return a few weeks later to bottle it.

While visiting Stewart I met head brewer Craig Scotland, who, at the time, was Scotland’s Brewer of the Year. I asked him why he thought he won. He said he thought it was the range, experimental beers created on the small-scale Project 7 brewing plant, working closely with Heriot-Watt and, most importantly, quality.

When asked about Scottish brewing, Steve replies: “It’s great to see so many new breweries and new beer styles. The growth in Scottish brewing encourages quality standards to rise.” Scotland now has many breweries brewing great beer, ranging from traditional British styles to beers at the cutting edge of innovation.

Martin Ellis is a book publisher. A member of CAMRA’s Tyneside & Northumberland branch, he was on the Books Committee for more than 25 years

Former stable block is Futtle’s home

Cask beer is key for Stewart Brewing

Number 39: Annabel Smith

RealAleHeroes

Challenging stereotypes

The image of cask beer as a man’s drink is being eroded and one of the forces behind the change is Annabel Smith, as Emma Inch reports

In February 2020, my partner and I took our then seven-year-old daughter to see an exhibition by acclaimed photographer Anita Corbin. First Women UK was created to mark the centenary of female suffrage, and featured a hundred portraits of pioneering women who were all firsts in their chosen fields. The worlds of sport, business, politics and the arts were represented, with photographs of celebrities hanging alongside ‘ordinary’ women, all 21st-century trailblazers.

The portraits were each a metre high. Many of the subjects had been photographed with the trappings of their trade around them. Nicola Adams, the first woman to win an Olympic boxing title, is pictured at the edge of a boxing ring, her gloves beside her; Elspeth Beard, the first Englishwoman to ride a motorcycle around the world, sits astride her bike, a spanner clutched in her hand; and Suzi Quatro, the first female bass player to become a major star and front a rock band, wears her trademark leather trousers as she grips her guitar.

At the end of the exhibition, I asked my daughter to tell me which portrait was her favourite.

“The lady with the beer” came the reply. “She looks really friendly.” That

friendly “lady with the beer” was, of course, beer sommelier Annabel Smith, who earned her place in the exhibition by virtue of being Britain’s first female beer inspector. In her photograph she sits at the bar of the Parcel Yard pub in King’s Cross, a row of handpulls in front of her, and a goblet of perfectly conditioned beer in her hands.

For this remarkable woman, who has done so much to inform both the industry and the public about cask ale, a pub is a very appropriate setting. In fact, it was in a pub that her career began.

“My grounding in beer is not through education, it’s not through a degree, it’s not through brewing,” she says. “It literally is through pulling pints.”

Aged 20, Annabel dropped out of university and returned to her native Yorkshire. In desperate need of work, she rang the first pub listed in the Yellow Pages, the Beer Engine in Wakefield, and asked for a job. As luck would have it, the owner, Bob Hunter, had just

“My grounding in beer is not through education, it’s not through a degree, it’s not through brewing. It literally is through pulling pints”

acquired another pub – the Brewers Pride – in the same town and was in need of someone to run it. Although it was only ever meant to be temporary, Annabel quickly became hooked on pub work.

“Within days it got under my skin,” she says. “The looking after the beer in the cellar, the theatre of being behind a bar, the social aspect of it, the music playing while you work – you couldn’t have that if you worked in an office!”

Bob took great pride in the beer he served, and it was he who gave Annabel her first lessons in cask ale and cellar craft. Within a few weeks she became the youngest licensee in Wakefield. She spent eight enjoyable years at the pub, before feeling the need to spread her wings a little and, following a brief period running Whitbread venues, she found herself in a sales role for Diageo.

“I was rubbish at sales,” she confesses. “I hated the pressure of it. I hated the fact that it was target driven. I’m just not that kind of person at all.”

But before long, Annabel had found her niche at Diageo, delivering the Every Serve Perfect programme and educating licensees right across the country about how Guinness was made, how it should

PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHIL TRAGEN

“Within days it got under my skin. The looking after the beer in the cellar, the theatre of being behind a bar, the social aspect of it, the music playing while you work – you couldn’t have that if you worked in an office”

be poured and how the lines should be kept clean. Annabel discovered a love of both training and the travel that accompanied it. However, when she was teaching about Guinness, she often found herself referring back to cask ale.

“In terms of quality, real ale is a real lighthouse for a pub,” she says. “If you walk into a pub and they are serving cask ale, and it is good quality, you can guarantee that the Guinness is good quality, too, because… cask ale is the most labour-intensive, it’s the most skilled beer to look after, and the trickiest beer to look after.”

Inadvertently, Annabel soon became known as “this lady that talks about real ale all the time”. So much so, that when Cask Marque – the organisation set up to monitor and ensure beer quality –advertised for a national account manager, a colleague left the advert on Annabel’s desk. She applied and in 2005 began work – with 49 male colleagues – as the UK’s first female beer inspector.

“When I handed my notice in to my male boss [at Diageo], he said to me, ‘Why would you want to go and work in an industry full of old men?’ And I thought, you are so misinformed about cask. There are lots of people like me who drink cask.”

Over the years, Annabel has worked hard to challenge this image of cask ale, and beer more widely, as a man’s drink. In 2009, together with Ros Shiel and Lisa Harlow, Annabel formed Dea Latis. Named after the Celtic goddess of beer,

the group initially performed a social function, bringing together women who worked across the industry, but it soon evolved into something more.

Britain has one of the lowest percentages of female beer drinkers in the world and, with a grant from the Brewers’ Research and Education Fund, Dea Latis set out to find out why. In 2018, it published The Gender Pint Gap and, after a further grant, followed this up with a more in-depth study, The Beer Agender, in 2019.

Unsurprisingly, Dea Latis found many women were put off beer by their perception of the marketing. Many also didn’t like the large volumes that beer is often served in, or had misconceptions about its calories. However, the reports also revealed female beer drinkers were often perceived in a negative light.

Throughout her career, Annabel has worked hard to combat these stereotypes and to encourage more women into the beer industry. Communications consultant, and former director of Cask Marque, Frances Brace believes: “Although equality in the industry is still a long way off, there has been progress, in the past 10 years in particular. Annabel has played no small part in this. It is the combination of her

Clockwise from top left: Annabel has taught thousands of licensees about cask beer; tastings are key part of her role; Annabel is no stranger to TV – seen here with the Hairy Bikers

extensive technical knowledge with her excellent communication skills that has helped her to break some of the most formidable glass ceilings in the industry.”

Jane Peyton, founder of the School of Booze, agrees: “Annabel is so generous with her time and knowledge and willingly shares it. I know that she encouraged and mentored several women who were early in their beer careers and who are now working in senior roles. I have no doubt that Annabel’s profile in the beer industry has inspired many women to consider a career in beer.”

the combination of her technical knowledge with her communication skills that has helped her break some of the most formidable glass ceilings”

“It

Annabel agrees that progress has been made, but feels there is much more to do.

“I think a massive amount has changed in the past five years in terms of opinions, attitudes and behaviours.

is

And obviously, certainly over the past year, the evidence of masculine toxicity within the beer industry in a way begs another research project, doesn’t it?”

After a couple of years at Cask Marque, Annabel became training manager, enabling licensees to learn about serving cask. She continues to work for it on a freelance basis, while also running BeerBelle, her own training, consultancy and events business. In 2017, she was named Educator of the Year at the Imbibe Personality of the Year Awards, and the following year, together with Jane Peyton, was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group. She is a highly respected figure within

the industry. As Frances says: “Over the years, she has trained thousands of bar staff, licensees and brewery and pubco team members in the art of beer quality in the on-trade. As guest speaker at countless events, tutored tastings and broadcasts, she has infected others with her love of real ale. For the past 30 years, she has been a beer appreciation society in her own right.”

The more I get to know Annabel, the more her inclusion in the First Women UK exhibition resonates. My daughter is correct: in her portrait Annabel does look friendly. But she also looks knowledgeable. And, most of all, in her metre-high frame, she is visible.

“There are very few representations of women in everyday life and what they

have achieved,” Annabel says. “It’s foundation for the future; anyone who sees this exhibition, they may be thinking, ‘I could never do that’. Maybe this will turn their minds around and go, ‘I can do this’.”

And with Annabel’s contagious optimism, perhaps we all can achieve more – perhaps we all can ‘do this’.

Emma Inch is a multi-award-winning freelance beer writer, audio maker and former British Beer Writer of the Year. She produces and presents Fermentation Beer & Brewing Radio. You can find out more about Emma at fermentationonline.com and follow her on Twitter at @fermentradio

“I think a massive amount has changed in the past five years. And obviously, certainly over the past year, the evidence of masculine toxicity within the beer industry in a way begs another research project”

Lost orchards

Have images of crop circles returned ? No, but spectacular drone pictures released by the National Trust reveal a series of newly planted orchards that resemble the cross-section of an apple, writes Tim Hampson

The five interlocking orchard ‘rooms’ at Brockhampton in Herefordshire mimic the five seed chambers visible when an apple is cut horizontally. They have been installed to tell the story of how the humble apple arrived in the UK thousands of years ago and provide homes for wildlife.

Rare and unusual fruit trees feature in the new orchards, including ‘rooms’ dedicated to the Grandpa Ailes apple from Kazakhstan and the Herefordshire cider apple, as well as one filled with Shropshire prune trees, one of the oldest varieties of damson.

The planting is the culmination of a three-year project to reimagine 21 acres of lost orchard at the site, which is already home to the biggest one cared for by the charity. It was funded by players of People’s Postcode Lottery and Arts Council England.

The concept and design, started in 2019, are by artist Walter Jack Studio and landscape architects the Rathbone Partnership, with the varieties of tree chosen to tell the story of the eating apple, from its origins in Kazakhstan through to its traditional use as the Herefordshire cider apple.

According to the artists, the circular orchards “are about telling this story of fruit at Brockhampton and where it began a few miles away and a few thousand miles away. This is about the geographical and international connections that are the extraordinary story of fruit”.

Trees have been planted elsewhere on the estate, too, with 700 installed in total. Species of apple, damson, pear and quince have been selected alongside maple, hazel, elder and blackthorn, providing a variety of habitats for

“It’s fantastic to see the lost orchards that once encircled the manor house brought back to life”

pollinators and other wildlife – and a blossoming spectacle in spring. National Trust countryside manager Iain Carter said: “It’s fantastic to see the lost orchards that once encircled the manor house brought back to life and reimagined. It is a celebration of fruit – both the fascinating history of how it arrived in England and the many benefits fruiting trees can provide for wildlife.

“As the orchards mature, they’ll also improve soil health and store water. Our existing orchard teems with wildlife in spring and produces a bounty in autumn – and now we will have an even bigger space for wildlife to thrive and, importantly, for the community to enjoy.”

Head of charities at People’s Postcode Lottery Laura Chow said: “We are delighted that players of People’s Postcode Lottery have supported the

creative restoration of this lost orchard. Hundreds of trees will provide important habitat for native wildlife and take visitors on a journey through the history and heritage of fruit at this important site.”

As well as the reimagined orchards, around three kilometres of accessible paths have been installed, which zigzag from a historic damson orchard near the manor house towards the newly planted site. A natural play trail for children has also been introduced, and a historic trow boat replica used to transport fruit along the rivers Severn and Wye takes centre stage in the restored orchards.

of pubs

CAMRA has released its pub closure statistics for 2021 and is calling for intervention from the government to protect the great British pub.

The figures show that across Great Britain last year, 290 pubs were demolished or converted to another use – an average of just over five a week.

There was an uptick in the number of new pubs being built, or existing buildings being converted into pubs, averaging just over seven new pubs opening every week in the second half of the year.

However, more than 500 pubs were also classed as long-term closures in 2021, where the building is still classed as a pub for planning purposes, but the business itself has closed or is empty and without tenants to run it. This shows the lasting effects of the pandemic, and the present cost of business crisis.

The Campaign has highlighted a number of steps that governments across the UK should take in response to the report, and to address the cost of living crisis. These include:

• An immediate cut in VAT for on-trade food and drink sales, to help both businesses and consumers;

• Introducing an online sales tax, with the money raised directed to relieve the grossly unfair rates burden on the pub and hospitality sector;

• Using the upcoming statutory review to bring more tied tenants into the scope of the Pubs Code for England and Wales; and making sure a robust Scottish version is introduced later this year to offer protections for tied tenants in the country for the first time;

• Bringing forward the introduction of the new draught duty rate for beer and cider, confirming that it will apply to containers of 20L and over;

• Confirming the retention of the duty exemption for small cider makers producing under 70HL a year.

CAMRA national chairman Nik Antona said: “These figures show that while there is some encouraging news about new pubs opening in 2021, there

is still a big problem with pub businesses not reopening after the pandemic.

“With the cost of living crisis affecting consumers, and the cost of business crisis facing our pubs, brewers and cider makers, we are really concerned that this positive news from our 2021 figures will turn into a nightmare report for 2022.

“Pubs are not only vital employers, but they are key to community life up and down the country – bringing people together and tackling loneliness and social isolation. Government across the UK must do more to make sure pub businesses can survive the cost of business crisis, and that consumers can still support their local pubs at a time when household budgets are being squeezed.

“CAMRA is doing our bit, but we also need action from political leaders. The UK, Scottish and Welsh governments must take action to safeguard the future of the great British pub so they can continue to play their part at the heart of community life in the years to come. That’s why CAMRA is calling for a cut in VAT for food and drink served in pubs and the introduction of fairer business rates systems, which desperately need designing so that pubs are taxed fairly –together with an online sales tax so online businesses pay their fair share, too.”

and

In response to pub closure figures for 2021, CAMRA is calling for a VAT cut, changes to business rates systems and a new online sales tax to help give our locals a boost

Action needed as hundreds

have failed to reopen post-pandemic

“CAMRA is doing our bit, but we also need action from political leaders”

The Leinster in Bayswater, London

Snooty Fox in Farringdon, Oxon

City of caves and ale

John Westlake

visits some of his favourite haunts in Nottingham

Over 300 years ago, Celia Fiennes, a pioneering traveller and writer who spent nearly 20 years exploring England on horseback, obviously having been impressed with her liquid refreshment in the East Midlands, penned: “Nottingham is famous for good ale, so for cellars, they are all dug out of the rocks and are so very cool.”

Some things never change! Not only does Nottingham still offer a wide choice of excellent cask ales, many from local producers, but it also stands proudly on a veritable warren of man-made caves, many of which are still put to good use by some of our finest hostelries, the most famous being Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem. Nestled at the foot of the rocky outcrop upon which Nottingham Castle stands, it is not just the cellars

Above and opposite: Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem must not be missed Top: Grade II-listed Ye Olde Salutation

that are hewn out of the local sandstone, but also much of the pub’s historic interior. The pub also offers a great choice of real ales and cider as well as good, home-cooked food. Just don’t mess with the haunted galleon!

Another point of interest here is that, right next door, Brewhouse Yard is the starting point from where Mortimer’s Hole, an ancient tunnel excavated to provide a secret route to the fortifications above, begins its ascent towards joining the cave system directly below the castle, parts of which are now open to the public.

Not far away on Maid Marian Way is the Grade II-listed Ye Olde Salutation Inn, another venerable watering hole sitting atop a labyrinth of caves dating back to at least medieval times and reputedly once the haunt of legendary outlaw Dick Turpin. Interestingly, the full name was once Ye Olde Salutation Inn –the Angel Gabriel Saluting the Blessed Virgin Mary, but being something of a mouthful, this was later shortened.

However, when Oliver Cromwell’s puritan movement sought to remove any biblical references in public life, it was renamed The Soldier and the Citizen, only for the original to be reinstated with the restoration of the monarchy.

Although heavily restored over the years, the Sal, as it is affectionately known, still retains plenty of character, with stone-flagged floors, ancient oak beams and a good selection of cask ales, usually including Robinsons’ Trooper (4.7 per cent ABV) in keeping with its reputation as a rock music venue.

Almost overlooking the Old Market Square where the famous goose fair was originally held, the historic Bell Inn is another Grade II-listed structure with a claim to being one of England’s oldest pubs. Passing several characterful rooms on either side, the stone-flagged central corridor ultimately leads to a more spacious lounge at the rear, where a glasstopped well affords a glimpse of the rock-hewn, vaulted and pillared cellars below, which in medieval times are believed to have linked with caves beneath the long-lost friary from which nearby Friar Lane derived its name.

Enjoy a pint from the local Nottingham brewery Greene King or one of the guest ales while admiring the informative frieze along one wall displaying a timeline of previous landlords.

Tucked away just around the corner on St James’s Street is the Malt Cross,

‘Rescued four years later and restored, the cosy bar fronts a stunning dining room housed within a sandstone cave’

originally built in 1877 as a music hall and still very recognisable as such, complete with a small stage and upstairs gallery. Not surprisingly, it’s another Grade II-listed building, which was extensively renovated in 2014. Look out for the astonishing barrel-vaulted glass ceiling, its wooden frame constructed entirely without the use of a single nail! Late to reopen its doors post-Covid-19, it is expected to be back in business by the time you read this. Hopefully, this will also include renewed access to the caves below, which once housed an Indian restaurant and, more recently, a multipurpose heritage art and craft centre.

Uphill from the Roman Catholic Cathedral on Derby Road, the Hand & Heart began life in 1866 as a brewery,

with the beers lowered into the rockhewn cellars below for conditioning. Some years later, a Victorian shop frontage was added and the business started selling direct to the public, but brewing sadly ceased in 1933 and the pub eventually closed altogether in 2004.

Mercifully rescued four years later and restored to its former glory, the cosy bar immediately inside fronts a stunning candlelit dining room entirely housed within a sandstone cave in complete contrast to the light and airy room upstairs, which has more in common with a covered beer garden. Real cider and perry along with several guest ales accompany two excellent beers brewed exclusively for them by the awardwinning Dancing Duck brewery in Derby.

Back towards the city centre, the modest exterior of the Dragon, with its impressive stone-mullioned window, fronts a simply furnished single, split-level room and to the rear, a rather unexpected enclosed beer garden. However, the Dragon has another surprise up its sleeve in the shape of a Racing Room featuring a full-size Scalextric track available for hire by aficionados or those who just want something different to do while enjoying a pint or two. Castle Rock Harvest Pale (3.8 per cent) and Oakham Citra (4.2 per cent), usually joined by a couple of guest beers, are served in tip-top condition and pumped directly from the cave cellar below.

Above: Historic Bell Inn has a glass-topped well where drinkers can see vaulted and pillared cellars below the bar

Above: Former music hall the Malt Cross with its vaulted glass ceiling

Beyond the Old Market Square, overlooked by the city’s imposing Council House, is the historic Lace Market conservation area, and right at its heart on Stoney Street sits the Angel Microbrewery, a splendid street-corner boozer and one-time haunt of local author Alan Sillitoe.

Originally called the Old Angel prior to the installation of its own, very visible, brewing kit, the pub has enjoyed a colourful history. It once housed a brothel, witnessed two murders during the 18th century and perhaps by way of penance, reputedly allowing its unusual, cruciform cave cellar to serve as a chapel and, in more recent times, a very useful air-raid shelter. Several

guest ales from other small producers normally accompany the Angel’s own selection of cask beers.

Barely a block away on the corner of George Street, the Mercure, formerly the George, is Nottingham’s oldest hotel and originally a coaching inn dating back to the 1820s. Nowadays, it also incorporates the Curious Tavern to the left of the main entrance, a dimly lit, part-flagstoned drinking den where a weight-bearing glass panel in the floor offers a tantalising peek at the rock cellars below.

These can be accessed in part via a separate entrance around the corner and down a flight of stairs, then along a passageway, which leads to another flight

of winding steps with a rope handrail. Here at the bottom is the Lost Caves gin bar, an atmospheric space that is proving popular with the younger crowd, but the three real ales usually on tap, often including one from the local Navigation brewery, are all to be found upstairs.

It is only a short walk up the hill and around the corner to find the Cross Keys, its attractive flower-bedecked, black-and-white painted façade and ornate windows fronted by a shady outside drinking area. The original alehouse and brewery on this site overlooking Weekday Cross were attached to the nearby St Peter’s church, while the first recording of a Cross Keys public house, complete with its extensive cave cellars, dates back to 1785.

However, the Midland Railway, while excavating beneath the pub to reach what was then Nottingham’s Victoria Station, misjudged the depth and the pub’s cellar and its contents collapsed into the tunnel to the delight of the men below, who reportedly took full advantage! The damage was so extensive that the structure had to be demolished and rebuilt in its current, Grade II-listed form in 1900.

Decorative plasterwork and wood panelling embellish the split-level interior, while two banks of handpumps offer ales from Navigation.

Close to here, the cave complexes below the National Justice Museum, as well as the partially demolished Broadmarsh redevelopment area, offer guided tours, while for those who travel by train, the railway station is but one tram stop away.

John Westlake is an awardwinning member of the British Guild of Beer Writers and a founder member of Nottingham branch

Clockwise from top: Angel Microbrewery; Cross Keys was rebuilt in 1900; Curious Tavern both inside and out; Dragon boasts a slot car racing room

The creation of a kellerbier

It takes courage to buck a trend. When starting a brewery it’s common practice for the core beer to be some form of hoppy ale, but Bristol’s Lost and Grounded bravely decided to be different.

The company was founded by Alex Troncoso with his partner, Annie Clements, in 2016. Alex cut his brewing teeth making Little Creatures Pale Ale (5.2 per cent ABV) in Australia, but the type of beer that has always intrigued him most is lager. Hence his move to Camden Town in London, where he was brewing director, and hence the subsequent decision to launch his own brewery based on a type of beer rarely seen in the UK at the time.

The spark was a visit to the hop harvest in Tettnang, Germany, in 2014, where Alex ordered a kellerbier – the unfiltered form of lager brewed locally. “What came

Above: Alex Troncoso and Annie Clements decided to be different

Below: Keller Pils is available in can, keg and bottle for restaurant trade

over was a slightly hazy, really simple, lemony-fresh beer,” he recalls. It was love at first sip and inspiration in a glass.

When he and Annie started planning Lost and Grounded, they thought long and hard about what they wanted to do and how to be different. Maybe a kellerbier would help the new business stand out. Here was a type of beer that had a certain familiarity to the drinker, but also a point of difference. But the challenge was how to make something so simple using only basic ingredients that nevertheless had considerable depth of character.

The answer, says Alex, lay in process and technique, and that began with the right equipment. He knew that he needed a mill so they could use whatever malt they wanted and not be restricted by what was delivered crushed. He installed a modern Steinecker brewhouse from Germany and he also insisted on a lactic acid propagation plant, to emulate the traditional German method for adjusting the pH level of the brewing water – all this because lager, as Alex passionately explains, is not just a type of beer that has been kept cold for a while.

For Alex, lager is about mashing, boiling, the collection temperature of worts and yeast handling, as well as cold conditioning.

“Why do German lagers taste brilliant?” he asks. “Because they stick to rules that they’ve followed for hundreds of years. Sometimes stuff works for a certain reason.”

The first sip of a classic German lager inspired brewery founders to reject the well-worn path and go their own way, as Jeff Evans reports

All this attention to detail eventually delivered the required product, a beer they named Keller Pils (4.8 per cent). That was six years ago and the recipe remains essentially unchanged. The grist is a blend of Belgian and German Pilsner malts and the same hops are used but with quantities adjusted according to the harvest. Magnum goes into the copper at the beginning, with Perle added in two doses, at 30 and 50 minutes. Hallertauer Mittelfrüh is also added at 50 minutes.

“We don’t add the hops too late,” says Alex. “The beer’s actually better if you boil the hops a little bit, get rid of some of the green character and leave a cleaner bitterness. You also get a noble aroma.”

The lagering process itself is, of course, crucial. Alex likens it to ageing

champagne on lees, which results in a certain breakdown of yeast cells, technically known as autolysis. Too much, he points out, delivers an undesirable Marmite flavour, but a little amount of autolysis is needed to pull the palate together.

“Over time – somewhere between four and five weeks – beer that is green will just snap together,” he says.

To ensure the beer stays in top form, this brewing process is constantly reviewed. “People think that beer should be the same all the time, but it’s actually pretty hard to keep it that way,” says Alex. “Every six months, we’re reoptimising the boil regime or looking at how we’re handling the yeast. It’s that challenge that keeps us motivated.”

Keller Pils is surprisingly lean in body for a beer of 4.8 per cent, although there’s a lightly bready texture to the malt. The hop character is well balanced – assertive but not aggressive, with notes of lemon and perfume. Overall, it’s a rather delicate and extremely refreshing beer that is very easily quaffed.

Creating and perfecting such a pleasurable beer is one thing, finding outlets for it is another. “It took a while for the trade to catch up with what we were doing,” says Alex. “Lager has to be good and reliable, but it has to tick all the economic boxes as well. It has to be the right price, the right profitability.”

That made certain outlets a little wary. Also, he says, for the first few years, Keller Pils was difficult to sell because a lot of people still believed lager should be bright and clear. Well, sometimes Keller Pils is really bright and at other times it’s a bit hazier. That’s really not a problem – it’s part of what Alex describes as the personality of the beer.

Keller Pils is now widely known and eagerly sought out by consumers. Other beers have filled out the Lost and Grounded range since its launch, but the original beer – available in keg, can and bottle (for the restaurant trade) – still accounts for most of the brewery’s output and remains central to the company’s philosophy and business strategy.

“We’ve stuck to the original plan,” says Alex. “It’s taken longer than we thought but people are starting to get it. It’s quite satisfying to finally be seeing everything we’d planned come to fruition.”

“We’ve stuck to the original plan. It’s quite satisfying to finally be seeing everything we’d planned come to fruition”

Left: Keller Pils is now sought after Above: Correct brewing kit was vital

Blackpool bites

The pub scene in the seaside resort has seen a remarkable transformation in recent years, with an explosion of micropubs, writes Jane Stuart

The Waterloo Music Bar, on Waterloo Road, is a long-established pub now unrecognisable from its former guise as a traditional boozer with a bowling green. Since reinventing itself, it has recently won Planet Rock’s Black Plaque Award for Best UK Live Music Venue. As one might expect from a pub that is out of the ordinary, the food offering here differs from the norm.

Burgerhain is a local ‘music-themed food’ outlet, specialising in homemade burgers, such as Hits On The Tongue, a nacho-based cheeseburger, topped with homemade chilli. Landlord Ian ‘Fletch’ Fletcher explains how the partnership came about: “Burgerhain approached me in 2019 to serve food from the street van outside when we had shows on. During lockdown, owner Russ asked if he could move into the premises as our kitchens weren’t being used. This was a great opportunity for us to have food inside the Waterloo. I’ve not been able to get rid of him since.”

Food is served during the Waterloo’s gigs. Fletch advises diners “sit to eat in Lemmy’s Bar and not the live room. They won’t miss any of the show as they can still watch on our big-screen TV”.

The music theme continues through the Waterloo’s drinks range. “We have a very interesting range of music

beers, wines and spirits from Motörhead, Kiss, AC/DC, Rammstein, Ghost, Rolling Stones and Marilyn Manson. All ranges and what they are can be found on our website waterloomusicbar.com.”

There is usually a musicthemed cask ale among the selection of three or four on handpull, including Dark Lord’s Red Knight Stout (4.6 per cent ABV) and AC/DC Hell’s Bells (4.2 per cent). Cross Bay brewery is also a regular feature, including Sunset –The Blonde (4.2 per cent).

a

is No 10 Ale House on Whitegate Drive, the town’s first micropub, which opened in 2018. You might be forgiven for expecting pork pies and Scotch eggs as the best you’re going to get in a micropub – but that is not so here.

Landlord George White decided to open a Thai kitchen in the pub and now has three chefs – headed up by senior chef Phen –providing a good range of dishes, including starters,

soups, stir-fry dishes and Thai curries, from Monday to Saturday, 4–8.30pm.

The cask ale is top quality and there is always a dark beer on. Recent offerings have included the divine Kirkstall Dexter Milk Stout Tiramisu x Rabbit Hole Coffee (4.5 per cent), Wily Fox Dark Flagon Rum Porter (4.4 per cent) and Titanic Cherry Dark (4.4 per cent). Other beer types are available including, on my recent visit, Salopian Shropshire Gold (3.8 per cent), Bowland Gold (3.8 per cent), Wily Fox Crafty Fox (4 per cent) and Titanic Rye IPA (4 per cent). Blackpool has George and the No 10 to thank for sparking the beer and micropub revolution on the Fylde coast in recent years.

One of the finer examples of young micropubs in the area is Shipwreck Brewhouse, just up the Fylde coast on Victoria Road in Cleveleys.

“We opened in June 2020 for beer takeaway and delivery,” explains landlord Paul Samson. “We started out with a few takeout paninis and pizza, and launched a full menu when we came out of lockdown. Our kitchen was six by three foot and it was a hot summer. It was awful but we could see the demand for food because of our high street location. In the second lockdown we used our business support grant to build a new,

Another Blackpool pub with

quirky food offering

Clockwise from top: Waterloo’s Burgerhain moved in during lockdown and never left; music-themed beers on handpumps

larger kitchen with a much bigger menu. The menu is always evolving and our latest reflects a move away from café style – for example, baked potatoes and scones – to more pub food such as burgers and platters.”

Shipwreck favours local suppliers. “We sell awardwinning Lancashire roasted coffee, Lancashire tea and Lancashire crisps,” says Paul. “We have a very strong relationship with Grimes of Cleveleys where we buy our pies and its freshly baked pork crackling every day.”

It was the food that lured me there, although it was the beer that kept me there. I had been keen to try the Shipwreck Platter – comprising pork pie, Scotch egg, ham, Lancashire cheese, Stilton, crisps, homemade slaw, chutney, salad, bread and butter – and it was every bit as delicious as it looked. The highlight was the tomato chutney, also sourced from Grimes, the butchers across the road. Food is served every day until 7pm.

The new highlight for me is Shipwreck’s partnership with local restaurant Fayez Tandoori. Every Wednesday

night, customers can order from a choice of dishes –chicken tikka masala, beef madras, chicken balti or vegetable bhuna –accompanied by pilau rice, popadoms and mango chutney for £9.95.

There are five handpulls offering a variety of beer styles, 90 per cent of which come from within 25 miles. On my

visit, there was Seven Bro7hers American IPA (5 per cent), Lakeland Brewhouse Blonde (4.4 per cent), Cumbria Way Golden Ale (4.1 per cent), Manchester Brewing Co Tuesday Ruby Mild (4.9 per cent) and Manchester Brewing Co Tara Stout (5 per cent).

But there’s also the fridge and a bottle shop upstairs. Paul

says: “We have collaboration beers with Withnell’s of Chorley and Blackedge of Bolton, who brew and bottle our Cleveleys-inspired Mythic Coast Beers, which helps raise money for Care for Cleveleys and Fleetwood Sea Cadets.”

I enjoyed the Twisted Wheel Banoffee Pie (12 per cent) and Runaway Rise Like Lions Chipotle Chocolate Porter (6.5 per cent). The beer that held me hostage on my debut visit was the Blackedge Gingerbread Milk Stout (6 per cent).

The above is just a crosssection of the exciting new breed of pubs that continues to spread across the Fylde coast, making it an inviting destination for the pub tourist. Please visit soon. Contrary to the title, we don’t bite.

Jane Stuart is a writer on beer and football culture. She has 25 years of experience writing about her travels with columns in the Blackpool Gazette and Shoot. For more of her writing, visit janestuart.co.uk

Clockwise from top: Pioneering micropub No 10 Ale House offers authentic Thai dishes and always has a dark beer on

Clockwise from above: Mighty Shipwreck Platter; bottle shop; Wednesday curries with a pint

New era of pub grub

Desi pubs are breaking new ground as they serve innovative cuisine from all over the globe that complements rather than replaces beer

On a dismal February evening, Birmingham’s Keg & Grill glimmers with possibility. This street-corner pub is a welcome refuge from rain-lashed Upper Gough Street, an escape that plenty of Brummies are taking advantage of at the end of a long working Wednesday. Inside, landlord Gardy Tiwana pours drinks, including cask ale in the form of Wye Valley’s HPA (4 per cent ABV), while staff hurries here and there, delivering pints and taking orders.

Perhaps the main attraction of this simply decorated place, though, is not the beer, nor the calm atmosphere, nor even the warmth. Like many of modern Britain’s best pubs, the Keg & Grill serves excellent food: chicken tikka, daal makhani, peshwari naan, among other

classics instantly recognisable to anyone who’s been inside a high street Indian restaurant. This is what is often called a desi pub: pubs where Indian and English culture meet, where you’ll find Indian food in a pub.

It’s an intoxicating mix, but no longer unusual. Birmingham and the Black Country are full of desi pubs, while delicious, diverse food can be found in pubs up and down the land. Got a hankering for keema muttar in Birmingham, jollof rice in south London, ka num jeep in Norwich or jerk pork in rural Worcestershire? Head to the pub. Some pubs, of course, have always served good food. What sets the new breed apart is their ambition and variety, and the ease with which (unlike many

gastropubs) the food complements rather than replaces beer. A new era of pub grub has begun.

MORE FLY THAN PIE

Jess and Jo Edun (collectively, the Flygerians) cut their culinary teeth at the pub – or rather, a couple of pubs. These London sisters spent more than five years serving delicious Nigerian dishes to the pub-goers of SE15 at the Prince of Peckham and, latterly, the Old Nun’s Head, until early this year. Like many of the capital’s best new operators, they used the advantages of the pub (flexibility, open-minded customers) to launch a thriving business. Asma Khan, perhaps London’s most feted restaurant chef of the moment, built her brand – Darjeeling Express – with a residency at Soho’s Sun & 13 Cantons, for example.

The Flygerians now have their own restaurant at the Palms in Peckham, but they have fond memories of serving steak, peppers and onions with suya seasoning, plantain and black-eyed beans, and cassava chips – among other dishes –to drinkers at the Old Nun’s Head.

“A lot of people were intrigued; [they] hadn’t tried Nigerian food before,” says Jess. “We went into a pub because we wanted to reach those people who hadn’t tried our food; we wanted to make it more accessible. It’s for everyone. It was such a good experience – you’ve got the old-school geezers, the young people, the mums. There was a bloke called Eddie, he was 82, and he’d always have the fried rice. There’s no boundaries.”

Above: Coqfighter and its Korean-style fried chicken sandwiches is the brainchild of three Australians who started the business in pub kitchens

“A lot of people were intrigued. We went into a pub because we wanted to reach those who hadn’t tried our food”

Jess and Jo learnt to cook from their grandmother, Mary. They launched the business, Jess says, partly to pay tribute to her memory. She thinks that any up-and-coming operator should consider a pub residency to grow their business. “Pubs have their own clientele, [which makes] it a good spot to build a customer base,” she says.

That’s certainly been the case for Coqfighter, which sells Korean-style fried chicken sandwiches in London and Bristol. Founded in 2014 by three pals from Melbourne – Troy Sawyer, Deacon Rose and Tristan Clough – this business was virtually born in the pub. During the

pandemic, it occupied unused kitchens at pubs like the Beehive in Wandsworth, Brave Sir Robin in Crouch Hill and Star in Leyton.

“It was a great way of testing different areas,” says Troy. “Is what we do going to work here, or here, or here? Some areas didn’t work, like Chiswick or Notting Hill. But pubs were great for us during lockdown because we could be in there [and operating] in three or four days, we didn’t need to bring in any crazy kit except maybe a couple of fryers.”

The Coqfighter crew’s passion for pub kitchens began in the business’s early days. “We started in pubs,” says Deacon.

“We had no money – we literally started the company with £500 each. We couldn’t afford to buy kit; we needed somewhere that had kit and customers already. Because that had been our route to creating this business, though, it made it really easy to go back to during lockdown.”

NORWICH’S BEER THAI

If it’s now very common to find uncommon food in London pubs (like Soho’s Duck and Rice with its Cantonese grub and tank Pilsner Urquell (4.4 per cent) perhaps, or Marylebone’s Jackalope, which pairs beautiful cask ale with Chongqing noodles), it’s frequently the norm outside the capital, too. Aey Allen, who runs the Vine in Norwich, was a trailblazer, having brought the food of her native Thailand to the pub she took over in 2008.

Aey’s family ran a food shop-cumrestaurant in Bangkok, and she worked in Thai restaurants after arriving in Britain in 2000. “A pub is more relaxed [than a restaurant],” she says. “Here we have a downstairs bar, which is more informal. We do sell food downstairs, but our main dining room is upstairs – it’s a small cosy restaurant. It’s two businesses in one!”

Plenty of British pubs serve Thai food – what sets the Vine apart is the level of quality across beer and food.

Above: Aey Allen’s Vine in Norwich combines high-quality Thai food with cask ales and Belgian bottled beer

Above: Sisters Jess and Jo Edun have served their Nigerian dishes at several pubs and are now operating out of the Palms in Peckham, south London

‘Jess thinks that any upand-coming operator should consider a pub residency to grow their business’

Alongside dishes such as moo tod (crispy pork belly), ka num jeep (dumplings) and gang pha (village curry), there’s cask ale, quality lager and Belgian bottled beers. This attracts a diverse group of customers. “I tend to serve food downstairs at lunchtime, because some people who come aren’t aware we serve food,” she says. “Some people come for a drink, some people come for food, some people for both.”

Now, 14 years after taking over the Vine, Aey has clearly built up a loyal following. Post-pandemic, she had to cut her 70-dish menu in half, but regulars kept asking for old favourites that had disappeared, so she restored them as specials. “I have to put them back!” she says. “People come and say, ‘Oh, you don’t have this any more’. It’s nice – it’s helped us to keep going since the pandemic because we have a lot of regulars.”

Back at the Keg & Grill, the menu is simple by design. It’s the sort of food, Gardy says, that customers will recognise. It’s hard to argue with a man so steeped in pub culture. Gardy’s father ran the huge, student-focused Dogpool Hotel in the Birmingham suburb of Selly Park in the early 1980s, where he introduced Indian food. Fast-forward 50 years, and – after a career in the civil service –Gardy opened the Hen & Chickens

“We’re experimenting with fusion food. Like a giant Yorkshire pudding filled with lamb jalfrezi with chilli broccoli”

in Constitution Hill, where he again combined beer and Indian food, in 2010. He sold it in 2013, when he moved on to the Keg & Grill.

Gardy currently runs the Pendrell Arms, a country pub near Wolverhampton, as well as the Keg & Grill. They’re very different markets, but the same rules apply. The key to a successful food-led pub is being as unpretentious as possible. “I call it comfort eating,” he says. “People can come in here in their workwear; they don’t have to dress up, like at a restaurant. We’re a pub first of all, a pub that does food, so you come as you are.”

If the customers are anything to go by, pubs like his will be nationwide in a decade. “We had the Caravan Show [in Birmingham] a couple of weeks ago, and there was a group from Devon who said, ‘I wish we had a pub like this near us’. We’ve had people from all over Britain who have said the same. I hope more people do what we do. I grew up in pubs, I hate seeing closed pubs. [What we do] is the best of both worlds – you’ve got the beer and you’ve got the Indian food. What isn’t great about that?”

A golden era for pub food may be dawning. High-class traditional options, from the steak pie and ploughman’s on offer at Leeds’ Whitelock’s to the marvellous Scotch eggs and sausage rolls available at Bathams pubs in the Black Country, have been joined by a host of equally tantalising options that reflect modern Britain. “Serving our food in a pub was like our two cultures coming together,” says Jo. “We’re British-born but with Nigerian parents; we’re dual nationality. It worked well! It was wonderful.”

That mixture seems likely to become more common in the years to come, certainly if Gardy has anything to do with it. “At the Pendrell, we’re going to start experimenting with fusion food – Sunday roasts, for example,” he says. “Like a giant Yorkshire pudding filled with lamb jalfrezi, with dry Bombay potatoes and chilli broccoli. We’re experimenting with about 20 dishes at the moment and we’ll probably end up rolling out about five or six on Sundays.” Pub grub will never be the same again.

Will Hawkes is the author of Craft Beer London, a guide to the city’s beer scene. He is a former British Beer Writer of the Year and is Fortnum & Mason Awards Drink Writer of the Year 2021 He tweets at @Will_Hawkes

Left: Gardy at the Keg & Grill combines top Indian food with great beer

Your shout

Write to BEER, CAMRA 230 Hatfield Road, St Albans, Herts AL1 4LW or email wb.editor@camra.org.uk

The fascinating article (BEER, summer) about the history of CAMRA’s oldest branch (South) Hertfordshire founded in November 1972, mistakenly has keg Whitbread Tankard as 5.8 per cent rather than just 3.9 per cent.

That reminded me of the Daily Mirror’s three-day “investigation into the British pint” four months earlier being ahead of its time in giving the original gravities and alcohol percentages of 58 draught and 48 bottled beers. The draught beers averaged 3.5 per cent and the bottled ones 3.3.

Journalist Richard Sear wrote of keg, “It is hard to understand why this kind of draught beer is becoming so popular. Maybe it sells on fizz appeal.” But the next day reported that “So appalled are some beer drinkers by the falling quality of British beer that they have banded together to form CAMRA – Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale – to fight for a better brew.”

The double-page spread about draught beer has been displayed framed in Bathams’ Vine Inn (Bull and Bladder) at Brierley Hill for as long as I can remember.

Paul Mudge, Stafford

May I comment on one of the letters in BEER (spring) – an excellent publication, which I enjoy reading? Brian Fraser queries the use of East and West Sussex and you comment that they are separate counties. That is not so. Sussex has always has been and always will be

Where CAMRA’s fight for beer started more than 50 years ago – Farriers Arms, St Albans

one county and has only been split for administrative purposes. We have this problem here in Somerset where we have North Somerset, North East Somerset with Bath and then Somerset County, which does not include the other two administrative areas, but we are all in Somerset.

Steve Barton, Wells

In BEER’s (summer) letters, Phil Edmond remarked how many members do not have internet access and that means many do not know what is happening. Your answer was there is not enough room to list every branch festival.

How about bringing out a monthly magazine, calling it

What’s Happening or even What’s Brewing? There would be lots of room then and it could then be found in pubs for others to see what CAMRA does. Your second answer about no internet access was to suggest to visit a website! As a branch, we have complained many times on behalf of members without the internet, so there is a demand.

Stephen Dearing, Chelmsford

Superb article on canals in BEER (autumn 2021). I could almost taste the pint at the end of a hard day on the barges. However, can I take you up on your location labelling. The Rising Sun is described as ‘Herts’. That doesn’t give me any idea where it is. It gets worse: the Royal Oak in Pencelli, Wales. Why are you treating Wales as a county? At least tell me if it is north, south, west or east. Or are you dumbing it down as you don’t think any non-Welsh person will know anything about the counties? This isn’t unusual, as it tends to be followed by national newspapers, but I thought CAMRA was above that.

Hywel Williams, Cardiff

A-list treatment

LRPS

We’ve highlighted before in these articles the close working relationship between CAMRA’s Pub Heritage Group (PHG) and Historic England (HE). Over the years, this has resulted in many pubs with important historic interiors gaining statutory-listed status and the enhanced protection from unwanted changes that this delivers. More recently, HE agreed with PHG’s view that pubs with the best historic interiors need their listing descriptions enhanced where they currently have little information about the building’s interior. Good, accurate interior descriptions are vital to help planners understand historic buildings when faced with applications for change.

The results of the first enhancement exercise were announced in 2020 and came with a big bonus – the regrading of one of our chosen pubs, the stupendous Philharmonic Dining Rooms, Liverpool, from Grade II* to Grade I, the first Victorian pub to be so highly listed.

Consideration by HE of the second tranche of pubs was inevitably delayed by the pandemic, but we now have the outcomes. This time, we had put forward a few currently unlisted pubs and, happily, at least two of them have achieved that precious listed status. HE had asked us to submit 10 pubs with hardly any interior description and a great outcome is that two were

promoted from Grade II to Grade II*. In all cases there is now fully detailed information about interiors in the listing descriptions. With so much good news to report, we’re spreading it across two BEER articles.

We’ll start with one of the pubs upgraded to II*. Whitelock’s Ale House, described by John Betjeman as “the very heart of Leeds”, can be found tucked away in Turk’s Head Yard, just off bustling Briggate. Although licensed since 1715, what you see today results from a remodelling in 1895 that created a rare surviving Luncheon Bar, one of the best examples of its type. The highly atmospheric main bar and dining room have a wealth of high-quality features including brass barley-twist columns, numerous advertisement mirrors and a rare ceramic tiled bar counter with a marble and copper top. All this is squeezed into a long, narrow planform that betrays the plot’s medieval origins.

Enhanced descriptions have seen many pubs with historic interiors receive revised listings or statutory protection for the first time.

Paul Ainsworth reports on the latest tranche of changes

From left: Stunning Philharmonic Dining Rooms, Liverpool; Whitelock’s in Turk’s Head Yard, Leeds, now has a II* listing

Grade II listing for rare survivor, the Admiral Vernon in Dagenham, Essex

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL SLAUGHTER

Our next pub is quite a contrast, being a 1930s estate pub in Dagenham, Essex. The Admiral Vernon was built in the then-popular ‘brewers’ Tudor’ style, with imitation half-timbering above and buff faience cladding below. Hundreds, if not thousands, of such places popped up between the wars, but most have been changed beyond recognition internally or lost altogether. The Admiral, though, has retained most of its original plan and many of its fittings, including three-quarter-height wall panelling, original counters and barbacks, and wood-surround fireplaces. The rarity of such a survival has been recognised by the granting of Grade II listed status. Sadly, real ale is not currently served.

A rural classic now is the much-loved King’s Head, Laxfield, more commonly known as the Low House. This is one of the pubs that now enjoys a detailed

‘Features include wall tiling, bench seating and art nouveau etched glass with room names including a Public Kitchen’

listing description and there’s an awful lot to describe. For starters, it’s one of only six traditional pubs in the UK without a bar counter, beer being served direct from casks in the ground-floor cellar at the back. It also boasts one of the most remarkable pub rooms in the country – the main bar is dominated by three high-backed settles, the backs of which define a corridor running round the room. The space inside the settles faces the fireplace and is indescribably cosy. Since 2018, this wonderful pub has been community-owned.

Three more pubs on the National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors now with full revised descriptions are:

Victoria, Great Harwood, Lancashire, is a superb Edwardian pub with six rooms and a central counter with tiled front and working screens. Original features include floor-to-ceiling tiling on the walls, bench seating and art nouveau etched glass with room names including one for a Public Kitchen.

Harrow, Steep, Hampshire, is a hard-to-find rural pub whose two tiny, delightfully rustic bars have distinctive and rare hatches for service from the ground-floor ‘cellar’ plus beer served direct from the cask. It has been in the same family ownership since 1932.

Red Lion, London SW1, was originally divided into three rooms, as evidenced by the three entrances and remains of partitions. This small pub has highly decorative late-Victorian etched and diamond-cut mirrors.

Clockwise from top left: No bar counter at the King’s Head, Laxfield; Victoria, Great Harwood, Lancashire, has six rooms and central counter; delightful rustic bars at Harrow, Steep, Hampshire; etched glass and mirrors at the Red Lion, London SW1

A British-brewed beer created in support of Ukrainian refugees was recently served in Parliament giving MPs and ministers the opportunity to help raise money for the relief effort.

White Crow, a 4.5 per cent ABV blonde ale brewed by Bridgehouse brewery in Keighley, West Yorkshire, was a guest beer at the Strangers’ Bar in the Houses of Parliament. All profits from the specially brewed beer will be donated to the #HelpUkraine Emergency Appeal.

“We were greatly disturbed by the events in Ukraine, which struck a chord

with everyone working at the brewery,” said Bridgehouse brewery manager James Kelly. “We therefore decided to do what we do best and get brewing to support those in need and launched a special one-off blonde ale to raise funds for the HelpUkraine appeal.”

The brewery has been working with the Brew for Ukraine initiative, which has more than 600 breweries signed up worldwide, including in excess of 70 in the UK.

Each supporting brewery is producing original Ukrainian recipes or themed

beer to raise money to support the relief effort, with more than $1m raised worldwide so far.

Brew for Ukraine organiser Steve Davison said: “We’ve had a fantastic response from independent brewers in the UK and worldwide, who have come together to Brew for Ukraine and raise much-needed funds to help the relief effort.

“It’s great to see one of the beers being poured in Parliament, with MPs having the chance to give their support.”

UK

brewers have been creating new beers in support of Ukraine, and raising money for refugees and charities

Pictured from left: SIBA’s Barry Watts, Robbie Moore MP, Steve Davison and Mike Wood MP

Shire horse charity walk

A Ukraine flag was proudly flown by farmer Jamie Alcock as he drove his Shire horses, Willam and Millie, along with Boo Boo Beithe the farm dog, from St Athan in South Wales to Hampton Court in London.

Travelling at an average speed of 3.2mph, the horses were given a two-day pit stop at Hook Norton brewery on their way to their final destination.

All funds raised from his charity drive are going to Police Care UK, the Royal Air Forces Association and the Shire Horse Society.

Alcock was inspired to take on the 2021 challenge in memory of his brother, PC John Alcock, who was an officer with Grampian Police, stationed at Elgin in Morayshire. PC Alcock died in 2017, 14 years after being injured on duty in August 2003.

Alcock also chose to fundraise for the Royal Air Forces Association this year thanks to a strong family link to the service.

He said: “I believe that the support we offer public servants like members of the RAF and the police is very important and should be available to them no matter how long ago they served. “The charities that offer this support are close to my heart. Some pay a price that they carry for the rest of their lives.”

To donate, you can visit Alcock’s fundraising page at peoplesfundraising.com/fundraising/shirehorses2022

Above: Licensee Natasha Hartfield of the Flying Horse in Smarden held a cupcake sale, which raised £600

Sheps Ukraine fundraising campaign

Faversham-based brewer and pub company Shepherd Neame has pledged £20,000 to kick-start a fundraising effort to support the people of Ukraine.

The independent family company will be donating the money to the British Red Cross’s DEC Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal. It has also launched a Just Giving campaign for the appeal, which is being promoting right across its pub and hotel estate to raise awareness for the cause and to encourage customers to give money.

Left: Millie and Willam with Boo Boo Beithe and Jamie Alcock, here being overflown by AeroSuperBatics WingWalkers

Some Shepherd Neame pubs are also getting involved to support the people of Ukraine, collecting supplies and raising funds. For example, Natasha Hartfield, licensee of the Flying Horse in Smarden, Kent, held a cupcake sale at the pub, which raised £600.

Would you ask for a top-up?

At the moment, a pint of beer isn’t defined in law as 100 per cent liquid, which means consumers could be short-changed and don’t have any recourse if a top-up is refused. If you were served a short pint in a pub, would you be happy to ask for a top-up?

I nearly always ask for a top-up. Politely. It was difficult with table service as it would often take 10 minutes to come back, but it didn’t stop me. Many Good Beer Guide-listed pubs always give a full pint round here anyway. Managed pubs seem to be a particular problem – if you know where I live, you will know to whom I refer –with regard to short pints. If your pint is 10 per cent short, that is 40 or 50p. Over an evening, that could amount to £2 and for a month, £20. With the cost of living crisis, that is significant.

I have never been refused a top-up, but I have received a few with bad grace. Those pubs do not get visited again if I can help it.

Nick Boley

I always ask for a top-up if I get short measure and nobody has ever refused, although one barmaid seemed quite annoyed and banged the glass on the bar and spilled quite a bit more.

Phil Ross

I have been refused top-ups, but only sometimes. The biggest problem is attracting the attention of the bar staff after they think they have finished dealing with your order. With beer more than £5 a pint, this is annoying.

Elvis Evans

A cheeky way to ask for a top–up, but one which I’ve never had the courage to use… Customer: “Is there room for a double whisky in this glass?” Bar person: “Certainly.” Customer: “Fill it with beer then.” Michael Hughes

I’m not shy about asking for a top-up. However, I think the frequent need to do so in some establishments is a symptom of a wider problem – staff working in pubs who are generally poorly trained. I rarely get the impression that I’ve been given a short measure in a deliberate attempt to diddle me – usually it’s just ignorance.

Ben Wilkinson

I am unhappy with asking for a top-up. Effectively, what the pub is doing is stealing money from you by serving a short measure. Frequently, they use tight sparklers in unlined glasses to maximise the froth. Having said that, the best bar staff will notice the measure is short when it settles and top it up without having to be asked.

Steve Evans

Sometimes, a recently tapped cask might be a bit lively, so bar staff will suggest waiting till the excess froth subsides, or to take a sip of the beer to give enough space for the top-up to be added.

On a busy Friday or Saturday night, just before closing, I might not bother staff with a request for a top-up unless it is very short measure, as they will probably be rather busy.

Iain Loe

All comments are taken from a discussion on CAMRA’s online forum at discourse.camra.org.uk

WIN BEER!

Compiled by James Daly. The quizmaster’s decision on correct answers is final when choosing the prize winners.

*The prize can only be awarded to entrants on the UK mainland. Readers can enter the competition multiple times, but can only win a month’s membership to Beer52.com once. Repeat winners will be offered a £10 voucher for Beer52’s online shop (the minimum spend of £30 applies).

GetQuizzic-ale

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l Send entries to Quizzic-ale, BEER, CAMRA, 230 Hatfield Road, St Albans, Hertfordshire AL1 4LW, by 31 August 2022.

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Enter online

To enter online, follow this link: surveymonkey.co.uk/r/ beerquizautumn2022

1 What was the Champion Beer of Britain in 1994?

A:

2 In George Orwell’s 1984, two of the party’s slogans are ‘War is Peace’ and ‘Freedom is Slavery’. What’s the third slogan?

A:

3 What happened at Actium in 31 BCE?

A: 4 Where was the revolution of flowers?

A: 5 What is a calliope?

A:

6 Which Kent brewery produces ales Red Top, Copper Top and Gold Top?

A:

7 Who said: “We must be the great arsenal of democracy”?

A: 8 “On every street in every city there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody” is the tag line for which 1970s film?

A:

9 What is a Ringelmann chart used for?

A: 10 In what year did Belgium become independent?

A:

11 What’s the name of the 1970s TV sitcom starring Leonard Rossiter and Alfred Molina?

A:

12 Which song has the lines “Turn up the music, turn down the lights / I got a feelin’ I’m gonna’ be all right”?

A:

13 Who first ran the 1,500m in under 3 minutes 30 seconds?

A:

14 Who said: “When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful”?

A:

15 Which animal has musth glands?

A:

16 In which sport have Guildford Heat been British champions?

A:

17 Gateshead school, Ferndean Manor and Moor House are among the residences of which 19th-century literary heroine?

A:

18 What’s the connection between Sir Paul McCartney, President Barack Obama and film star Marilyn Monroe?

A:

19 Which brewery has produced ales Mating Surfaces and Spezial?

A:

20 What is linonophobia?

A:

Summer winners: Paul Booth, Nottingham; Brian Demby, London; Paul Gower, Crowthorne; Paul Hodges, Bristol; John McNamara, Bathgate

Second City brews

It might not be a beer mecca, but Birmingham still has plenty to offer

Even proud Brummies admit their city is one of the British beer scene’s notable underperformers, considering its size and brewing tradition. Birmingham is Europe’s biggest single local authority by population and the wider conurbation is the secondbiggest urban area in the UK, yet with fewer breweries and specialist beer venues than smaller cities like Manchester.

Beer retailer Krishan Rajput laments that his home town never experienced the sort of beer explosion that swept London in the past decade, but points out that new bars and adventurous breweries continue to open. A true enthusiast who began turning his father’s off-licence, Stirchley Wines & Spirits, into one of Britain’s best bottle shops back in 1989, Krishan helped prompt some of the beery activity himself with his involvement in initiatives like Birmingham Beer Bash. With his advice, I picked out a selection brewed mainly in the city, including from Attic and Dig Brew, which I’m keeping back for a later column, and Orbit, whose kveik beer I featured in the last issue.

Birmingham Brewing Co, founded in 2016, just around the corner from the shop, offers accessible veganfriendly, gluten-free session beers in unfiltered cans. I was particularly impressed with Stirchley Lager (4.4 per cent ABV), a bold, dry-hopped British take on the style. A punchy lemon and mowngrass aroma with floral hints heralds a muscly malt palate with vanilla wafer crispness, and the beer finishes with a surprisingly delicate dryness.

Fixed Wheel’s No Brakes (5.9 per cent, unfiltered can) is an old-school West Coast IPA with plenty of firm malt and a decently clean and bitter finish. But there’s plenty of hoppy complexity, too: orange, honey and lychee aromas, grapes and a dose of pine in the mouth, then a bittersweet finish. The Halesowen brewery was set up by keen cyclist Scott Povey in 2014.

Fixed Wheel was an inspiration for contemporary producer

Burning Soul, founded by old friends Rich Murphy and Chris Small in 2016 on the northern edge

of the city centre. Coconut Porter (7 per cent, unfiltered can), made with a blend of English speciality malts and roasted coconut, has become something of a signature beer –and with good reason. Besides the inevitable suggestion of plain chocolate Bounty bars, there’s sultana fruit, brown toast and a good plug of earthy bittering hops to pin it all down.

Burning Soul’s site was once occupied by Two Towers, something of a lone voice when founded in 2010 and since relocated to behind the Gunmakers Arms in the Jewellery Quarter. Its traditionally inclined range includes the excellent (if wincingly punning) Jewellery Porter (5 per cent, bottle-conditioned), with a chocolate aroma and classic coffee, dusty grain and

light roast on the palate. There’s more dark grain and an autumnal hop burr on a lingering and slightly austere finish.

Beowulf, founded as a Yardley micro in 1997, is now in nearby Chasewater Country Park in Staffordshire. Its historically informed Strong Mild (7.5 per cent, bottleconditioned) is a hefty, rich and fruity dark amber brew with notes of cherry truffle, malt loaf, dusty chaff and herbal bitterness.

I’m delighted that, unlike some rivals, Krishan still supports established names alongside shiny newcomers.

Find more at stirchleywines.co.uk

Des de Moor is one of the country’s leading writers on bottled beer, and author of The CAMRA Guide to London’s Best Beer, Pubs & Bars. Follow him at @desdemoor and read more of his reviews at desdemoor.co.uk

Tribute to Cornwall

Chef and MasterChef: The Professionals quarter-finalist Benjamin Palmer shares his love of Cornish produce and beer pairings

I’m from Nottingham originally, but when I was really young, we moved down to Cornwall. Growing up by the sea surrounded by boats obviously gets you into the whole fishing vibe. We caught our own mackerel and pollock and to me, Cornish produce is just prime product. I used to go fishing with my grandad on his little boat. We would catch mackerel. It was in such abundance, you’d literally put your rod in and be pulling them out every two seconds.

We’d go home and cook them on the barbecue with salad and potatoes. I loved it. As I got older, in the summer with friends, we added beer into that mix as well. It’s just relaxing and makes you happy.

Being surrounded by fresh fish landing daily and awesome meat, I can’t think of any reason why I wouldn’t want to be a chef and get to use those kinds of cool ingredients. It just makes sense for me to be in the food industry.

I’ve had many career highlights so far, including the privilege of doing a stage, which is like an unpaid internship, working in Gordon Ramsay’s threeMichelin-starred restaurant in Chelsea, which was epic. The level of standards it has and the pressure and speed it works at was amazing to see.

Obviously, getting to the quarter-finals of MasterChef: The Professionals a few years ago, and cooking for the likes of Jay Rayner, Charles Campion, Michel Roux Jr, Monica Galetti and Gregg Wallace was also a high point.

I’d always had a dream of going back to my home town of Looe one day and opening a restaurant using local produce, and four years ago I did that with the Sardine Factory. In the restaurant, we do feature some beer in our cooking. The number one dish for this is fish and chips. It’s an obvious choice for the menu because people love fish and chips, but beer can really enhance it.

We use a Cornish ale called Tribute, or sometimes we’ll use Doom Bar as well. The hoppiness of ale adds to the flavour of the batter. It gives an umami flavour to the dish, and it carbonates

the batter as well, which is what makes it crispy. Aside from the traditional beer-battered fish, beer can also be a really interesting pairing for food. Some people are put off by the heaviness and acidity of beer, but sometimes it pairs better than a glass of wine.

I’d always recommend a beer with fish barbecued on the bone and served with a wild garlic mayonnaise and homemade fries. Or, when my wife and I eat fresh oysters, it’s a bottle of beer we have as opposed to a glass of wine or champagne.

Estrella’s Inedit, created with Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, is a beer flavoured with coriander, liquorice and orange that’s made to be drunk with food. It’s a great option because it feels less gassy than a standard beer. And we shouldn’t always have to drink wine with food. That being said, I do love wine. Another dream I have is to have a restaurant abroad and last year I got to open a pop-up restaurant in Greece, in a little town near Kalamata. I took my local dishes over there and we did a kind of Greek/English-inspired menu for a week, which was really cool.

While out there, I found some great Greek white wine. It’s definitely up and coming as a wine country. It’s reasonably priced and they’ve got unique flavours to them. It’s definitely one to watch.

“Aside from beer-battered fish, beer can also be a really interesting pairing for food”

l Benjamin Palmer (above); The Sardine Factory in Looe, Cornwall (below)

UP TO DATE

Caledonianaxed

EDINBURGH’S Caledonian brewery is to be shut by Heineken, ending more than 150 years of brewing that included winning Champion Beer of Britain with Deuchar’s IPA.

The global Dutch giant says Caledonian was “economically unviable” and was not brewing to its 50,000-barrel capacity on Victorian equipment that needed major investment.

It adds it has reached an agreement with Greene King to brew Deuchar’s IPA (3.8 per cent) and Maltsmiths (a 4.6 per cent

American-style IPA) at the Belhaven brewery in Dunbar. It’s not known if Edinburgh Castle (4.1 per cent), a traditional Scottish 80 Shilling ale, will survive.

Heineken took over Scottish & Newcastle Breweries in 2008 which had bought 30 per cent of Caledonian’s shares four years earlier.

Caledonian was founded in 1869 by George Lorimer and Robert Clark. Based alongside the Caledonian railway line, the brewery, then named Lorimer and Clark, carved out a unique route to success by producing a Scotch Bitter that was exported to

North-East England. In 1919 the brewery was bought by Vaux, but sales of Scotch fell and in 1987 Vaux said it would close the Edinburgh brewery. It was saved by a buy-out led by head brewer Russell Sharp and Dan Kane, CAMRA’s Scotland organiser.

They renamed the brewery Caledonian and achieved notable success in 1991 when they bought the rights to Deuchar’s IPA.

With the closure of Caledonian, Edinburgh will lose yet another historic brewery, one that played a leading role in the revival of Scottish beer in the 1980s and 90s.

Get out and visit the pub

CAMRA is powering through its Summer of Pub campaign, which runs through to 29 August, encouraging people to head to their local and support it after a difficult two years.

Pubs and breweries across the UK have been asked to organise events to celebrate the first summer without restrictions. These will be captured by CAMRA on an interactive map, allowing beer lovers to seek out pubs, clubs and taprooms that are running events nearby.

Pubs, breweries and branches can help spread the word with a range of marketing materials available through CAMRA.

As part of the celebrations, CAMRA is supporting the Good Beer Co’s initiative to get Thank Brew into independent pubs and breweries around the country. Thank Brew is an easy drinking ale created by Adnams’ Fergus Fitzgerald and all profits will support the Eden project’s Big Lunch, Together Coalition’s Thank You Day and Reset Communities and Refugees,

supporting Ukrainian refugees arriving in the UK.

CAMRA push to improve cider quality Hop growers face cost triple whammy Brewing pioneer and hop maestro retires End of the line for champion brewer

● Heineken closes historic Edinburgh brewery

KEEP

with all the What’s Brewing news, events and campaigns on our website, wb.camra.org.uk

Plea for pub support

● Energy crisis threatens to shut pubs permanently

BEER drinkers in Northamptonshire are asking a local MP to fight for help for pubs facing the soaring cost of energy, which threatens to close them permanently.

Northamptonshire

CAMRA branch chairman Bernie Peal has written to Daventry MP and government chief whip Chris Heaton-Harris

tasking him to lobby for a pubs’ support package.

The plea comes after the licensee of the Live and Let Live in Harpole, Miranda Richardson, cited soaring energy prices as the reason she would be ending her tenancy in August.

In the letter, Bernie said: “As a local consumer group, Northamptonshire CAMRA is worried about the ability of patrons to support local pubs through this tough time. We know pubs are

hard hit by the cost-ofbusiness crisis, but consumers have the cost-of-living crisis too. We will continue to support our locals where possible, but they also need support from the government.”

CAMRA national chairman Nik Antona added: “It would be a scandal if pubs that have survived the pandemic are forced to close for good because they can’t cope with high energy bills.”

Growers face triple whammy

BRITISH hop growers are reaching out to brewers and calling for urgent talks on the prices they agreed as wage, energy and fertiliser inflation hits the industry.

The board of the British Hop Association commissioned John Pelham of farm consultants

Andersons Midlands to identify the single-year inflation facing growers (left) for the 2022 crop and what this means for the overall cost of production.

Pelham’s found growers are faced with a minimum 15 per cent increase in wage costs, nearly a 100 per cent rise in fuel bills and significant increases in fertilisers, spray chemicals, string and other inputs.

The British Hop Association is seeking the full support of brewers, hop merchants and traders to ensure all growers are able to achieve a fair price that covers the cost of production. Without it growers will be unable to survive.

New bid for a full pint as Crown mark returns

CAMRA is asking government to use the return of the Crown mark and changes to weights and measures legislation to ensure consumers always get a full pint of beer. While the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

acknowledges “the Crown stamp gave customers confidence that they were not being sold a short measure of beer,” CAMRA wants government to make sure pub-goers have a legal right to receive a 100 per cent liquid pint.

Currently a pint of beer

isn’t defined in law as 100 per cent liquid.

CAMRA national chairman Nik Antona said: “The government now has a fantastic opportunity to give consumers the right to a full pint – defined as 100 per cent liquid as part of the new consultation.”

Hop growers are seeking revised prices for this year’s crop as inflation hits industry

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Learn and discover cider

● New content focusses on cider and perry

CAMRA championed cider and its producers with some of the latest content added to its online Learn & Discover platform.

For cider and perry enthusiasts wanting to learn more about their favourite drink, there are new guides exclusively for CAMRA members:

CiderVarietalsis the second of a two-part series by cider writer Rachel Hendry. It is a deep dive into apple varieties and

cider varietals, exploring the history of categorising cider apples and how the English Apple Classification System assists both cider makers and drinkers. It also covers analysing tannin qualities to differentiating between bittersweets and bittersharps.

In BringingCidertothe Table filmmaker and author Bill Bradshaw presents his third video highlighting how fine dining and the wider hospitality industry values cider as an ingredient and

accompaniment to food. The latest film includes an interview with chef owner of the Robin Wylde restaurant and Lilac Wine Bar in Lyme Regis Harriet Mansell.

Pommelier Susannah Mansfield provides an extensive guide into what can go wrong with cider and perry in CiderFaults Detailing the biochemistry behind undesirable flavours and appearances, Susannah identifies why certain flaws happen and what can be done to avoid them occurring.

Hogs Back hop crop blessed

SURREY-BASED Hogs

Back brewery welcomed 200 guests to a blessing of its Tongham hop garden by local vicar Claire Holt.

The blessing of crops is a tradition dating back centuries in rural communities, as a way of

encouraging plentiful harvests. Hogs Back’s 8.5-acre hop garden is home to 6,000 plants.

Hogs Back MD Rupert Thompson (pictured with Rev Holt) said: “Centuries ago, crop blessing was a way of

recognising the interdependence between man and the natural world, and today, we've come full circle, with the environment our single biggest focus after a couple of centuries where we forgot to respect it.”

City pub rescues need help

COMMUNITY-OWNED pubs champion, the Plunkett Foundation, has called for relaxed rules so groups can buy urban sites.

Foundation research revealed improved community rights legislation, flexible funding and support would boost the number of urban community-owned pubs, breathe new life into neglected buildings and transform neighbourhoods.

The research found the most common reason for an urban community pub failing to reach trading status was private competition for the purchase of the building. More than half (52 per cent) of 200 community pub projects in urban areas that contacted Plunkett Foundation for support and advice were outbid when trying to buy their pub through competitive process. Groups also cited the challenge of raising enough money to meet the escalating price of urban pubs.

Citra creator retires

Hop maestro steps down as head brewer

OAKHAM Ales brewing legend John Bryan (pictured) is to retire, after more than 26 years at the Peterborough brewery.

He celebrated the announcement by taking the controls of a restored Spitfire and doing a barrel roll over the countryside.

An innovative and hugely influential figure in UK brewing, Bryan joined Oakham in October 1995.

Within weeks he was promoted to head brewer following the retirement of founder John Wood.

Influenced by his predecessor’s open-minded approach to hop selection, John Bryan was one of the first UK brewers to travel to the USA to witness the hop harvest in 2002.

Bryan’s 2009 visit was to go down in brewing history as he was introduced Citra.

He still jokes about it claiming: “It was my first sensible commercial

decision at Oakham Ales – to brew a sessionable beer with that first tranche rather than the strong IPA I initially had in mind.” Citra was Champion Golden Beer of Great Britain in 2014 and 2019.

Bryan won’t be stepping away completely. He will remain as a partner in Oakham and continue with his annual visits to the USA. The brewing will be left in the safe hands of newly appointed head brewer Mark Tetlow.

Cash injection for Welsh locals

WELSH pubs are to get support from Pub is The Hub to offer essential services, including food stores after being given a £25,000 cash boost.

The organisation is supporting diversification projects for Welsh pubs after receiving the grant

from The Prince’s Countryside Fund.

The two-year programme will enable Pub is The Hub to help locals provide much-needed services and amenities in rural areas across Wales. This could include a wide range of projects such as village

stores, cafes, IT hubs, allotments and libraries.

Pub is The Hub Wales advisor and director Malcolm Harrison said: “We are looking for good publicans in Wales with pubs that can offer a vital service to people in their area.”

CAMRA’s prestigious Campaigner of the Year Award has gone to cider writer and podcaster Gabe Cook. Gabe (pictured) was given the award at the organisation’s Members’ Weekend and Conference in Eastbourne for his work supporting and promoting cider and and its makers.

It is the first time the award has gone to a cider campaigner.

Top title’s cider first ‘Best in the world’

THE story of the Campaign’s first 50 years has won a top international publishing award.

50YearsofCAMRAby

Laura Hadland took first place in the Gourmand awards. Now in its 27th year, the international awards saw entries from more than 110 countries.

Having made it to the final three, Laura’s book was awarded the coveted first place by a team of judges and a copy has been on display for delegates at the World Cookbook Fair.

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End of the road for Pale Rider

SHEFFIELD’S Kelham Island brewery has brewed the last batch of its award-winning Pale Rider and is to close.

Launched in 1990 by the late Dave Wickett at the Fat Cat pub, it was the first new independent brewery in Sheffield for more than 50 years.

Push to raise cider quality

Bid

THE Campaign has joined forces with makers of real cider and perry across the UK to call for tax reforms that will support highquality production.

The Campaign has written an open letter urging the Treasury to increase the minimum juice content of cider – the amount needed for it to be classed as one – to support producers of =high-quality versions.

Current tax rules only

require cider to contain 35 per cent juice, which means drinks topped up with water or concentrates can be counted as one for tax purposes, which the Campaign thinks misleads the buying public.

CAMRA’s real ale, cider and perry campaigns director Gillian Hough said: “CAMRA is campaigning for a lasting change to give consumers confidence that when they buy a product marketed as cider it contains at least 50 per cent fresh pressed juice.

“We welcome the

government’s decision to expand cider’s ‘farmgate exemption’ into a small producers’ scheme and are asking that it steps forward to support the makers of high-quality, high-juice ciders and perries.”

CAMRA’s campaign has the backing of many producers. Cidentro Cider House founder Hiranthi Cook said: “As a new cider maker producing cider using 100 per cent pressed juice I’m all for the government increasing the minimum content to at least 50 per cent.”

It moved to a larger, adjacent site in 1999 and it was here, Pale Rider (5.2. per cent) was brewed, becoming Champion Beer of Britain in 2004.

The brewery said: “It is with deep sadness that we are having to announce that we and the brewery will shortly be closing. We would like to thank everybody who supported us over the last 32 years – especially our staff and customers. The Fat Cat will remain open.”

Former Kelham Island brewers have gone on to be involved in a number of other influential breweries including Brewdog, Tapped and Thornbridge.

Backers step in to save town’s hop festival

SHEPHERD Neame has joined a community effort to ensure the town’s hugely popular hop festival (right) will go ahead this year.

The free annual event has been running for more than three decades and attracts thousands of visitors to the town. But

last month organisers warned that this year’s event, the first after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, could be axed due to a cash shortfall.

Following a community fundraising campaign, along with the addition of five new sponsors joining

one of the event’s long-term principal backers, Shepherd Neame, it will now go ahead as planned on 3-4 September.

For more details of the programme including bookings for campers for the weekend go to www. favershamhopfestival.org

BREW FOR UKRAINE BEER REACHES MPS

A BRITISH-BREWED beer created in support of Ukrainian refugees has been served in the Houses of Parliament giving MPs and ministers the chance to help raise money for the relief effort.

White Crow, a 4.5 per cent blonde ale brewed by Bridgehouse brewery in Keighley, West Yorkshire, was the guest beer at the Strangers’ Bar. All profits go to the #HelpUkraine Emergency Appeal.

The brewery has been working with the Brew For Ukraine initiative which has more than 600 breweries signed up worldwide including over 70 in the UK. Each brewery is producing Ukrainian recipes or themed beer to raise money to support the relief effort with more $1m raised so far.

CENTENARY WIN FOR RUGBY CLUB

ARDROSSAN

Academicals Rugby Club scooped Ayrshire & Wigtownshire branch Club of the Year award for the first time in its centenary year. Club and CAMRA member Allan Merry has been instrumental in introducing real ale into the Accies’ with a selection of Scottish ales available on traditional handpump and keykeg fount.

The Accies now goes on to the next stage and compete against rivals from Scotland and Northern Ireland for the SNIB Club of the Year title.

BLOOMING MARVELLOUS

FRIENDSHIP has blossomed into a blooming partnership for licensee Lindsey Smethills with the opening of a florist in the beer garden of her Swinton pub.

Best pal, florist Danielle Brooke, found herself without premises so Lindsey offered the business a home in the White Swan’s garage (right). It took two weeks to empty, clean and paint the garage, and now business is blooming. As the beer garden is close by, Danielle has dressed the tables with flowers.

INNOVATION PAYS OFF FOR HOP FARM

WILL Kirby and Henry Smith of Brook House Hops in Herefordshire have won Hop Farmer of the Year at the Royal Three Counties Food & Farming Awards. The Bromyard operation has invested in the latest picking, processing and storage technology over the last five years and is rapidly building a reputation with brewers for the pioneering work it is doing to lead the British hop revival.

NEW CONTENT FOR LEARN & DISCOVER

AWARD-WINNING beer writer and founder of YouTube’s Craft Beer Channel Jonny Garrett, has created two videos explaining key problems impacting brewers for CAMRA’s education platform Learn & Discover.

One asks what do we

mean by independent, and why does it matter? Jonny explores the benefits independents bring to consumer choice and to the brewing and hospitality industries, as well as what does it mean to support “independent businesses”.

The other asks what can I do to champion cask ale? Jonny talks us through how we can all make a difference by supporting cask beer.

To see all Learn & Discover content visit camra.org.uk/learndiscover/

CAMPAIGN BACKS PUB PRIDE EVENTS

AS part of CAMRA’s Summer of Pub campaign to promote pub-going, the Campaign partnered with Ask for Clive to promote Pub Pride in May.

Pub Pride was an opportunity for communities to celebrate the event locally and promote inclusive and welcoming spaces for LGBTQ+ people everywhere.

FEST’S POIGNANT CHARITY CHOICE

NORWICH’S City of Ale celebration raised money for Norfolk and Waveney Mind in memory of city publican Carl Newell (pictured below with partner Dawn Hopkins, licensee of the Rose Inn).

Newell lost his life to depression and Hopkins was asked to choose this year’s charity.

Hopkins said: “Norfolk & Waveney Mind was a huge support immediately after Carl’s death.”

Donations can be made at justgiving.com/ fundraising/city-of-ale

If you have news for this page email editor@camra.org.uk

Going for growth – licensee Lindsey, left, and florist Danielle

Ask the expert – what is a pint of beer?

In a regular series for WB Online our experts answer reader questions. Here John O’Donnell tackles a pint measure

IN the UK, the volume of a pint is defined as 568ml (20 Imperial fluid ounces) of liquid. This measurement includes the frothy layer of foam on top of the beer, commonly known as a beer’s head. The head consists of gas bubbles – mainly carbon dioxide (CO2) – surrounded by hydrophobic proteins deriving from barley and wheat, alongside polypeptides bonded with hop alpha-acids. Given enough time, the foam will dissipate, reverting to a liquid, hence why the head is included as part of a pint’s quantification.

Most pubs use brimmeasure glasses that, when filled to the top, will contain a whole pint or slightly over. CAMRA beer festivals and some pubs use line-measure glasses, which are slightly over-sized and have a mark near the top indicating the level of one pint. Few pubs may even use metered pumps, which accurately dispense in multiples of a half pints.

One of the problems with using brim-measure glasses is that it is almost impossible to achieve a full pint of liquid

due to the head. Over the years, it has become generally accepted by trading standards bodies for a pint to comprise of a minimum of 95 per cent liquid and five per cent head, although CAMRA’s policy has long been that consumers should be able to expect a full liquid pint.

The British Beer & Pub Association’s guidelines for publicans state a pint served in a brim-measure glass should always contain a minimum of 95 per cent liquid. It also advises that if the level does not meet the customer’s requirements, it must always be recognised they can ask for a top-up, which should always be received with good grace and never refused.

If a pub is found to be regularly serving under 95 per cent the owner could be prosecuted. Weights and measure legislation in the UK is enforced by local authority Trading Standards (Shared Regulatory Services in Wales or the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland), providing consumers with protection against

‘One of the problems with using brim-measure glasses is that it is almost impossible to achieve a full pint of liquid due to the head’

rogue traders. When Trading Standards officers visit a pub suspected of underserving, they will typically purchase a number of pints to get an average measure. They will add a defoaming agent to collapse the head, decanting the liquid into a measuring cylinder to determine the volume of liquid served.

l Haveyouaquestionforone ofourexperts–ifsosenditto wb.editor@camra.org.uk

John O’Donnell (pictured) is a member of CAMRA’s Technical Advisory Group, Great British Beer Festival bar manager and editor of Beer Buzz