Campaign For Real Ale

“Why does Leek not have a beer festival?”

With its great and diverse range of pubs and bars, surely a beer festival would only enhance the town?

This question has been asked on so many occasions over the years in public and at very many local, county and regional CAMRA meetings.

Leek has always been slightly better than most other small towns: and in my opinion is quite simply the best for its range of cask ale pubs than any town I have visited in my entire adult life.

CAMRA was formed in 1971 to address the very limited choice us pub going customers had in the way of cask conditioned (or real) ale, as the huge ‘big six’ brewing empires had a controlling stake in over 80 per cent of pubs in the UK. Therefore, they could and did control what was allowed to be sold in most British pubs leaving a very poor choice of decent beer indeed. Those were the days when most smaller, local breweries which often had a handful of tied pubs were merged or taken over by the big boys and were promptly converted to selling the big national brands of the day.

Remember the generic bland stuff the British public had forced on them because they had no other choice? Remember the massive publicity drives that we had forced on us, that only the huge brewing empires could afford? Harp Lager, Watney’s Red Barrel, Double Diamond ‘works wonders,’ and Strongbow with real arrows hitting the bar top next to a glass of the almost undrinkable stuff they told us was cider?

Real cask conditioned ale was quietly removed from the bars of most of the ‘big six’ owned pubs as they privately wanted to fade it away, to take the ageold skill out of brewing, and wanted everything to be dull, uniformed and pasteurized, super chilled pap. They wanted everything to be done on the cheap, to the detriment of discerning pub consumers.

CAMRA addressed this ‘gap’ in the real ale market by slowly and tentatively, organising small scale beer festivals, where a few smaller independent brewers were able to sell their product to an eager and thirsty public.

Stoke Beer Festival was the local and early pioneers of this phenomenon by staging its first event under canvas in the grounds of Keele University in 1980. Stoke was to grow to one of the biggest in its day but was soon surpassed by many others.

Then a beer festival was the one sure place that eager beer drinkers knew they would be able to get a real choice of different types, styles and strengths of decent cask ale, from breweries based all over the UK. In those early days of beer festivals, if you had a choice of 12 different cask ales, you counted yourself as lucky, and were the proverbial, ‘child in a sweetie shop.’

Well dear readers, if you translate that thought into the context of todays pub scene in Leek, then how is this for a fascinating statistic? Admittedly it was pre-pandemic, and a lot has certainly changed since then, but as recently as the summer of 2018, a group of local CAMRA members did a survey of all Leek pubs.

On a single Saturday afternoon within a twohour time window, between 1pm and 3pm, no less than 84 different real ales were on sale from an amazing range of 44 different breweries. The weakest strength was 3.2 per cent and the strongest was 6 per cent. There were light ones, dark ones, pale ales, IPA’s, APA’s, bitters, citrus beers, milds, stouts, porters, wheat beers, as well as a decent range of real cider too.

And all of this is served at correctly controlled pub condition, which cannot always be said for some sold at beer festivals. If this is all on sale in our home town, then why would Leek even begin to contemplate hosting a beer festival?

Is it any wonder that the very, many busloads of enthusiastic CAMRA members from other branches from far and wide who visit Leek regularly, have dubbed the town as: “Leek-A Beer Festival Every Day.” How lucky we all are. Cheers!

Steve Barton

Chairman of the Staffordshire Moorlands branch of CAMRA