A Lesser Class Of Member?

I joined CAMRA last August.  I paid my £25 online and received my membership pack in three days.  All well and good.  I also received my membership card.  It looks something like this :

 It was a plastic covered adhesive sticker thing attached to my welcome letter.  I presume it had all my details printed on it at the same time as the rest of the letter, using either an inkjet or laser printer.  Also all well and good.  Until, after a couple of weeks of carrying it around and producing it for various events, the details started wearing off.  Seems the surface is too shiny to hold printing ink for long. Hmm. Well.  Slight flaw there.  Did the Sages of St. Albans expect it to hold the letters for a whole year of usage?  "How do other members of the Beard Club deal with this issue?" I wondered.  Until one day, I was in my local CAMRA discount pub and saw some people flash this for money off :

This one looked much more fit for purpose.  Solid plastic, firmly printed with non-wearing ink.  I thought "I paid my money too.  Why do I not have one?  I presume there's a reason. So where and how do I get one?"

A short time after this, the words on my cardboard/plastic card finally became illegible.  I emailed CAMRA and told them their printing of my card was not much cop and nobody could read whether it was valid or not.  They emailed back promptly thanking me for my input and three days later my replacement arrived :

This time I realised I had learned my lesson.  I had it laminated.

Are there conditions attached to the silver card?  I couldn't find them on the Beards' website.  Do you have to pay several years in advance?  Be a member for a decade?  Be over 40?  Know Roger Protz personally from being on the SWP Central Committee with him? 

Or am I displaying the archetypal characteristic of the CAMRA member - that of entitlement?

Old Beer Ads #4 - Webster's Yorkshire Bitter (1990)

The memory of Websters is now fading, even though it hasn't been gone all that long. I've heard the ads with the talking dray horses were reasonably popular in their day (and certainly more popular than those with Professional Cliched Yorkshireman, Frederick Sewards Trueman).  But I chose this particular one because it actually mentions the fact of the brewery being closed and shipped off a few years before it happened.

Like Boddingtons, Websters is a once famous and widespread brand that has died a slow death and vanished from memory once its home brewery closed.  Grand Metropolitan sold the place to Courage around the time this ad was out, and soon after they were bought out by Scottish & Newcastle.  Already having John Smith's in the portfolio (at the time outselling Websters by 300%), S&N saw no need for Websters to exist and shut the brewery in 1996 with the loss of 400 jobs.  If any of those newly made redundant workers had somehow seen this ad then, it would have left a taste more bitter than any pint of Pennine ale.

Apparently, you can still find Websters in Yorkshire somewhere.  The keg bitter is still being brewed by everyone's favourite contractors, Burtonwood.  You will not see it advertised or promoted anywhere. 

Talking horses and Yorkshire fast bowlers having better things to do, it seems.

What is to be done?

Pub closures are increasing. The British pub is dying.  Oh woe for the pub!  What is to be done?

I do my best.  I drink far more than the Government say I should be doing (The way I see it is - the British Pub is a threatened institution, and if I have to go to them and drink lots of beer to keep a great tradition alive, then it's a sacrifice I'm prepared to make).  But even my unwise alcohol intake cannot keep even Lancashire's pubs going by itself.

They say it's the smoking ban, or the recession, or the pubco beer tie.  These things don't help.  But in my opinion (and why else are you here if you don't want to hear it), the main reason is increasing social disapproval of public alcohol consumption.

As I've said before, a lot of bad things happened in the past.  We think we're better than we were even 30 years ago (we're not, but that's another story).  For most adults in the 1970s, the pub was a major recreational destination.  Pints were mere pennies.  Everyone socialised and they were happy, at least until enough booze was sunk to make people maudlin or fighty.   But with increased social and employment mobility, people simply knew fewer people nearby.  Certainly not well enough to go to the pub with them.  Would you want to risk being seen at your drunken worst by your barely-known neighbour?

No, best stay in and watch the TV.  And there's plenty of that these days (hundreds of channels as opposed to 3 in 1979).  Sure, you still want a drink.  Could go to the pub, but you work long hours and your wife would prefer you to be at home with her. Hooray for the £4 bottle of supermarket wine or slab of Carling.

So we reach the 21st Century, where pubgoing is an "event" rather than an automatic happening.  Beer is now lots of pennies rather than a few.  When you do go, you have two or three.  Don't want to risk being caught over the limit in the morning as your job is 25 miles from your house.  Can't go for a lunchtime pint even if you did have the time (presenteeism is everything).  Disciplinary offence now.

Everyone drinks a few less pints in the pub on average than they used to.  Pubs now are a wafer-thin margin business, and are being caught by increasing costs and decreased custom.  Of course the most marginal will go to the wall.  Welcome to Capitalism.

It goes without saying that the Upper Class Government we have does not approve of the plebs drinking, but who needs prohibition or even exorbitant taxation when you can simply create a social climate that frowns upon drinking with other people?

I care not what others think of me.  Anyone who has seen what I wear will attest to that.  But humans are creatures of fashion and herd mentality. Who wants to be seen doing what is simply not done?

Old Beer Ads #3 - Boddingtons (1993)

Amazing as it seems now, in the mid-1990s Boddingtons Bitter was the third best selling cask bitter and the best selling canned bitter in the UK.  Such success was mostly built on the success of advertisments like this.  They all had the same basic plot.  30 seconds of some lavishly shot glamorous situations, and then a few seconds revealing it was actually about Mancunians drinking beer.

Personally speaking, and I was only a teenager at the time, I found these commercials appalling.  Looking back, I see them as a typical example of Soho adwankers taking a much-loved regional product and turning it into something to brayingly laugh about over cocktails in a poncy central London bar.  Parodies of contemporary ads may have made their fellow "creatives" applaud at the next workshop, but for those who can't grasp the intent, it's alienating and patronising.  I, and many other Northwesterners, would have gladly responded to such "affectionate ribbing" by demolishing the brewery at Strangeways ourselves.

It took another 14 years, but the charming fellows at AB-Inbev did it for us.  Boddies time in the sun was short, and the brand slowly tanked after it fell out the fashion these ads expensively promoted.  The can and keg stuff is still made at an enormous beer factory (I hesitate to call it a "brewery", myself) near the M6, but cask Boddingtons is long gone.

I have not seen it on either a font or handpump for nigh on a decade.  Surely somebody knows where the Boddies is buried?

The Local Beards and Evil Keg

My local CAMRA branch has 930 members, yet the Branch Secretary complains regularly on the website and branch magazine that he sees very few of us. Well....

As you may have seen on the news in recent times, bad things happened in the 1970s. Savile. Hall. Glitter etc. But, apparently, the worst thing that happened in the 1970s was keg beer. Enormous national breweries tried to foist 'tasteless fizzy beer' upon the poor drinker in an effort to make more money. And even though the Big Six breweries barely exist anymore, the industry as a whole has not been forgiven by those who went to pubs back then. The mere mention of kegs will get CAMRA members of a certain age foaming like a pint of Whitbread Trophy.

But whereas 40 years ago, keg was used to dispense brown dishwater bitter, the influence of US craft brewers has meant that UK craft brewers are using them to serve up their fancy expensive IPAs and Imperial stouts.  And, although these beers are undoubtedly  of higher quality that Watney's Red Barrel, the mere sight of the keg font has the beardy end of CAMRA ranting about evil chemical fizz.

And, unfortunately, the committee of my branch tends towards the hirsute.  For any discerning beer drinker under the age of 40, the free CAMRA rag they put out is both hilarious and exasperating. Keg beer, of whatever provenance, is referred to as 'zombeer'. Punk IPA, Schneider Weisse, Tetley Smooth. All the same. All evil. In fact, the craft keg is reckoned to be worse, as the 'thin end of the wedge theory' means its increasing popularity will allow the likes of Heineken to brand John Smith's as "craft". On the other hand, any previous keg-only pub that sticks a hand pump or two on the bar is lauded for giving customers the chance to buy Marston's Pedigree or Thwaites Wainwright. Cask, any cask, is by default better than any keg.

Sadly, the local committee are now confused. The anti-keg motions at the CAMRA AGM were defeated, and the member who stood for the National Committee on a 'death to zombeers' platform was soundly defeated. The next local mag is due out in June. It will make interesting reading. I plan to read it over a BrewDog at the craft place in a nearby town.

Old Beer Ads #2 - Greenall Whitley (1984-85?)

If you're from the North and a certain age, you will remember Greenall Whitley.  A regional brewer based in Warrington, they pumped out oceans of bog-standard brown filth for decades.  Strangers coming to our part of the world back then would arrive at one of their pubs, shout "Not bloody Greenalls!  Anything but that!" and hastily leave for somewhere where the beer tasted of something.

It's presumed the ad agency tasted the beer, as they say nothing about it's qualities.  Merely saying that having fought the law and the law winning, being back home in Lancashire is better than breaking rocks in the hot sun.  Even the pump-action shotgun wielding guard is moved to tears by the mention of Greenalls.  Maybe he tasted their beer too.

Whatever our hammer-wielding friend thinks of Greenall Whitley Land, it's assured that the company itself thought a lot less of it.  In the following few years after this ad's run, they bought numerous breweries around the North.  Then shut them all.  This must have been a good idea, as they even shut their own in Warrington in 1991, thus depriving future drinkers like me the uncertain privilege of drinking their Best Bitter.  After that, Greenall Whitley Ltd. slowly divested itself of it's assets over the next decade, eventually consisting of little more than some hotels and a few bottles of gin.  Never mind, I'm sure it all made money for someone.

Sadly, Mr. Curly Rockbreaker may have got back someday to the place he knows so well, but he would have been unlikely to have found anything he knew still remaining.

Bizarre Beers #1 - Hilden Barney's Brew

What goes into beer, exactly? I'd expect you to say the usual - yeast, malt, hops etc. You know, all the boring stuff. Sometimes they get adventurous and put coffee or chocolate in the stout. Maybe even in quantities where you'd taste it through the black malt.

Hilden Brewery have taken a different approach.  What appears to have happened is that someone was putting up the spice rack while brewing, and, having put one Schwartz jar too many inside, the whole bloody lot has fallen in.  Whether you like Barney's Brew depends on what you think of cardamom and black pepper in beer. The views of it online are certainly mixed.

I await the next brew from Hildens. Maybe "Fred's Brew". With rocks and dinosaur bones in. Probably