Boggle Sips The Kool-Aid...

I'd been meaning to get along and have a beer at Brewdog Camden so, on a sultry afternoon, I made my way over to boho Camden Town to check it out.

The place was deliciously air-conditioned as I walked in, with a few small groups of lunchtime hipsters dotted about, and a customer at the bar chatting to the barmaid. The place is branded top to bottom, and a small TV plays video of the zany BD antics on a loop on a fridge behind the bar. Not unlike one of Orwell's telescreens. Some beer books are dotted about for the customers to peruse, and there are board games.

The barmaid broke off from her chat to introduce me to the Brewdog Experience, which goes along the lines of, have you been here before, have you had Brewdog beers, etc. I hadn't and I had, so we got on with getting a pint. She was knowledgeable about the state of play with the beers, and open about who was brewing what these days - I opted for some Meantime-brewed Zeitgeist, a which seems to have given Meantime some problems. This pint was pretty good, maybe a bit hoppier than I remember.

I took my beer and plopped down on a stool facing the telescreen. The bloke from the bar sat down a few stools away and got a conversation started. He's about my age, but decided fairly recently that he liked beer, and was just getting his feet wet around the London scene. He was toting a copy of 'Man Walks Into A Pub' and had picked up this week's freebie Shortlist magazine, containing an article by Peter Brown (?) on the rise of craft beer. His particular interest seemed to be in the broadening of the gastro offering in 'craft beer bars' to include proper gelato, so he'd been going around to try and generate discussions with small pubcos and bar operators. Despite his years (a few above the age range Emma Cole at Craft Brighton identifies in the Shortlist piece, thank you very much), he was enthusiastic as a kid about what he was discovering.

He departed and I had another beer, this time a black IPA called Libertine. Single-hopped with Simcoe, it showed off the hop nicely, but the beer lacked a bit of complexity. I'd have liked that hop in an IPA. Sums up Brewdog's beers to me, they just stop short of being very good. The bar, though, was a pleasant place to chill out with a couple of their beers. Staff friendly and helpful, and they know their stuff, and the food got the thumbs-up for value and quality from my erstwhile drinking companion.

I suppose the thing is, with the pleasing expansion of 'craft beer bars' around London, the Brewdog brand is the USP here. I imagine I could have gone to the Crown & Anchor in Brixton Road, or Craft in Clerkenwell, and encountered similarly knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff, but there's no doubting Brewdog's cult-like appeal to a section of beer drinkers. I'd be happy enough to shut out the irritating cacophony that occasionally issues forth from Fraserburgh and come back here to drink more of their beer.

It's also handily-placed for the so-called 214 Bus Crawl, a route which will take you from the Bull at Highgate, to the Southampton Arms, past Camden Brewing in Prince Of Wales Road, and by this place on its way to Liverpool Street.

I walked out of the place and back into the stultifying heat.

They tell me the second London bar will be in Shoreditch.

Strange Bedfellows

It's been an interesting week for British Beer. Pete Brown lit the blue touch paper on Monday, painting a big picture of the threats facing our home brewing industry. That's brought others in the blogosphere into the debate here, here and here.

Now, as bloggers, my feeling is that we have a somewhat intense and narrow focus on beer, for different reasons. I'm not in the business, but I like my beer. Pete has fingered some around these parts (I recognise myself) as navel-gazers who aren't seeing that Big Picture. The factionalism, the negativity. Pete wants evangelists to be in the van, proclaiming the Beer Revolution. Sticks in the mud need not apply. As for factions, we're all at it, sticking labels on parts of the beer community - 'spoogebeerians', 'crafterati', 'extremeophiles'... sometimes (certainly, in my case) disdainfully. But I care about beer. I'm enthused by the scene rowing up in London - the excellent quality and range of styles coming out of the brewhouses of forward-thinking brewers. I'm excited by travelling for beer, when the opportunity presents itself (rarely, these days).

The week wasn't just interesting for Pete's piece, though. On the same day, somebody called Scott Wilson, top talking head at MolsonCoors UK, had his address to the SIBA conference reported here. He identified wines and spirits as the enemy, and used "the craft, service and love that goes into coffee" as his benchmark for revitalising cask beer. He also noted a lack of innovation. He said that craft brewers could lead the beer revolution.

Oddly, Scott's example of innovation was the widget, which has no place in craft brewing that I can see, nor in the on-trade. I'd have thought a brewer would see creative use of new hops, bringing new and exciting recipes to market to excite the palate and enthuse the drinker, would be innovative. Or maybe just evolutionary. Whatever. Still, his language was equally stirring. In fact, thematically, not a million miles from what Pete threw open for discussion.

But hist! Just a few days before, somebody called Tony Jennings, CEO of Budweiser Budvar UK, weighed in with this polemic against Big Brewing, labelling the "Dark Lords" as bellowing dinosaurs on the verge of extinction. Their declining markets will make their messages irrelevant. The future belongs to craft. Tony's beer isn't UK-brewed, and you could imagine a brewer like Budvar, pursued all over the world with relentless (or pointless) zeal by A-B (InBev) for decades, to exhibit some schadenfreude over the slow global implosion of markets for Big Brewing. But he has a point about how to sell good beer. He says...

More and more drinkers are realising that this is the only route to getting beers with the quality, variety, provenance and values they crave, and the traditional pub is central to this, making it far more than a great retail experience. Thank goodness society is at last showing signs of valuing the importance of this institution in our world.

I'm not sure about that last sentence, though. Tony, interestingly, heaps scorn on any idea that Starbuckisation is what's needed for pubs. Did he have a sneak preview of Wilson's comments at SIBA?

And then, midweek, the Big Bang, as MP Martin Horwood's 10-Minute Rule bill was adopted by Parliament, meaning it will receive a full reading in the House. This bill threatens to create a statutory instrument compelling pub operators to free the tie by, among other things requiring a guest-beer rule and making rent-reviews open-market. That must alarm Enterprise and Punch Taverns quite a bit. The bill got some passing mention ahead of time, but the tone was that it was unlikely to get a full reading. That didn't stop some in the trade trying to shoot it down, though.

The IFBB (Family Brewers) tried to pre-emptively kill the bill by lobbying every MP with a plea that the tie should be kept as it is for estates under 500 pubs. That didn't move the members, and now we have CAMRA (who had nothing to say on the bill before it passed), the FSB (Federation of Small Businesses) and even the Fair Pint Campaign, all backing the bill. Fair Pint's website has lain dormant since last August, but even they've been stirred from their prolonged snooze. BBPA are against it, saying that nothing should be done until they report back on the implementation of self-regulation in June.

But that's just one facet of the range of issues facing British Brewing. On another, on the Early Day Motion (number 1475) petitioning the Treasury and George 'Boy' Osborne to scrap the beer duty escalator and the planned duty increase in this month's Budget, most of these parties are all onside. CAMRA have been trying to turn out the membership to lobby their local MP, and this morning, what is this? but an email from BBPA asking the same thing. I wasn't expecting that, since Diageo have come out in favour of equal duty rates for all alcohol drinks, which would hamstring beer in comparison with much higher-ABV drinks, and they apparently pull quite a few of BBPA's strings.

It's instructive in demonstrating how alliances are formed and abandoned in order to deal with single issues, when what is really needed is a single voice dealing strategically with the relationship between brewing and pubs, industry, legislators and consumers . I suspect if anybody tried to draw a Venn diagram to describe the current relationships between the various trade bodies and umbrella groups, it would resemble a drunks' attempt to draw a perfect circle using their wrong hand.

There's a cacophony of different voices all saying they speak for beer and pubs, but at the pointy end, in the pubs, all it seems to do amongst publicans trying to earn a crust, is provoke scorn, if the comments pages on the Publican website are anything to go by.

All these voices, all these issues and tensions are bound to throw up a load of dirty laundry. The reason why wine (beer's biggest competitor?) can present such a unified front is that most of it isn't made here. Wine drinkers don't see any of the politics, any of the industry tensions or any of the relational dynamics in play within the industries of the producing countries. All the drinker sees is uniform rows of elegantly-labelled bottles on supermarket shelves, or in a pub fridge. Our brewing industry has to play out their agonies in front of its customers, if they care to watch. And I suppose another point is, how many beer drinkers ARE watching? Does a bloke who pops down his local for a couple of pints each evening pick up on this? And does he care? Would he ever change that lager he's been drinking for years for something new and interesting, for that matter?

So, back to our mate Scott from MolsonCoors. He mused on the failure of "campaigns like Beer Naturally, Beautiful Beer and Beer Reverence" to stop the decline in beer sales. What's that now? Never heard of 'em. But what beer were they campaigning for? Who supported the message? And how did they try to get that message out?

We need a single independent voice speaking for British Brewing and British Pubs, not shills for large or vested interests who only want a talking head to spin their message. One body that can credibly send a message to legislators and consumers alike, that we have a thriving and resilient industry that is being attacked by joyless health nazis and neo-prohibitionists, and bled dry by the Treasury. Who'll take the lead? Beats me...

Edit: wouldn't ya know it? Hit 'publish', and then saw this on twitter. Another voice to add to the choir...

Beer Evangelism: Little Acorns?

Giddy from my huge lunchtime scoop, I headed off to the Battersea Beer Festival. I've been every year since 1995, I think, and even though the past couple of years had started to make me feel this fest was dying on its arse through not enough beer and a venue that couldn't cope, I was meeting an old workmate for a few halves and some beery chat.

DP pitched up, we settled into some Hook Norton Double Stout and reminisced about London Drinker, Twickenham and some workplace beery episodes. Then he asked me if I remembered his mate Craig. Not clearly I didn't, so he proceeded to remind me of Craig's first beer fest, at this very venue a few years ago, where, being a lager drinker, he couldn't find anything he could drink. DP recalls I took him to the Foreign Beer Bar and 'nursed' him (DP's words) through some beers he could get down.

Craig was heading our way, but these days with no apparent misgivings about his choice of bevvy. Rather, he had become a bit of a real-ale monster. And so it proved. He found us sipping Otley 08, but was himself keeping his powder dry by working through sessionable strength stuff, but the list was no longer in some strange version of English, and he was set for an evening out enjoying a diverse beer list.

It made me think of Pete Brown's musing on the fruitlessness of painting beer as the new wine. A couple of years ago I had a time, a place, and a drinker who was out of his comfort zone. A bit of enthusiasm, knowledge and trust and now he's enjoying good beer.

I admit I grinned.