HANDPUMPS, SMILING BEHIND THE

"Please come to our pub.  Look, we put this photo on Twitter!  Look how happy we are!  Look at all these pumpclips!  We've even mentioned all the breweries' accounts by name!  And CAMRA! But for information!  Not attention! Not for retweets and likes or anything!  Please come to our pub and drink our beer.  It's really quiet and our over-ambitious cask ale line up is going off.  Please, we beg you.  We'll take the Marillion off the jukebox!  We'll clean the toilets!  We'll even put Titanic Plum Porter on! Please!  We're desperate!"

REGULARS, THE

It happens rarely these days,  but occasionally some us go to pubs we've never been to before. Imagine the scene - it's Friday evening, and you're tired of the places you frequent regularly. But there's THAT pub you always pass but have never entered.  Oh well. Why not?

So you go in. It's empty. Empty, but for several people parked right in front of the bar. Of course, you cannot see the drinks offer because they'really blocking the view. You shuffle up slowly and, after a minute, one person sees you and moves to the left. Great. At least now you can order something.

So, you have your drink. What now? You could sit in the unpopulated, cavernous wasteland that is the rest of the pub. But no. That would seem, well, standoffish. You park yourself at the end of the bar, hoping to look neither over-friendly nor snobbily distant.

You try to pick up the banter. It's mainly about some guy called Mike, who is presumably one of the regulars who for some reason is absent tonight.  You can't quite pick up the nuances of the tales of what he was caught doing this week, but it sounds decidely unsavoury. Everyone else laughs anyway.  Then the politics talk starts. All suitably ill-informed,  but this is their pub so you keep quiet. Then someone remembers the football game is on and beseeches the barman to put it on the big screen. He does. Loudly. Soon the volume is matched by the customers shouting at the TV.

By now, you've nearly finished your drink. "Same again?" you're asked. You politely decline, explaining your bus is due in five minutes. And you leave, feeling a wave of relief as you walk out onto the pavement. Thank god,  you say to yourself,  that's over.

Then you go to your usual haunt, which somehow no longer seems quite as tedious as before. You order a drink, block the bar and talk complete bollocks that nobody but your fellow regular bar blockers will completely understand.

Because, after all, life is nothing if not the constant expression of hypocrisy.

KEG, EVIL

If you were a CAMRA member, life used to be simple.  There was cask conditioned beer (or "Real Ale" as they termed it themselves) and there was KEG beer.  Bitter, lager, stout. Didn't matter.  It was all mass-produced, adjunct-laden, expensive fizzy filth.  And many CAMRA members, if not nostalgic for the days of Watney's Red Barrel, preferred the simple dichotomy.

Then the new wave of brewers arrived with their IPAs and Imperial Stouts.  And because they were taking their cue from America, they put them in kegs and used carbon dioxide to dispense it.  And, despite these being the antithesis of bland keg beer, a lot of  CAMRA members didn't like it.  It was from a keg.  And keg is evil.

To be honest, these fundamentalists were few in number, but they filled the local CAMRA magazines and the CAMRA newspaper, "What's Brewing", with their views.  Reading these copious missives about the forthcoming keg takeover brought to mind those apocryphal Japanese soldiers captured on isolated islands in the 1960s who thought World War 2 was still ongoing.

Needless to say, a lot of CAMRA members, even many in lofty positions in the organisation, drink this "craft" keg beer.  They're just not allowed to talk about it in their own publications lest it be seen as not "promoting cask ale".

The world will move on.  The future will happen whether the diehards like it or not.  But it will hurt. By god, it will hurt.

COMMUNICATION

Back in the Dark Ages, by which I mean around 2008, anyone wanting to appreciate the subtleties of beer had to do it the old-fashioned way.  They first had to find the beer they wanted, then buy it, taste it, and write their own subjective impressions of what it's qualities were.  Looking back, it makes one wonder how the whole beer scene survived.  I mean, such a multitude of opinions.  Who knew what to think?

Thankfully help was at hand.  Noticing a gap in the market, a certain type of person charged through it like a gap on a bar on a Friday night.  These people were known as the "Beer Communicators" and they came from various backgrounds.  Some were bloggers who had overwhelming enthusiasm for how AWESOME the beer scene was and, like, needed to tell everyone about it,  Some were already "media professionals" who had an interest in beer and saw communication about it as a potentially profitable sideline to going to dismal local gigs or rewriting news agency copy.  And some were, undoubtedly, people who neither knew nor cared about beer, but swotted up on it in an effort to gain some sort of career prospects.

What none of the above were much interested in was the quality or veracity of information they were disseminating.  After all, beer is a fairly saturated industry.  One more sale is one fewer sale for someone else.   So based on whether they liked the beer itself or the people behind it, they talked their favourites up to the expense of others who, in their opinion, were lesser regarded.

And this is why they were called "Communicators" rather than "Journalists".  Journalists ask questions because, in most cases, they seek the truth and wish to make that truth known.  A Communicator is merely someone who spreads the word, true or not, because they're an inherent part of the industry.  If the industry is "done down", then their potential revenue stream is likely to be reduced.

In Beer Communication, there is no Bad News. BEER PEOPLE ARE GOOD PEOPLE, and making money and taking market share is a lesser concern, despite such an ideology going against all known rules of good business..  If, like, everyone is good to each other, then beer (or more to the point, the beer being promoted) will become so wonderful, the industry will grow forever.

Of course, the said Awesome Breweries are gradually being taken over by larger concerns, so the Communicators have to realign themselves to the new reality.  Watching them do this is one of the few amusing things left in the beer world.  But as long as the freebies and access keep coming, everything stays Awesome and inconvenient truths are glossed over.

Some have said they should drop the Journalistic pretensions and just come out as Public Relations people. But that wouldn't be, like, awesome, man.

CLUB, THE WORKING MEN'S

In the very early 80s, whenever my parents were fed up of me (which was often, I hear), I got given to my grandad to be entertained.  Salt of the earth, my grandad.  A forklift driver in a wallpaper factory. Apparently never had an accident, despite rarely being sober enough to walk the streets legally.  Anyway, during these occasions I was usually taken somewhere that was explained to my four-year-old self as "Grandad's special pub".

When I was older, I worked out the official name for this place was Galgate Working Men's Club.  All I knew at the time was it had a snooker table (which I was never allowed near), a cellar underneath which the floor was audibly hollow (which I was never allowed near), and a noisy and colourful fruit machine (which for some reason I was allowed near).  Of course, I was only allowed five 10ps to play with, and as my capacity for fizzy pop and scampi fries was limited, I reckon any surplus winnings went to Grandad's next pint.

When I got a little bit older, I was no longer invited to Grandad's Special Pub.  Perhaps I was more tolerable to be around for my parents, or perhaps they didn't want me "corrupted" by the alleged malign influences there.  I usually heard my Nan ranting about someone called Maurice Ryecroft who apparently led Grandad astray (though, to be honest, I think he needed precious little leading) and, worse, had a dog that worried the local sheep.  After that, I was only taken to the more salubrious environs of the Green Dragon, the local Yates & Jackson pub.  Though always outside with my pop and crisps.  This was the 1980s after all.

My Grandad is long gone. As is his Special Pub.  And presumably Maurice Ryecroft and his dog also.  There are, I hear, working men's clubs still going, but as their milieu is in terminal decline it won't be long before they're gone too.

Perhaps the "working man" in the old sense of the word no longer exists.

CROWDFUNDING

It's said that being rich means never having to spend your own money, and so it goes with successful businesses looking to expand.  Such companies always find somebody else to pay, whether it be in the form of share issues, outside investors or bank loans.

Small Craft breweries are in the position that they generally have 'goodwill'.  Beer is associated with good times and GOOD PEOPLE, so it's natural that it engenders warm feelings in its consumers.  And so many breweries wishing to fund ambitious expansion plans have, naturally, exploited this with Crowdfunding.  They issue a prospectus, usually named in a emotionally leading way inviting those interested to emotionally identify with the brewery and its intentions, and give various tiers of investment with increasing levels of benefits associated with them.

Usually, said benefits involve discounts on beer from the online shop, or maybe a yearly invite to an Annual General Meeting held in a remote location at an inconvenient time of year.  But that doesn't matter.  To those investing in the crowdfunding scheme, the money or the benefits are of little importance.  In such vacuous times as these, people endlessly seek things to identify with.  And a few hundred pounds given to a Craft Brewery shows to others that they are a good person, and committed to the future of a small business involved in doing Good Things.  Everybody wins.  The brewery gets it's cash for minimal outlay, and the Crowdfunders get a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Until, of course, the day the funders want to cash in on their investment.  That might be difficult.

KEG

Once upon a time, a brewer was fed up of his beer being bashed about, left to go off and generally mistreated by the chiselling pub landlord looking to cheat the Working Man out of his pennies.  "This cask fermentation thing leaves too many variables." he said "What if I brew it, filter all the solids out, and infuse it with carbon dioxide for make up for the fact it's gone flat?  Then I can put it in a sealed barrel and no amount of stupidity or penny-pinching can ruin my beer."  That was the theory.  Cut out the British small businessman with packaging, and your product will be served  as intended.

Not many people can remember the original Watney's Keg Bitter, as it debuted at East Sheen Tennis Club in the 1930s.  Presumably there were few complaints about the actual taste as after an hour or so of knocking a ball back and forth over a net and shouting "Jolly good show!", a chap can get rather thirsty and any refreshment is welcome.

But whereas Keg Bitter survived the dubious cellarmanship of the times, it fell prey to Big Business.  Over time, the carbonation was increased, cheaper ingredients were introduced and the price, of course, went up.  Premium product. old boy.  It's "consistent".

Flavour undoubtedly suffered, and, according to received wisdom, The Campaign for Real Ale came and saved us all from nights of burping and mornings of diarrheoa.  And everyone was grateful.  Or so they say.

Sadly, nobody asked the Working Man his opinion, because of course such things were never done.  He repaid CAMRA's efforts by ditching bitter and mild, and increasingly turned to mass-market lager.

It was fizzy and consistent, after all.