I sit before you today feeling slightly fragile. Yesterday I attended the Great British Beer Festival at Olympia and made the most of it. Rummaging around my pocket, I also seem to have joined the Campaign for Real Ale. I think it was something to do with the fact that you got two free pints, which was worth almost half the value of the annual membership…
But hang about. So I am now both a CAMRA member and a Brewdog “Equity Punk”. Is that actually possible? It’s a bit like having pictures of Vladmir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky (or worse, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak) next to each other on my mantlepiece. If the Universe collapses today into a singularity with the sheer inherent contradiction, I am afraid that was me. Sorry.
Joking apart, let’s give a shout out to CAMRA today. They have been going for 50 years, and with a deeply noble purpose. The big six UK brewers were pushing a business model around a similar range of beers (although with amazingly clever advertising to suggest differentiation) that was pasteurised, carbonated and stored in small kegs. CAMRA was formed to launch the counter attack on behalf of beer that was stored in barrels where it continued to ferment, and served without the use of CO2. Their material documents their successes, including shaping the “guest beer” provision when the 1989 Beer Orders broke the pub monopoly of the Big 6.
The argument about CAMRA is about the extent to which they have adapted to the technological innovation that has blessed the beer world since they were found. The accusation is that they have remained mired in a world where the keg and CO2 are synonymous with rubbish 1970s lager, and always will be. Which brings us to the King Kong v Godzilla battle of the beer world - “Real Ale” v “Craft Beer”.
We all kind of know Craft Beer when we see it. It began in the US when home brewing moved into brewpubs and microbreweries during the 1970s (see my previous blog https://www.londonbiermeister.co.uk/blog/america-the-beer-tiful-part-1-january-2021 ). Efforts have been made to define it. The US Brewers Association has the catch-phrase “small, independent and traditional”. This was mirrored in the UK with the “Small Independent Brewers Association”, which was then renamed “Society of Independent Brewers” when some of the members started asking “who are you calling small?”. “Independent” has become a sticky point for some as the big players - especially the ubiquitous AB Inbev - hoover up traditional breweries and their IPR. I have discoursed on my love-hate relationship with this particular corporate entity in the past (https://www.londonbiermeister.co.uk/blog/someone-s-always-playing-corporation-games) and will spare you a repeat.
However, the Real Ale purists will reply, with varying degrees of friendliness and condescension, that craft beer is a meaningless term, that some of them are very nice indeed but that they are not Real Ale and that this is the only yardstick of authenticity.
At this point I see analogies with the music scene of the 1970s. A bunch of earnest men with long hair were suddenly shocked when a bunch of loud youngsters exploded onto the scene shouting “never trust a hippy”. There has been respectful co-existence between Real Ale and Craft Beer. There has also been Brewdog, who have been excluded from the CAMRA world because of the technology that they use and who have been very shouty on the subject of “Real Ale no longer means anything”.
More on Brewdog next time, for reasons that will become apparent at the end of this article. But just to mention in passing the controversy of the Great British Beer Festival 2011, where Brewdog were originally booked to attend (“despite all of our past differences with CAMRA”) but then didn’t. Suffice it to say that there are two very different versions of this story in terms of deposit payments, keg sizes, CO2, etc, which I will not try to disentangle.
So anyway, the festival and the beers. I last attended the GBBF way back in the 1990s, when I was completely clueless. I won’t even mention the drinks that I went for, as it was so ill chosen in terms of the sequence. This time I took advantage of being on holiday and settled in just after lunch to take it slow and go for the long haul.
The other main criticism of CAMRA has been that it can come over as a bit of a cult into which the uninitiated are not welcome. The beer author Pete Brown (“the Bill Bryson of beer”) has written about this. It was true that it was a massive hall which might have been quite daunting if you didn’t know what you were doing - a bit like landing in the foyer of the Louvre with only room titles to go on (I quite like the way some art galleries give you a leaflet which basically says “if you only look at ten paintings, go for these ten and here is a bit about them”). There were people who looked like the embodiment of CAMRA - a man in his 60s with the beard and the belly. But for the most part it was ordinary blokes, my age (52) or a bit older. There were women there - often wives / girlfriends, probably 10ish% of the total attendance. The demographic diversified as the day went on, with the average age decreasing a bit and a few non-white people. It was certainly not unfriendly. I had a couple of good chats to people. Pete Brown’s challenge in the past was whether they would have been friendly to the person who went up to one of the bars and said “sorry, I’m new to all this, what would you suggest”. I suspect the experience would have been mixed - I didn’t have the nerve to try it myself…
I spent quite a bit of time walking around before planning my campaign. The eventual sequence I settled on was
You now understand, dear reader, why I was a bit fragile when I got up this morning. But producing this journal of my day has revived me, especially when doing so on a sunny day looking from my newly purchased houseboat out towards Chelsea Harbour. Bliss.
In two weeks time I venture back into the beer event world with a vengeance. The joy that awaits me is the Brewdog Annual General Mayhem in Aberdeen. It has always been a feature of slightly dodgy companies that they get the shareholders hammered once a year. So - hey - why not? I will be fascinated to see how the vibe compares with GBBF. My hunch is that it will actually be a similarly proportioned bunch of blokes who like beer and feel quite comfortable as I do with a foot in both camps. Let’s see. More anon.