The Meaning of Bri

BRi’s Blog:  The Meaning of Bri

There are 100’s of beer blogs out there right now and I don’t wish to disparage any of them but thought I would make it clear why I have joined their ranks and how mine may differ from many:

1                     Are You An Expert? - I don’t work within the brewing industry in any way so all my views and recommendations are mine alone and based on my own experiences. I don’t mention this as a disclaimer, as most phrases like this are, but to inform you that I’m just someone who is passionate about great beer and I just want to share the knowledge I have. I am not promoting pubs or beers on anyone’s behalf other than yours, dear reader. I have been drinking beer for a long time and continue to explore the huge variety of styles available both home and abroad so if you find you disagree with me often, and think I am wrong about your favourite beer, then either accept that my view is different from yours and continue to read my blog but get annoyed by it or stop reading my blog. I’m happy for debate and discussion on beer, pubs, brewing etc. but you just telling me I am wrong is not an argument. It’s a statement. So think on before saying ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about’ unless you can tell me why I am factually wrong. I have worked in pubs and at beer festivals but, more importantly, I have spent a fair bit of time on the other side of the bar drinking beers from all over the world. I am not a member of CAMRA.

2                     What Beers Do You Like? - Beers are as different as people so I will tell you what I like (usually just on a scale of 0 to 100) and will only occasionally go into great depth about the taste experience (grapefruity, coffee, stale scones etc) as most beers are amply covered in cyber-space by breweries, beer guides and bloggers so I don’t really think that many people will be that interested in my descriptions of every beer. I may well point out if I think a beer is not like it usually is and, especially if I believe the recipe has been changed drastically, but that is only for guidance. I fully appreciate that what I like, you may not. We are all like snowflakes: unique and likely to fall in upland areas. I favour very hoppy pale beers (especially Double/Imperial IPAs) but also love deep, dark stouts and porters (so Black IPAs have my name written on each cask). I’m not so fond of amber, brown and red beers but a great beer IS a great beer and I still enjoy the best styles that produce these colours but my preferences are at the polar opposites of the spectrum. Nevertheless, I will still credit a well made beer even though I usually go for the big flavours of the craft brewers so it’s not just the 6% beers that get rave reviews from me; there’s no reason that I won’t champion a 2.8% or a 22% if they are done well – and they sometimes are. I’m not averse to trying innovative and strange brews from any corner of the globe, either, as long as it has been made with the best ingredients and passion.

3                     What’s Your Blog About? - The dominant feature of Bri’s Beer Blog is to advise people of the very best pubs in a particular area (town, city, region) as this is what I would like to know when I go somewhere new so I hope to be able to help people from my experiences. I will not just tell you every pub I went in although I may tell you every beer I tried so you may get a feel for the sort of place it is. Remember, by the very nature of the sort of pubs I will recommend that they will be free of brewery tie and be able to choose whichever beers they bloody well like so the beers I mention may very likely not be for sale if you decide to venture in. If this is the case, feel free to say to the barstaff that my blog said certain beers were sold there and watch their blank expressions. Oh, and I rant. These are called ‘Briatribes’ and is generally me giving my tuppence worth on the state of the beer and brewing in an irreverent and meandering style that may best be referred to as ‘unstructured’.

4                     What Makes A Great Beer? - I am only really interested in what has become called craft beers. That is, beers brewed primarily for the purpose of producing the best possible beer with the best possible ingredients. The minute an accountant starts advising a brewery of how to cut costs then most, if not, all hope is lost. As will become abundantly clear, I am not saying that big brewers CANNOT brew great beer – indeed, many of them used to – but just that they DO NOT brew great beer; and that’s all I’m interested in. In fact, I don’t think I will use the term craft beer anymore as it has become as meaningless as the words traditional, IPA (not actually a word at all), best bitter or free house. That is why I tend to just use the phrase great beer as there can be no other interpretation.

5                     What Is The Aim Of These Blogs? - Although I will rant and rave with the best of ‘em about the vagaries of the breweries and the government, I really don’t think this blog will make a brewery have a rethink about using cheaper malts or adding dry hops to the brew. I may complain that they don’t but I’m more concerned about drinking the beers that are great and are available NOW. It’s called ‘voting with your feet’ and we should all walk away from ANY establishment that treats its customers with contempt by attempting to sell them bland, shoddy, poorly-produced, overpriced goods or services – and not just beers and pubs – they want our money so make them earn it! I know that if you want a pint and the only pub for miles is a national brewery pub it’s difficult but I now walk/bus/train to wherever the next great pub is or I go without! That is why independently brewed premium bottled ales are the beer market’s greatest growth sellers, at the moment, as people who demand quality would rather drink bottles at home if the only choice is the ubiquitous muck that passes for real ale in a majority of pubs. You may get used to an insipid beer but how much do you actually enjoy it? Why settle for mediocrity when greatness exists and is available (somewhere)? I am not campaigning but I do let my feet do the talking and they control where my wallet goes – if you’ll excuse the rather labored metaphorical platitudes (and the phrase ‘metaphorical platitudes’). If I can help one person make an informed choice of where to drink great beer before having put their hand in their pocket and wasted it on some BFD then I will feel these blogs will have been worthwhile.

6                     Why Now? - Brewing is an industry featuring professional companies that are run on principles no different than any other business – that is why Britain ended up with a handful of enormous breweries only a few hundred years or so after every house brewed their own beer; because of economies of scale and the drive for profits. It wasn’t just the best breweries with the best beers that prospered, rather the breweries with the best business acumen. And so it continues. But after a long period of dark days for the British drinker where there were only a few truly great beers because any new independent found itself competing against the giant corporations for the same drinkers so had to attempt to compete on price and not just on quality alone which invariably lead them down the road of what I call Beer Flavoured Drinks. BFD is the name I use for any drink that uses the traditional ingredients of beer - usually in such small proportions that they are barely discernible to any of the senses – then adds various cheap adjuncts (such as rice, wheat, wood shavings) to them so they at least taste of something (even if it is wood shavings) or to make them look nicer (my favourite one is the brewers who use to use formaldehyde in the beers as a preservative, a fining to make the beer clearer or to keep the white, foam head a bit longer depending on which explanation you accept as the best/correct reason. That’s right: embalming fluid!) As a general rule, I find that the quality of a beer is often inversely proportional to the size of the brewery that brews it. Obviously, I am not suggesting that all home-brewed beer is great and all international beers are undrinkable as some small brewers do make very nasty beers as, indeed, some mega-breweries have on occasion made a very nice beer - only they tend not to as they don’t need to – so this is merely my findings after years of research. I could add a graph to show you. But I won’t because I haven’t made one but I’m sure you get the picture. My aim is to drink the best beers possible at any given location so I openly admit I have all but given up drinking beers brewed by multi-national corporations. I’ll say it again: I’m not saying that they are unable to make a wonderful beer but they tend not to so I would rather give my business to a small, independent craft brewer and, if that beer is not so great, I don’t feel so stupid for trying it than if it was made in a giant factory by a computer and is as rubbish as I suspected it would have been all along. That’s what experience is: learning from your mistakes and, hopefully, not repeating them. I am eclectic in my favourite styles of beer, and which breweries make them, but I am not trying to be elitist. I don’t dislike national brewers’ beers because they are popular; I dislike them because they are made with cheap ingredients and mass produced with little care for the consumer. They are brewed to be not so much liked by many but disliked by few. A sorry marketing strategy that is, alas, successful. Yet, having said all that, I believe now is the best time in my lifetime so far to be able to get great beer so I want to help people find them and enjoy them. What a hero, eh?

BRIATRIBE #1 – BRAND NEW BEER

DO BREWERIES BELIEVE THE BRAND IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE BEER?

There comes a time when a beer has changed so significantly due to changes in the ingredients and the brewing process that it has become a totally different product. Some beers have even transformed from deep, rich, amber brews into pale, thin, hoppy beers but retained the same name but usually it is just, unfortunately, a general dumbing down of the beer to make it more palatable to more people or, in reality, less distinctive and therefore less offensive to more people.

I understand that this is just good, commercial sense: create a product of quality, gain a reputation for it then, once the brand is established, make the product more marketable - which often means blander unless you are going for a niche market– then, perhaps, when the product is a big success, sell the brand to the highest bidder before your market declines. Although this is misleading, often to the point of being deceitful, it is legal so is a very successful business model but surely there comes a time when it is complete misrepresentation? Take the most successful girl-group of this century (so far), the Sugababes* for example. Ten years into their existence the entire group became different from the one that started and what began as an innovative soul sound has transformed into a rather embarrassing, desperate, bandwagon-jumping, Frankenstein’s monster-style hybrid of everything that has been successful over the previous few months. In short, the cash-cow brand has been established now it must be milked at all costs until it is well and truly spent.

The beer example of this that comes to mind, historically, is the cream of Manchester: Boddington’s Bitter. I was lucky enough to have drunk it occasionally in my early drinking years when travelling in the north-west of England as it was only generally available there back then. It was a pale, hoppy, straw-coloured session beer that just oozed quality and flavour despite being only 3.5% alcohol. Not the best beer in the world but certainly one you were pleased to see on the bar. Then, it happened. What had happened to countless breweries in the latter half of the 20^thcentury: the umbrella of Whitbread breweries cast its shadow over Salford and Strangeway’s Brewery became part of that empire which, as history had already shown us, leads inevitably to takeover and closure. It took a while. The beer was revamped and heavily advertised on TV with parody storylines bursting the pretentious bubble of other products that had ideas above its station and championing Boddies as a down-to-earth Manchester beer drank by real locals. First to go was the hops. Too expensive. Then, most of the handpumps went as it was re-launched as one of the revolutionary new ‘smoothflow’ beers dispensed from ludicrously oversized founts by means of nitrogen rather than the gassier carbon dioxide of keg beers and lagers. Then, eventually, in 2004 the brewery itself was gone and the ‘Cream of Manchester’ was brewed in Wales whilst the cask version, what little remains of it, is seeing out its retirement as part of AB InBev (catchy little name) being contract brewed for them by Hyde’s Brewery in Manchester. You still see it on keg in Spain if you’re very unlucky.

Other familiar beers that a serious case of bean-counting or other debilitating afflictions has happened to over the years:

Fuller’s London Pride / Fuller’s ESB

Everard’s Old Original / Tiger

Young’s Special / Winter Warmer

Hopback Summer Lightning / Crop Circle

Deuchar’s IPA

Timothy Taylor’s Landlord etc.

I have spoken to brewers directly about how their beer and become unrecognisable from the beer it once was and they have denied it to the point of actually believing it themselves. I accept that ingredients change due to supply limitations. I also accept that taste-buds mature and evolve over time and my perception of a beer may be influenced by this and by the circumstances that I drank the beer – everybody knows an ice-cold lager served from a tall, shiny fount into a frosted glass taken fresh from the freezer and drank whilst sat in the sunshine by the pool on holiday with loved ones tastes better than the same beer served at room temperature poured from a can into a plastic beaker in the pouring rain on your own at home when the TV is bust. I even accept that a beer’s flavour can be influenced by what you have previously eaten or drank – the first beer on a Friday night will taste different to the last one no matter what it is – but these are minor variations whereas I am talking about wholesale changes to taste, colour and alcoholic strength.

Fortunately, for every brewery that starts saving money on hops, malt and any other elements of crafting a unique product rather than churning out a beer-flavoured drink there are at least two new brewers who will exploit the new gap in the market. Bitter and lager are being squeezed by innovative new flavours of beer and the big brewers are certainly aware of it and have jumped on the bandwagon (or brewer’s dray) calling some of their beers ‘craft’ and making single-hopped varieties. Ha ha ha ha ha. The last acts of desperate men and women. If any of them use this opportunity to make great beers then good luck to them. But they will not. They will make accountancy-directed brews. Nobody is going to forsake Buxton or Magic Rock beers for them. The best they can hope for is that people who drink Marston’s Pedigree or Bass give it a punt although I’m sure CAMRA will support their endeavours.

So, what’s in a name? The mega-breweries have reached their current status via the common practice of taking over and closing down the competition – if people don’t like your beer over a local product simply remove them from the market and they are left with Hobson’s choice (no reference to the fine Hobson’s brewery from Worcestershire intended).

Anyway, back to the late 1980s: Whitbread were not actually interested in the Boddington’s beer itself but the company had 280 pubs in its estate so it was purely the commercial decision to buy the brand, the estate and the brewing capacity (which was eventually disposed of and the capacity absorbed elsewhere). Yet the beer was mostly only readily available in the north-west of England originally so it wasn’t that famous nationwide and Whitbread already had plenty of beers of a similar strength to Boddies and they didn’t particularly need another beer in their portfolio. But they wanted to buy some credibility. The historic 18^thcentury brewery, started by Samuel Whitbread in London, had already muddied their reputation among beer drinkers by the fairly standard business practice of investing in smaller breweries - which was often referred to as the Whitbread umbrella - as although their financial muscle was perceived as securing the future of these smaller competitors it gave Whitbread an edge in terms of being able to step in with a takeover bid when one of them appeared lucrative.

Let us not forget though that Boddies itself had taken over the Oldham brewery in 1982 and Higson’s of Liverpool in 1985. Business is business. It’s a dog eat dog world and survival of the fittest, and all that, yet, behind all the monopolies and mergers - and where exactly were the Monopolies and Mergers Commission in all this? – the breweries had learned that it wasn’t how great their beer was that mattered but who could develop the most important brand. Image was everything. It was the eighties and if you watch a retro video show of music from that period you may find it hard to believe that people were swayed by such heavy-handed, crass marketing but they were. And still are to a degree. Bigger was best and greed was good, apparently. They weren’t the only ones at it as the brewing world was carved up mostly by half a dozen players until 1992 when the government’s Beer Orders came along to save us – ha ha ha. [See a later post on this topic.]

Global brewer Coors most recent sizeable gambit was buying the extremely dull brown beer brand of Sharp’s of Rock in Cornwall. They have bought volume for sure but unlike its predecessors it was not a great beer with a great reputation that is now on the wane but it was already an established brand. It never was a sought after beer just ubiquitous in the same way as Greene King boasts that their ‘IPA’ (in inverted commas, for obvious reasons) is the biggest selling cask beer in the country; Well that’s because it’s in nearly every pub! That’s the same way estate agents call large housing-estates‘popular areas’ when they actually mean ‘densely populated areas’ which is not the same as the implication that people desire to live there ahead of other areas. It is like saying the years between 1939 and 1945 were a popular time to die. Volume does not always equate to popularity. Most governments tend to assume power even though many more people DIDN’T vote for them than DID vote for them. More people DISLIKE Manchester United football club than SUPPORT them. This is just semantics, I know, but I wanted to make it clear that aggressive branding exercises do not necessarily make a product loved, trusted or even desired but can actually become counter-productive; Woolworths was known as a cheap and cheerful shop (low-end) so when they had to try and compete with really cheap shops or up their game and attempt to become known as a retail outlet that sold quality goods at a reasonable price (mid-market) they were left in no-persons-land and went belly-up (yes, I know there were other factors involved).

Brands can become a millstone as much as a meal-ticket. So why try and re-establish a dead brand? That’s what a brewery concern calling themselves Truman’s are doing. Truman’s was a very old brewery established in the centre of London in 1666 – at one time allegedly the largest brewery in the world - and when the brewery closed in 1989 the real-estate value was monumental. The beers were brewed elsewhere for a while but then were axed. All traces of Truman’s as a London business was all but gone save for a handful of their very decoratively tiled pubs that still live on. This new brewery venture will not likely be able to recreate the same recipes from quarter of a century ago and beyond (although they are attempting to) and they are not even on any of the sites where beer was brewed under that banner nor, I believe, is anyone related to anyone from the original family that started the brewery nearly 350 years ago. Why resurrect an archaic brand name when not that many people remember or care about the beer or brand anyway? Maybe they believe any history is better than none at all. If the beer is great I’ll drink it but I won’t just because it has the same name as a beer I remember from the past. That is the point of this piece: Do brewers believe that the brand is more important than the product?

The 21^stcentury consumer is savvier than the last century’s chump because advertising and branding is so well established now that it starts from birth if you are born in a hospital which has a fast-food chain in the foyer. The saturation in all media has made us blind to it. People can view a website and pick out the bits of information they want and not even read the ads anymore – it’s a skill that has evolved since the inception of the internet so is hereditary now and people who believe subliminal advertising works are missing the point that consumers no longer trust advertising: Probably the best beer in the world is probably not the best slogan in the world. Even a child recognises hyperbole. Today’s consumer may still buy into brands but they want to be seduced and encouraged to do so not deceived and corralled. Treating people like idiots is a sure way of upsetting them – even if they are idiots.

So rather than waste a lot of time, effort and money fighting for the consumer’s hard earned pennies I propose that manufacturers, businesses and corporations all simply make the best product they possibly can and let social media do the rest. The new brewers are doing that. Sure, they aim to define their brand with marketing and presentation and, let’s face it, nobody does that quite like BrewDog but they have the quality products to back up the hype and attitude or they would soon get found out by the discerning market they have courted. Now, I’m off to the Euston Tap to have a half of Summer Wine Brewery’s 10% Clynelish Barrel-Aged Kopikat Imperial Coffee Stout because I saw on Twitter that they have it on draft and somebody I trust told me it was very good.

* PS – Since beginning this Briatribe I hear that the original Sugababes, which is Mutya, Keisha and Siobhan, have got back together to record new music. This is the equivalent of the Strangeway’s Brewery reopening and brewing original Boddington’s Bitter again but also having a go at an IPA and a Saison. Hooray!