2. The Not-So-Slow Death of a Beer Culture

They had beer-and-sandwich lunches, so we might have hoped for a better outcome. The reality is that those meetings between the British government of the 1970s and the mighty unions, of most note being Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers, were a futile attempt to find common ground. One likes to think that there was a genuine attempt on the part of Edward Heath’s Tory government^[1] and the rabid socialism of the likes of Scargill to find a deal that would not bankrupt the government while confirming the union workers in worthwhile, safe, and sufficiently rewarding employment. The reality was that we had abject weakness on the one hand and seeming disingenuous attitudes on the other.^[2]

Margaret Thatcher had no truck with such approaches. The Iron Lady brought down her mighty fist and the unions were splattered. And so she will go down in history as the Prime Minister who took the nation out of the horrors of strike after strike that paralyzed the country, introducing a market-driven system where rewards were to be had by genuine endeavor and not as a God-given right.

But she got it dead wrong with the brewing industry with the beer orders of 1988, which led directly to the loss of some of the great brewing names. Names like Bass.

I joined Bass, in Burton-on-Trent, in the spring of 1983. It was either that or a place on the faculty at the renowned Imperial College, London: a no-brainer.^[3] To join the company that was the UK's equivalent of Anheuser-Busch (albeit writ smaller in volume terms) with its dedication to people and quality was immense. With what pride did we wear the red triangle. We had 13 breweries and major brands such as Carling Black Label, Bass Ale, Tennents, and Stones Bitter. Wherever you looked in the company there were top people: some of the most gifted brewers and batteries of outstanding quality control folks, through to wonderful staff serving the beer in the pubs.

All was not rosy, though, as I found when they shipped me to the Preston Brook brewery in 1988 to have the “smooth edges knocked off—you must be seen to escape from the Ivory Tower, Charlie.” At the root of the problem were the unions that Margaret Thatcher was intent on controlling. The reality at Preston Brook was that control was very much in the hands of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) and the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW). I certainly learned a lot about human nature in my 2+ year posting at the brewery that some called “Pissed and Broke” and was baffled at how the union concept, founded on the finest principles of support and help for the downtrodden in more draconian days, could be so abused.

Bass had visions of the brewery, close to Runcorn, being a behemoth plant supplying vast swathes of the beer-drinking hinterland owing to its strategic location at the crossroads of north-south and east-west thoroughfares.^[4] They made two naive moves. The first was to entrust the design and construction of the brewery (completed in 1974) to engineers with no feel or empathy with the very special demands that a brewery operation must have. In short they designed a chemical works, badly laid out for all considerations of beer quality. The second was that they had not realized the militancy of the very people that they were recruiting to the workforce: hardened unionists who had honed their rebellious, almost anarchic mentality in the docks of Liverpool.

I was Quality Assurance Manager and, as such, had no members of the TGWU or AUEW in my team of more than 30.^[5] But I had plenty to say in management meetings about my perception of what needed to be done to solve our problems. Came the day, then, that the managing director Mike Myers (no relation—this one was no comedian) decided that I should sit in on one of the management-union meetings, so that I could see for myself just how they were dealing with the situation.

Myers, a chain-smoker who was so laid back that he seemed horizontal, started the meeting.

“I would like to kick off by showing you a graph that summarizes the quality performance of Carling Black Label from Preston Brook as compared to the other breweries in the group. As you can see, we have moved from being last to now having the best scores in the Bass organization. And this is a tribute to the Head Brewer, Neil Talbot, and the Quality Assurance Manager, Charlie Bamforth.”

The TGWU shop steward interrupted.

“Err, Mike…”

“Yes, Jack.”

“Who the f*** is Charlie Bamforth?”

“He’s sitting right there,” came Myers’ reply, as he gestured to me.

The unionite fixed me with his meanest stare, and his eyes narrowed menacingly.

“Never seen you before. You must have a f***ing good hiding place. Must let us know where it is sometime.”

Then he instantly swiveled back to glare at Mike Myers.

“But never mind him. It’s you, yer ****. You’re the one we want.”

And thus did a couple of hours unfold in which the union men verbally abused one member of the management team after another (present company excepted—after all, they had no interest in me, as they had said).

I was astounded. It seemed to go on for an eternity as I watched and wondered. Eventually the abuse ended and the unions stood en masse and marched out of the door, slamming it behind them. Mike lit up another cigarette.

“Well,” he said “I think that went pretty well.”

If I did not know it already from my memories of strikes, disruptions, three-day weeks, and the other miseries owing to the radical left, I certainly now appreciated what Thatcher was trying to do. The brewery by the Mersey was unmanageable. And the pleas of the likes of Talbot and me for investment so that we could properly control quality were doomed to failure at HQ, who would not invest in a brewery that was so seriously dysfunctional.^[6] A year after I left the company in 1991 the brewery closed, and the tanks were packed in crates and shipped to communist Eastern Europe.

By that time Thatcher had embarked on what was to me a less justifiable goal than bringing the unions to heel: She set the brewing industry itself in her sights. She decided it was a monopolistic situation.

The UK brewing industry at the time was dominated by The Big Six, namely Bass, Allied, Whitbread, Grand Metropolitan (the erstwhile Watney's), Courage, and Scottish & Newcastle. National companies all. But there were plenty of other, smaller brewing companies, such as Greenall Whitley, Wolverhampton & Dudley, Marston's, Greene King, Shepherd Neame, and many, many more. Every region had its own brewing companies, from St. Austell Breweries and Redruth Breweries in Cornwall to Sinclair Breweries in Orkney.

The wonderful feature of the beer world in Britain at the time was the pub. Although there were “free houses” not tied to a given brewing company, most pubs were owned by the brewers themselves and primarily sold the products of that company, perhaps with the odd bottle of beer from other suppliers as well as the inevitable tap delivering Guinness. It was this vertical integration that stuck in Thatcher's craw: In short she said it was a monopolistic scenario. She would not countenance the argument that in most places there were substantial numbers of pubs owned by different brewing companies. No, the situation must change. She was adamant. In due course (1988) “The Beer Orders” appeared, a.k.a. The Supply of Beer: A Report on the Supply of Beer for Retail Sale in the United Kingdom.

In the Monopolies and Mergers Commission report, they themselves pointed out that there were more than 200 brewers in the UK, categorized as

- the 6 national brewers accounting for 75 percent of beer production, 74 percent of the brewer-owned retail estate, and 86 percent of loan ties.

- 11 regional brewers accounting for 11 percent of beer production, 15 percent of the brewer-owned estate, and 8 percent of loan ties.

- 41 local brewers, accounting for about 6 percent of beer production, 10 percent of the estate, and 4 percent of loan ties.

- 3 brewers (namely Carlsberg, Guinness, and Northern Clubs Federation) without tied estate and supplying about 8 percent of beer production and accounting for more than 1 percent of loan ties.

- 160 other brewers, all operating on a very small scale.

Not an inconsiderable diversity, one might argue—com-pare and contrast for example the situation at the time in the United States where there were far fewer brewing companies, and overwhelming control by a very few.

At the time the Brewers Society,^[7] which represented the collective interest of the UK brewers, made the following observations about the brewing industry and the merits of the extant system:

In short, The Brewers’ Society saw

The Monopolies folks somewhat patronizingly observed,

In summary:

And then the kill (literally as it turned out), in the shape of their recommendations:

And then the astounding observation (in view of what would transpire):

If no changes are made we believe it is inevitable that a very small number of brewers will increasingly dominate the supply of beer in the United Kingdom.

The UK brewing industry was aghast—but the most they could wrangle out of the government before the ensuing bill was passed to law was that they would be allowed to keep not only 2,000 pubs, but also 50 percent of the remaining estate that they may own. Thus, in the case of Bass, owning 6,300 pubs, it was necessary to sell 2,150 outlets.

To summarize the impact, it was quickly realized that there were two ways to go for the big guys: either brew beer or sell it. The retail profit on beer in the pubs is substantially larger than is the wholesale margin of beer leaving the brewery. So if you are going to brew beer for others to retail (just as per the United States following prohibition) then it is a pretty good idea to be big and powerful and brewing very large volumes, one by one the Big Six fell away, the last being Scottish & Newcastle, who embarked on the bulk brewing route, bought big time into Europe, but finally succumbed to the overtures of Carlsberg and Heineken in 2008, who divided up the spoils between them (thereby making yet bigger global brewers, of course).

Bass? We were already significant hoteliers, with the Crest group. But the board decided that they would really embrace beds and bathrooms rather than barley and bottles and morphed into Intercontinental Hotels, with more rooms than any other company on the planet and with brand names like Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn. The breweries and brands, as we have seen, were sold to Interbrew before some were divested to Coors.

Huge pub chains were established on the carcasses of the major brewers, companies like Wetherspoons, Walkabout, All Bar One, and the Eerie Pub Company. They make huge investment in the pubs—to the extent that these, while ostensibly more attractive, comfortable, and refined than the hostelries they replaced, have in reality become little more than cheaper family dining haunts. And the beer? Why, the pumps one sees so often are delivering a relatively few global brands.

At the last count there were 42 brewing companies in the UK that owed their origins to a time before 1970 and around 600 founded since then. All of the new guys are relatively tiny and, in global terms when compared with the world famous names, so are most of the bigger UK brewing companies also relatively small. Anheuser-Busch/InBev,^[8] Molson Coors,^[9] Heineken,^[10] and Carlsberg^[11] are all global entities, with a mighty presence in the UK not least because of Thatcher’s legacy, of the British brewers, the biggest are Marstons (headquartered in Wolverhampton^[12]) and Greene King.^[13]

It remains possible for brewing companies to own their own pubs—up to a point. And so at the last count Marstons owned 2,203 such hostelries and Greene King possessed 2,091. But compare and contrast with the Independent Pub Companies who, because they do not brew, can own many more pubs—companies like Punch Taverns, owning 8,420 and Enterprise Inns with 7,700.

The beer business is a very different one post-Thatcher, and one tragic victim is cask-conditioned ale (see endnote 19 of Chapter 1). People often ask me what I miss from my homeland. High on the list is this style of beer. Whenever I find myself back in England and whichever city, town, or village I am in, I head straightway to a pub. And if I do not see beer handles,^[14] then I turn tail and go in search of them. When Thatcher severed the tied house link, the death knell was sounded for some great beers. Ironically, one clause of the Beer orders allowed for pub owners to have a “guest” cask ale from another company. However, any self-respecting brewer of such beer demands total control of the product from brewery to glass and would never trust it to a third party.^[15] The beer needs to come into condition and also needs to clarify. So the barrels need to be set up properly in the cellar and given time to present to best advantage. And then, once tapped, the contents need to be used within three days; otherwise, we have vinegar, because air-loving organisms called acetic acid bacteria get to work. Small wonder that we at Bass, like others, had an army of “outside Quality Control” personnel, whose job was to patrol the pubs, making sure that the cask beer was in tip-top condition but also that everything else in the outlet was the best it could possibly be: The glasses were clean; the sparklers^[16] were adjusted properly; all beers including those in keg and bottle were also served properly.

I cannot entirely blame The Iron Lady for the demise of cask ale. Some of the guilt must be with technical gurus in some companies, and I will single out Guinness^[17] here. For the longest time they had been dispensing their glorious stout under a mixed gas top pressure of carbon dioxide and nitrogen for the simple reason that the latter gas affords much smaller bubbles and vastly more stable foams than does carbon dioxide alone. The research whizzes in Dublin and Park Royal, London^{[18] , [19]} set their sights on transferring this mixed gas technology to the canned beer, so that people who wanted to have their draft Guinness in the comfort of their own home could do so with just the same amazing head. The problem is that the much lower carbon dioxide content of draft beers means less inherent foam-forming ability, on tap, gas release can be encouraged by using a pump. But what to do in a can? Enter the widget, the plastic or metal insert in cans that serves as a nucleation device, in plain terms a contraption for making bubbles.

The brewers making ales took note and in no time had produced cask-ale alternatives for the can, pasteurized of course and therefore straightway at variance with the traditional product. Worse, however, is that nitrogen scuppers hoppy aroma for entirely unknown reasons. But there is no disguising it, and so the magnificent dry hop character of ales (something not found on Guinness) is lost.^[20] Furthermore the beer develops an extremely smooth mouthfeel.

Undaunted, the product development folks in breweries had their mental light bulbs turned on: Let's pasteurize our draft ales, put them into kegs^[21] with less carbon dioxide but also some nitrogen to ensure stable foam and a real s-m-o-o-t-h texture. Dispense it stony cold, of course. Call it Nitrokeg. None of this finings stuff, and natural conditioning and handfuls of hops in barrels. So much easier to clean out the kegs when they get back to the brewery. No skill needed on the part of the publican. No brainer. Cask ale's death knell was well and truly rung.

Of course, with stouts and ales of the purportedly traditional type now available to take home, who needs a pub? Solitary, nonsocial drinking has never been easier. And, in turn, the power of the supermarkets has never been greater. This is the new monopoly, the shift of purchasing away from the pubs (in the case of beer) and from smaller, family-driven shops in the case of groceries, clothing, and most other products. Customers are understandably attracted by one-stop shopping at heavily discounted rates. Those cost savings are facilitated by the megastore buyers squeezing their suppliers (e.g., brewers) to the margins. The bigger the brewing company, the more able they are to compete through the economies to be achieved by brewing on a large scale, thereby allowing a modicum of profit from the transaction.

And so off troop the shoppers back to their central-heated homes, with their 60-inch screen televisions to eat their prepackaged fast food and overly cold canned beer as they watch wall-to-wall soccer (so much cozier and cheaper than visiting the stadiums with their extortionate ticket prices). No dropping into the pub at any time—before or after a game, to socialize, to chill out. In any event, you can't smoke in the pub anymore, whereas you can puff away to your heart’s content in the home. Small wonder that British pubs are closing at a rate of six every day. No surprise to see the radical shift from draft beer to that in bottles and cans (see Figure 2.1). Unsurprising too, that the percentage of total UK beer sales in the form of cask ale was less than 6 percent in 2008, whereas it was around 17 percent when Thatcher came to power.

Beer Sales by Package Type (%)

Figure 2.1 Beer trends in the United Kingdom.

You are probably getting the idea that Thatcher is not my all-time favorite politician. The reality is, however, that despite there being a Parliamentary Beer group,^[22] there is a long history of the exchequer bleeding the industry dry on excise taxes (duty).^{[23] , [24]}

* * *

The graffiti seems entirely apposite for me: “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” What right do I have to expect that my notion of the sublime beer-drinking experience is the right one? A rustic pub, cask ale, simple fare—perhaps some fresh-baked ham on crusty well-buttered bread with a pickled onion or two—a log fire, muzak-less buzz of conversation, my Times. Perhaps I am growing ornery and am dwelling excessively in the past. Yet I see my glass of traditional ale as a metaphor for spiritual drift. Quiet contemplation, even meditative sipping of a liquid that evolved glacially over centuries swept away by super-chilled beers that seem to speak entirely of this frantic, Blackberried, and iPodded multitasking, less-compassionate world.