Cooking Lager

The End

2011-10-31T14:13:00.005Z

The future

All good things come to and end. Indeed all crap things come to an end too.

It started from reading beer blogs. The curiosity was mild at first and the amusement greater. Amusement not only that for some drinking was more than throwing it down your neck and getting a little pissed. Amusement at the idea that enjoying a dark pongy liquid made you more discerning, with the darker and pongier being all the better. Amusement at the idea that putting up the price of a slab of supermarket lager would make a difference to the viability of dumpy old men’s pubs and stop pissed up kids from vomiting on the pavement on a Friday night.

It started by making a simple point, that a can of Stella Artois, one of the nation’s most popular beers, wasn’t actually a horrible tasting liquid but a quite pleasant drink. That despite its popular moniker as “wife beater”, a few cans didn’t give me the urge to beat up my girlfriend. It started from the observation that as a customer the cheap price of the beer in supermarkets was actually a bit of a bargain. A nice cheapish way of having a few drinks and relaxing and being no bother to anyone else.

But the curiosity grew and I started to throw a bit of pongy ale down my neck. I didn’t find it too bad. Then I stopped shaving every day. A little stubble from time to time grew into a beard. The girlfriend made the odd comment, but slowly accepted it. Then came the sandals. They are just so freeing. Bang tidy trainers constrain your feet, sandals allow the toes to move in freedom. The beer t shirts started through logic. Why buy clobber if people give it to you for nowt? So beer t shirts became the order of the day. As winter set in what is better than a cheap acrylic 1980’s jumper from a charity shop? They make sense. They are cheap, warm & the washing machine is kind to them. Then the orange Sainsburys bag. They are strong, durable and free. What better way to carry around your tankard, beer guide, festival programme & Greggs Steak Bake? But it’s not about the look; it’s about the slow descent into pong.

It begins by spotting a new label on the hand pull in a pub and “trying” it and deciding it wasn’t too bad. Then you find yourself drinking it more and more and forsaking the gorgeousness of Foster’s for a new brief inconsequential fling. But the fling becomes a romance then a love affair, and then you can no longer look than can of Carling in the ring pull without feeling a sense of shame in your gut. That you are forsaking all that CAMCL has achieved. It’s takes a while but you pull yourself together, you look yourself in the mirror and you say to yourself “I can no longer live a lie”

The squeeze was watching Emmerdale and sipping a white wine spritzer. “We need to talk” I said, She looked over, irritated at first then saw the look on my face. She knew it was serious. “I have something to confess, I am not sure how you will take it” Her look became a cold blank stare. I knew this was make or break for the two of us. “I’m a beer geek” I said. Immediately I felt a wave of relief. There it was, out in the open. No longer would I feel shame. “Oh stop pissing about” She said as she threw a cushion at me and I saw her reaction was not one of fear or loathing or disgust. Was there a little sympathy in that mild irritation I wondered? I had hoped our relationship would survive the revelation, and a glimmer of hope was all I needed to embolden me further.

Next came my parents. Over Sunday lunch the conversation went quiet. I took my chance. “Mum, Dad, I have something to say” They looked at me quizzical as I continued, “I have been living a lie. I can live it no longer. I need to leave the closet” My father’s eyes expanded in surprise “I am a beer geek, I like to drink pongy dark beer, pongy light beer, and the pongier the better. Whether cask, bottle, can or craft. Whether macro or micro, if it reeks I love it. I like to comment on the cascade hops and talk about resinous quality in the after taste. I’M STLL YOUR SON; GODDAMMIT” I put my head in my hands and my father put his arm around me “You’ll always be our son, and we’ll always love you. Even if you’re a beer geek. Have you considered homosexuality? That’s quiet fashionable and may even be healthier than heavy drinking.”- “Beer geekery is fashionable dad. It’s all the rage. Have you not read the cask report? And beer geekery isn’t about getting pissed. We neck pong for the taste, not to get pissed. We are quite boring that way” I replied.

The next thing was to come out to friends. The reaction was “We already knew, we already suspected”. The clues were there. A growing preference for dumpy old men’s pubs. A suggestion we go somewhere where the pong is not vinegary and music quieter and the girls less orange. So what is next?

I went to a beer festival. It was in Didsbury in Manchester. It was very good. There were other beer bloggers there. I spotted the Real Ale Girl at the bar, looking pissed and lairy, but could not say hello whilst still in the closet, no matter how fit her mate was or how pissed me and my mates were. It felt wrong, whilst I was still living this lie, whilst I hadn’t a proper pongy ale blog of my own.

I went up to the CAMRA membership stand and said “I used to be a lager lout. Please forgive me. I used to be one of the ignorami, but I love this old man’s grog now me, even though some of it tastes like a rodents arse. Some of it is the dogs bollocks. Can I sign up? A rather nice lady gave me a form and a pen and it felt like growing up. Afterwards she gave me a hug. I’m getting some Spoons tokens by all accounts. She tried to flog me a beer guide but I told her it was cheaper on Amazon. She had no signed photos of Roger Protz to sell. I presume she had sold out.

Well the final step is to come out publically and end this farce. To stop living a lie. I can no longer blog about Foster’s Lager as I don’t think she’ll have me back. Cooking Lager is done. It’s more than a meaningless fling with the pong. Onwards to a brave future. If at a future festival of pong and vinegar you see a drunk bearded man mumbling, be kind. If he says "I used to be cooking lager but I got cured", offer to top up his tankard.

I’m already writing an AGM motion now I’m in the beards club. It’s titled “Minimum pricing is bollocks and all those that support it are knobs”, but first I’ve got to go into a pub and ask for my CAMRA discount!

Say it loud. I’m a beer geek and proud!

Social anthropology

2011-10-12T12:57:00.005+01:00

Hollywood totty Reece Witherspoon liking the lout

Via the wonderful world of twitter I became aware of a couple of things on the internet worth a look. An article of the BBC here, that makes a fair argument regarding the direction of alcohol policy (further reading can be found here). Namely that demonising alcohol and controlling its price are ineffective tools to tackle the favourite tabloid story of “binge drink Britain”. Should you want to know more about binge drink Britain the Daily Mail are fond of such stories, and a good one can be found here. The best bit is always enjoying the excuse of publishing photo’s of pissed up kids whilst expressing the required level of disapproval at the whole “getting pissed and shagging a drunk fat bird” shenanigans of students that don’t yet know any better.

You don’t need me to tell you, but be wary of the Daily Mail. It can appeal attractive with its view that Kelly Brook on holiday wearing a new bikini is newsworthy, but if you’re not careful you’ll find yourself trapped in an insane asylum of your mind where immigrants are tearing at the very fabric of your reality.

If demonising alcohol and controlling its price are ineffective tools to tackle the apparent issue of binge drinking, then you have to assume a different motive for those proposing it, and if they cannot be honest about their motivation why trust them?

Thus you have to assume the true motivation of organisations like alcohol concern is one of gradual denormalisation of alcohol and eventual prohibition. You have to assume CAMRA are not interested in responsible drinking and are disingenuous in their statements and basically think that you are dumb enough to think pub prices are “great value” if only those damn supermarkets didn’t let you know just how cheap the products really are.

The beardies already have a sop for their middle aged and middle class affectation for the pongy products of small inefficient breweries in Small Breweries Relief. You wouldn’t think it acceptable for the small scale manufactures of elite sports cars or tailors specialising in bespoke suits to pay less tax. Why should products used by the better off be subsidised effectively by a higher rate of tax on those enjoyed by the less well off?

The beardies & the prohibitionists ought to be resisted in any attempt to impose higher prices on cheaper alcohol products. Boozer’s everywhere need to tell ‘em to stick it.

Value Cider

2011-10-05T15:25:00.002+01:00

Since blogging I’ve been chronicling many of the wonderful products that sit firmly in the “cheap” and “mainstream” category of the drinker’s cannon. My overriding reason for doing so is to offer a counter to the view that such products are crap and instead offer the view that actually most of them are alright and a bargain to boot.

One product I had a go of a while back was “basics” cider, blogged here. A surprisingly cheap and quite pleasant product for those of us for whom “discerning grog appreciation” means throwing it down our necks and enjoying getting a little tidily.

If you look at the latest Gordon’s Gin Commercial here, which nicely pokes a little gentle fun at wine bores whilst promoting a decent mainstream drink with unpretentious values you wonder why so many think aping the pretention of wine bores is any way to promote beer. Beer in most of its forms, pongy ale included, is a decent enjoyable unpretentious drink. Promoting values it already possesses appears a better strategy than copying the nonsense associated with wine.

This post isn’t about beer, it’s about cider. A drink I really only like in its mainstream commercial form. I quite the odd pint of “real” cask pong, I’d run a mile from the rancid gut rot sold as “real” cider. The cheapest mainstream cider fits into the value ranges and unlike the value ranges of beer it actually has an acceptable taste and abv. It’s a bit watery compared with a Magners but not so much as to be unacceptable or unpleasant considering 2 litres can be bought for more or less the same price as 568ml or 500ml if you’re buying a regular brand.

This grog has become a regular guilty pleasure since I discovered it. After a spot of gardening it’s quite nice to sit on a folding camper chair, smell the freshly cut grass and neck a couple of ice cold glasses of fizzy sweetness.

Tesco has to be the brand of choice. Sainsbury’s have shamefully increased the price of theirs to £1.89. Tesco are a more reasonable £1.39. Also Tesco interestingly put the ingredients on the bottle and you’ll be pleased to note the prime ingredient is “fermented cider”.

click to enlarge and read

In order to fully appreciate the nose and bouquet of this fine vintage pick a stemmed glass that enables you to swirl it about and release its aromas. Get your nose in there for a wonderful appley delight and swig with unreserved pleasure. 2 litres gets you nicely on the way to being pissed at a price of mere buttons. Coins you might find between the cushions of your sofa. What’s stopping you?

If the cap fits

2011-09-19T14:12:00.005+01:00

How beer used to be served

When I started this nonsense I was inspired primarily by challenging a few opinions that had become established truths among beer geeks through mere repetition. Namely that cheap booze was a great evil and standard regular products were rubbish only the undiscerning drank. You might spot the obvious logical flaw in this. Firstly cheap is relative. Even if you set a minimum price that within time becomes cheap. Whatever floor you set becomes the bottom. Secondly if the great British public were to abandon mainstream products and adopt any niche product en mass, then that product by default becomes mainstream and those seeking a smug sense of self satisfaction and superiority will have to go find something else to champion.

In truth mainstream products are okay. They may not be the finest product on Gods Earth but they are of a standard enough people consider acceptable at a price that people consider to be worth it.

However reading this is the guardian prompted me to question some of the offers currently doing the rounds, cheap beer wise. When this rubbish started off 3 boxes of 18 for £20 were pretty common. I lamented when the offers reduced to boxes of 15. Of late the offers have been on boxes of 12. Currently Tesco are flogging boxes of 12 for 2 for £16. It strikes me as quite poor. Working out the price of a pint of Carling your getting 18 pints (for that is 24 440ml cans) for £16 or 89p a pint. For the 5% beers like Carlsberg Export you’re looking at £1.33 a pint (24 half pint bottles for £16). The grog is getting pricier or the offers are not really about at the moment. Maybe it will improve by Xmas but by comparison I worked out the price per pint of a premium "authentic" beer.

My choice of what constitutes this may not be yours. Bitburger German Lager may be just as industrially produced a lout as any, but in the UK it markets at a premium on the single bottles with all the other “premium” beers. This is running at 3 pint size bottles (okay half litre but I can’t be arsed quibbling) for £4, or £1.33 a pint. The same price as the cooking lager. Plenty of the premium ales are priced 3 for £4 and are in or around the 5% abv mark.

Whoaa, what’s going on? As a cooking lager enthusiast my basic principle is to get a few beers down me as cheaply as possible. I’ve nothing against premium authentic beer, it’s just that I don’t mind the standard brands and flogged cheaply they hit the spot. But when they are not flogged cheaply, what’s a cooking lager enthusiast to do? It’s all in the price. Just as the posh beers are really not as great as the beards would have you believe and the lout not as bad as they make out, I’ve nothing against necking the posh beers. There ain’t no brand loyalty, just loyalty to your own pocket and hard earned wedge. If cheap enough, cheers. Shop around, do the maths. Currently the premium posh stuff isn’t retailing at a premium over the standard stuff and worth a sniff.

I'll be turning into a beer geek if this carries on.

How beer is served now

Things get better.

The Popular Peoples Front of Judea

2011-09-14T13:54:00.003+01:00

This lady has nothing to do with this at all

A couple of developments in beer worth noting and deriding. It appears the People’s Front of Judea has inspired the creation of the Judean Peoples Front & the Popular Peoples Front. Namely CAMRA are not the only beer club to dismiss and deride anymore. Now there is CAMRGB & Craft Beer UK to have a pop at on the blogosphere. Now when having a pop at the “beards and sandals brigade” I shall have to define which popular people’s front these odd balls are associated with rather than just assume. Zak Avery has beaten me to blogging about this exciting development. But I thought a little cynicism and scorn of my own wouldn’t go amiss.

Firstly CAMRGB offers the cooking lager enthusiast possibly the best reason to put twitter on your Smartphone. Simply because you can tweet “DRINK FOSTER’S LAGER” with a #CAMRGB hash tag and it ends up on their website. Who doesn’t want to spend all day doing that? As for the aims and objectives, I’ll let you decide whether you agree with it or think it amusing but harmless rubbish. It’s free to join, by all accounts, making it better than CAMRA but you don’t get anything like Spoons tokens so maybe it’s not as good. Who knows? I guess it’s up to you.

One amusing aspect is the “Donate” using PayPal button. Yup they are after your quid. They’ve not said much about what they are going to do with your quid but they want it. I missed a trick there with CAMCL. I should have begged for donations and offered no clear idea as to what I was going to do with those donations and just bought cheap lager for myself. In terms of actual campaigning for “really good beer” first impressions are they do the sum total of buggar all. The beer festivals highlighted are run by others but heh, their position is clear and it’s free. For now. They might do something if you join and suggest it.

Time will tell if it amounts to anything. Here’s hoping that if it does they have more common sense than to want to kybosh cheap supermarket grog and they all get in the habit of buying packets of razors. I don’t hold much hope. Exchanging a few pleasantries on twitter with the chap running the shebang (I think he’s called Simon) informed me it isn’t just a really good beer club; it’s a socialist really good beer club for the beer comrades. That should be fun then.

As for Craft Beer UK, it appears a producer club rather than beer drinkers club. Just what the industry needs, another trade organisation. If you have a brewery is it worth joining? You have to decide for yourself. Is there a benefit to pooling resources to promote the sector in general or are you better of promoting your own brand on your own? Don’t ask me. What does appear pretty clear is that the membership criterion appears a bit in flux. Yesterday it appeared only open to small brewers making beer the existing members liked. Today it’s a public vote. I guess they have some thinking to do. If I had a brewery I wouldn’t want to join a club that defined “craft” beer as anything that would impede my future business. I might want to build a bigger brewery, expand my market and export at some point. I might rue the day I joined, funded & helped a bunch of upstarts define craft beer in a manner than eventually chucked me out and no longer let my beer be officially “craft” I might see the sense in keeping the definition of the term nicely loose to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean.

Of course, though, whilst Cooking Lager enthusiasts may deride these organisations we can take a sense of pride that we are too busy necking cheap lout to get on with the business of formulating CAMCL into anything other than a vague spiritual notion. To join CAMCL all you have to do is neck a 4 pack of Carlsberg whilst sat on the couch, scratching your ball sack (or whatever if you’re a girl) and belching “Ooo Laa Laa Ga Ga”. Do that and you’re in.

The Campaign

2011-09-12T13:20:00.005+01:00

The Campaign for Cooking Lager (CAMCL) has always been a bit of a piss take. That however does not appear to stop us from winning. See this here. Supermarkets offering high value cheap grog appear to be winning. Pubs offering poor value expensive grog appear to be losing.

Some will shed a tear. I won't. Instead I offer a picture of the lovely Hayden Panettiere drinking some lovely lout to cheer you up.

When it comes to pubs I saw a sign outside my local Wetherspoons. The sign showed 2 popular brands of beer alongside prices significantly cheaper than any nearby boozer. The tagline? "Why pay more?"

I can't think of an answer. I can't think of a reason to pay more. Spoons it is then. If you can think of an answer, maybe you know how to save the boozers and can explain why the Spoons was the only gaff with any punters in.

The best bit of the article?

"The GMB has calculated that the average price of a pint of lager cost 93p at a pub in 1987. If it had risen in line with the Retail Prices Index measure of inflation it would now be £2.18, but in fact it has climbed to £3.09, making it unaffordable as a daily staple for many consumers, already hit by rising utility bills, petrol prices and salaries which have been frozen."

It's all in the price.

Carling Chrome

2011-09-02T11:47:00.005+01:00

After trying Foster’s Gold I was actually quite keen to try the other mainstream lager brand extension, Carling Chrome, however as all cooking lager enthusiasts I have a reluctance to paying full whack and knew it would have to wait until I spotted it on discount. I didn’t have to wait long. A 4 pack for £3 in Sainsbury’s and bob’s your aunty so to speak, cheap enough to try though not neck regularly.

I could mull over the naming of these extensions. Is Gold more desirable than Chrome or vice versa? Do these names exude the very essence of quality and desirability? Then concluded I didn’t really know. For me it’s all about the lout, the neck ability and the cheapness.

The cheapness is the issue with brand extensions qualifying as cooking lager. The purpose of them is clearly to command a premium price and lout enthusiasts like me don’t do premium prices. The early discount being more a strategy to get punters to try the product rather than an indication the product is heading for regular discount. When the beer geeks got all excited about Punk IPA appearing in cans and on the shelves of supermarkets it was initially discounted in an attempt to kick start a market among regular mainstream shoppers. Beer is no different to cheese or Pot Noodles.

I doubt either Carling Chrome or Foster’s Gold will regularly discount as it isn’t the point of the exercise. The regular brands are suffering declining sales forcing regular deep discounting and in some respects a decline in brand value as punters get used to a 40 or 50p can of lager and rather than see it as a fantastic bargain and question the value of the product when it isn’t discounted and when it is sold as a premium in the on trade. Cooking lager enthusiast like the decline because it means discounting and cheap grog, a perspective quite different from beer geeks that are desperate to pay more for their pint of pongy vinegar.

I’m not sure how many times Carling have tried to extent the brand. I remember Carling Premier as a stronger lager sold in a can with a widget to give it the “smooth” effect of some canned ales. I have a mate who given the chance will drone on at length about how great Carling Premier was and that they should bring it back. It never did much for me, but I’m not fond of “smooth” beers whether it is done to an ale or a lager. I guess if it was that great it would still be in the shops and we will see if Chrome is that great if it is still in the shops this time next year.

At the risk of repeating the last blog posting I am uncertain why regular mainstream brands attempt to premiumize themselves. A premium brand releasing a standard product affords the opportunity for the authenticity to rub off slightly. I’m not sure it quite works the other way. Coors, who make Carling, already have a strongish light lager that commands a premium price and is rarely discounted in Coors Light. My observation is that beer more strongly appeals to a female customer, whilst Carling is very much a product of the lads but I suspect bringing regular Coors Lager to market would afford a strong premium brand to rival Budweiser. After all Coors is the beer of Smokey and the Bandit. Budweiser is only the beer at the start of Smokey and the Bandit 2. You would transport a truck of Coors across America; you would only get pissed up on Bud prior to transporting an Elephant.

But anyways, here we are with posher more sophisticated Carling. Similar to Foster’s Gold it is a lighter tasting lager with more alcohol. Is more closely resembles a “Lite” beer, whilst Foster’s Gold tasted much more like the “ice” beers that hit the market a few years back. The beer is smooth with a sweetish aftertaste and arguably has more going for it than Foster’s Gold. I found it a nicer drink than the previous one. Neither really would appeal to the drinker looking for beery flavour but both are nice easy going bottles of cold beer to get pissed up on. I’d neck it any day of the week. I’m often perplexed when I read more scathing reviews of light lager among beer geeks. Sure beer geeks are looking for more by way of beery taste, but there is nothing wrong or unpleasant about necking lighter beer.

Whilst arguably not unpleasant and quite nice I would question whether there is a strong market for lighter beer in the UK. It took off big style in America but numerous attempts to hawk it in the UK failed.

The thing about beer is that it gets written about by beer geeks so if you were to read the story of American beer you would get reams on craft beer and buggar all on the far bigger story of the success of light beer. My suspicion as to why it never took off in Europe was confusion as to the term “lite”. Is it diet beer? Light in Alcohol? Light tasting? Either way the European drinker decided that was for girls and didn’t drink it. Will light beer take off with sexier names like Gold and Chrome? God knows. If it does, a couple of mainstream brewers have found a product they can sell at a higher price and save established brands from decline. If it doesn’t we await with anticipation for the name of next light lager sold at a premium. Would I win a prize for suggesting “Carling Posh”?

If I was being facetious I’d make the following mild suggestion? Carling and Foster’s are great. Worth every penny of the 50p a can. I love the stuff and would only drink something else if it was 40p a can or even 30p. If you want to sell grog for more why not look at the grog that does sell for more quite regularly. The shelves are full of premium priced Ales & Lager’s that even when discounted go for 2 bottles for £3. These tend to a bit more flavourful and authentic. It’s only an observation, like. There appears to be a market among people that want to pay more and think of themselves as more discerning piss heads than the common rabble, and it’s clear what they are after.

Always believe in, because you are Gold

2011-08-25T17:15:00.005+01:00

The basic rules of cooking lager appreciation are the beer must be neck able and dirt cheap. However a bit of flexibility is a must when encouraging cooking lager appreciation in others. Praise yields more result that criticism and when the lovely lady squeeze did a bit of shopping and bought me a six pack of Foster’s Gold I was delighted. I didn’t even enquire whether it was on special offer but expressed my delight she’d put some lout in the basket. The cheapest I’d seen this was £4.50 in Asda. Other promotions had it at around a fiver. Full price it is 6 quid for 6, a quid a bottle. A bit pricey for 4.8% lout all considered but I’ll give it a go as it’s bought. Putting lout in the basket is a good thing, to be encouraged. We can work on the whole cheap as humanly possible bit gradually.

I confess to a smidgen of concern regarding whether there was an ulterior motive. Was she about to confess to something and wanted me in a better mood? Was her mother coming to live with us? Had she thrown out all the treasures I had stored in the attic? Not the pilfered beer glasses? Did she want rid of my dart board? Was she about to suggest re decorating something? Had she been buying shoes out of the joint account? Was she about to leave me for an overweight pongy ale enthusiast because she found a beer gut stretching a Hobgoblin lager boy T-shirt & sandals the sexiest thing on earth? Will I be changing this rubbish to cooking bitter and begging for a second chance?

I remained silent and waited. Nothing. It would appear to be an entirely altruistic gesture. We’ll see I guess when I neck one. A day later the lout had been in the fridge and I settled down to one. The bottle informs me it is a 4.8% chill filtered lager. “Premium” 5% brands have arguably had some success with lower alcohol 4% spin offs. The stronger spin offs from the standard 4% brands seem to die a death pretty quickly. There is a logic to this, the 5% brands have a bit of authenticity to them but if you don’t want to get too pissed up you can manage it on 4%. When standard brands go up market they appear to be standard with more alcohol rather than actual premium products. How will this fair? Anyone’s guess. Carling has a new brand out called “chrome” in this category so I guess it’s time for brand extensions all over again.

The purpose of this beer is by all accounts to give the loyal Foster’s drinker something more sophisticated for when times demand an occasion, as the can of lout is okay when you’re with your mates but not in front of a lady. That’s what the marketing department say, anyway. I asked the squeeze. “Do I look sexier with a bottle of lager or a can of lager?” The answer was “You look sexiest when you are hoovering. But not during Emmerdale. You want to do that more often if you want to turn me on”

The brand whilst being a UK brewed Australian lager has never been the product that by all accounts isn’t that popular or widely drunk in Australia and this stronger version isn’t an attempt to sell the authentic Foster’s. It’s a whole new beer.

But what is the lout like? Well it’s a pleasant affable inoffensive drink lacking in anything you might want to call flavour. A light tasting lager to the kind and watery piss to the unkind. Nothing at all unpleasant and if cheap enough I’d be happy to neck it by the gallon. A light unchallenging beer for a hot day or something to get angry about if you are a beer geek, I suspect. There is nothing about it at all to dislike.

If I were to be slightly sceptical, we have been here before. Anyone remember “ice” beer? Or even “lite” beer? Both lager styles which pretty much failed to take off in the UK market and this beer is pretty indistinguishable from that.

Usually when you drink a stronger beer you expect more of the general taste of beer. The basic mechanics of brewing dictate that to up the alcohol you put more of the core ingredients in to end up with a higher ABV and that makes it taste of more. Chill filtering is a process where you near freeze fermented liquid and remove the ice particles. This ups the abv because you are removing water and not alcohol and also removes much of the flavour whose resins are attached to the ice. Hence a lighter tasting higher alcohol beer.

The main standard lager brands advertise mainly to a male clientele. Carling, Foster’s & Carlsberg are by their advertising “lads” products. Are lads looking for a stronger version which tastes of less? I don’t really know other than when previously asked the question it was a “no” or else ice beer would still be in the shops. As a lad I’m looking for cheaper beer but I don’t see much of a chance of a new brand extension called “cheapest”. At least they are not patronising women, though, by introducing a light tasting lager for the ladies.

My guess is that some beer commentators would describe this as being indicative of all that is wrong about large scale brewing of bland products. It really isn’t. There are worse things and indeed worst beers in the world. The only offence is trying to up the price of the grog they are selling. The standard brand sells for about 40-50p a can. They want to sell beer for more, so they introduce a spin off. If it works it works, if it doesn’t it doesn’t. My guess is that this will be short lived but I’ve been wrong before.

On a positive note, it produces a pretty good belch without that beery feedback loop created by beers which taste of beer and it is named after a song by Spandau Ballet. If that’s not a good reason to drink it I don’t know what is.

Eventually the bombshell came. I was looking for a much loved and much worn t-shirt. “I’ve had a bit of a clear out. The scruffy t shirts are in the bin. Why not wear one of the new shirts I bought you that you’ve never worn?” It’s not all bad. Some aspects of living with a bird are pretty good. The sex, basically. Regular sex.

Cookies Crystal Ball

2011-08-23T10:07:00.006+01:00

Holly Valance encourages you to neck a Foster's Gold

Firstly an apology, this is yet another long tedious post where I try to make a thoughtful point rather than glorify binge drinking, mild misogyny or make fun of bearded sandal wearing beer geeks. I’ve not given up on that and if you come back later I’ll try to have some for you. I’m necking some Foster’s Gold tonight after the squeeze bought me a six pack. I shall be necking it whilst watching Seven Dwarves, the best show on telly. I’ll let you know why Foster’s Gold is the beer to finally kill of dark pongy ale for good.

I’ve been pondering the distinct and noticeable alteration in the pub landscape away from drinkers pubs (wet led is I believe the technical term) and dining pubs (I’m not sure whether these are dry led? Are they? Comments below. I must say I don’t much like the idea of dry food. It sounds over cooked).

I’ve been reading a fair few things that lay claim to food being the saviour of pubs and from a business perspective I don’t doubt it, though whether a cheap restaurant is actually still a pub is another discussion altogether. Any business has to give the punter what they want and I want to eat a meal and have a drink with my good lady far more often than I wish to neck beer with my dodgy mates. Even when I used to neck beer with my dodgy mates more often than I do now, had you said to me then “Do you really want to hang around this dump getting pissed with this lot, or would you prefer a nice meal in the company of a pretty lady who will take you home afterwards for a bit of how’s your father?” I’d have abandoned the lads without hesitation. I was in truth hanging out with my dodgy mates because no bird wanted me, and if the current bird decides the rest of female kind is correct in their assessment of my qualities and dumps me I will no doubt find myself drinking in pubs with the lads more frequently until I can con another lass into taking me on by pretending to be clean, charming and sophisticated. I might even join a beer club so I can drink with Tand & Mudge until I pull again. I suspect they could teach me how to bird.

The change of use from wet to food led is though, in my humble opinion far more profound than many realise and its effects will eventually significantly alter the pub and brewing landscape. Do me the honour of reading my argument then feel free to disagree? My opinion is not written in stone, if you disagree you might be right.

Pubs come in 3 basic business models, the single outfit, the horizontally integrated chain and the vertically integrated chain.

The single outfit or free house appears a popular business model with beer geeks because of the freedom to procure products from wherever the owner/manager decides. Hence there may be beers uncommon in the pubs of that area or a quirky popular feature than generates trade. The pub may follow the current trend of offering multiple beer choices from around the world and be a beer geek’s paradise. The pub may or may not have an attached micro brewery but if it does it’ll be an unnecessary vanity of the owner. The pub will undoubtedly thrive on the wide choice available rather than the pong they brew out the back in the shed. Food may or may not be part of the model and once more fit in with the vanities of the owner. It could be a particular style of food or an adherence to snob driven food fads like organic local produce. It can even result in the customers denied their basic human right of Heinz ketchup and HP sauce if the owner decides he doesn’t want that putting on the fine local organic sausages. Whether this drives trade will be observable on an individual basis rather than an industry wide perspective. Success depends on the vanities of the owner finding favour with a sizable niche in the locale. The main trade will be products bought in that customers decide they cannot get elsewhere. Otherwise they would get it elsewhere because it would be cheaper to do so. If you make shed brewed pong, this is your retail outlet and if you want to buy it wade through the beards to get to the bar.

The horizontally integrated chain in operating a number of outlets is going for a wider mainstream customer base. It can be observed the product choices in these establishments favour national brands and lack imagination. Many beer geeks would like to see a legal right to procure beers off the national list. The reason many of these chains prefer national procurement is often stated as obtaining the economies of bulk purchasing but there is another reason entirely and that is one of preventing corruption. A chain of over a thousand operators procuring product individually affords many opportunities for back handers. The operator buys product on the books and the supplier gifts the operator off the books. National procurement with a managed supply chain keeps everything on the books but favours suppliers that supply nationally. The most successful of these chains appears to be Wetherspoons with a managed house model and focus of delivering quality at reasonable prices to the end customer. They are not the only one; Crown Carveries appear to do a roaring trade as do many others you can mention. Those chains that attempt to be actual restaurants rather than pub themed restaurants even make a go of a pricier offering.

The tenanted model of Punch and Enterprise appears flawed for any number of reasons though the high leverage adopted isn’t really the issue that many think. All capital costs money, whether it is debt or equity. The business has to service both with either interest or dividends. Leverage requires interest payments where equity can halt dividend payments making an equity capital structure more resilient to a temporary downturn. Neither capital structure is resilient to a permanent downturn in trading conditions as who really wants to own equity that eats itself rather than offers a return?

The struggle of the tenanted model comes from the inability to offer value to the end customer. Customers quite rightly baulk at the prospect of the eye watering prices charged in pubs maintaining a 50%GP on kegs of lager bought from the internal supply chain at double the rate the kegs are sold to the free trade because the pubco makes its money by charging wholesale more than you or me can buy retail. You don’t have to have an MBA to figure that ain’t gonna work. Oh and the answer isn’t to fix the retail market with minimum pricing, as that fails in the core issue of offering value to the end customer

Horizontally integrated pubs are naturally going to focus on an efficient national procurement policy and offer the same brands throughout the chain. Whether the pubs focus on food or drink is all to do with what drives trade and where the profits and margins lie. The beer choice will always cater for the mainstream and it is futile to moan about the lack of interesting pong. Enjoy a Carlsberg with your panini.

The vertically integrated model is by far the most interesting when it comes to the food led operation. These businesses exist through no more than historical legacy. From a market where brewers sought to secure a retail outlet for their product via a chain of pubs because otherwise no one else would sell it for them. They exist regionally rather than nationally, due to competition law, though that competition law has never been sophisticated enough to recognise a monopoly can exist regionally and not just nationally. A wet led business model ensures the brewery is both a profit and cost centre within the business. That is a brewery absorbs costs but provides the main source of profit as the main products sold. In a food led business the brewery is no more than a cost centre, and an unnecessary one at that. As wet led pubs diminish and food leads the business, the profit being made is on things bought in rather than produced. The company does not own farms or food processing units nor vineyards or wineries. The brewery is an historical legacy, a significant source of costs and minimal contributor to profits. The business case for owning a brewery is slight and is either an expensive vanity or white elephant depending on the state of the company’s books.

When you factor in the ownership of many regional brewers as family businesses, the future brewing operation looks even more bleak. It is no longer the done thing to hand over the business to the eldest male, heterosexual, stable, married, male child producing child. The shareholding is split between all children, then between all their children and so on. Each generation dilutes the shareholding and introduces shareholders with no interest in the business. Some may have an interest in joining the family business, others may wish to sell up, mortgage their shareholding for the capital to go do their own thing or simply secure a liveable level of dividends for a cushy life. As one generation passes to another the chances increase of a none family member taking the helm. Somebody that knows how to run a business rather than somebody that contains some of the DNA of the dead guy that started it, someone with an MBA and a CV, someone whose job it is to deliver dividends from the current business and seek new business rather than maintain what used to be the business but is now only an historical legacy of the founders. Someone who asks “why the hell are we running an expensive brewery when we make all our money out of a regional chain of restaurant pubs flogging hot diners and bottles of Pinot Grigio?”

At this point the regional beer brand may live on in the form of contract brewing, or die as better marketed and more recognisable brands fill the pubs. The beer geeks may even be happy if micro brewed pong appears in an outlet or two.

As a separate brewing entity do most regional breweries make something as niche as micro brewed pong or even as respected by regular drinkers as a national brand? Not really, without the pubs the brewery hasn’t got a business. The brand value of many UK regional brewers isn’t really that great. Those that are, are arguably no longer regional. You wouldn’t describe Fuller’s as a regional brand; London Pride is national if not to a degree global. You may very point out that many German bars seem to be food led and that hasn’t closed down Paulaner or Hofbrau. The brand value of those beers is pretty good and exists beyond Bavaria. You can find a Hofbrau & Paulaner pub/restaurant in many cities. Most UK regional brewers have failed to build intrinsic brand value over a number of years through running low end tatty pubs where there core product isn’t that great. Warm vinegary piss isn't that great unless you have a beard. They have failed to build a lager brand, the most popular beer style in the country and world, and now sell more third party beer brands than their own. They may have the odd pub where the own brand beer is pretty decent and a few bearded guys give them an award and put them in a book but the regular experience of the regular customer tells a different story and that story is the brand lacks value.

In conclusion then, my crystal ball says that national brands are here to stay, micro brewed pong may indeed prosper so long as the fad is maintained and enough people grow beards and wear sandals but the decline of the wet led pub and its replacement by food led pubs is the death knell of the regional brewer as a brewer. The vertically integrated business model makes little sense if the retail outlets don’t really need a brewery. As the regional brewers divest themselves of underperforming low end wet led pubs and invest in smarter higher end dining pubs the brewery becomes ever more a vanity to the business rather than an integral element of the business. The pubs may live on, the business may live on and the names may live on, the brewery will not.

My crystal ball is clouding now; I look at the empty lager cans littering the floor. The squeeze is due back from her mother’s shortly. Better tidy up, brush my teeth and try not to appear pissed or I might get dumped and have to start drinking in pubs again and claim that pint of Carlsberg Mudge once promised to buy me.

A trip to Aldi

2011-08-22T11:49:00.003+01:00

Back in a rose tinted past when this blog was a lot better and was yet to go this far downhill, I used to get free stuff. A nice chap, rabidbarfly, sent me some beer along with a Breda beer glass. I had never encountered Breda lager, nor was there an example in the beers I was sent. I did a bit of googling at the time but never forgot the brand as it’s a beer glass I regularly neck cheap lout out of.

Recently I was looking at the beers in Aldi, weighing up the cheap bargains and low and behold there is was, Breda Lager, 99p for 500ml. I got the feeling of excitement I suspect many beer geeks get in finding a beer they have wanted to try. The bottle informs me it is brewed especially for Aldi, a 4.9% adjunct free lout of water, malt & hops.

There was no information on the bottle regarding where the beer was brewed, but wiki has it at Randall’s brewery in Guernsey rather than the original Dutch brewery, as does the breweries own site.

I do like necking lout from branded glassware, and as I had the glass I had to buy a few bottles of the beer. I even had an ill fitting T-Shirt with the brand on and despite the paint stains on it I digged it out of the garage to wear for my lout judging session.

Beer tasting is a fine art. It involves smell, appearance, swilling the beer around, umming and ahhing, making pointed references to fruit and what not. I prefer my own method which is to chill the beer to as cold as you can get it, pour it out and take a big gulp. If it tastes nice thumbs up and if it doesn’t pour a dash of lime in and neck it anyway as I’ve paid for it.

No lime required; a lovely drop of lout. A delicate slightly sweet profile and nicely easily going. I enjoyed all of them. Not necessarily anything special, I’m not sure I’d have bothered had I not already had the glassware, but I’m chuffed to have got around to actually necking a brand of beer of an obscure glass I got given. I might even go get some more of it.

You win some; you lose some

2011-08-15T13:04:00.006+01:00

For me the joy of cooking lager appreciation isn’t just the lovely ice cold fizzy lager slipping down your throat creating waves of pleasure from the tip of my tongue to the ends of my toes. It’s the fact that it’s dirt cheap and just as importantly being dirt cheap it annoys people. It annoys alcohol health prohibitionists from Don Shenker to Mike Benner. If I knew where they lived I would turn up and neck a cold can of cheap lager whilst sat on their front lawn. I wouldn’t break anything or go looting or mask my face. I might wear a hoodie and pair of bang tidy trainers, though, because it's like the fashion.

Not that I’d be a pest. When they asked me to bugger off, I would do so, but as I pottered down the street back to the bus stop I’d feel a sense of cheap lager triumphalism. I might leave the empty can on the doorstep as a point of protest, but that would be as far as my protest would go, and only if I’d finished it. No need for any undue impoliteness. A protest but a polite one. No nicking or breaking stuff or making David Cameron return from his holidays to correct the moral vacuum at the heart of society.

In the game of cooking lager appreciation, you get your successes and you undoubtedly occasionally get your failures. Noticing 3 for £20 at Tesco and joining that with a general £5 off token AND a £5 off £40 shopping token to get 6 boxes of lout for £30 and working out you bought 90 bottles (6x15) of strong lager for £30 is a success and one in the eye for the prohibitionists. You may be then be faced with the problem of what to do with 90 bottles of strong lager and the dawning realisation that you will be drinking it until Christmas but you know, heh ho, at least you won’t be needing to go into any pubs any time soon.

It doesn’t always work out though. Noticing a 15 box of Tuborg was £7 at Tesco. Having a general £2 off token and a specific £4 off a 15 box of Tuborg had me wetting my appetite over buying a 15 box of lovely lout for a pound. £1. Yes. Up yours Shenker and Benner. Turning up to the store to find them sold out of 15 boxes of Tuborg, my heart sank. No box of lout for £1. Bugger. Supermarket stocking incompetence has allowed a goal to be scored by the prohibitionists. Will the box of lout even be on the special when it is back in stock? Who is to say? I consoled myself with a 30 cans of Carlsberg for £15 tray and even bought the groceries the squeeze said we needed.

You win some; you lose some, no need to go looting quite yet, but so long as our green and pleasant land is littered with empty cans of lager rattling along in the wind, cooking lager enthusiasm remains universal and the likes of Shenker and Benner shall not win.

Enjoy alcohol cheaply

2011-08-03T16:56:00.007+01:00

The bird off Harry Potter necking some lout it is now okay to fancy because she is an adult though she looks a bit young here.

I am never sure of the protocol for sharing what may or may not be a private email, but it amused me enough to share it. I removed the lasses name and email. I seem to get the odd unusual email from time to time. The emails I am most likely to read contain the the subject heading "We would like to give you some free beer", but unfortunately that's a bit thin on the ground of late.

For those kind enough to read this tosh, I'd like to assure you it remains committed to the noble principle of getting as pissed up as you like on dirt cheap grog. Cheap lager remains the pinnacle of beery pleasure, but whatever your tipple please do not enjoy it responsibly, enjoy it cheaply.

Thank you xxxx, but my blog isn't about responsible drinking.

It's more about the great pleasure and joy of necking large amounts of dirt cheap supermarket lager.

The goal being to create a resistance movement against minimum pricing by encouraging others to celebrate cheap lager

I suspect quite the opposite of your aims.

All the best,
Cookie.

From: xxxx
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:09:19 +0100
Subject: Alcohol awareness
To: cookinglager@hotmail.co.uk

Dear Sir/Madam

I am working on behalf of Drinkaware.co.uk, a charity which promotes responsible drinking and aims to reduce alcohol misuse and minimise alcohol-related harm. I have just come across your site and was wondering if we could possibly work together to raise awareness.

I would like to enquire about sponsoring one of your articles. Currently we are trying to direct users to our lager facts page: http://www.drinkaware.co.uk/facts/alcohol-facts-and-information/lager

Let me know your thoughts on the above, along with any other ideas you may have. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you in advance for your time.

Kind Regards

xxxx

The importance of cheap grog

2011-08-02T12:01:00.003+01:00

A dumpy foreign pub that welcomes smokers.

I started this nonsense what seems like many moons ago because I disagreed with what was and remains the consensus within the beer blogs and beer writing in general that I had been consuming. Namely that mainstream beers were of a poor quality and the people that consumed them were undiscerning mugs and most significantly that the prices of such products were way too cheap and needed to be increased to save the health of the nation, reduce anti social behaviour, save pubs or simply because those proposing such measures didn’t like the products they hoped would be affected. I thus decided to start my own account of buying a cheap box of lager, enjoying it more than I in all honesty expected to do, and not behaving in any manner troublesome to you other than I wasn’t sat in a pub whilst I drank my lager.

Fellow beer blogger Mudge has a theme to his blog, and arguably articulates his views in more adult and less puerile manner than myself, and that theme is clearly the smoking ban. I don’t wish to alter the theme of this blog nor intrude on another’s but I occasionally find myself in agreement, occasionally in disagreement, with dear old Mudge.

I agree that the anti alcohol lobby that clearly wish to introduce prohibition by stealth are using the techniques and models of anti smoking health campaigners.

My view is that drinking, unlike smoking, is a healthy and normal activity. Smoking causes cancer. I know of no serious commentator that would argue with that fact. Whilst it remains legal, it is damaging to the health of the nation. The techniques used to reduce and eventually abolish smoking appear to be one of advertising it’s dangers, banning the advertising of the product, taxing the product at a level to discourage use and restricting the ability to smoke in public places. By denormalising smoking and making it a troublesome activity to pursue, an activity no one really in their right mind would choose to do, the intention is to effectively eliminate the habit. A goal it is impossible to argue isn’t an admirable goal. If you were to invent smoking today it would be an illegal product.

If we take a hypothetical example of a factory producing arsenic sweets for children and the sudden medical discovery that arsenic was poison, you could make no serious argument for not banning arsenic sweets. The job losses and economic cost of closing the factory is not a good enough reason to accept the selling of a known poison. The metaphor being that closed pubs is an acceptable cost for the denormalisation of smoking. Lament the loss of pubs by all means, lament many becoming cheap restaurants, but the cost of eliminating smoking is an acceptable one.

Freedom of choice and liberty is often used as an argument but it is only recently that our society has become fragmented enough to allow this argument. Man has always been a tribal species and lived within the boundaries of the tribe, whether that is the rules of religion, law or social acceptability. Human kind and the individual within has never been entirely free, and there have always been behaviours frowned upon. One cannot make the argument that society is becoming less free because smoking is frowned upon when behaviours previously unacceptable like homosexuality, having children out of wedlock and/or without a partner or even wearing trainers in a posh restaurant becomes acceptable. Society is no more or less free; it is just that the boundaries of acceptability alter over time. A free society of the libertarian is a dangerous and worrying society lacking the conventions that make our daily inter dependant existence acceptable. If someone is free to blow smoke in my face you might also accept they are free to defecate upon my shoes. I love my trendy trainers as much as you love your sandals.

Alcohol minimum pricing is one of the features of denormalising alcohol and is akin to the high tax placed on smoking. No one really believes 50p per unit will have any discernable effect on consumption or behaviour. However it begins the model placed on smoking and allows for future increases. Those increases are likely to be an accelerator above inflation and gradually the price of a can of lager will creep up and up. It’s immediate effect negligible, its effect 20 years down the line one of very expensive booze and declining numbers of boozers.

In my observation most smokers wish to quit because of the high price of tobacco and know how much a money they would have in their pocket each month if they quit. A minimum price of alcohol is the start of a process that we can observe today if we look at the price of a packet of cigarettes. It is not a habit anyone in their right mind would start. If we look at the difficulties of smoking, standing out in the rain at your place of work or when out for a drink you have to question why anyone would do it.

The denormalisation of drinking isn’t in my view a theoretical conspiracy, but an observable fact. In most places of work it is unacceptable to go for a lunchtime pint. Most people would not tell their boss they went out for a drink in the evening lest they be thought of negatively as a boozer. Most of the media coverage regarding alcohol is by and large negative and highlights the many social and individual costs of drinking. This is not to say those costs do not exist but appear out of proportion to their occurrence. The denormalisation of drinking is well underway and to support minimum pricing is to support one of its foundations, a strategy taken from the denormalisation of smoking.

You may believe there is no serious and immediate threat to your drinking habits. In a society where the majority of people like a tipple of some form you would be correct. Twenty years from now, when the denormalisation of alcohol has made far more progress, when a can of lager is as relatively expensive as a packet of cigarettes, when a minority of people drink. Will you be able to say then that there is no serious and immediate threat to your drinking habits?

Little Ole Wine Drinker Me

2011-08-01T13:01:00.004+01:00

I found myself at a wine festival last week. I had no plans to attend one. I was walking around a foreign city of the Teutonic form with a guide book. I’d looked at a few statues of some dead people that lived hundreds of years ago and pondered whether people actually did this type of rubbish, walk around looking at statues and such gubbins. Some people must, I thought, I wasn’t the only one at it. A morning of it was enough for this lifetime and I felt deep within the desire for an ice cold fizzy pint of lout. I’d done a page worth of a guidebook and realised it was likely the only page I was likely to ever do, so time for a pint of lovely ice cold fizzy lout. Only lout will do, to quench the thirst, cool the throat, clear the mind and feed the soul. Or so I thought.

I’m not the type of beer geek to worry about “craft” beer and brew pubs. I like normal places with normal people. I knew nothing of where I was so I pottered along to an area that had looked rather nice with a view to picking a respectable looking bar and buying a pint of regular popular recognisably branded lout. The type of lout that must be okay because everyone else is drinking it.

As I pottered along I noticed a bustling market. It appeared busy. The smells of cooking food were enticing to my palette. I didn’t realise I was hungry until I smelt the aroma of cooking meat. Then I realised I was starving. I realised that if I didn’t consume some dead animal inside a bread roll with a dollop of mustard on it I would most likely pass out from hunger. A swift right turn and I was heading in the direction of cooking meat.

Upon looking at the menu of delights offered I was pleased that I could read most of it at least with a view to recognising what was pork and what was chicken. The details of the dishes eluded my poor grasp of the language and upon deciding I was in no mood for a gamble I used the well worn technique of pointing at what I wanted. Gambling can be interesting, and rarely in my experience do you end up with something inedible and in fact you gain an appreciation of what the foreign words mean, but in this instance knew that I wanted what the guy before me in the queue was having, so pointing did the trick.

I looked about for a beer stall, and sure enough there was one. But also there appeared to be a wine festival on. I am happy to share my knowledge of wine. It comes in 3 types. There is red and white and rose for the ladies. These wines are sub divided into cheap stuff that makes you wince and takes a few swigs to get the hang of, mid priced stuff that doesn’t make you wince and you are better off buying if you either have a lady friend or wish to impress a lady and the really pricey stuff that appears little better than the mid priced stuff that is great to neck if someone else is picking up the bill. I am aware there are grape varieties, countries and regions that subdivide wine further but have never ventured into discovering this due to a lack of interest in something I have long considered to be a poncy way of getting pissed. I prefer a more egalitarian way of getting pissed, hence my love of beer and more specifically cheap beer.

The wine menu I could at least read. The red and white wine was clear, the region and grape variety I could also read. Being able to read it and understand it however are not one and the same thing. I noticed other punters were able to buy a tray of mixed wines in small measures. Similar to buying a meter of Kolsch beer in 20cl glasses in a tray. So I picked one of them and found a seat among the locals to neck my grog and polish off my jumbo sized hotdog.

I sipped the first one. Not unpleasant but it wasn’t lout. I decided necking them like shots would be the best thing to get through them and not waste them. The locals were puzzled at my behaviour and I was engaged in conversation. I engaged them in conversation in their native tongue but decided against revealing I was an Englishman. As they were doubtless puzzled by a chap throwing these wines down his neck rather than tasting them I decided to claim to be an Australian. That would I thought excuse any behaviour considered uncouth, or at least explain it.

After the first tray of wine I was of the opinion I quite liked it so decided upon another. Which I necked with equal gusto, commentating to my conversational partners that the wines of their country were indeed very fine.

The grog was decent enough, got you to a nice state of mildly pissed reasonably swiftly and wasn’t that expensive compared with the general level of prices thereabouts. I pondered the antipathy towards wine that exists among the beer blogging community and now I am a fully fledged wine appreciator and sophisticate I feel able to comment that such antipathy is ignorance incarnate. Wine is a fine drink to be appreciated and enjoyed. I wholeheartedly recommend necking it from time to time as an occasional alternative to the lout and generally noting that it makes you a well rounded sophisticate like what I am.

If I learnt anything about wine drinking, I learnt this. If you have a lady, stop at around 5 trays worth. Above that you wake up in your hotel room with a strange bruise and no idea how you got there and realise that you are no longer in possession of your English Language guide book but seem to have acquired an Italian Language Guide book alongside a series of mysterious texts on your mobile phone in Italian clearly from a lady asking whether you fancy meeting up for a drink that afternoon 6 stops away on the underground. If you are single, neck as much of it as you like and you could very well wake up finding you have acquired an attractive and exotic new girlfriend.

Beer Quality

2011-07-21T13:50:00.005+01:00

I got an email a few days back from a chap that was obviously hawking something. I usually bin off such stuff unless they are offering me free beer in which case I wholeheartedly express my support and enthusiasm for their endeavour. For the record the chap was hawking the following tat here. It’s only worth looking at for the couple of pretty girls and the menu “getting good head” which made me snigger, at least. I like the puerile end of comedy.

His email got me thinking though, what are the attributes of good beer? My conclusions are as follows

Price.

A beer can never be too cheap. Free is the best price but as a preference, a price of buttons is preferable to an arm and a leg. A beer can be too expensive, for sure, but never too cheap.

Temperature

A beer can never be too cold. Even a beer ice lolly is good. A beer can often be too warm, but never too cold. Ice cold lovely lout slips down a treat and doesn’t touch the sides.

Fizz

I don’t think I’ve ever had a beer that I thought was too fizzy. I’ve had limp flat pongy beer all too often, but never one I thought was too fizzy. Fizz is the sparkle that tickles the senses.

Conclusion

The greatest beer in the world has to be the cheapest, coldest fizziest beer there is, and it is possible to measure each factor. The price is clear, the temperature easily ascertained and the fizziness apparent from the power of the subsequent belch after the first swig. By this simple test it is possible to work out whether a beer is proper real cooking lager or just overpriced warm flat pongy muck you want to avoid lest you get stung.

Saturday Lie In

2011-07-11T13:22:00.004+01:00

The best comedians ever to grace a television

For those that still read this rubbish, you might like to know that I am also on twitter. I cannot in all honesty recommend you follow me on twitter because frankly I wouldn’t. Those that do get treated to enlightening thoughts every so often on the lines of “oo, I could do with a can of lout about now” and not much else. You’d be quite justified in thinking you were not missing that much. Much like this blog, really.

However twitter has lots of other people on it that often say interesting things. Note I say interesting and not intelligent, thought through or even correct. From people exposing footballers that sleep with their sister in law, to people moaning about phone hacking journalists or even low grade big brother celebs having public slanging matches with other even lower grade big brother celebs, all of human life is as they say here. It can be a fascinating thing to tune in or out of.

It’s a pity then that on Saturday mornings I miss the amusing but pointless and futile attempts by a small group of beer bloggers to get some beer onto a Saturday morning TV show called Saturday Kitchen. Saturday Kitchen is one of those shows it’s really not worth getting out of bed on a Saturday morning for. There used to be proper shows on a Saturday morning like Going Live which featured the best comedians ever to grace the TV (not including the Chuckle Brothers which are the actual best ever), Trevor & Simon. It is a travesty they are not on TV anymore yelling “We don’t do duvets” at the kids of Britain. Now I would tweet a campaign to bring them back.

My view of Saturday mornings basically is that when I was I kid I had to get up because my mum made me. A combination of Trevor and Simon and Coco Pops made it tolerable. As an adult my lovely lady occasionally makes me get up because we are going somewhere but by and large I can lie in bed and if she suggests I get up I can do one of 3 things. Drag her under the duvet and make hot passionate love to her, gently slap her on the arse, say “cup of tea wouldn’t go amiss, treacle” and await her hitting me with a pillow and then dragging her under the duvet and make hot passionate love to her or last but not least farting then dragging her under the duvet and laughing before making hot passionate love to her. The farting is what we northern English types like to also call “foreplay”. The hot passionate love I am assured is the best 90 seconds (yes, we do it 3 times) of her weekend and she is so overcome with pleasure I then end up making the tea myself.

So all in all I miss Saturday Kitchen. From what I gather I am not missing much. Some people cook some stuff, some celebs plug whatever it is they are plugging and most controversially some barstool actually recommends a bottle of wine to go with the grub that’s been knocked up. The dirty rotten wine drinking barstool. How dare he? Words cannot express the obvious disgust that someone would dare suggest a bottle of fruity nice wine available in a supermarket for around a fiver that goes with grilled sea bass.

Someone ought to take him round the back of the studio and knock some sense into him until he goes out and buys some of Hardknott Dave’s lovely pongy but expensive and difficult to get hold of proud British beer! You can follow this noble campaign to get the TV to promote and plug Dave’s beer here, here and here and join the objection to a TV cookery show that so far refuses to promote and plug Dave’s beer. Don’t mention that TV has had a few beer related TV shows in recent years even though they have been sub Top Gear banter type rubbish featuring a Top Gear presenter, a comedian, a wine buff that likes beer or even an actor off a sitcom and his mate opening a pub because they have never mentioned Dave’s beer.

I cannot be bothered to get up and watch Saturday Kitchen and tweet along but please make sure you do. I think I speak for lovers of cheap lager everywhere when I express my unwavering support for the endeavour. We cannot let these wine drinking sods win and don’t stop until they feature Dave’s beer on their telly show!

They're here already.

2011-07-05T16:43:00.002+01:00

It started, for me it started one Thursday. There was no expectation on my part for what was about to happen, no pre warning, no hints that something wasn’t quite right. It was before Colin Valentine of the political wing of CAMRA had pointed the guns of his esteemed beer club at the ranks of beer bloggers. I had heard rumours for sure about “ale jihadists” but always thought it a humorous term for those that took their love of pongy ale that bit too seriously. Those that did more than simply appreciate what for the most part is reasonably decent if a bit pongy grog. Those that give the appearance at least of fighting a war against lager rather than just appreciating and promoting their personal tastes.

How wrong can you be? There I was in the car park of Tesco, loading some San Miguel into the boot of the car and before you know it a sack was thrown over my head and I was bundled into the back of a Ford Transit. Who are you? What do you want? I cried with fear in my voice as I heard and felt the van speed away.

“We saw you in the supermarket buying 3 boxes of cheap lager for £20. We are the paramilitary wing of CAMRA, what reasoned argument will not solve, we sort out. We are taking you to a pub and we are going to make you drink cask ale until you damn well get used to it and start to like it. You’ll thank us for it, in the end”

“But my car, my cheap lager, what’s going to happen to it?” I begged.

“Your car will be put in your driveway, the dirty cheap lout will be poured down a grid and we’ve got your phone. We’ve texted your missus that you’ve joined a sexually deviant religious cult and won’t be back for a bit so don’t keep dinner warm”

I felt despair. I felt fear. It’s free country I thought. I would never stop anyone from making their own beer choices, why would they wish to prevent me?” It all became clear. This was a group that advocated the madness of minimum prices for cans of lager. Good God I realised, they were capable of anything. What torture would I have to endure with these madmen?

The hood came off; I was sat in what appeared to be the cellar of a pub. I heard the rumble of tatty bearded old men walk above and discussions regarding the true origin of IPA and an argument about sparklers. The smell of pongy ale was overpowering. They gave me a pint of dark pongy liquid they referred to as “bitter” alongside a bag of something called “pork scratchings” which appeared to be little more than salted cooked fat. “Get that down you, lager lout” they taunted.

“You can’t do this to me” I pleaded “I’m a beer geek too, I have a beer blog and everything, please, for God’s sake please, a can of Foster’s, have you no humanity?”

I heard a rasp “Foster’s Blogger? Worse than a lager lout, a £4 a half craft keg drinker no doubt, you’ll be here a while, young man”

“No, No, my blog is about cheap lager, Google cooking lager, let me go and I’ll be nice about beards, sandals and this warm pongy muck you’re making me drink”

They started to mutter among themselves. I heard “He’s like the first impression that's stamped on a coin. He isn't finished.” I heard nought from them for days but all that was brought to me was pint after pint of warm flat pongy bitter and pork scratchings. Hunger and thirst finally got the better of me and I succumbed to the pongy beer. It slipped down and reminded me of the perfection of cheap lager, like an echo of what beer could be. I begged them, I told them I was converted but they didn’t believe me. I never knew fear until I supped pong. A man returned and said he’d been looking at the cooking lager blog and I was the worst sort of beer blogger and would be here imprisoned for a while. Days turned to weeks, weeks into months then a new bearded man arrived. He had a bad haircut and a weird 1980’s jumper. He showed me a pair of sandals and beige trousers and asked me what I thought. I saw my chance. “That’s quite dapper” I told him. “He has passed the test” I heard from the back of the room. I was handed the sandals and beige clothes to wear. I put them on. They gave me a CAMRA card and some wetherspoons vouchers. A hand was placed softly on my shoulder and a voice said

“Less than a month ago, Santa Mira was like any other town. People with nothing but problems. Pubs with nothing but keg lager and smooth bitter. Then, out of St Albans came a solution. Seeds drifting through space for years took root in a farmer's field. From the seeds came beer ingredients which had the power to reproduce themselves in the exact likeness of beer ingredients... It takes you over cell for cell, atom for atom. There is no pain. Suddenly, while you're asleep, it absorbs your mind, your memories and you're reborn into an untroubled world...Now you’re one of us...There's no need for lager... Lager. Lager. Without it, life is so simple, believe me.”

“It may sound harsh, but we did it for your own good, son, you can now step back into the world, now what are you drinking”

I wasn’t thinking, it came out of my mouth before I could think “Pint of Carling, please” I uttered. I heard gasps of horror and they reeled back but a saw a chink of light and ran for it. Up some stairs and I was in a pub. I moved though the crowd. My disguise of sandals and beige made me identical to the rest of the punters. The discussion about IPA and sparklers was still ongoing. Keep your eyes a little wide and blank. Show no interest or excitement, I thought. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. I had a beard and a haunted expression. I ran for the door. And so I ran. I ran! I ran! I ran! I ran as little Jimmy Grimaldi ran the other day. I ran through the road. Cars swerved and beeped their horns. I shouted. Help! Wait! Stop. Stop and listen to me!... These people who're coming after me are not human!. Look, you fools, you're in danger! Can't you see?! They're after you! They're after all of us! Our wives, our children, everyone! THEY'RE HERE, ALREADY! YOU'RE NEXT!

Don't just sit there measuring me for a straightjacket, call for help!

Blogging about blogging

2011-05-23T23:23:00.008+01:00

Sometimes I like to offer my thoughts on things other than beer, but to give it some sort of tenuous connection here's a photo of big brother tart and subject of the most recent super injunction scandal Imogen Thomas taking a bath in some beer. Got a beer connection in. She's on the left. A different tart is on the right.

That's because I'd like to offer my thoughts on things freedom of speech and tittle tattle related.

I'm a child of television, the news when I grew up was on TV and the papers only offered yesterdays news and opinion and in the red tops tits and entertainment. However the Establishment have long controlled the news. I remember a report in the 80's regarding the miners strike. The report detailed the police response to violent strikers as they stormed them with horses and knocked seven shades out of them. Except it wasn't true. The police stormed a peaceful protest and the strikers stormed them back. The BBC edited it and the report was a lie.

I'm not one to defend Arthur Scargill. He didn't hold a national vote of his union and bullied many of his members with threats of violence to join his failed attempt to take on a democratically elected government. The fact he was a poor leader that used and abused his membership for a failed political gambit doesn't excuse the fact that the Establishment and the BBC lied in news reports.

Now unelected judges have failed in an attempt to silence the news media regarding what really is inconsequential tittle tattle regarding Ryan Giggs (if you've not heard) nailing a tart known for reality TV and getting her kit off in lads mags. The British courts even thought it possible to apply the injunction globally. I mean, you know, other countries have freedom of speech and care little for whatever idiocy British judges come out with. The arrogance.

All of this is irrelevant except of course if you wonder whether British High Court Judges (who of course have never been known to frequent brothels, enjoy a spanking and would never want to cover something up about themselves) might seek to cover up something in the public interest. Among the debate I think a change has come in regard to where we get the news and how we consume it.

If you want to know what is going on in the world, you don't look at TV. If you want to know who has been shagging it's not in the News of the World, it's on twitter and in the blogosphere. You know the days news before you get home from work, because Google News has streamed global news organisations to your PC or phone. You can read the paper of any country you like, when you like. You can compare the tits in Das Bild to The Sun to your hearts content, every morning. TV news is old news by the time you see it. If you want to know what occurred at a protest, it's on youtube. On youtube you can see the copper beating up the protester before Sky News & the Establishment have edited it to create the required narrative. The political class and judiciary cannot keep pace with a global tool of freedom of speech.

The shocker is that it is the British judiciary pondering how to control it. You'd kind of expect it to be one of these despotic regimes you read about.

On this scandal, the blogosphere and twitter became the source of news. Not just a bunch of nutters like me expressing opinions on things, but the actual news. Ha Ha Ha. I suspect we might be entering a time where you can honestly say "it's a free country, guv" and actually be correct in that assertion. It's cool this internet thing.

Draft Lout

2011-05-19T20:00:00.004+01:00

Whenever I treat myself to a cooking lager gadget the squeeze’s response tends to veer between mild annoyance and open hostility. When I treated myself to a Chambrer mini keg chiller I got the open hostility end of the spectrum. I’m not sure why, for it is a thing of beauty. I mean, who doesn’t want a tap in the kitchen dispensing ice cold fizzy lager? It’s living the dream, so it is.

We haven’t got the space, you already have a separate beer fridge, and how much lager does one person need? Each objection was met with calm logic. We can make the space by more effectively using the space we have. Who needs toasters and kettles and bread bins and knife racks? This compliments the beer fridge, offering greater choice. You can put a bottle of Pinot Grigio in the beer fridge if you like. I’ll make the space by necking a few cans. A man can never have enough lager in the house. It’s an investment, a hedge against our inflationary economy. In the event of nuclear war we can make a bunker out of slabs of lager. None of these points really sunk in, women eh? Time of the month, no doubt. If it weren’t for my calm logic counter balancing her irrational emotive perspective we wouldn’t even have a dartboard up in the guest bedroom.

Despite being a thing of beauty, and wanting one for ages, it doesn’t really conform to the principles of cheap lager appreciation. Even on special offer the kegs represent a more expensive pint than that available in cans and bottles. £14.39 for a 5 litre keg of Heineken (£2 off) with 2 free Heineken glasses compared with £4 for 6 330ml cans also on the special. But it’s a gadget, cool for parties and cool for pouring a draft beer. The choice of beer kegs is limited to Heineken in regular shops but a wider choice exists in specialist outlets if you like paying £20+ for unpressurised kegs of Bitburger and the like. The Heineken kegs are easier to fit, cheaper and don’t require extra gas cylinders. I haven’t fitted a none pressured keg to it so I can’t tell you how well that works, but it looks slightly more complicated from the instructions. The pressured keg was a doddle to fit. Not sure exactly how long it takes to chill a keg as I fitted it up and didn’t pour a glass until the following day. 24 hours later it was chilled to perfection.

One odd note I’ve noticed for a while are the sizes of free promotional glasses. I’ve got half-pint glasses for beers that are sold in 330ml bottles. Heineken is sold in 330ml cans or bottles. The size of the free glasses? 440ml. Odd stuff. They are quite nifty looking though.

The beer? Ice cold delicious fizzy lout. Better heading and less fizzy than the cans but still with a nice fizz to it. I love it to bits, even though these 5 litre kegs seem to be on the way out in the UK market. Maybe that’s why I found a chiller for less than 70 sheets when the RRP is more like 150. The Carlsberg draught system died a death due to the kegs being twice the price of the canned beer and the cheaper draught unit having no chiller. The pretty nifty and well designed Carling draught system doesn’t seem to be knocking around the supermarkets either, despite being designed to fit in a regular fridge.

The Heineken kegs dominate a fridge they are put in, so the draught chiller is just the trick. I stocked up on the kegs just to make sure I get at least 6 months out of it.

Choice

2011-05-10T21:38:00.006+01:00

Proper Beer

There are rare times, thankfully rare, where the cooking lager enthusiast can find himself in an establishment where there is no cooking lager. Unbelievable, maybe, in the 21st century but surprisingly true. The evolution of the pub is a story that is far from a story of progression from grim dump to cooking lager nirvana. Whilst many pubs embrace cooking lager offering all the choice a lout connoisseur could require of Carling, Fosters & Carlsberg alongside meals at 2 for £6 and a big telly showing the footie, some pubs appear resolutely stuck in the stone age.

It is never as much fun necking cooking lager in a modern forward thinking pub as the prices are £3+ and you don’t even get a touchy rubbable textured can like what Fosters are doing for 40p a pop in Tesco, but life can take you from the comfort of your own couch and the lout enthusiast must adapt. By all means moan about the prices, that is to be expected, but in the civilised world one must expect industrially produced light lager to be available. It’s a shocker when it isn’t.

Rubbable Texture

When in one of these backward pubs that don’t do cooking lager it is important to ask for it. “4 pints of Carling, please, treacle” should always be the first thing asked for even if it doesn’t appear on. It makes it clear that as a discerning customer you require the wholesomeness of cooking lager and none of this dark pongy muck. When told they don’t serve Carling a response of “Okay Fosters then” re-enforces the point that cooking lager really ought to be available. If they tell you they do authentic lager say, “alright then, Carlsberg will do”

At a push though, the question has to be answered of if you have to, what pong do you ask for? Let’s face it, it’s all much of a muchness. Dark, pongy, bitter and likely to give you a hangover. There are many breweries and brands, and what is being flogged this week will doubtless not be on next week so there is little point in remembering anything. The conclusion I have reached is to drink any pong I recognise that beer bloggers have knocked up. It will either be drinkable or not and no worse than any other pongy grog, but at least I’ve read the blokes blog and can post a rude comment if I feel like it. Possibly “Can I have my £2.80 back please?”

Thus having established there was no cooking lager, informing the bar tender that was a bit of a dead loss, and mentioning the Campaign for Cooking Lager is the most exciting new consumer group of 2011, and saying “Jesus, how much?” when informed of the stipend expected of me for the 4 pints, we opted for 4 pints of Hardknott Katalyst, a beer brewed by well known and popular beer blogger Hardknott Dave.

Lots of pong

Despite Dave’s poor spelling in his choice of beer name the beer actually wasn’t that bad as far as “real cask pong” goes. Quite neckable. After a couple I really wasn’t missing Fosters but maybe that’s because I knew I had a fridge full of the Amber Nectar at home. Would I recommend it? Well I’d recommend you sit at home and neck cheap cans of lager, but at a push it’s better than not drinking.

I’m fully expecting next time I step into a pub, in about 6 months time or something, there is at least a beer brewed by a beer blogger. If not I will have something else to moan about alongside the price of the grog.

Chemical Fizz

2011-04-27T23:49:00.003+01:00

I have been searching the world, well Tesco to Morrisons to Sainsbury’s to find the elusive beer called “chemical fizz” ever since I discovered beer blogs. What was this intriguing grog I wondered? Where could I get it? what did it taste like?, how much did it cost?

Finally the search is over. I’ve discovered a beer that is bona fide chemical fizz, and lovely it is too!

Tesco Finest Kriek Bier, a Belgian Cherry Beer on the special at 97p a bottle seems a bit pricey for 250ml of 3.2% grog even on discount but when I saw the ingredients I almost whooped aloud in joy.

Water, malt, Wheat, Hops, Sugar, Cherry Juice, Flavour, Ascorbic Acid, Propylene Glycol Alginate, Artificial Sweetener. Good God, it’s the Holy Grail of beer, it’s chemical fizz! I mean Propylene Glycol Alginate! Yes Yes Yes! Chemical Fizz!

Propylene Glycol Alginate is E405 to chemical fizz fans. An emulsifier, stabilizer and thickener used everything from food to polymer production. In beer it improves the performance of the bubble.

The thing about chemicals is that they are genuinely healthy. On a basic level food preservatives extend human life rather than reduce it by the simple act of reducing food poisoning caused by rotten food. All the organic hippy health nuts basically are wrong. Human longevity has been increasing all the time food production has been industrialised and chemical food additives have been used. These chemicals go through testing and pass safety tests natural ingredients would fail. Most people over the age of 60 are alive because of a diet of unnatural chemicals prescribed by doctors to thin blood, reduce cholesterol and regulate the functioning of organs. In short if it’s got an E number it’s good for you. Organic vegans beware; you are going to die early.

I’ve drunk a few fruit beers before. Bacchus, Fruli and the like, and have long known I quite like this type of fruity girly grog. You know what? I’m cool with that. It’s the 21st century, I’m happy with my feminine side. I have no more a problem drinking fizzy pink wine as borrowing a dab of the squeezes moisturiser after a shave. Shave. Google it. It’s what none beer geeks do. It involves razors and foam and stuff.

But what is this chemical fizz like? Bloody lovely. Fruity, fizzy with a nice thicker mouthfeel you don’t quiet get from real proper alcopops. If an alcopop is a sorbet, this is a scoop of ice cream. One of these days I might bother to try an actual sour lambic beer but as the popular style is to fruit them up to make them palatable I’m not looking forward to it. It’s the sugar and the chemicals that make it so nice.

They should put sugar and chemicals in everything. Let’s face it, Frosties are nicer than Corn Flakes, Vimto is nicer than water and chemical fizz is soooo much nicer than pong.

Pub etiquette

2011-04-25T17:00:00.002+01:00

Today’s post has been inspired by top beer blogger Mudge. In attempting to improve the shoddy behaviour of pub goers, and in particular CAMRA members, he has in my opinion been unfairly criticised.

I think much of the disagreement comes out of looking at only one of the many disgraceful actions of the pub going of his beer club by it’s members, rather than provide a guide to pub etiquette for regular drinkers.

So may I attempt to define one? After all, one is clearly required. You can only combat ignorance with education.

The pub goer ought not to expect standards of service common in other retail outlets or even common across the bars of Europe. The UK pub is an environment all it’s own and those foolhardy enough to venture into them ought not to think that experience of other customer outlets is at all relevant. Nope, this represents ignorance of the highest order. A degree of ignorance on a par with drinking anything that is a popular national brand and is available “on keg”

Upon venturing into a pub one ought first to expect to pay top dollar for mediocrity. Any other expectation is plain ignorance. Take out a second mortgage for you will be paying prices 6 times that of a cheap can of supermarket lager for the privilege of drinking it out of a glass. Expect the glass to be scratched and displaying the faded name of a beer quite different to that in the glass, the one you have asked for. Do not expect the standard of cleanliness you might expect at home. The table will be sticky with the dried beer stains of previous customers; the seats stained with peculiar unidentifiable marks and the toilets are best left not ventured into.

I say this because pub toilets are best left, full stop. Better to hold it than ever contemplating stepping foot in one. To do so might involve the type of shock that will require therapy, at great expense and many years.

You cannot expect to sit down and be served a drink, expect to go to the bar. Do not expect a smile, expect a surly weary resignation by the person who is about to pour you a drink and charge you an arm and a leg for the privilege. You have received a great compliment by being served at all, the bar staff are within their right to ignore you completely whilst they piss about with the till for half an hour. You have to remember that as a customer you are an impediment to the smooth running of their pub and be grateful for what you receive. Expect any number of fonts to be “off”, and the choice to be far smaller than it initially appears. Never expect ice in any drink. Expect no clear indication of the sum of monies you will be asked to hand over prior to asking for your pint. This great mystery is part of the tradition and character of the great British pub and to question it is too show your great ignorance. Only expect that when you eventually discover the price, it is likely to be eye watering.

This great institution must be supported, and it is your great privilege to pay top dollar for what elsewhere might be considered overpriced mediocrity. By doing so you are displaying your great enlightened wisdom. After drinking your drink, take your empty glass to the bar. If you have an empty plate take that too alongside any empty crisp and peanut bags. At the bar ask for a dishcloth and bottle of cif cleaner and proceed to clean the pub. Also ask whether they want the toilet cleaned too. Do not think for one minute that the pub employs people to do that, and it is their job of work. Do not show your outstanding ignorance; accept the great privilege of them allowing you in to spend your money in their boozer. The people employed to pour drinks, take orders, clear and clean tables are best at laconically pissing about with the till, or reading a newspaper behind the bar and ignoring any punter that walks in.

So don’t be ignorant. Once you’ve paid an arm and a leg for an overpriced beer and fetched it yourself from the bar, be prepared to take the empty glass back to the bar. If you don’t offer to do the washing up to boot, you are frankly pig ignorant. Also stick a mop up your arse so you might clean the floor on your way out.

And don’t for one minute think it’s easier to just pop into Tesco’s for a slab of lovely cheap grog as that’s ignorant too. Remember these important rules and one-day you too can find yourself drinking in one of Britain’s great pubs and doing your bit to save them from extinction.

Well said, Mudge!

This is a local pub for local people, there is nothing for you here!

2011-04-19T20:23:00.004+01:00

Many and varied are the types of establishment one can get a drink. From a trendy bar or restaurant to a grim dumpy pub, the choice is as they say all yours. Whilst the sensible choose a nice drink at home at reasonable cost, many like to throw hard earned money away drinking in grim pubs, and who are we, cooking lager enthusiasts, to criticise? If that’s what some people like to do, good luck to them. If the picture is too small, click on it for a bigger one.

In the spirit of beer brotherhood I present a pub called “The Albion” in Chester. I was in Chester recently and had a walk along the Roman wall to kill an hour before a meeting and encountered a sign for a family “hostile” pub that to be honest amused me more than it attracted me in. Good god, I’d rather have a tooth pulled than step foot in such a place, but heh ho, if it’s your cup of tea look it up.

I suspect the hostile and unwelcoming establishment has won awards from bearded types, and I suspect further they stock a wide range of pongy ale and could very well be full of old men in white beards fighting the good fight against chemical fizz and informing me “old scrote” is drinking well today. I hold no hope of a lovely fizzy ice cold pint of lout on a summer’s afternoon.

Enjoy, but please don’t expect us “normals” to ever get the appeal.

For the record I also saw a Slug and Lettuce offering buy one get one free on cocktails. Slippery nipple cheap grog fans?

Bitburger

2011-04-17T22:31:00.003+01:00

Not been on the beer blogs for a while. When one is tired of beer blogging is one tired of life? But it wasn’t boredom so much as being very busy. Busy to the point of spending my days doing the job I’m paid to do rather than pissing about on the Internet. Busy going for a few job interviews. Busy hawking my dubious talents in the UK & abroad. Busy doing jobs around the house the squeeze wants doing because she seems a little more bothered about such things as peeling wallpaper than I am. Oh and I got a Nintendo 3DS which in the great league of things I currently confess to liking more than I like cheap lager. For the first day I got it I even preferred it to sex, but there is only so much Ridge Racer 3D you can play before you realise you can progress through the levels far quicker playing with the squeeze than you can playing video games.

There isn’t any NDS files to download for this toy yet so the games I’m playing are all legit. If any other cheap lager enthusiasts follow things Nintendo, feel free to keep me informed when compatible flashcards like R4 are released.

That’s not to say I haven’t been keeping an eye on the cheap lager. Sainsbury’s had a decent offer on Beck’s at £6.99 for a box of 15 but with Easter on it’s way I’m rubbing my hands at the 3 for £20 offers I’m hoping Tesco bring out. What better way to celebrate an important date in the calendar of our Lord and saviour than to mark both Easter and the Royal wedding with a river of cheap lager?

Whilst we await these bank holidays and hope for good weather so we can sit in the garden with an ice cold can of lout and not be at work I came to realise what a lucky man I am. I really do believe I have finally trained up the squeeze in the art of cheap lager. Whilst doing the shop I purchased some microwaveable pies that offered the promise of a free beer. I put the code off the sticker into the website and awaited my token. Whilst I was away the first of these arrived and the good lady used it in my absence to buy me some cheap lager. Seeing a 3 bottles for £4 offer and being keen to use all of the £2 voucher she bought me 3 bottles of Bitburger for all of £2. She is both a creature of outstanding beauty and intelligence. Doubling up on the offers is a trick I have been slowly brainwashing her into. Got a fiver token at a supermarket? Be in no hurry. Wait for a super cheap lager offer and wallop another fiver off it! Double bubble. The good lady is learning the art of cheap lager and it can only mean our love grows deeper. I have a further 2 tokens from the nice pie people and cannot wait for cheap lager to get cheaper.

As for what Bitburger is like. Not bad at all. A nice drop of lout. Quite sharp and hoppy, with that lovely resinous quality that comes from hop extract and I really rather like it. A nice change, and well worth the buttons paid.

Brewing Beers Like Your Dad Used To Buy

2011-03-22T11:51:00.003Z

One of the great joys of being a cheap skate is that it leads to places you can be “educated” into believing are rather naff if you are the type of person that cares what others think is naff, all in search of a bargain. A bargain is a wonderful feeling. Getting something for less and sticking one on those that believe in paying top dollar. It can lead you from Wetherspoons pubs, along the aisle of Aldi, along market stalls or even into charity shops and it is in a charity shop I found my latest bargain.

Don’t be fooled into thinking charity shops have anything to do with charity, that’s just a con. Most established charities spend more on there underfunded pension arrangements and paying the head honcho a “going market rate” than they do on whatever unfortunates they purport to benefit. A charity shop has only the following functions and that is to give old biddies the idea that they are still useful and somewhere they can stay warm and have a cup of tea with other old biddies whilst talking to each other in a manner they don’t believe is racist as it was by all accounts acceptable to talk about black people in that manner in 1950. That means it is perfectly morally acceptable to pick up an old second hand book, ask the price and when told it is 50p say “I’ll give you 20p for it, it’s quite tatty”

“Brewing beers like those you buy” by Dave Line is a fascinating book and worth every penny of that 20p. It is clearly a book of the 70’s and all the more fascinating for it. The book offers the home brewer the opportunity to brew a beer like their favourite brand. It doesn’t offer an exact formulation of commercial brews, but a recipe and method to enable the creation of a beer similar to the brand mentioned, using equipment available to the home brewer.

The book being a little dated is a little weak on equipment, advising the reuse of plastic pins that you might have bought ale in, when these days you can get plastic kegs of all sizes from a homebrew shop. Much of the equipment is arguably just as relevant as the process of brewing hasn’t changed, even if brand names have. Dave Line takes you through the equipment, ingredients and brewing process not just as a step by step guide but with an explanation in a well written format that leaves the reader really informed not just on what to do, but with all the whys and wherefores. Many of the illustrations are his own doodles but even so, they are clear and understandable. The book takes you through brewing a Guinness Extra Stout to get you started and contains recipes involving adapting a malt extract brew kit with hop tea and additional sugars, to full grain mashing. It’s a fascinating book, I love the detail including the idea that if a brewer has a beer with sediment in it, you can feed the sediment to reactivate the yeast and have a living example of that brewery yeast to add to your version of the grog. The book is packed with knowledge.

The recipes are firmly rooted in the brands of the 70’s which makes the book more of a “brewing beers like your Dad used to be able to buy”, but even so many contemporary brands are present. There is a recipe for Carling Black Label under the brewer “Bass Charrington”, alongside Carlsberg, Skol, Tuborg & Harp. Many real ales are present that you can still buy including Fullers London Pride, alongside some you can’t. Interestingly the book has recipes for long forgotten Keg beers like Double Diamond and recipes for global brands like American Budweiser, Pilsner Urquell, and Chimay. The recipe for Foster’s sits in the beers of the world section indicating the beer presumably was a specialist import of the day rather than a familiar brand and the Original Gravity of the recipe suggests a stronger strength than the beer is sold at in the UK. Dave’s description of Stella as “beautifully brewed” is sublime. I love this guy. The back of the book informs me he died in 1979. The beer world lost a gent of sanity and reason.

There are a number of features of the book that I have fallen in love with. Firstly the book makes no judgement on any of the beers in it. There is no “crap” beer. The author clearly loves his beer and loves it all and is interested in helping the reader create the brand the reader likes rather than impose his own likes. If the reader likes a Keg Bitter, here’s the recipe and the author thinks it’s a lovely hoppy brew. If it’s a real ale the author is as equally positive as a keg lager. You the drinker get to like what you like without someone telling you what to like.

Second off I like the authors obvious enthusiasm for saving a few bob. The clear intent of the book is to allow the reader to brew something decent at home and not have to pay pub prices. Interestingly people in the 70’s thought pubs a rip off too. It makes me realise the love of cheap grog is a universal one that transcends generations.

Maybe you didn’t have supermarkets pilling slabs of cheap lout high and flogging it cheap back in the days of power cuts, flares & union power. No fear, you can make your own. Maybe you couldn’t drive to France and fill up the car with cheap lager either. The ingenuity of man finds a way to achieve cheap grog whatever the market conditions and that I find heart-warming. There is a genuine philosophical connection between the home brewing in Dave’s book to the growing cooking lager enthusiasm of the 21st century. This isn’t home brewing to knock up an innovative black IPA with an unsavoury IBU; it’s knocking out cheap neckable grog.

I’m going to have a go at one of the recipes too. The recipe for San Miguel looks simple enough. It’s a lager kit with brewing sugar (dried malt extract) instead of white granulated sugar with an added hop tea. Looks simple, requires the least equipment, and reads quite tasty. Handy as well if the joyless that campaign for minimum alcohol pricing get their way, the path of cheap lout can continue unabated with Dave Line as an inspiration and Godfather.

A cracking beer book, if a new contemporary edition came out I’d pay full whack for it, and I have no higher praise for anything than saying I’d pay full whack for it.

Happy Birthday CAMRA

2011-03-16T10:23:00.006Z

From This

To This

and this

Today is CAMRA’s 40^th Birthday. Happy Birthday and congrats to the very campaign that inspired CAMCL, The Campaign for Cooking Lager. No CAMRA bashing today, CAMCL officially wish CAMRA a happy 40^th Birthday. If you have a beard stroke it, if you have sandals wear them and if you have a tankard wave it!

Today is a day all cooking lager enthusiasts can crack open a cheap can of lager in front of the telly and toast our bearded sandal wearing, Guardian reading, tankard waving, dark pungent vinegar from panda pops bottles drinking brothers in beer! Happy Birthday beardies, here’s to the next 40 years!

Beer Ticking Competition

2011-03-14T10:00:00.005Z

Congrats to Stoph McBride, Beer blogger with his beer blog here, for winning an old second hand beer ticking DVD that I decided to give away because it wasn't worth keeping. I wrote everyones name on a piece of paper, put them into a pint pot and the lovely squeeze selected one from it. Send us a postal address to cookinglager@hotmail.co.uk and I’ll post the rubbish to you. Enjoy. Soon, Stoph, you'll be have your own collection of panda pops bottles filled with mysterious dark pungent vinegary liquid and this DVD will teach you all you need to know.

You drink ‘em, then you tick ‘em

2011-03-09T13:52:00.005Z

“Shall we watch this?” I enquired of the squeeze as I showed her the exciting and interesting DVD I’d bought? “No” came the reply “Beertickers? Why on earth have you bought a DVD about beer? Can’t you watch it on your own? Do I have to see it?” With that I pottered upstairs, DVD in one hand, can of Carling (with giant wine glass) in the other anticipating the excitement of discovering all about the thrilling world of Beer Ticking. The film has been knocking around for a while but I’ve only just got around to watching it. I guess whiling away a boring day in the office by reading beer blogs isn’t enough for me. I’m guessing I need beer geekery in my home life too.

In the shortish (some might say not short enough) film amiable film maker Phil Parkin takes us on a guided tour of beer geekery & beer ticking meeting along the way a series of unusual odd balls engaged in the hobby. Phil explains the rules to us as “You drink ‘em, then you tick ‘em” sets himself the task of ticking 500 beers and on the way we get to meet characters such as Dave Unpronounceable, Gazza Prescott, Mick the Tick & Brian the Champ.

On the way there are some peculiar diversions involving Phil interviewing such beer luminaries as a thinner than he looks now Pete Brown & a bang tidy looking Melissa Cole. I say peculiar because these bits appear to have little to do with beer ticking and shoe horned in. Pete informs us of the important role beer has within the history of our sceptred isle on a five minute walk round of Burton on Trent’s brewing museum and Melissa informs us that drinking beer is great and it’s those wine drinkers with their 250ml of 14% grog that are the problem. An argument that falls over later on in the film where we get to see that an important part of beer ticking is indeed getting pissed as that's what happens if you “tick” 13 different beers. Not to mention the 250ml glass of wine being entirely a development from pubs and bars and not a reflection of typical home drinking. It’s as if Phil Parking decided upon a documentary on beer, asked a few well known faces to take part, got a response of “yes”, filmed a short interview entirely unrelated to the topic and slotted it in regardless because like heh, these people are beer celebs.

Where the film really works is in the contributions from some actual beer tickers. These people are portrayed sympathetically and the impression you get is one of a decent bunch of chaps with an unusual but entirely harmless hobby. Phil falls in love with his topic and rather than maintain an objective distance from it, he wholeheartedly engages in it. This results in a fair insight into the hobby including the rules that you have to neck a half before it’s a tick and the peculiar activity of bottling. This involves pouring your half into an empty 250ml panda pops bottle to tick later in the event of their being more that needs ticking than you are able to do. I mean I’m no expert but that can’t be a way to actually enjoy the beer, can it? Necking old stale beer from panda pops bottles? We are informed by a chap called Gazza Prescott that “scoopers” appreciate the beer and tickers just need to tick it off.

The lack of objective distance results in the documentary being a little thin on detail and as a viewer watching it the questions I had were not answered. Are the hobbyists suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder in the sense of what is a diagnosis of an actual doctor? What are the lives of the tickers outside ticking? Do these men have wives, girlfriends, children, hold down jobs? Are they in any way regular chaps with an odd hobby or do they live at home with their elderly mother never talking to girls and holding down a boring admin role at the local council on the lowest pay grade? Do these chaps have other obsessive compulsions? Do they like World of Warcraft? How much do they spend on their hobby and does it result in forgoing other pleasures as the hobby dominates their lives or is the hobby part of an otherwise balanced life? All this went unanswered. Interesting asides were not pressed by Phil Parkin in favour of maintaining bonhomie with his subject. I’d have loved to know why Dave Unpronounceable and Gazza Prescott got banned from a local pub they are choosing to boycott, especially if it was related to their hobby.

A feature of the documentary not all will like is that one aspect of Phil Parkins love of real ale paints a picture not that beer ticking is a minority sport within the ranks of CAMRA members and beer enthusiasts but that beer ticking is a central plank and activity. You do get the impression that beer enthusiast = Beer Ticker, though Phil’s enthusiasm and general chappish likability do add greatly to the journey he takes you on.

One feature of the closeness to his subject that does work is the insight the beer tickers afford him. We get to see Brian the Champ pull out a massive folder of the nearly 40,000 beers he has ticked and start cross referencing it with the beer menu at the Great British Beer Festival as he hunts for his 40,000^th tick. They all have massive folders, except the younger ones (by younger I mean middle aged) who have electronic PDA’s.

One aside works well in that Phil Parkin creates his own tick by brewing a Thornbridge Jaipur variant on a brewery visit, nicely connecting the visit with the theme of ticking.

I was left with the impression that the tickers at least enjoy their hobby and are not necessarily the weirdoes you might assume if someone were to simply explain the activity to you. At least the ones in the documentary. That they enjoy drinking and ticking is an activity that enhances their drinking pleasure rather than detracts from it. I cannot think of a less fun thing to do whilst having a pint than to note it down in a book (Brewer, Beer Name, ABV), but whatever gets you through the night is alright. The DVD extras are worth viewing if you need a bit more beer geekery than the 70 minutes of the documentary and as an overall personal view I liked the piece. Worth watching.

Will that in mind I offer the DVD to you, dear reader, by way of a prize. You can win this exciting now second hand DVD by posting “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme” in the responses below. If more than one people respond I draw a name out of a hat to choose the winner. On announcing the winner I will then ask for an address to post it to. It’s only a DVD, I can nick a jiffy bag from the stationary cabinet at work and don’t mind whether the postage is UK, Europe or beyond. The DVD is all regions but English Language only. I attach but one condition to the prize. Once watched you have to pass it on with the same condition that they pass it on. Pass it about and let anyone interested see it. You have to see it to the end to see whether Phil ticks 500 and reaches his goal.

Rough Pubs II

2011-03-03T10:22:00.003Z

Unfortunately there are pubs around that are not rough pubs. These types of pubs think they can tell me what to wear and think they are doing people a favour by allowing people in to spend their own hard earned money.

My employer has a right to tell me what to wear on the basis of paying me a not ungenerous annual stipend for my services. I don’t particularly want to wear a whistle and flute but am willing to do so for the financial generosity of paying me to do not a lot and giving me a desk with the internet on. If he asked me to wear a gimp mask I would decline and seek employment elsewhere or at least ask for a pay rise. My lady squeeze sort of gets to strongly suggest what I wear on the basis I am having sex with her on a regular basis. She happens to be a lady of taste and I don’t mind not wearing the same tatty t-shirt & tracksuit bottoms all weekend and instead adopting a more metro sexual smartish look if it makes her happy.

However, if I wish to wear a football shirt or a hat in my own time I will do so. As it happens I don’t, but I don’t wish to be told that I can’t wear what I like by a publican. I don’t actually own a football shirt. I own a baseball cap. I don’t want to pay £40 for a nylon t-shirt advertising a betting company. I do want, in fact I demand, the right to buy one and wear one if I wish. If the urge ever strikes me I will. I will wear what the fuck I like on my day off.

As it happens I am not a scruffy bugger and frequent places that by and large are not full of other scruffy buggers, but I don’t wish to be told that I can’t be a scruffy bugger. I reserve the right to choose that for myself.

I may be over 21 but the legal drinking age is 18. By all means ask for ID and ask with a smile, but I no more wish to drink in a place that bars 18-21 year olds any more than I would wish to stay in a guest house that bars blacks, Irish or homosexuals. I’m not a member of those 3 groups either, but if that’s your policy you can stick my custom up your arse.

The ban on work wear is a peculiar one considering another sign advertises the place is ideal for business lunches. My work wear is a suit. Do they wish me to take that off if I go for a “business lunch”? Am I offended by the presence of a working man in overalls stood at the bar having a pint after work? Not at all, and I wouldn’t expect him to be offended by the sight of me in my cheap suit. The only people that offend me in pubs are bearded types telling me the pongy ale “is drinking well” when what I want is to sink an ice cold pint of fizz.

You might be unsurprised to find out I have never stepped foot in the boozer that puts that sign outside its premises. It is deeply unappealing. It doesn’t tell me the place is smart, it tells me the place is trying too hard, is restrictive and thinks it’s doing me a favour. It is a place trying to keep “the wrong sort” out. It’s like the Daily Mail set up their own pub just for Daily Mail readers. Well “the wrong sort” happen to be my fellow man. I mean, good god, the pub sells meals 2 for a tenner.

Thank freedom and democracy that publicans haven’t got a monopoly. Thank freedom and democracy for competition, whether from other pubs, restaurants, bars or supermarkets. Here’s to the freedom to see such signs and say “fuck that”

The Rough Pub Guide

2011-03-02T15:50:00.005Z

When it comes to books on beer and pubs it is fair to say I have sometimes been a little less than kind. I mean what is the point? A guide book to pubs and/or beer? Wondering what a beer is like? Buy one and drink it. You don’t need a book. Decide for yourself whether it is any good or not by way of your own personal opinion after you’ve had a swig. Same goes with pub guides. Good god, what is the point? See a pub and unsure whether you like it or not? Walk in, if you like it stay, if you don’t walk out. Job’s a good ‘un. Who on gods earth needs a guide? Doesn’t seem to stop people knocking them out though.

Occasionally a beer book comes your way, changes your opinion and knocks your socks off and “The Rough Pub Guide” does that in spades.

A call to arms to save the great British boozer and a celebration of all that is true about pubs. Namely that pubs are dumpy shit holes full of reprobates and criminals getting pissed and having fights. A true honest to goodness celebration of pubs without crap about “responsible controlled environments”. I love it to bits.

The book is a few years old and looking on Amazon appears to be out of print. I found this one in a charity shop where I was looking for a dead man’s suit. A bit of googling and by all accounts the author had a blog going regarding his book but again that does not appear to have been updated in a while. Pity, as both the book and blog are a decent read. One can only assume there will not be another edition as I suspect the dumpy pubs detailed in the book are gone now, never to return. If they are not they ought to be.

I’ve never really got the maudlin sadness at the decline of the pub industry, but the sheer joy of this book is infectious. To read through it is to get a real taste of boozers I suspect you really wouldn’t wish to go in unless you were happy to risk life and limb, a trip to A&E, the loss of ears, permanent disfigurement and loss of either sight or hearing.

But even so the book communicates a joy of pubs I’ve not encountered elsewhere. Not for this book a list of crappy pubs selected on criteria of the pongyness of the ale and joyless lack of a football on TV or music and aimed at middle class, middle aged tosspots. Not for this book a list of crappy gentrified pubs known more for pretentious posh nosh that fighting in the car park. Nope a list of pubs you suspect you’d quite enjoy if you survived unscathed. This book distils the essence of a true pub, how awful they are; why you are wise to avoid them and at the same time instils sadness in their passing.

Arguably if this type of rhetoric were more common rather than the bollocks of “responsible and controlled environments” I would be more inclined to support a “save our pubs” campaign, though no more inclined to visit one. I would want them saved for the reprobates that use them by way of ensuring such types were off the street and away from decent law abiding folk.

I love this book; it almost makes me wish to walk into a pub, and then scares me slightly off doing so.

Product Placement

2011-03-01T12:00:00.007Z

I want to ask a question. Is booze so evil and bad that it has to be excluded as an acceptable product in the new rules that make product placement acceptable in UK TV?

With ITV dying on its arse as we all click series record on our Freeview recorder boxes and skip through the adverts it’s no surprise that commercial TV needs to find in-programme advertising revenue, but why exclude booze?

A feature of UK TV that has long amused me are the made up brands that often appear in UK dramas. From the Stellaberg lager that Frank Gallagher drinks in the TV show Shameless to the well known Newton and Ridley fictional northern regional brewery whose ales are sold in the Rover’s Return pub in Coronation Street. Drinking is a normal form of behaviour in TV drama. In fact the behaviour is more than a little contrived. No one really goes to the pub with the regularity of TV characters, but the fictional pub provides a social setting for characters to interact, a requirement of drama. Arguably one of the more ridiculous elements isn’t the frequency of pub going but the number of characters in the soap EastEnders that use the local laundrette with a regularity that suggests they either do not possess washing machines or they have all bought ones that break down on a weekly basis.

Within these drama’s the characters are constructed by the writers in such a manner that part of the character description usually specifies what they drink in the local fictional pub as part of a character profile. Elderly businessmen can be counted on to order a scotch, elderly working class types, half a bitter or mild, young fellas, pint of lager or bottle of lager, rough lairy women that work in the factory all drink pints, the sophisticated ones drink wine or spritzers and old girls like a G&T . Any casual watcher of these dramas quickly picks up the formulas’ used and no amount of pointing out to the lady in your life that it is all the same storylines repeated ad infinitum (I'm waiting for a love triangle that involves the family dog) seems to reduce a requirement to watch them all.

As amusing as “Stellaberg” is, what is the problem with Frank Gallagher just having a pint of Stella? That example might be a bit ropey. Inbev are more likely to pay money so Frank Gallagher doesn’t drink Stella than any lout brewer pay money so he does, but even so drinking is a normal legal activity.

Why shouldn’t we see the Rover’s Return filled with people drinking Carling lager or the beer of any local northern regional brewer?

The first beer brands I became aware of were due no doubt to product placement in American movies put on UK TV. Coors for me is the beer Burt Reynolds transported across America with Smokey on his tale. Budweiser is the beer he drank when he was a drunk at the start of the sequel where they transported an Elephant. These brands looked exotic, exciting and representative of an American culture I much admired as a teenager. Maybe putting Hydes Bitter on in the Rovers Return wouldn’t have had the same effect but arguably neither option is an encouragement to drink. Drinking is a normal adult activity I was always going to have a go at regardless of what Curly Watts drank alongside having sex, driving and getting a credit card, and none of it so far has done me any harm and my intention is to keep going because I quite enjoy it. Especially the drinking and having sex bit.

Boheme Lager

2011-02-28T10:42:00.004Z

One of the most neglectful aspects of this tosh so far as been to fail to cover one of the more exciting cooking lagers available to the British cooking lager enthusiast and this weekend I bought a big box of it to compensate for my neglect. It is currently difficult to ascertain whether permanent inflation has hit the cooking lager market bumping up the prices of lovely grog or whether we are stuck in the wilderness between Christmas and Easter waiting for the next 3 for £20 offer on big boxes of cheap lout.

One example is a recent 2 boxes of 15 for £18 offer on Beck’s in Sainsbury’s, making a half pint bottle a whopping 60p. Is that a good deal in these economically straightened times? Should that be accepted as the new economic reality of a stagnating inflation riddled economy? Should the cooking lager enthusiast shrug his shoulders and accept the value of money has collapsed and 60p is what a bottle of lout now costs? Kronenbourg looks a far better deal at £6.13 for 15, a far more reasonable 41p a bottle. It looks like there are still bargains out there on decent ice cold fizz.

However for me it was time to revisit a lout I’ve not necked for a couple of years. Boheme lager is a brand exclusive to Tesco, in effect their own Czech lager. Brewed to 4.7% and containing water, malt, hops & hop extract. Boheme 1795 is a pilsner brewed by Budejovicky Mestansky Pivovar, the oldest brewery in the city.

Crickey this sound like we are in proper lager territory here, and in some respects we are. Crap about craft versus industrial lager negates that one of the key attributes of European fizz is that the quality of the beer, its intrinsic attributes being far more important than unquantifiable attributes like the “amount of love” it was brewed with. Most decent authentic lager is industrially made and that is a key feature of its quality and consistency.

We could put this beer in a term of reference of other better known brands of Czech lager on the market but whether you are necking Pilsner Urquell, Budweiser Budvar or Staropramen you should be looking to do so at about £3 a litre. 2 500ml bottles for £3 appears the fair going rate for decent neckable branded grog in this arena. This grog came in at 20 330ml bottles for £10, or 50p a bottle or £1.50 a litre. Half the price of other available Czech lagers.

So is it only half as good? Nope not at all. It’s a cracking lout. It has a fullness to the body, a delicate sweetness and a wonderful crisp bite. A bang on decent Pilsner that even a “discerning” drinker would be happy to throw down there neck. On the great scheme of lout appreciation I’d put it up there as an arguably a comparable grog that could be branded and hawked at the same price of the branded goods. Boak & Bailey look at the grog here.

Bang per buck isn’t just about alcohol content, it’s also about how good the lout is and this lout really is top stuff for the buttons being charged. There is no such thing as bad cooking lager, it is all good, but some arguably is better than others. The way you decide this is by necking everything that is cheap and deciding for yourself what you like, and I really quite like this one.

When Tesco first started hawking this grog they flogged it at 3 boxes for £20, but when it came off the bargain bin other louts were offered cheap and I waved goodbye to the crisp delicious nectar. As the box sixes of the other offers has reduced and this remains 20 330ml bottles, at £10 for a box the offer hits the spot. Welcome back to Daddy.

Thought is free

2011-02-23T13:36:00.007Z

I’ve had a thought, an observation, rolling around my head for a few days and as blogging is an excuse to at least attempt to form those thoughts into a coherent point of view I thought I’d give it a go. But first an apology for not taking the piss out of anything to do with beery pretentions or beards.

It was inspired by two blogs, Firstly Pete Browns blog post about beer and food matching, here, but also inspired by Mudgies attempt at crystal ball gazing, here.

Beer and food matching is something I thoroughly enjoy deriding, but I’m going to lay off on this one. My observation from reading newspaper columns and watching TV shows is that wine experts often eulogise about fine wines that may indeed cost a few bob more than a regular 3 for £10 Jacobs Creek special offer that I might buy to go with whatever attempt at cookery I’m about to thrill my lovely lady squeeze with. This may be an attempt to encourage the reader or viewer to be a little more adventurous in their choices though I also observe most of the audience for such things are more interested in reading and watching than doing. The only recipe I have ever knocked up from a cookery show was courtesy of Delia Smith, though I would credit watching daytime telly favourite ready steady cook as a student as being full of informative tips on knocking out edible scran quickly. I’ve never bought a bottle of wine recommended to me by a wine ponce off the telly or in a newspaper lifestyle section. However my main observation is that whatever grog they are banging on about, it is never referenced from the perspective that the regular commonly enjoyed brands are in any way shite.

I don’t think I’ve ever read or seen a wine expert bang on about a £14.99 bottle of nice Italian wine that goes with whatever dish the cook has knocked up by expressing the view that it is so much nicer than a £3.99 bottle of Echo Falls or that bottles of £3.99 plonk represent vile chemical rubbish only the undiscerning neck and we’d all be far better off is such shite did not exist. I think I understand the reason why, but correct me if you disagree. They understand the audience will by and large like a glass of wine, that those that don’t will not be reading it. They understand the audience may or may not have an interest in wine but probably are familiar with £3.99 plonk and may drink it regularly. They understand that the £3.99 plonk actually isn’t vile filth but a perfectly decent standard product enjoyed by millions. They understand that telling people the wine they are drinking is vile filth may turn them off drinking wine rather than turn them on to paying more for a bottle. They understand you can eulogise about how great this wine is without any reference at all to the bottle of cheap plonk. Cheap plonk isn’t really relevant to explaining the wonderful fruity notes of this more expensive plonk.

It is far more common when reading and watching the same basic stuff about beer to see more expensive beers framed within a reference point how much better they are than cheaper beers. An example is here, from notable professional beer writer Adrian Tierney-Jones. It is in no way a criticism as I enjoy his writing, hold him in high esteem and he has been kind enough to leave the odd comment on this rubbish I knock up. It is an observation that whilst the article eulogises about the beer, this is framed in the context of what the beer isn’t rather than what it is. It isn’t a bottle of beer that retails for about a quarter of the price. Well we knew that before we knew anything else about the beer. An alternate example is the marketing of Brewdog beers, a cracking example here, where the marketing of their own premium lager takes as its main reference cheaper lagers that cost about a third of the price of a bottle of Brewdog lager. Rather than tell us how wonderful their own lager is, they insist on telling us how shit popular cheaper national brands of lager are.

What do I make of this notable difference that the world of beer has to the world of wine? Well one thing I note is how I am rarely told by wine buffs that wine is a nasty unnatural product. I rarely ponder the ingredients of the wine I drink wondering whether there are any nasties in there to harm me. I notice most bottles of wine mention they contain sulphites but I also understand sulphites have been used since Roman times to preserve grapes. The wine may or may not contain cheaper fermentable sugars added to the grape juice to produce a cheaper product but my judgement is based largely on how drinkable it is and how much I paid for it. That wine is a natural healthy product to be enjoyed and that by and large the more I am willing to pay the better bottle of wine I might get.

I also note that when drinking in Germany the view held by many drinkers regarding their National product of beer is somewhat different to us. That beer is considered a natural agricultural product to be celebrated alongside bread, meat and all other delights. That what I as a tourist think is a beer festival is actually a celebration of agriculture that happens to include beer because beer is the best thing you can make from agriculture. It is only English friends that tell me they are feeling rough because last night they had a skinful of “dirty beer” combined with being “a dirty stop out”. Not exactly a serious statement of being dirty but hardly an affirmation of a natural and healthy product.

When pondering beer it is easy to wonder whether that can of Foster’s is vile and unnatural filth. Is it really? Well of course it isn’t. It is made of regular barley & hops though there may indeed be not that many hops and other natural cheaper commodity grains may form part of the recipe that keeps the cost down. Nothing unnatural, vile or filthy about it. The beer is arguably popular and to a large number of peoples taste, though clearly not to everyone’s. However it is easy to note the effect of being regularly informed that standard regular brands of beer are vile and unnatural filth. It may be assumed that the effect is to push me as a punter to “better” or more expensive beer that also funnily enough is unclear about what it contains. Those beers may be fuller in flavour but not necessarily to my taste or to my pocket. It is just as easy to assume that regular beer is the vile filth many beer writers tell me it is, entirely unrelated to the fuller hoppier beers I am told represent the embodiment of the brewers craft and opt instead for a bottle of wine. After all no one has told me any of that is vile filth.

So the conclusion I find myself heading towards, is one of sharing some of the amusing pessimism of Mudgies blog post regarding the inexorable decline of beer drinking, and pondering the first comment by Pete Brown. It depends on whether you thing people are genuinely influenced by TV shows and lifestyle articles in the press. I know anything on the blogosphere is read by about 3 or 4 people but wouldn’t you expect established media more widely consumed to be influential?

I do laugh at the beery cheery types that appear to take issue with views expressed in the press that does not conform to their own established agenda of “being good for beer”, but wonder whether “being bad for beer” includes anything and everything that cannot establish something positive to say without first explaining that all those popular brands lots of people like are complete muck.

Holsten Pils

2011-02-21T09:50:00.004Z

With a lack of great bargains on the big lout boxes my perusal of the smaller beer unit packages at half price went beyond trying the relatively new Bud 4%, and into the old school charm of Holsten Pils. Holsten is a beer I haven’t drank for years. I remember it being quite heavily advertised on TV when I was a child by the likes of American actor Jeff Goldblum, who succeeded in giving the impression of a rather sophisticated drink for the discerning beer swiller. I think these were replaced by a more humorous campaign involving the clever editing of old movies interspersed with scenes of a contemporary comedian. It’s all on you tube here if you fancy a bit of nostalgia.

I’d all but forgotten the beer existed until seeing the film “This is England” on TV. The presumably authentic representation of the 1980’s had many characters necking cans of Holsten Pils as an iconic 80’s brand. When a four pack turned up half price, I was only ever going to remind myself of the beer.

The can informs me on the label it is brewed in Hamburg but in the small print “the EU”

See wiki here,

Holsten is specially produced in Germany (since 1879), but it may be produced by other Carlsberg companies around the world.

The can also contains the spurious bullshit that due to an enhanced fermentation process more sugars turn to alcohol. Also that the beer is lower in Carbs than other leading lagers. Interestingly it is a Carlsberg product and in the great game of being the purest lager it lays claim to only 3 ingredients, water, malted barley & hops. There really needs to be consistency with beer ingredient labelling but heh, the grog is cheap.

An older friend tells me the beer used to far stronger than the 5% it currently is. Certainly when I last drank it, it was 5.5%. My friend informs me it used to be 6%+ but I have no way of confirming this. If it is not on Google it never happened. Further to this my memory of the beer was one of being a crisp clean pilsner lager with the crisp bitterness you expect from a pils.

In its current form the beer is a little lacking on the nose with a taste that lacks the expected bitterness. The lack of a sharp crisp bite is followed by a rounded after taste of dryness but is lacking any body. It fails to make its mark as the beer I remember or being a lout that is in any way up to the standard of current 5% louts on the market. Most of the current 5% louts from Carlsberg Export; Grolsch & Becks have more going for them than this. Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t bad, just a drinkable grog that is nowt special on the market. If it stays half price I might do it again.

It is certainly a pity that Carlsberg haven’t done anything with this brand. Reducing it to 5% and reducing its flavour has put it in a category that does nothing for it. Failure to invest in marketing the brand makes it a forgotten retro brand rather than contemporary continental lout. Maybe there isn’t a market for lout above 5%, maybe that’s tramp territory, but there doesn’t appear much of a market for it at 5%

Like running into an old girlfriend. At first you might be pleased to see her, then you remember why you broke up and exchanging a few pleasantries before going your separate ways is the best possible outcome. She's put on a bit of weight since you last saw her and not really the bird you remember. You certainly don't want to hit the sack with the girl.

Budweiser 66

2011-02-20T14:25:00.004Z

New products and brand extensions come out all the time. Whilst small niche shed pong brewers or “craft” as they like to style themselves seek out new flavours to excite beer geeks and make regular boozers gag, the larger marketing driven companies ask the question “what would a large number of people want to drink?” Then they apply several layers of bullshit to justify a course of action and the next new and exciting flavourless watery lager hits the market because that is what we want. The idea that we just want a decent neckable beer that is cheaper than other decent neckable beers never really occurs to them. No, what we want is top pay more for watery piss, apparently.

Cooking lager enthusiasts tend to ignore this nonsense upon noticing the new brand extension is asking twice the price of regular neckable grog. Then at some point it finds it’s way into the half price bargain bin and at that point you can expect an appearance on this here blog as I decide to try it. It not that I’ve never drank watery piss before, it’s that I’ve never drank watery piss with this brand on it.

Budweiser 66 is a 4% abv variant of the familiar American lager promising a lightly carbonated grog with a smooth easy taste. All true. The colour of the beer somewhat gives the game away from the off. I’ve drunk some pisswaters in my time but am unsure whether I’ve drunk a beer so light coloured. The smell is moderately promising but on the taste you get very little. A light sweetness on a broad palate of a crisp light lager. That isn’t necessary a bad thing, sometimes a light beer hits the spot refreshment wise. I think we’ve been here before with Bud Light, which never did last long as a brand in Britain.

Overall I can have no complaints, the beer was exactly as I expected it to be but I remain unsure why I would want a light 300ml of 4% lager in bottle. When I opened it the squeeze made the unusual decision of joining me in one and her perspective was slightly different. She enjoyed it and suggested that was a light lager she quiet liked and would drink again. Horses for courses I guess. A 4% lager is something I’d be happier with as a longer drink, a pint or 440ml can.

Overall I cannot say anything too nasty about it; the beer is perfectly pleasant. Just not a lot going on with it. If the squeeze likes it I’m sure it’ll pop up in the trolley again and I wouldn’t be offended by it passing my lips. I wouldn’t seek it out; but then again I wouldn’t with the parent brand. For the record I preferred this to the parent brand but that’s not saying much. Is there a market for this type of light lager? Well they have never really taken off in the UK so my bet would be that this extension won’t have the legs to stick around long term, but you know, if they want to flog it cheap then I’ll neck it. I’m unsure the UK customer has ever really got light beer to the extent of the US customer. What does light mean? Lighter in taste, calories, and alcohol? All or just some of that. This isn’t even using the term light, whilst clearly going for lighter in alcohol & taste.

Pete Brown may consider this brand to be the anti Christ but heh, cheap grog is cheap grog. If you are looking for a light beer this one is no worse than any other, it’s just not worth top dollar, but what is?

Getting pissed is what beer is for

2011-02-18T13:50:00.006Z

I love reading the beer blogs and I love the fact that people seem to care so passionately about whatever floats there boat. Whether it's a new wave of craft brewing, maintaining a tradition of cask ale, getting excited about undrinkable grog with an unpleasant amount of hops, arguing about CAMRA, whatever, it’s all good.

What I enjoy is getting pissed. I love it, it’s great. Usually it’s just getting slightly pissed as since going out with her, the squeeze has been successful in knocking on the head my previous propensity to get smashed, but even so getting slightly pissed is fun. It means I can still enjoy a little romance and I am free of a hangover the next day. It might even be better for my health, but I’m not convinced.

The joy of getting pissed can appear I think sometimes to be “undiscerning”, that one doesn’t care what one gets pissed on, but nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly one has to factor cost into the equation but cost is but one factor. The grog has to be drinkable and leave you the next day with the least possible hangover. I’m not convinced by those that strongly rate one beer style over another for this, the evidence is anecdotal and I strongly believe you have to get pissed on lots of different things before discovering your own personal nirvana, then buying it cheaply from Tesco.

For my delicate constitution the substance I have found I can drink in greatest quantity and feel okay the next day would be the Helles bier of south Germany. I once woke up on a pals couch in Schwabing and felt slightly rough and uncertain where I was. Not hung-over, but a bit tired and dehydrated. I worked out what I’d necked the night before and quite frankly it would have killed an Elephant. We’d spent the day in the beer gardens and the night in the bars. There were photo’s taken on phones of dancing with girls that I was keen the squeeze didn’t see. Let’s not trouble her with that and let’s not have questions that need answers. I have done similar in the UK but arguably felt rougher on a smaller consumption, whether I was necking cask ale or cooking lager. For the record I’ve found little difference in the hangover potential of either cask beer or keg lager but keg smooth bitter is Satan incarnate for entering the depths of hell the following morning. On beer vs. wine, wine is all too easy to drink in a quantity that can leave you in bed until 4pm the following day vowing never to touch it again.

The worst hangovers I’ve have always come from strange local spirits. Necking moonshine from a jam jar with American rednecks after several pitchers of the cheapest domestic lager left me closest not only to death but wishing for death. My most stark memory of the evening was having a go at George Formby’s “When I’m cleaning windows”, on a drinking associates banjo (he didn’t have a ukulele) and being told the best place in England was “Scotchland”. I told him the best place in America was Sarah Michelle Gellar. By comparison fermented yaks milk is a delightful way of getting pissed even if it tastes foul. Sangria is another substance that I have banned from my body, it is neither big nor clever to neck several jugs of it and go on a donkey ride. Egyptian vodka & Egyptian Stella have the wonderful effect of keeping you drunk even when you wake up at 5am to go see some ancient historical crap the most interesting fact of which is that Roger Moore made a Bond film there. The hangover kicks in about noon and 2 bottles of the ice cold Stella calms it nicely. On a weekend in Dublin I discovered if no liquid but Guinness passes your lips, your poo turns jet black. My biggest problem is that whilst reasonably travelled for a working class northern pisshead I’ve not been everywhere. I need to get pissed everywhere in the world before making any sort of judgement on what is the best thing to get pissed on.

As a result you can imagine I care little for whether Brewdog Punk IPA tastes better in cans or bottles. I’m sure both are nice, in what form is it the cheapest and how will I feel the morning after necking a skinful of the stuff? These are questions that need answering. Until then I have a quiet weekend of moderate sobriety because the following weekend a pal is visiting England from Germany. I have permission to get proper trollied. He’s a bit of an Anglophile and likes pongy cask ale. I’m taking him around the bars all the nice beer bloggers showed me on the last twissup as they seemed to be nice places to neck pong. I might join him in that or I might neck an ice cold fizzy lout, who’s to say? As darkness falls we will be drawn like moths to the light of bars where dancing and pretty girls reside. I shall behave myself.

At no point will I comment on the bitterness, hopping rate or condition of any grog I throw down me. I shall not take a pint back nor talk about any of the beer other than “this is okay, not sure about this one” I shall enjoy the company of a friend I haven’t seen for a couple of months and we shall get proper pissed. Proper good style pissed. Because getting pissed is great and getting pissed is what beer is for

A pint of Harp

2011-02-16T15:17:00.003Z

Joking about CAMRA stereotypes may very well be a lazy form of wit. There is no structure to the joke, it really is just nothing more than standing in the school playground and pointing at the kid whose mum has dressed him in a jumper he himself doesn’t want to wear, saying “ha ha” and encouraging all the other kids to do the same. I wouldn’t describe it as the same thing as bullying but it is pretty close to bullying, can be a feature of bullying and if the recipient is a sensitive soul be interpreted as bullying. Among friends it is called ribbing. It is what chaps do.

Maybe I have been guilty of this, and if so I apologise. Not for bullying but for insulting you with a low form of wit. You deserve more. You deserve a well crafted and structured joke. Beer snobbery like all forms of snobbery is intrinsically ridiculous and snobbery has a long history of being ridiculed. From the wonderful “Keeping up Appearances” to “Dad’s Army”, the self set up of the snob via their own conceits followed by their downfall as reality bites has been a comedy narrative with origins that predate television or even the music hall. You dear reader deserve something of that calibre and rest assured I am busy working on it.

Until then I would like to express my respect for the gentleman pictured to the right of the photo. I love you man. I love your hair, I love your 20 year old grey jeans that presumably one day were black, I love the badges on your jacket and I love more than anything the tie. I love that you believe wearing a tie with that outfit makes it somehow “smart”. I love it. I love it. I love it. I want to be there with you now having a pint of pongy ale and learning all about great pubs and proper beer. Don’t for one minute think I am taking the piss. I really am not. I really fucking would love to get away with getting up in the morning, dressing like that and nobody telling me that it wasn’t perfectly okay. You my friend are a free man. The rest of us are slaves. We are slaves to convention, to rules, to acceptability, to the comments of friends, lovers and employment bosses. You walk among us as more than a number, you are a free man and I want to be able to call you friend. Respect also to the old guy in trainers. Bang tidy old chap, is that lout in your glass?

Congratulations to the CAMRA Pub of the Year, The Harp. Facebook users can see more here. Well done on the award. It’s not quite as prestigious as CAMCL’s Supermarket of the Year, but for every Oscar ceremony there has to be a few BAFTA type gubbins.

I want to visit, I want to buy my mad haired friend a pint and sit as an apprentice at the foot of a master. I will do so when I run out of cheap supermarket lager.

Playing the blues

2011-02-15T12:44:00.006Z

Been drinking some of this grog of late, Beck’s Blue. 0.05% Alcohol by volume. 19.1 calories per 100ml. Now you might think I’ve been necking that because I’ve turned soft or even thoughtfully listened to the perspective of Don Shenker and reduced my booze intake. Actually I bought a load of it because it was cheap, on special offer and I’d been meaning to try it for a while. Unlike my cheeky little flirtation with Cobra Zero, here, it wasn’t prompted by the squeeze but arguably off my own back. It was a beer I fancied trying.

In social situations where I get the short straw and end up driving I’m always a bit stuck for what to drink. I like most soft drinks but it is entirely unnatural to drink a lot of liquid. You drink as much as you need of water, tea, Vimto because you happen to be thirsty and that is the liquid that floats your boat. In such situations I have a soft drink but it really only serves the purpose of having something in my hand when it appears socially necessary to do so. Whether in someone’s home or out for a drink with friends it feels more natural to have nothing, and if you have something it is because you are thirsty and not because you can’t sit there and have nothing. Social convention dictates its is rude to have nothing and not being a rude sort of person I have drank numerous cups of tea around people’s houses I didn’t actually really want but didn’t want to be rude and it’s no real skin off my nose to throw a cup of tea down me.

We could get into the whole social convention of beer drinking and why I’m conditioned to neck a pint because I’m a bloke and that’s what blokes do. As a tool for getting pissed beer is pretty inefficient, there are far more trips to the toilet involved that appears civilised. I quite like getting pissed and I’m not about to pretend otherwise. The fact that beer contains alcohol is one of the things about it I like. You can if you want lay claim to only drinking it for its taste but I suspect you’d never have gotten a taste for it if it wasn’t inebriating. As a tool for getting pissed, wine is far nicer. You can neck a far amount without numerous trips to the toilet and if you neck it at the rate of beer you’ll get pissed pretty quickly.

I’m happy to admit that one of the reasons I often do not wish to get pissed is related to sexual function. Plenty of single blokeish mates will tell me stories of having a skinful, pulling a bird and enjoying the natural sexual function in a state of inebriation. I cannot manage it when pissed. I did once wonder whether this was sexual dysfunction and contemplated a trip to the local GP but decided against it when I ran through the probable conversation in my head. After explaining my concern regarding sexual dysfunction but noting that I was otherwise fine and that it only occurred when I’d drank a skinful I presumed the doctor would simply advise me not to drink a skinful before sexual congress and not give me some tablets that allowed me to make love whilst pissed. If you know different and think it worth a trip to the doctors, let me know as I’d like to drink more and not have it affect the loving nature of my relationship.

So the test for me was not only whether I liked Beck’s Blue but whether it was something I’d be happy to sink a few of in a situation of not getting pissed. Over the weekend I conducted my experiment. As a drink Beck’s Blue is arguably more like a beer than any other alcohol free beer I have drank. The absence of alcohol is notable in the taste profile but in all other respects the stuff tastes like a cold bottle of lager and not an odd fake lager. For authenticity I’d rate it higher than Cobra Zero, but I’d put the taste of Cobra Zero as a drink slightly higher. I could arguably drink a few more of these than Cobra Zero due to its dryer taste and lower sweetness. My experience of alcohol free beer isn’t that comprehensive. I’ve tried this, Cobra, Kaliber and had a swig of a few German “alkoholfrei” beers that German friends opted for. The Hofbräu & Schneider’s alkoholfreis are not common on the UK market, though, and in all honesty I didn’t especially rate them when I drank them nor would I seek them out. Alcohol free beer is arguably a distress purchase. As a distress purchase I go for Beck’s Blue again and sink a few over and above diet cokes, mineral waters & orange juices. A nice one I quite liked.

Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T11:09:00.002Z

It is true to say I love cooking lager; I love its ice cold fizzy deliciousness. I love the fact a giant box of it can be bought for buttons. I love the fact that some beer geeks look down not only on the product but those that enjoy it. Cooking lager not only fills me with joy but it connects me with the vibrant hub of the world. Today is Valentine’s Day, a day for expressing one’s love. I shall not get to express my one true love today for a different love is to be appreciated. The lady squeeze has texted me to tell me she loves me. The flowers have arrived and it’s a bigger bunch than any of the other girls in her work place got. I guess I picked the right picture off the Interflora website. Tonight I shall be ripped off in a fancy Dan restaurant by paying over the odds for a Valentines menu and bottle of wine. What wine shall I buy? The second cheapest on the menu. Not the cheapest, the second cheapest. It’s only fermented grapes, the cheapest will be perfectly okay, but I don’t want to appear cheap. If I’m lucky the evening shall end with a bit of how’s your father. We shall wait until we get home, we don’t want to be thrown out of another restaurant.

Yesterday I discovered a sweet ritual 2 friends of mine engage in. Both gentleman, both single, both as far as they care to admit heterosexual, and both having a yearly ritual of going out for a Valentine’s Day meal together at a curry house. They claim it is a bit of a joke, I neither know nor care whether it is. A few years ago they were out on the piss and went for a curry not knowing it was Valentine’s Day. They figured it out when presented with the special lovers menu and because it came with a free drink they opted for it. Being the 21^st century the restaurant had no issue with 2 gentlemen enjoying a romantic Valentine’s day meal and in fact were made especially welcome by a slightly camp Indian waiter who treated them especially attentively as they enjoyed their candlelit meal. They go out to the same restaurant every year for a ruby & free pint of cobra & lovers desert to share. Love is as they say a beautiful thing, I await an invite to the civil partnership ceremony and wonder whether it will be two stag nights or one joint one.

My love of cooking lager will have to wait. Another night I will show my love by cracking open a can of lout and plonking myself in front of the telly. I may occasionally be unfaithful, I may occasionally neck other forms of grog with differing modes of dispense but cooking lager is an understanding lover. She never complains and she is always there in the fridge waiting for my return. However you are spending the evening and whoever lovers’ arm you spend it within tonight is an evening for lovers. Here’s my beer poem in honour of Dredge.

I wish to scream, I wish to shout

I need to express my love of the lout

It’s golden fizzy ice cold bliss

Every swig the embrace of a lovers kiss

What Craft Lout means to me

2011-02-11T11:20:00.005Z

What Craft Lout means to me. In any given product or commodity a degree of craftsmanship exists. During the industrial revolution and the adoption of factory systems to produce goods many thought the days of the artisan craftsman were numbered, but nothing could be further from the truth. The craftsman has adapted and prospered both within the processes of industrial production and beyond it by maintaining niche industry.

When you want some furniture for a new house your squeeze has made you buy, you have many choices. An antique shop full of old crap? IKEA full of new crap? A craft bit of joinery from someone that did better at woodwork than I did at school? The artistry is within the design and quality standard of its production. For any given piece of furniture the squeeze will decide what she wants based on its design, her taste, and I will simply go along hoping I can persuade her against anything that will involve me getting my screwdriver out and having to assemble anything “flat pack” from instructions poorly translated from an oriental language.

So where is the artistry in industrial macro lager? A mass produced product knocked out to a consistent quality standard with each unit product identical by a big machine with a big green button on for go and a big red button on for stop? The artistry is in the product design and the loving way the guy in overalls presses that green button.

Beck’s for instance, brewed to the same recipe since the world was in black and white and offering a genuine authentic German lager at half the price of any other Reinheitsgebot pisswater being hawked. Carling as another instance. Take a lager and hone it carefully to suit British tastes by the loving addition of adjuncts, super chilling and fizz. The examples go on and on. Each example of cooking lager and lout represents a loving attention to detail in its design then applied to an efficient production process that allows the cooking lager enthusiast to neck a skin full for tuppence. Stella lovingly brewed with maize as an adjunct and often derided. Maize has been used to brew since the times of the Inca’s. Take this ancient tradition and fuse it with the European Pilsner lager tradition and you have an exciting fusion of Inca and European tradition, all for 50p a can.

The question really isn’t, “What is craft lout?”, but is there a lout you cannot describe as “craft” Cooking lager enthusiasts can rest assured the cheap grog they know and love is a craft product. We all know what craft means, it means the beer we know and love. Lout = Craft, always has been, always will be.

Real Ale

2011-02-10T14:47:00.004Z

I thought I'd share the following links

Real Ale

Rough Pubs

Lager

The site has numerous other links to entertaining stuff but these made me smile.

New uses for closed pubs

2011-02-09T09:01:00.003Z

There can be a lot of negativity on the Beer Blogosphere regarding the death of the pub industry. It is by all accounts something some people care about. One can only wonder why, when they can sit in their own nice clean homes necking cheap supermarket grog and not have to sit in run down tatty miserable pubs anymore. I guess for some people the glass is always half empty. To raise the mood I did think of a blog documenting all the nice things that happens to closed pubs. Things like being knocked down and a Tesco being built or a block of flats. A cheerful look as to how a dynamic market economy doesn’t leave decaying old buildings to rot but instead utilizes them for nicer uses than a dumpy pub. A counter weight to this blog about closed pubs, from the fella Mudge. You might be surprised to discover I can’t be bothered. So instead I’m starting the first in what might be an occasional series about closed pubs that have gone on to being something better and serving their communities in new and interesting ways.

We start first with this story in the Manchester Evening News. It details the charming story of a dumpy pub becoming a bondage club. The pub, the Rifle Volunteer in delightful Stockport was obviously not wanted by the people of the town, and can you blame them? Instead a thriving fetish establishment called "The Slave Academy" has opened offering such things as “mistress worship” and caters for the residents of the borough in a way a pub clearly could not.

I can only presume the establishment isn’t a knocking shop containing trafficked East European slaves forced to work as hookers, as I doubt they would be so open about it. As you expect from this blog I researched this interesting development fully, but not by actually going there. I doubt I could have got away with “I’m off to a fetish club dear, to research material for my blog. It’s about the exciting new uses of closed pubs” I am lucky in so far as my lovely squeeze can be an open minded sort of girl, but I would not have got away with that one. I googled it and discovered the establishment has a website, here. I would caution you against clicking on it at work. I cannot say it really does look like my cup of tea any more than going for a pint in the Rifle Volunteer would have been, but Mistress Sascha looks like a game girl. It is stories like this that show the decline of the pub industry has many positive benefits and offers an arguably cheerful story of a pub being put to better use. Glass half full !

If you have any stories of pubs put to better use let me know

The Great Cooking Lager Beer Bong T shirt Competition

2011-02-08T14:10:00.008Z

A recent flood of beer blogs regarding “cans, bottles, kegs or casks” has in my view failed to mention what is arguably one of the finest ways of delivering cooking lager direct into the human anatomy. As most cooking lager enthusiasts know, the world of beer is full of fine examples of beer innovation coupled with a preservation of tradition. The flavours offered the beer enthusiast are many and varied, but the pinnacle of beer is clear by looking at the most popular beers sold. The public are not wrong, they vote with their feet and wallet, and cooking lager sits atop the great pyramid of beer as the finest example of what beer should be. That is cold, fizzy and neckable.

Arguably one of the finest methods of necking cooking lager is the beer bong. A funnel to pour cooking lager straight down your neck at speed delivering cooking lager goodness straight into you without the tiresome bother of drinking and tasting it. Get your own Beer Bong here and begin that lifelong love and enthusiasm for getting drunk quickly on cold and delicious cooking lager. But I expect you are already in possession of a beer bong or even that you could make your own out of a bit of tube and a funnel.

It is sad so many beer enthusiasts overlook the obvious best beer delivery dispense method. I hope to rectify that with the Great Cooking Lager Beer Bong T shirt Competition that doesn’t even have to involve cooking lager. Blog about whatever grog you like, whether cooking lager, “real” pongy ale, or “craft” beer. Neck it from a beer bong, post your blog with picture evidence, post me a link and you might win a prize. (Extra points awarded to photo's showing a pretty girl pouring the beer down your neck) It is that easy. I might even give away more than one prize, but I might not. Whadya win?

Why, you win a T-Shirt that proclaims your love of the greats of beer blogging. Whether in smart restaurant, discotheque, craft ale pub, beer festival or public toilet you can stand out from the crowd in a T Shirt that declares you to be a discerning reader of the beer blogosphere and admirer of its greatest contributors. Is there a finer prize that has ever been offered? I doubt it but yes it could be yours.

Franks Alcoholic Root Beer

2011-02-07T12:46:00.005Z

It is quite rare I’m tempted to pay full price for anything. Being one of life’s cheap skates, always on the lookout for a bargain, it can be quite painful to pay the full whack for anything. I did so on a recent trip to Tesco. Sure I got a bargain on the Beck’s Vier and even picked up some cheap Budvar Dark lager (3 for £4) & Tesco Belgian Kriek beer(£1 a pop) but bizarrely it was this little number that got me least by way of bang per buck at £1.95 a bottle. Franks Alcoholic Root Beer 4%, by Kopparberg of Sweden.

I’ll let you decide whether this is an alcopop or an actual beer, I’m not fussed either way. Grog is grog. The label did seem to indicate some actual connection to beer by way of mentioning the ingredients as Barley malt, Hops, Yeast, Wintergreen Oil, Liquorice Root, Aniseed and Vanilla. The first few seem actual beer ingredients to me.

I am more familiar with root beer as a soft drink, and as soft drink I love it. It is uncommon in the UK but when I find it I enjoy it. The Spoons have it on as a soft drink in their pubs, Sainsbury’s occasionally stock 2 litre bottles of the pop, but root beer has never really taken off in the UK. The UK has its fair share of unusual soft drinks, so I’m guessing an overall lack of demand for a classic American pop.

The bottle seemed to indicate that this product is aimed firmly at the “over ice” category of large bottled drinks dominated by cider brands. Upon cracking it open the smell was entirely like a pop version with the fizz also more indicative of a can of pop. From smell and appearance alone you’d put this as an alcopop rather than a beer.

The taste had more layers and a natural texture than a typical soft root beer. The vanilla, liquorice & aniseed stand out at different points but the taste comes across as a posh pop with less of a cloying sweetness. Designed more for adult tastes and possibly that it is impossible to session a root beer or can of coke. It would be difficult to session this regardless of a reduced but not absent sweeteness. The taste of alcohol is wholly absent. You’d never guess from taste alone that you were drinking an alcoholic beverage. On the whole I liked it. But I like root beer. I suspect if you didn’t like root beer you’d find this to be a bizarre concoction. One to try again, but I’ll wait for a special offer before buying more.

Poachers Grog

2011-02-04T12:16:00.003Z

It’s been a while since anyone sent me some free beer, but I’ve still got some lovely Badger stuff to neck and blog about. That’s a hint, if anyone still reads this crap. I did think of reviewing Foster’s lager on a weekly basis. What is the point of drinking new beers when you have discovered one of the best?

I won some beer, though, by way of a bet and this grog will be making an appearance when I get round to necking it. It is pong too. Some of it says “CAMRA says this is real ale” on the bottle. Some of it doesn’t. Within the world of work, one from time to time makes the acquaintance of a fellow pisshead. A temporary contractor from Lincoln knocks around the office from time to time and we have been known to have a pint. This is despite his beard, elderly appearance, lack of trendy trainers and fondness for the variable pongy local grog that passes for “real ale” around this part of Oop North. I even took him into the local “craft” beer boozer a few weeks ago to give him the choice of numerous cask and world beers and be in an establishment where beards were the norm rather than unusual. That’s the kind of nice chap I am. I could have dragged him around the tatty pubs near work or his hotel for a skinful of Stella, but I didn’t. I took him on a bus to beer geek heaven. It’s the brotherhood of beer geekery, it transcends cooking lager or even pongy ale enthusiasm.

Now in such places one is faced with a choice of 20 beers of various hues of brown and unusual aroma that you have never heard of and Paulaner Weissbier or Warsteiner. You can guess what I would opt for, but in the company of a bearded mate you might be pleased to note I necked some of the shed brewed obscure pong and didn’t gag. One or two I quite liked, but I’m buggared if I remember which ones.

As can happen when one is boozing, there was a bit of banter including a mention of the respective attractiveness of female work colleagues. Nothing as crude as Andy Gray or Richard Keys for whilst we may be both unreconstructed sexist male chauvinists we are at least gentlemen and would not behave like that. Among the bantering came a bet. It wasn’t a bet regarding any female colleague but it was a bet in regard to the likely outcome of a work based event. My erstwhile colleague applied logic to the facts of the situation and made a reasonable and logical prediction. I declined to apply logic and instead applied human nature to the situation and predicted a different more chaotic outcome. He suggested a small bet to make it interesting. “Okay, but just for fun, I’m not betting my house or anything” came my reply. “Ten pints?” “Okay.” “Not Stella, Ten pints of your local beer versus ten pints of my local beer”. “How will I claim ten pints when I win, do I have to travel to Lincoln?” “Ten pint bottles, on my desk when I win”. A shake of the hand and one week later I was paid up in full with ten lovely bottles of a beer of Lincoln, from what appears to be a microbrewery. Poachers, the website here. A locally sourced taste of Lincolnshire. I’ve eaten Lincolnshire sausages and they were alright, so I fully expect the beer to be decent enough too. Expect full reviews of Lincoln micro brewed pong when I get round to it. I look forward to it. Lovely beer to throw down my neck that I didn’t pay for. That is as they say, living. If any blogger is aware of this grog, let me know what you think and what I can expect. Don’t bother telling me what food each bottle might go with, but I am always interested if you’ve necked it and have an opinion on the grog. Free grog, always happy to receive it, always happy when I do.

'Sharp' Practice by Molson Coors

2011-02-04T10:09:00.003Z

Official press release of CAMCL

'Sharp' Practice by Molson Coors

CAMCL, the Campaign for Cooking Lager, has voiced serious concerns over the future of Molson Coors and cooking lager following the acquisition of the Sharps brewery by Molson Coors. The global beer giant has gobbled up Cornwall's leading microbrewery in a £20m deal to secure what M-C's Chief Executive Mark Hunter calls the "Doom Bar Brand".

CAMCL’s Chief Executive, Pedro Miguel, said "Once again we are seeing the acquisitive actions of a global brewer buying local brewers to secure what they perceive as marketable pongy ale brands for short term profit. What future will there be for Coors other beer brands such as Carling and Coors Light? No cooking lager was mentioned in the release announcing the deal. We're also concerned what the deal might mean for the long term future of cooking lager when the Cornish brewery closes, production absorbed centrally and cooking lager capacity is used up producing pongy ale? Can Coors confirm cooking lager production capacity will not be affected and the British cooking lager enthusiast will remain awash in a river of dirt cheap fizzy gorgeous lout?"

"Whilst we are not that arsed about the fact that one of the UK's brewers wishes to hawk a pongy ale nationally after abandoning their own pongy ale heritage, we regret that they have decided to take focus off knocking out lots of lovely cheap lout. We remain concerned that hawking drinkable pongy ale nationally to a quality and consistency uncommon in the pong market might even eat into the cooking lager market."

CAMCL will be seeking assurances from Molson Coors management about the future of not only Carling Lager but also all the Coors cooking lager brands.

Will Molson Coors retain the focus to knock out cheap lout now they are hawking pong? We urge them to respect their history in selling global keg and bottled lager beers. Will people continue to regard Carling beer as being truly cheap and lovely?

As for the regular drinkers of cheap lout they can only hope that these Emmets from Burton upon Trent will treat their cooking lager with respect.

Shameless journalism

2011-02-03T13:52:00.004Z

On the issue of the type of shameless piss poor journalism that attempts to place the blame on anything and everything on us beer drinkers, I ask all that read this rubbish to join me in a letter writing campaign to the Torygraph complaining about the picture used in the following article, here.

Dear Daily Torygraph,

Your article “Irish bank flight quickens despite EU rescue” contains a picture of the good honest beer that is Guinness to depict the ongoing financial crisis affecting EU member states. Being a beer geek I quite like necking a good skinful of beer on a regular basis and can state categorically that beer drinkers are not to blame for any of the countries of the EU going bankrupt or even banks going tits up. I don’t remember everything I do when pissed, but I can state with damn near certainty that I didn’t bankrupt Ireland or any other country whilst in a state of inebriation. I am prepared to admit that the disgraceful state of the toilet might very well be something to do with me, but a quick squirt of toilet duck and a flush is all it needs. Please alter the picture to something like a Leprechaun or something as that will offend Irish people in general rather than us beer geeks.

Regards

Cooking Lager

Please write your own letter of complaint, so the bastards get the point. We can’t let them get away with it. Pictures of beer on binge drink articles? Pictures of beer on financial crisis articles? They are slagging off us beer drinkers and we ought not to stand for it I tell you.

It's a funny old game II

2011-02-03T12:10:00.002Z

Funny how things go, read it all here.

"The European Union's highest court was today advised to rule that EU law does not prohibit pubs showing live Premier League matches from foreign broadcasters, potentially sparking a revolution in the way mediasports rights are sold across the continent."

And people say the EU is crap?

It's a funny old game

2011-02-01T12:16:00.005Z

I’ve been meaning to blog something on the subject of screened football matches in pubs for some time. As the January transfer window closes and the bizarre economics of football is spread over the newspapers now seems a good time. I follow developments in the saga of pubs and bars that screen foreign satellite TV.

There is little point in commenting on the crazy economics of the game of football other than to say that so long as “fans” are willing to stump up ever increasing sums, the economics of the game will remain more entertaining than what occurs on the pitch.

Having said that I quite enjoy watching a game of football. I don’t follow the game as such, or follow a team, but I do like to watch anything described as “The Big Game”. From reading the blogosphere and the views of many that love traditional pubs one can get the impression that seeing a football game on in a pub is as awful as an absence of old man’s pongy ale. Pubs ought to be quiet places full of old timers sipping away at pints of mild in front of a roaring fire in a grotty old building that has stood since the English Civil War. God forbid anyone enjoys themselves or smiles. Popular music, football, keg lager? Down with that sort of thing!

Watching a football game in the UK can be either free to air or for regular season games require a subscription to Sky pay TV. Many pubs subscribe to Sky via a business package that affords the copyright to broadcast the game to customers and is more expensive than a personal subscription. The rights to the games are held by the Football Association that sell on those rights to TV broadcasters for each region they have cut the world into. The FA know that an English football match is worth more to UK broadcasters than none UK broadcasters and that none UK fans cannot get to see any game at the stadium. Hence the rights are sold more cheaply to none UK broadcasters and games are shown live that would otherwise not be in the UK. The FA own a monopoly of broadcast rights that apparently isn’t an illegal cartel via the clubs that form the league.

The technicalities of broadcasting have resulted in broadcast signals being available beyond the remit of the copyrights the broadcaster has bought since broadcasting first began. In the days of analogue terrestrial television it was possible to pick up UK TV in parts of Holland and Northern France. As the people picking up these signals were few in number and private individuals not engaged in a commercial activity (Dutch bars never picked up on the exciting commercial possibilities of showing Eastenders) it was never considered an issue worth pursuing. Why would a copyright holder of a Hollywood movie that sold the rights to the BBC for broadcast in the UK have much of a problem with a few hundred other people watching it, considering the costs and legal issues involved?

Satellite signals are however receivable across large landmasses. In point of (apparently dubious) fact, any satellite signal is receivable by 50% of the globe. There is no technical reason why I cannot receive a signal from any one of 50% of the global broadcasters of the world. It is to do with the world being round and not flat. With the advent of pay TV and the revenues from it, many signals are encrypted and rights fiercely protected. To decode the signal I would have to acquire a decode card from the broadcaster. In a free EU market you would think there ought to be nothing stopping me buying a decode card from any EU broadcaster. If I wanted to watch German football and TV, I should be able to subscribe to German Sky. German Sky would not sell me one for use in the UK, and also if I wanted to watch German football it is broadcast on ESPN in the UK and available cheaper to me than it is to domestic German customers.

However if the broadcasters would sell me one, is any law being broken? Copyright is being broken but am I breaking copyright by receiving it or are the broadcasters breaking copyright by broadcasting a signal beyond their market? It’s a tricky one.

I have been following the issue of UK pubs showing football matches from foreign satellite TV for a while. The morning advertiser covers the subject often enough to remain informed of goings on. I have an interest in it because whilst I am not a pub regular I do like to watch the odd game with the lads over a pint or two. It may not be your cup of tea, but it is mine. Football for me is a draw and a reason to go into a pub on a wet rainy weekday night and meet up with the chaps for a few scoops.

Many pubs around my neck of the woods use Arab satellite TV to show the football. A workings man club I occasionally go into despite not being a member and because the old timer on the door never asks and even holds the door open for me shows Arab satellite TV on 3 big TV’s in the room they keep the full size snooker tables and dart boards in. It is not your cup of tea, keg lager and bitter under £2 a pint and no beardy beer geeks to be found, but it is a cracking atmosphere. 3pm games not shown on Sky are available; it is cheaper for the pub, bar or club and me the punter sits with my mates watching the game drinking cheap beer. I’m not about to complain, and I gather few do. The establishments that come a cropper do so from Sky TV inspectors rather than vexatious punters.

The legality of this state of affairs is I gather currently being bounced about the European courts. I hope the courts consider the rights of humble EU citizens to live in a free market and not be stitched up by large corporations that seek to cut the world into separate markets for exploitation. The EU is one market, not many. I hope the law of contract in the free market supersedes that of copyright. I hope more than expect, mind you. If the kybosh is placed on this noble attempt to stick two fingers up at the cartels of large corporations, hope lies in the internet. The internet has all but ended copyright in music, TV and film. I’ve found a few websites that show any sports game in the world streamed live, but still have little interest in baseball. It looks a bit blocky when I plug my net book into my TV, but it can only get better. It might mean letting my mates in my house to neck my gorgeous collection of cheap lager and incur the wrath of the squeeze, but at least it is one up on Rupert Murdoch. I wonder what the legalities are if I take a netbook computer into a Spoons and use the free wifi to stream footie to the table my mates and I are sat at? An experiment may occur.

The Cooking Lager College Lout Club

2011-01-28T15:24:00.004Z

Elitism in beer is arguably a good thing for the beer industry. Whilst cheap fizzy gorgeous cooking lager may appeal to a wide number of people, cooking lager arguably does not appeal to an important demographic. That being “idiots with more money than sense”. Cooking lager enthusiasm has long failed to capture this exciting potential, so how can we engage this important and lucrative demographic in cooking lager enthusiasm?

Welcome folks to The Cooking Lager College Lout Club. It cost £1000 a week, and being arguably more expensive than other beer clubs not only makes it better, but it makes you more discerning. For this princely sum you can pay eye watering amounts of money to get pissed up, money that you no longer have to use on things like the roof over your head, clothes on your back, food in your mouth or nice holidays to nice places. You get to sit at the very pinnacle of elite cooking lager enthusiasm.

But what do you get for this substantial sum of hard earned geld? Well it is in no way like a weird religious cult at all that asks you to give all your money to it and the guru also asks to sleep with your wife. It is only a coincidence that I ask you to give me all your money and in return I pop round each week with a box of cooking lager and also sleep with your wife. The lager could be Foster’s, it could be Carling, it might even be Carlsberg, but it is likely to be whatever I found on sale in Tesco this week. You get tasting notes on the lines of “This is lovely lout, serve cold, neck it and enjoy”. I also throw in a cheap T-Shirt with the logo “The Cooking Lager College Lout Club” on the front and the moniker “for more discerning cooking lager enthusiasts than you are, pal”. Wearing this T Shirt will make you more attractive to members of the opposite sex. Additional T-Shirts can be bought for further payments of eye watering amounts of money. Oh and there’s a membership card too.

The myth of pre loading

2011-01-26T14:42:00.005Z

The myth of pre loading or why pre loading is a recognised trend because 380 scouse students filled in a questionnaire.

One of the arguments usually trotted out by the anti cheap booze killjoys is to repeat the myth of preloading. That is to argue that cheap off trade alcohol is irresponsible because it is apparently common place for people these days to drink at home prior to heading for a night on the town. I have long considered this to be a weak and flawed argument, regardless of whether the activity is common or not.

Firstly it attempts to place the blame for drunken behaviour on the first rather than last drink of an evening (god forbid you place it on the actual drunk) and shift it onto supermarkets and away from pubs and bars when all those fighting and puking in the street have clearly being hitting the bars near where the trouble occurred. An attempt to shift responsibility and paint pubs and bars as wholly safe, responsible and controlled environments.

This of course begs the question as to whether there was any anti social drunken behaviour before off trade alcohol was common place. In times when the only place you could get a drink was in a pub, was the country a civilised example of temperance and moderation? I would say not, and point you to the origins of the temperance movement, detailed here. Specifically a quote from temperance campaigner George Sims, the origins of which can be found here,

Enter the public-houses, and you will see them crammed. Here are artisans and labourers drinking away the wages that ought to clothe their little ones. Here are the women squandering the money that would purchase food, for the lack of which the children are dying.

Its pubs he is talking about, not Tesco’s. I have never bought the line that pubs are controlled and responsible environments, for one simple reason, I have been into pubs. Many and varied boozers from middle class tosspot dining pubs to swanky bars to dumpy old man’s boozers to rough places where the punters all have missing ears. You can of course not lay claim that all pubs are the same and be, to quote Star Wars “wretched hives of scum and villainy”, but by equal measure you cannot claim all pubs are responsible and controlled environments. Pub landlords have little control over how much an individual may drink if a punter is being bought drinks by others, nor can they really know whether a drunk entering their premises has been drinking in other pubs or at home. The pub and bar crawl is a common activity in Britain and on any given Friday and Saturday night many people will move between bars. This affords no insight in to how many a punter has had, or where.

The question has to also be asked, if pubs are responsible places, and a drunk enters the premises, what are they doing serving drunks? Serving a drunk is illegal. It cannot be controlled and responsible to sell them more.

I could also explain my own experience of preloading. When I went to university it wasn’t uncommon to have a few drinks in either the halls of residence or later our shared house and head out later. As skint students, we had limited funds but still wanted to go out and attempt to pull a girl, but more likely end up with only a kebab. I noticed a difference in behaviour among friends that didn’t go to university. Rather than live away from home, these friends began work and remained at home. An evening would start off early in a pub and lead onto the late night bar or night club, with no less alcohol consumed. Primarily because a bar was the only communal place to meet and disposable funds were greater. The difference wasn’t related to the price of supermarket booze, but a combination of having a home without parents present and less disposable income. I would say further that the anti social behaviour of my university friends was no lesser or greater than my taxpaying employed not bloody scrounging student friends.

However all this is as they say anecdotal evidence. What we need is peer reviewed proper researched evidence. With the magic of Google I’ve found this. It’s looks like proper scientific research, it smells like proper scientific research, but does it taste like scientific research? No, it tastes like shit. It is a study not of the general population, but of only 380 people, conducted by John Moores University. Basically a questionnaire put out put out by research students and answered by 380 other students. From this they have discovered over half of them preload. From this limited section of the population it is apparently possible to make the following claims.

• More than half of those interviewed usually pre-load with alcohol – that is drink at their own or a friend’s home before leaving for a night’s drinking in a town or city centre.
• On average, women who pre-load consume over a third of their total amount of alcohol for that evening before leaving their own or their friends’ homes. Men who pre-load consume approximately a quarter of their nightly total before leaving home for their night out.
• On average, males and females consumed more than the recommended weekly maximum for an individual’s alcohol consumption (21 units1 for a man and 14 units for a woman) in a single night out. Those who pre-loaded were four times more likely to consume over 20 units on a night out (including pre-loading, and bar and club drinking).
• Those who pre-loaded were also two and half times more likely to have been in a fight when going out in the last 12 months. In fact pre-loading was more strongly associated with being involved in nightlife violence than the total amount of alcohol an individual consumed.

All of this, on the basis of interviewing 380 scouse students. From crap like this it is then possible to get to this

So, if 333-million fewer pints are being sold in the nation’s boozers, where is the increase in liver damage coming from?

The answer is, quite simply, through the recognised trend of pre-loading.

Recognised trend? I’m really sorry but when you look at let’s say the link between smoking and cancer, you had a society where over half the population smoked, and cancer wards that contained a far greater proportion of smokers and with data that covered whole populations you could take correlation and infer causality. You really cannot do that by asking 380 scouse students to fill in a questionnaire. Recognised trend? Recognised trend? By all means believe what you want to believe because it supports your pre existing world view, but really, Recognised trend?

Binge drink Britain, pre loading? Good fucking god. Pubs get your house in order, stop serving drunks and tipping them out into the streets to puke and fight and then and only then can we talk about safe and controlled and responsible environments.

NWAF

2011-01-22T11:04:00.008Z

There were 2 important reasons to visit NWAF. Firstly to continue my ongoing academic anthropological study of the creatures known as the lesser spotted beer geek, an unusual nocturnal creature prone to unconventional hair on head and face and rarely seen without a pewter tankard filled with a mysterious frothy and unpleasant smelling concoction. Secondly to observe the Campaign for Real Ale in action in order to inspire the campaigning activities of the Campaign for Cooking Lager. Plans are ongoing for the national cooking lager festival, an altogether different affair. As cooking lager enthusiasts we prefer to sit on our own couch with a can of cheap lout watching a bit of telly and occasionally scratching our balls. A social gathering isn’t really our cup of tea. A cooking lager festival would be more of a volunteer run supermarket selling cheap Foster’s to battle against minimum pricing regulation. I say supermarket, when in fact I mean the back of my mate Jase’s Ford Transit, and when I say Foster’s I mean any cheap lager, meths masquerading as vodka and any knock off gear Jase is shifting at that time. Volunteers are advised to wear running shoes and when spotting a member of local constabulary are asked to shout “scatter” before running in the opposite direction.

But anyway the first national cooking lager festival out of the back of Jase’s Ford Transit is still in the early planning stages, the matter at hand is one of taking a look at the CAMRA NWAF malarkey.

Crikey it was a bit out of Manchester and hardly in a salubrious part of it. If there is such a thing as a salubrious part of Manchester. Maybe this is the nice part of Manchester but even so, someone from Basra wouldn’t be keen of living in the area. On the way to it I saw the unusual sight of a man running along the pavement with a frying pan containing fried eggs in one hand and an open can of Stella in the other whilst dressed as Noel Edmonds circa an early episode of Telly Addicts. What that was about I don’t know, but kind of would like to. The venue itself was actually quite impressive with the bars along the outer perimeter with seating in the centre. I was running late and firstly scanned the venue for a mate of mine I was due to meet up with for a pint and natter. I couldn’t find him so I bought a glass for £2 (£2 for glass? Jesus I should have brought my own Carling glass with me) and headed towards the bar looking for something called “Porter” that the Beer Nut had recommended to me on twitter. I found one uncertain whether it was the “right” one, but it was nice enough if you like things like Guinness. Finding a seat and pissing around with my phone to call my mate I discovered just how out in the sticks the venue was when I couldn’t get a bloody signal on the piece of crap. So like a Billy no mates I pottered about the venue swigging my grog and deciding what to neck next. I necked an Augustiner Edelstoff lager for my next grog before running into the man and legend that is Tandleman. One thing you can say about Tand is he most defiantly knows his pong. His recommendation to try an 8.6% Damson Stout was well worth the swigging. After the first gulp I momentarily understood why geeks get so excited about pongy ale. Only momentarily, mind. Whilst arguably being unfaithful to my first great love that is Foster’s Lager, my infidelity was not falling out of love with cooking lager. This was but a brief meaningless fling.

The Campaign for Cooking Lager is just that, a campaign for cooking lager. It isn’t a Campaign against anything that is not cooking lager. However there was one part of this festival one simply has to mention. What with Mike Benner, CAMRA head honcho banging on about responsible drinking and all. Whilst I noticed no drunken anti social behaviour, there were people present in a state of inebriation having clearly consumed more than the responsible alcohol limit of 3-4 unit daily. There were beers from about 3.5% abv to anything up to 8,9,10 abv + and no alcohol unit information was present. Foster’s Lager shows the number of units clearly on both the can or pint glass. I am not going to tell Don Shenker, but somebody might. But to suggest this festival represented a bastion of responsible drinking would be a bare faced lie.

A final Weissbier before heading home to the squeeze, another chat with the legendary Tandleman and my final impression was of a fine event staffed entirely by volunteers. All of whom giving of their time freely for a Campaign they believed in. It would be a harsh man that looked upon such a thing in a churlish manner; especially considering what a nice time I’d had of it. I also learned a new found respect not for the principle of minimum pricing which I remain vehemently against but some of those that propose it. I had made the mistake of assuming the CAMRA lot that advocate it do so because they believe its effects are on others and not themselves when in fact they themselves would take a hit.

The volunteers that man the event are entirely unpaid and do so for the good of their Campaign. It is to open the eyes of people like me to the wonderment of pongy ale. They are however able to drink freely of the pong on offer, via free beer tokens. A fact I discovered talking to a gentleman that handed one over. These are gifts from the Campaign to their volunteer staff. They are not remuneration as that would break both minimum wage laws (the value and number of tokens equating to less than the minimum wage for time worked) and would represent a taxable benefit to the recipient they would have to declare. Nope, they are a gift. A free beer. A soon to be illegal free beer because free is below a price of duty + vat, or indeed 40 or 50p a unit. So respect to them for sticking to their principles in the face of losing a nice gesture that ensures the volunteers can enjoy the festival themselves and not be out of pocket, something you would not begrudge anybody. But fair play to them for sacrificing this in future on principle.

I got my £2 quid back on my glass and departed. Inebriated but not visibly drunk I had consumed far more than my daily unit allowance. As I got back to the centre of Manchester my phone started to work and I received not only an apology from my unreliable friend (his squeeze took exception to what for him could have been his fourth night on the piss in a row) but a series of messages from the lovely squeeze informing me explicitly that I was late, and implicitly that my chances of a romantic interlude were none existent.

As for my study of the lesser-spotted beer geek, I reached a number of conclusions. One they all seem quite nice people and fit more or less into the demographic of “guardian reading public sector employees” Should you want to befriend one say something like “That Tony Blair is a right shit”, or if you wish to do the opposite say “Maggie Thatcher saved this country from the trots, commies, unions, socialists and pinkos” These are not conclusive results, I would classify them as intermediate, but the study continues.

Facebook

2011-01-20T13:27:00.004Z

Campaign news, cooking lager enthusiasts. CAMCL, the Campaign for Cooking Lager is now on facebook.

Why not look up the Campaign and show your support. You can actively campaign for lovely cheap lout not only by buying and necking cheap lager from the supermarket but by joining a facebook group, here.

It may not be as good as other facebook groups, like Driffield Porn Burger Caravan Lads for Junior Apprentice 2011!, but heh, the Campaign is in it's infancy and it's like the power of social networking or something or other

Old film review

2011-01-19T11:49:00.007Z

Boozing, alcohol, units and the like are something I’ve blogged about a little too much recently. But heh, why let that stop me. I’ll be having a proper drink tomorrow among beer geeks, so I’ll blog about that soon. A weekly ritual of mine appears to have developed. One of reading through the TV guide and setting the telly recorder for any films I fancy watching. I spotted an old black and white film called “The days of wine and roses” on at about 2 in the morning recently, one I was vaguely aware was about alcoholism but I’d never seen. I quite like old movies and am quite happy to watch black and white films, not requiring a contemporary remake in colour before I’ll touch it. It starred Jack Lemmon & Lee Remick. One old movie I really do like is called “Some like it hot” with Jack Lemmon, a comedy that breezes along at a pace and has men dressed as women thrown in for good measure. Marilyn Monroe plays a drunk in that one, but with amusing rather than dark consequences. Despite the dark subject matter of the late night film I decided to underline it in red on the recorder and give it a go. After all, boozing is in the news and it might be interesting to look at an old black and white view on the subject.

When I got round to watching it, the first things I noticed were the points that make many old films inaccessible. I watched the film with contemporary eyes, having no direct knowledge and experience of the era the film was made in. The fashions stand out, the hats all the guys are wearing; the fact the guy works in an office but has no PC on his desk. What did he do all day with no t'internet to piss about on? The fact that all the executives are white males and the only women are secretaries. All of this type of stuff stands out to me and detracts from the drama. I even notice the lighting black and white films have, lighting up faces to show the actors expressions when the only way that lighting could realistically occur was if when the actor is looking into his child’s cot, the baby is shining a torch back at him. But that’s old black and white films.

The story starts off with Jack Lemmon as an obvious boozer who starts to date Lee Remicks “dozy lass” character. On the first date, he’s knocking back whiskey from a bottle in his coat pocket. She isn’t a drinker but he gets her on the booze with a chocolate cocktail. They marry, have a kid, and both sink a lot of booze. This leads to her burning down the apartment when drunk and him losing a series of jobs after getting the sack from his executive PR job. At this point I almost turned off. It appeared to me a run of the mill flawed morality tale about weak characters fucking up their lives. The bloke was obviously a controlling drunk to start with, she a weak willed dope that should have thought twice about him on the first date. But as I was halfway through, I continued. The film got slightly better before falling off a cliff into the realms where it was impossible to suspend disbelief. To engage in a film you have to accept what is occurring, essentially to believe and engage with the plot, even if it involves crap with aliens with pointy ears. At least temporally for the duration of the film. I could believe the point where Jack Lemmon sees his own reflection in a window, decides he’s a bum and rather than go into the bar he goes home and talks to his wife. I could believe it when they go and live with her Dad, go on the wagon and life looks up. I liked the bit where he walks into the kitchen and his father in law is having a beer, offers him one and he declines, instead going up to his wife to secretly get drunk. At this point the film was subtle in the points it was making and more effective for being so. He then ends up in a straight jacket in a looney bin, and a young Quincy from AA offers him help, which he takes. A looney bin? That happened quickly. Really? The drama fell off a cliff at that point. I accepted early doors that I was watching a propagandistic morality tale, but that for me this was the point where we found out the pointy eared alien was half human, begging the question how 2 species from 2 planets can mate, when we know that 2 species from the same planet cannot mate even if closely linked in an evolutionary sense. My belief could not be suspended and the film fell apart. Quincy saved it slightly as the AA guy, helping our main protagonist with a character that served to narrate the proceedings with his actions.

The films continued with the bloke joining AA and getting his life together, and the woman refusing AA and falling into a life of alcoholism and casual sex. He tries to help her but she doesn’t take it, misery ensues for all. In the closing scene we see the woman walking away past a neon “Bar” sign as the bloke looks forlornly on. The misery of drink in case we’d missed the point. The only redeeming feature of the final act was the coy way the film dealt with the woman’s sexual promiscuity. Inferring it in the way films of that era did with anything sex related. It made me think of those Doris Day films where a married couple share a room but sleep in two separate single beds.

All in all, what did I think of the film? Absolute tosh. Complete crap. The pudding was over egged to the point of getting an omelette. Was I more informed about alcoholism? Not in any discernable sense. What did I learn from it? If you go on a date, and your date is swigging whisky from a bottle in the coat pocket, decline the second date even if the bird in question is Alesha Dixon.

What did I drink when watching this tosh? Two 275ml bottles of Carlsberg Export. Figure the units yourself.

Appeasement isn't possible

2011-01-18T10:52:00.003Z

Good and bad news, cooking lager enthusiasts. Bad first, looks like the government will be going ahead with restricting the sale of cheap grog here in the torygraph. Better news in the grunyad here that it will have no effect.

So the good news is cheap booze will remain available, the bad news is the first ham fisted attempt at prohibition is being made, albeit ineffectively.

First they came for the cheap cider drinkers, and I didn't speak out because I didn’t drink cheap cider. Then they came for the cheap lager drinkers, and I didn't speak out because I didn’t drink cheap lager. Then they came for the cheap wine drinkers, and I didn't speak out because I didn’t drink cheap wine. Then they came for the craft pongy ale drinkers and there was no one was left to speak out for me. Whatever grog you like to throw down your neck, the prohibitionists are the enemy, not the boozers that neck different grog. Appeasement isn't possible, stand up and be counted.

Badger Week III

2011-01-14T11:41:00.013Z

It was with thoughts of the wurzels, and much “ooo arrr” that I cracked open a couple of ciders whilst sat in my favourite position in front of the telly. There has been quite a revitalisation of cider over the few years prompted initially by the success of the Magners brand selling premium priced grog to UK punters. This would naturally lead to other producers having a bash promoting their own cider brands or creating them (see super normal profit, how it prompts market entry from competition, moving the market to normal profit equilibrium and explaining full well why Magners have never repeated their initial success and never will again regardless of whatever brand extension they attempt , or whatever the company says to the markets) These days you can find a fair few premium priced ciders on the shelves. I gather there has been a knock on effect for “real cider” too, a wince inducing product beloved of the bearded members of our community. There is of course one cynical reason you can assume with some brands. With alcopop suffering at the hands of the tax man and seen as a product hawked at kids, you can produce something sweet and fizzy as a fermentation rather than mixing an ethanol distillation and call it cider and hawk it at that important part of the market for people that want to get pissed but don’t like the taste of drink. A market not only containing teenagers, but indeed some adults.

However this stuff I was about to neck firmly sits in the premium end of the market. Premium meaning “actually made from apples” rather than flavoured corn syrup. Nowt against fermented flavoured cord syrup, ethanol is ethanol in my view and cheap cider is usually the only cider I actually like. Unlike beer where I do like most beers, whether expensive authentic imported stuff, pongy cask ale, keg bitter or cold fizzy delicious cooking lager. I like ‘em all but being cheap I neck the cheap stuff. With cider I’ve never much liked the proper “real cider” stuff, considering it “minging” and full of dead rats, and can only really neck the chilled fizzy variety.

These Badger ciders are contract made by Thatcher’s. I don’t know whether they are “real” in the bearded sense of the word. I tried to find out using Google but the technicalities of the definition put me into a boredom induced coma. Read it for yourself and decide here, then tell me. Whether “real” or not in the bearded sense of the word they are real in the philosophical sense in so far that they tangibly exist. They are also products of authenticity and tradition being as I’ve said before actually made from apples and pears. So will I like ‘em?

Badger Apple Wood Cider Oak Aged 6% of Thatcher’s in Somerset, made from Dabnett & Redstreak apples from a single harvest. Medium dry with oaky wood infused notes. Looks promising, at least the 6% bit does. Cracking it open you get a sweet appley smell, which is I guess what you would expect. It is lightly carbonated and on the first swig you get a thick full on apple flavour. Not as thin as other commercial ciders, and also with a lingering sweetness. The sweetness is all natural with none of the saccharine sweetness of the cheaper brands. I loved it. Delicious. Really hits the spot and arguably a superior product.

Badger Pear Wood Cider is a crisp and fruity 5%. Cracking it open the smell was to my mind “odd” but then again I have to confess to being unfamiliar with pear ciders other than the very name “pear cider” can get the beards all red faced and argumentative. “It’s Perry” they will scream “Pear cider doesn’t exist” they will rant. Big deal, so what, get over it. It is no big deal if a “barley wine” drops the term and becomes "strong ale”. So what if it’s called “Pear Cider”. Nobody knows what the fook Perry is. Everyone knows what cider is. What is Perry? Well it’s basically cider made from pears instead of apples. Why don’t we call it pear cider then, we might sell more? Perry? The only Perry I fancy is Katy Perry. The odd smell wasn’t unpleasant, it was floral. Maybe I wasn’t expecting that. The taste was all sweetness with a treacly stickiness at the roof of the mouth. I had a swig. Alright, not bad, not exactly my cup of tea but more than just drinkable, worth trying. The squeeze liked it more than me. My preference being the apple cider, her preference the pear cider. All in all 2 nice decently respectable drinks I’d neck again and entirely lacking the super strength white cider tramp image cider used to possess.

Won't someone think of the children?

2011-01-13T16:08:00.006Z

From time to time I get dragged to things I have little interest in. Recently the lovely squeeze dragged me to what is known as a “neighbourhood watch” meeting. I’ve been to these things before and usually they are pretty tedious. I got a free fridge magnet, pen & window sticker at one of them though. There is no opportunity to drink cooking lager or watch telly and you tend to have to talk to your neighbours. Or stare at the wall whilst the squeeze talks to them. Not this one but one meeting I went to was in a local school and you had to sit on the really small chairs designed for kids. The only thing on the wall to stare at was pictures the kids had drawn. Not one of them had any semblance of artistic talent. I'd have burnt them rather than put them on the wall, but then I suspect I'm not cut out to be a teacher. I would not describe the area I live in as rough, in fact I think it’s quite nice and hasn’t any more problems than I imagine most places have. There are certainly no needles in the park, muggings or rapes. At least none that I have heard of. If you had one word to describe where I live it would be “boring”. But I like boring. The house and car insurance is cheaper than “interesting”. At this meeting was a local copper and his plastic policeman underling and the format was a short presentation about what they are doing in the area followed by a series of moans from neighbours about local kids. Apparently some local kids have been drinking cans of lager. Now I am not going to condone or make light of their concerns. Underage drinking is against the law, drunk kids misbehave and cause property and car damage and if it is your car then you are going to be pissed off about it.

One lady mentioned she had been intimidated by local kids outside a local off licence. The kids had asked her to buy some booze for them. She declined and they swore at her. As she should have done. I would have declined, but had they swore at me I’d have swung for them. The police answer to this was a surprising one. They mentioned they use sting operations across the town regarding off licences, sending kids into the shop to buy things they ought not to be able to. Now you may think this is unfair and just not cricket but in one sense I do see the problem the police have. Paul Bailey’s beer blog has a perspective on this here.

If a shop is breaking the law then that shop ought to face the legal consequences of their actions. In order for that to occur, evidence is required. How do you get evidence that a shop is breaking the law? Is a signed statement from a drunken child that they bought 4 Stella’s from Mr Ahmed’s offie enough to stand up in court? Is a witness statement from a disgruntled customer of Mr Ahmed that he saw him sell some blue wkd’s to some 13 year old girls enough evidence? Being caught red handed selling booze to kids is evidence, I’d say. I appreciate it can be difficult to work out someone’s age, but that’s where asking for ID comes in. You can ask for ID in a polite manner, it needn’t cause offence to a customer. Booze is a restricted substance that requires a licence to sell and laws and regulations exist regarding its sale. I had no issue with the concept of a sting, go for it coppers and weed out those retailers breaking the law whether pub, off licence or supermarket.

The issue I had was one of applying an effective solution to a known problem. Accepting the neighbour’s story as true and seeing no reason to disbelieve it, the problem was not that Mr Ahmed’s offie was selling booze to kids. On the contrary, a problem existed because Mr Ahmed’s offie would not sell booze to kids. The kids had presumably tried to buy booze and failed and decided to loiter around in either hope or expectation of acquiring booze by fair means or foul. A sting operation would not help in this instance. There was no suspicion Mr Ahmeds offie was breaking the law and attempting a sting would likely yield a negative result.

The actual solution was not to sting Mr Ahmed’s offie, but to help and assist him and his establishment. If Mr Ahmeds phones the police and reports kids loitering around his shop after unsuccessfully trying to buy booze then the police need to turn up and have a word with the kids. Loitering may not be breaking any laws, but intimidating people is against the law and at the very least the kids can be moved on. This requires the police to respond to a phone call in a timely manner and act on it. It isn’t a task they can do at their own convenience. But then I suspect no crime occurs at a convenient time you can plan for. As you would expect from a contrarian like me I told the local bobby this, explaining the flaw in his approach and suggesting the solution I had arrived at. I did not suggest it was the only solution but did point out that it was a solution and the coppers original plan wasn't. Suffice to say he didn’t appreciate it, but he didn't ask for the fridge magnet back. I think Mr Ahmed is in for a sting. I’d tell him but I rarely use his shop, so won’t get the opportunity. Tesco’s is cheaper you see.

Hardcore Boozing

2011-01-12T10:30:00.004Z

I’m going to start this blog by firstly admitting I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I’m going to justify it by stating nobody really knows what they are talking about and my opinion is as good as any. It is on the topic of heavy drinking, inspired by Glyns posts here, and Mudges reaction to it here.

When I say I don’t know what I’m talking about, what I am saying is that I really don’t know how much alcohol constitutes a safe amount. The government advises us that it is 21 units per week for a man and 14 for a woman, with a unit being half a pint of 4% beer. So 10 and a half pints of Carling per week, spread about and not all in one night. Can you drink more without ill affect? I’m sure you can. How much more? I don’t really know and question whether anyone really knows for sure. Is the government wrong to advise us regarding what level of booze we ought to be consuming or should the government stay the hell out? In fact there is no consensus, look here, differing governments advise different levels.

The government advise us regarding many things. This is often called “the nanny state” by those that object to being advised. Do I object? Not really. Public health is a public cost. I find it sad the government feel they have to advise us to drink less, eat fruit and vegetables, and exercise more. You can even stand in the urinal in a British pub and see an advert from the government asking men not to rape women. What is that all about?

Some advice you might object less to. Advising children not to get into cars with strangers and to look left and right when they cross the road. That I suspect is one aspect of the nanny state you don’t object to. I don’t read many blogs taking the line “How dare the government advise kids not to take jelly babies off strangers that pull up to them in cars and ask them whether they want to get in the back seat and stroke some puppies. It’s a free country goddammit; the kid should make their own mind up, assess the risks for themselves and decide whether they get in the car. Not all strangers offering jelly babies to kids are going to rape and murder them. It’s a diabolical liberty and infringement of our basic freedoms. Why are we paying our taxes for this?” Though if you know different, let me know. That would be one worrying blog to read.

For all I don’t know on the topic of what is a safe amount to eat, drink & exercise, there is something I do know. I know that eating healthy and taking exercise is in fact better for you than sitting on your fat arse eating chips. The government advice to do the former and avoid the latter isn’t actually wrong, and advising us of this isn’t restricting our freedom to do the latter if we so choose.

Like government advice on smoking, it is actually true that smoking kills you. For every old timer telling you they smoke 80 woodbines a day and never had a day off sick in their life, the graveyard is full of people not so lucky who are not around to tell you about their health. When the government say “don’t smoke”, they are not actually wrong.

Regarding drinking, it is a well known fact that heavy drinking is bad for you. Over time it kills your liver, mottles your skin and makes you look old and haggard. In the short term it makes you feel as rough as a dogs arse. For every idiot claiming they heroically knock back 100 units a week, AA has a dozen people on the 12 step program rebuilding their shattered and broken lives. It’s neither big, hard nor clever and far from heroic. At the risk of causing offence the heroes of heavy drinking like George Best, Richard Burton, Keith Floyd, Oliver Reed, are not really heroes. They are sad idiots that ruined their lives and died prematurely. The fact that they might have enjoyed doing just that is neither here nor there

So what is a safe amount to drink? I’m not even going to begin to express an opinion. I don’t know. If your doctor checks you out and tells you that you are in decent shape then that’s as good as indication as any that you might not die any time soon. Like getting your car serviced. The mechanic may tell you the car is in decent shape or he may tell you it’s a wreck. It’s no guarantee, but it's fair advice. If you get your car serviced but you never get yourself serviced, then I’d ask you what is more important, your car or you? When the government advise you check your knockers or nuts regularly for lumps, you know what? It might just add to your years on the planet.

Oh and if you read blogs where people are telling you they are seriously caning the grog, and you express admiration and respect for their heroic drinking, I’m sorry but you are as big an idiot as they are. Don’t encourage them just so you can feel better about your own habits. The risks you take are with your own liver, not someone else’s.

You’re an adult, do what you like, but heh be careful out there and don’t get into a car with strangers because you want to stroke a puppy. Especially not if the driver looks like a body building Freddie Mercury.

On the fiddle

2011-01-11T11:50:00.004Z

Today I’d like to share a bit of a scam with you. I’m not sure I should, as by doing so you might beat me at my own game if you happen to live anywhere near me. It involves getting 20% off at Wetherspoons. Yes I know I bang on about the Spoons but heh, it’s a cheap pint alright? And I’m a tight wad to boot.

If you have a Smartphone, that is a phone with the internet on, for pissing around with facebook & twitter there is a free application called Foursquare. You can find it on the Android market place and presumably on things like iTunes. You use it to check in to places. Presumably so “friends” know where you are. Why you would wish to do this is anyone’s guess. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would seek to avoid their friends and not let them know where they are, but heh different strokes for different folks and all that. You can link it to facebook if you like or run it without “friends” on the list or even check into places as a “secret” and not make it public to friends. Why would you bother?

Well if you are the person that has checked into your local Spoons more often than anyone else you become, ahem, the “mayor” of that Wetherspoons and you get 20% off. Don't let being the mayor of Wetherspoons put you off just yet. You just have to show your phone which proclaims you the mayor when you order. Here’s the scam. Its works on location and you don’t have to be in the Spoons to check into to it. If there is a Spoons within a few miles of where you are you can “check in” to that Spoons. After a few days you become the “mayor” of said Spoons as it only takes a few check ins to win the prize. And as I said, you don’t have to make it public, so friends don’t actually think you’re in the Spoons when in fact you are doing something useful and productive.

In one respect the offer makes sense. It is meant to reward loyal and regular custom and affect customer choice. It makes more sense to reward your actual customers than reward joining a third party beer club. You can however abuse it by making out you go in everyday when you might only go in once a fortnight.

Check it out, use and abuse. At least until they get wise to the fact the promotion has a slight flaw and withdraw it. Until then, you’ve got a few quid off your order, which is cheap at the best of times with or without 20% off.

Picture ripped off here.

A question of price

2011-01-10T10:48:00.003Z

Something fascinating from the Guardian. Not often you can say that. Ignoring the authors point about “lager swilling losers”, there is some interesting statistics regarding the rise of pub based prices. Now all prices rise over time, but pub price inflation is higher than both general inflation and wage inflation and has been for some time. In prosperous times you would expect wage inflation to exceed general inflation, that people get more prosperous. In current economic times you can observe price inflation exceeding wage inflation as a sign of falling prosperity.

Many reasons are given for the decline of pubs, from smoking bans to changing behaviour and customer expectations. There are those drinkers that may have a love of the pub that goes beyond regular drinkers, and consider the pub something to be protected. These people may indeed be prepared to pay an ever increasing proportion of their income to “support” pubs. There are even some odd types that think people need to be “educated” to appreciate pubs more and be prepared to pay more for them. I would hypothesis that most people fall into the category that I belong to. That of quite enjoying a pub that fulfils my own basic criteria of being clean and nicely furnished and welcoming to all but really isn’t that interested in sinking a lot on a school night. Someone that enjoys a drink as part of a wider set of interests. If pubs become ever more expensive we will use pubs less. That our hard earned income is for the purpose of enjoying our own lives and not “supporting” any given industry, especially one that seeks to give us ever poorer value. It is no surprise to me that arguably the most noteworthy success story of the pub industry is J D Wetherspoons, a company that offers comparatively lower prices than the competition.

So when contemplating the decline of pubs and lamenting the propensity of those of us who enjoy cheap supermarket alcohol and drink occasionally in cheap pubs, please do not seek a legislative answer. Please do not think for one minute that price controls will save the Great British Pub. Out of my monthly take home pay there is only so much of it I am prepared to hand over for the privilege of boozing. I have a world of other expenses I choose to spend my money on that give me as much pleasure, if not more, than visiting a pub or having a drink.

Oh the stats :-

PRICE OF A PINT

1981 57P

1991 140P

2001 204P

2011 306P

Badger Week II

2011-01-07T14:37:00.003Z

It’s still Badger Week on this blog and its staying badger week for a bit to come. Until I've necked the lot. Christmas is over and done with. Skint till pay day at the end of January. Dark when I get up, dark when I go home. The only things to look forward to are sex, the weekend and darts on the telly. I’m not going to say what I enjoy the most but when you’re watching the darts you can sink a beer. And sink ‘em I do.

Badger Golden Glory 4.5% with a golden amber brown colour, a peachy fruity floral aroma with more of the peach in the balanced sweetness. Cracking it open reveals a fizzy effervescence and on the taste a light thin malt sweetness with an aftertaste of said peach and those floral kind of sweets. Parma Violets. Dryness kicks in as a last resort. Like a bottle of scented Haribo and very much enjoyed.

The darts runs from 7-8 and it’s about the 8 o clock mark the discussions begin. “You’re not pressing the red button” “ But the game isn’t finished, it’ll be over in half an hour” “No it won’t, if there is a comeback there’ll be at it all evening” “So what if they do, it’s great” To prevent an argument a bit charm goes a long way. If you can induce the love of your life to wrestle you for the remote control, an evening even better than watching the darts might beckon, but if it’s a nail biting game you’ve got so say the darts comes close.

Badger World Champion 4%, First Gold English Hop with a ruby brown colour, floral hop & roasted malt smell with a taste of malt, orange zest & spicy hop is all things considered a nice drop of beer. A fresh aroma, balanced sweetness & bitterness with a dry aftertaste. A lovely pint of bitter. The single hop offers a clarity but slightly lacking in depth. A simple but decent beer. Not a lot going on, but what is there is top stuff.

Two cracking beers, cracking darts on the telly. No sex but heh, there’s always the weekend.

Of twothers and schooners

2011-01-06T13:37:00.004Z

I’ve been quite entertained today by the fuss of the twother, or schooner. It’s on a fair few blogs and got a mention on the telly news. I cannot tell you whether it will take off, and frankly don’t much care. It would I suspect depend on whether anyone actually wants to buy two thirds of a pint. In my view anyone that drinks less than a pint in a UK pub under current weights and measures law is what is known as a “poof”. That’s not a homophobic statement as I’ve nothing against consenting adults doing what they like, and as contrary to the Daily Mail perspective on gay rights, giving all people in society the same rights isn’t “sticking homosexuality down our throats”, it’s just plain “fair”. No I use “poof” in its modern 21^st century meaning. Sure the word “gay” used to mean happy, it also used to mean homosexual. Today it means “naff”. As in “like your mobile phone is like totally gay”. Frankly if you drink halves, thirds or two thirds you are in my view “a right poof”. Yes that includes you; there are no exceptions other than ladies. Ladies are allowed to drink less than a pint if they so wish. If you object then all I can say is that I didn’t make the rules. Rules is rules, and in your own home you can drink what you like in whatever measure you like because you are not in public showing everyone what a right poof you are.

I have once seen someone drink a measure that is as near as dammit to a 2/3 of a pint measure. Only the once. In Europe you can sell 1/3 of a litre and many bars offer that measure. The only person I have ever seen take it up was a four foot tall Japanese lady that weighed about 6 stone/ 38kg / 84 pounds wet through. It was in the Weisses Bräuhaus, and she didn’t know whether she liked beer and wanted to try the smallest one on offer. After her first small wheat beer she sank 4 more full sized ones before asking me to marry her. Upon telling her I was attached she proposed to my friend.

Having said all that I do have a strong opinion regarding weights and measures. As a customer I want things like price and quantity to be clear and unambiguous and would be more than happy to see all imperial weights and measures abolished including the great British pint. I have never understood why I was sent to school to learn stuff and was taught the metric system, yet live in a country that is partly metric and partly imperial. One or the other please, and as the rest of Europe use metric it makes sense in a single market to follow suit.

If you think you would get less beer if you bought half a litre, do the following experiment. Nick a pint pot from a pub. Go on, just do it. Just this once. Buy either a 500ml bottle or can of any beer of choice and pour it into the pint pot. You will notice you actually have more beer in the pint pot than a usual 568ml pint that you would buy in a pub. That’s because pubs rip you off with short measures and the froth is considered part of the pint. A continental half litre in a lined glass is actually more beer than a UK pub pint. Our European cousins with their metric lined glasses are getting what they paid for and we are getting stung.

If that hasn’t convinced you ask yourself this. Why did we learn kilometres at school to live in a world where motorway signs denote miles? Why do I buy petrol by the litre but milk by the pint? It’s just plain weird and pointless. There is no point to the hangover of the old imperial system. Like the monarchy, once all the old timers have all died off and the rest of us wonder why they had such strange attachments we’ll no doubt get shut.

Wetherspoons January Sale

2011-01-04T13:57:00.005Z

Today marks the start of the Wetherspoons January Sale! Woo Woo, cheap pub based beer, should you wish to step into a pub. The tradition of January sales is more to do with retail operations off loading the current season’s stock to make way for the spring season; however retailers have long noticed it is an opportunity to flog cheap tat and stores are filled with stock specifically to offer on "discount".

As far as I’m aware pubs and restaurants have never been in the habit of discounting stock they are trying to shift and possibly with good reason. Would you buy a cheap meal on the understanding the ingredients are on the turn? Restaurants have their own methods of utilizing leftover stock. Soup of the day anyone?

However January is a quiet time for pubs for two reasons. Firstly people have spent up, often getting paid before Christmas and waiting until the end of January for the next pay cheque. Secondly the indulgences of the Christmas period often result in a natural tendency and desire not to repeat it through January. It is the month people resolve to drink less, eat better and get fitter. Gyms sell more memberships in January than any other month. Unless of course you resolve to drink more, as the Rabid Bar Fly heroically has decided to do here, pickling his liver and harming his long term health and wealth for our amusement.

The Spoons January Sale marks more than an opportunity to neck a cheap pint over the next couple of weeks. It marks one of the key reasons Wetherspoons buck the declining trends of their industry and succeed. It marks an understanding of the market, that now is a good time to offer a bargain. Wetherspoons are often disregarded on the beer blogosphere, as a lowest common denominator of pubs appealing to tight wads like me. They are so much more.

Where else is it absolutely clear what the opening times of the establishment are? Where else is it absolutely clear what the price is before you order your drinks? Where else offers enough choice to make everyone in a large group happy? Where else can you sit down for a dump in a clean toilet with an abundance of loo roll? The Wetherspoons do so much right. I would not and cannot describe a Wetherspoons as an ideal pub, my personal ideal is a much more continental waiter service Bräuhaus type model. However they do so much right other more expensive establishments get wrong. I’m not saying the model to pub based success is the Wetherspoons, I am saying look at what they get right, and it is no surprise they are successful when so many places offer so much less and expect people to pay so much more. On top of it all they offer a bargain, enough of a bargain to make you forgive all they get wrong, including long waiting times if they are busy.

I am a little undecided though? Pound fifty for a bitter or two quid for a lovely ice cold pint of lout?

2011

2011-01-03T13:35:00.003Z

I’ve managed to so far resist the temptation to do any of the following. Review 2010, award “golden pint” awards or detail all the fantastic cans of cheap lager I necked over Christmas to celebrate the birth of our Lord and saviour, detailing which cheap lager goes best with a turkey dinner, basically because I didn’t.

In fact Christmas was quite a sober affair. I drew the short straw driving wise, so I can lay claim to having drank pretty much every variety of J20 available. Christmas Eve I did the driving to a fancy dress party of a work mate of the squeeze whom gets camper every time I meet the fella. You might say being gay is an excuse, but frankly in my opinion it isn’t. There is no excuse for that level of campness unless you are applying for a part in a 1970’s sitcom. Having said that I quite enjoyed it despite being one of the few sober people there.

I blame that party for the ensuing week. Volunteering to do all the driving on Christmas day I got neither grape nor grain down my neck. Christmas week followed and still I could not be bothered to get any booze down me. As New Years Eve approached the squeeze even asked if I was sick. Not As far as I know? Surely New Years Eve would break my boozing fast?

It was then I realised I had contracted loutitis. A disease so rare it isn’t even known by most doctors. It affects cooking lager enthusiasts from time to time and the only known cure is a can of cheap lager.

After a New Year of not boozing and once more doing the driving I was getting quite used to not drinking. Then the darts occurred. Not being the type to fork out for Sky telly, the PDC darts passes me by. Phil Taylor, who is he? The second rate BDO tournament has hit BBC2 free to air TV in all its glory. Fat blokes, tattoos, gold sovereign rings and Colin Murray commenting more on the players girlfriends than the arrows. It is beautiful. As far as sport goes it might as well be a tournament of fat blokes throwing paper balls into a rubbish bin at the other side of the room, but the drama of the thing is compelling. I find it to be the sport highlight of the year, coming in only a few days into the New Year. As one fat bloke stared at the dartboard, a bead of sweat running down his chubby pink face we new it all hanged on that one dart. That one dart to win the leg, the set and the game. Miss the double and the other fat bloke, the one with a tattoo would get a chance to get the leg, the set and even up the game to all square. I held my breath. With that sort of tension there is only one response.

“You going into the kitchen, my love?”
“Yeh, want something?”
“Hand us a can of lout, love”

And I was back in the game. My first swig of cheap lager for over a week. The golden fizzy delight tickled its way down my throat. It’s not you; it’s me I thought. I am the one that has been away. You have always been here, waiting for me. I am the one that has been chugging J20 and peppermint tea. I am the one that has been driving to places to see family, friends and dutifully walking around the sales and not screaming “It’s all shit, for gods sake woman, it’s all cheap pointless shit” But now we are back together, a love that will never die. The love only a man can have for a can of cheap lager.

I had pondered the point of cooking lager enthusiasm. Sure it is fun to have a bit of mild harmless fun at the expense of beer geeks. But with that swig the point became all too clear. There is no greater love than that of a man towards his can of cheap lager. That is something to celebrate through 2011. Have a great 2011 and get some cheap lager down you.

Badger Week

2010-12-23T10:50:00.005Z

A big thank you to Badger Beer. The lovely people at Badger sent through a much appreciated early Christmas gift of a Fortnum & Mason’s Oval Game Pie. That’s got to be nicer than a 99p Sainsbury’s basics pack of pork pies. 1.5 kg of Pork, venison, rabbit, pheasant, pigeon, pork liver, chicken, chicken liver & seasonings all wrapped in pastry. It’s meat heaven. I’ve still got to drink the lovely beer they sent me and suspect the 2 will go very nicely together as I look out of the warm house into the freezing Siberian temperatures outside and decide that sitting in with a nice slice of pie and one of Badgers beers is just the ticket to comfort, relaxation & not freezing to death outside.

With that, Christmas week is officially Badger Beer Week on this here cooking lager blog, in the clearest sign yet that in the commercialisation of Christmas the price of this blog is little more than a nice slice of pie. It’s what the little baby Jesus would want. So with a couple of days before having to attend a Christmas eve “camp” fancy dress party at the squeezes “best gay mates” flat, then a Christmas and boxing day of visiting my parents, her parents, her sister, some aunties I am kind of hoping to neck my badger beers in the relative peace and quiet of a warm house and all the rubbish TV lined up on the free view recorder.

Noticing the free view box had recorded me “Oz & Hugh” I could sit down with a slice of pie, a nice beer & watch some beer related TV programming. I occasionally get to watch what I want. Not often, but occasionally. It appeared the usual fake matey Top Gear inspired blokeish rubbish as 2 gormless middle aged men set upon an odyssey of drink as they went about setting up rival bars one playing the part of the CAMRA geek and the other a normal everyman. Oz portrayed the CAMRA geek by his behaviour and neglected to do his audience the courtesy of a visual shortcut by not donning a white beard, sandals, bow tie and sticking a copy of the Guardian under his arm. I have one question. Beer Blogger & Brewer and all round decent chap Stuart Howe of Sharps Brewery did them the kindness of not only appearing on this rubbish, but also giving them some beer to drink, yet all we saw was the back of his head? What was going on there? I have nothing to say about the rest of the show. Alright, but haven’t we seen it all before?

I’d love to say I considered carefully which beer might go best with this pie, but in all honesty I picked one at random. All food goes with all beer. Matching is pretentious rubbish borrowed from wine bores. Pretty much any wine goes with any food too, but admitting as such would leave a quarter of an hour to fill in most TV cookery shows if they just said. “I went down Tesco and picked this one because it was cheap, it goes quite well I think, not too bad, drinkable and not at all like diesel fuel. Ummm its red, not sure where it’s from, the bottle might say. Umm, Bulgaria, is that good or bad? ”

So I cracked open a Tanglefoot promising melon & pear with a copper colour. A fruity smell, crisp sweet & spicy. 5%. Very nice. A clear bright glass of beer with a lovely effervescence (fizz) on the taste. A malt dominated flavour with subtle hops. Full mouth feel with a dry finish as you get it down you leaving a burnt caramel aftertaste. Cracking stuff.

I’d of had a second but the next random pick from the selection box was Golden Champion 5%. Summer in a glass. Just the ticket for when the depths of this Siberian winter are annoying you. Contains Elderflower. A floral tangerine smell to a copper beer with a crisp fruity taste. Like drinking a bunch of flowers. Sweet is the dominant flavour with a floral hint of a half remembered sweet shop of childhood. I’d of finished this but the squeeze stole it off me after a few gulps.

I’ll try a few more tonight and hack away at more of this giant pie. Suffice to say all the beer goes very nice with game pie, as I suspect most things would. Time to open the Christmas quality street.

Christmas crap

2010-12-22T13:57:00.007Z

Just a short question today for anyone reading this rubbish. Of all the shite you neck at christmas from mulled wine to egg nog to christmas cocktails and punch all to be "polite" when you get dragged around either a relatives house or a relative of your lass all because you can only bear to visit them once a year at best. Is there a drink any more soul destroying than this?

This muck here.

Branded Cava wine from the TV show Loose Women.

As far as fizzy wines go, I can handle Cava . It's cold, it's neckable, it's fizzy but really, there is no need for this.

PS: If you are dumb enough to buy one, you can buy a decent bottle of champagne for the £20 this £4 quid bottle of Cava costs, and which would make the better gift. Loose women Cava, or a bottle of Moet?

Cheeky Vimto

2010-12-20T10:28:00.009Z

Sat in front of the telly last week the squeeze and I were watching a Jamie Oliver Christmas Special. Watching Jamie Oliver Christmas specials is not something I’d recommend unless you like your intelligence insulted by an irritating fake cockney twat but I find myself sitting through all manner of shite from time to time in the hope that the evening will end in sexual intercourse. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t but I do it through a belief that the lucky night is tonight. Insult of the evening, and insult of all insults was the bit where his guest, welsh piss head foxy single mother of two and former voice of an angel Charlotte Church decided to show us how to make a drink called “cheeky vimto” This is an insult because the drink in question is hardly complicated to make. It involves chucking a large port in a pint pot, pouring in a blue WKD (vodka alcopop) and necking. I do not need to be shown this, even if Charlotte Church has lost a bit of weight and is looking half decent these days. It gets its name not because it contains Vimto but because it tastes a bit like Vimto, a none alcoholic fruit cordial popular in the north of England. Whilst Vimto is primarily marketed as a kids drink, its origins as a cordial during the early 20^th century temperance movement is somewhat forgotten by Vimto lovers today, of which I count myself as one. I love the stuff. Vimto rocks.

Now this story in its own rambling way has a point because a good while back I introduced my polite well educated and slightly posh lady squeeze to my rather less posh cousins, a delightful group of robust fun loving northern girls that introduced the love of my life to cheeky Vimto. A drink my squeeze enjoyed a great deal that evening to the point showing me she wasn’t as posh as she makes out, behaving as lairy as my drunken cousins, threatening to slap a girl that talked to me, vomiting in the gutter, having a cab refuse our carriage, demanding sex when we got home, and knocking my confidence ever so slightly by falling asleep coitus diebus. She hadn’t drunk cheeky Vimto since.

However tonight she decided she would quite like a cheeky Vimto, but unfortunately we had neither of the 2 ingredients in the house. A vodka and actual Vimto is just not the same, she said. Fast forward a couple of days and we were in a well known supermarket buying more Christmas food that either of us could possibly eat even if half the country invited itself over for a Christmas mince pie. What appears in the trolley when I’m not looking? A four pack of blue WKDs and a bottle of port. Now this was an opportunity to educate the squeeze in a bit of the core principles of cooking lager enthusiasm. “Hang on love what is this?” I enquired. “I fancy a cheeky Vimto, I can have one if I want, I’m not going to be sick on you” was the reply. “That’s not at issue my love, look at the shelf, £4.49 a four pack but 2 for £7. A quid is knocked off each four pack when you buy 2. £3.50 a four pack. But look closer, there is a box of 12 for £9, and that’s £3 a four pack, but the box of 12 is on two for £14. The cheapest blue WKD’s are 2 12 packs”. She did mutter something about wanting a cheeky Vimto but not 24 cheeky Vimtos but by then the trolley contained the bargain and I was working out price per gram in my head of two differently priced and sized jars of honey. That’s what I do, that’s how I shop, and that’s how I roll.

That very evening, at the behest of my lovely squeeze I made her a cheeky Vimto. As an act of love I even made it for her in my treasured Carling glass, the glass from which I drink most things. I have tried this drink, but only sipped the drinks of others. For the full on effect one has to have a whole one, so I made myself one too. The first surprises are that blue WKD contains caffeine and is only 4% alcohol. Oh how alcopops have been decimated by the prurient anti booze campaigners. Back in the day kids could go out and neck this sugary pop at 6 or 7%. The modern position of alcopop is in a parlous state. Maybe it needs a Campaign for alcopop?

Once mixed, what gets you first is the smell. The cheeky Vimto has an almost overpowering sweet smell of fruity jam. It smells absolutely delicious, absolutely like “pop” and the first swig is insanely gorgeous. It’s nothing like booze. It tastes not entirely like Vimto, but of all the fruity pops on the market it most resembles Vimto. It is sweet, sugary, fruity and just plain lovely. I can well understand the attraction. What an easy going and delightful way of getting pissed.

One issue I had that didn’t appear to bother the squeeze was that I in contrast to her found it a drink that is quite difficult to neck more than one of. The sweetness is great but for me, one is enough. Oh and that night I did get lucky and no she wasn’t sick on me. Result.

Pickled eggs

2010-12-17T15:28:00.010Z

Some days I am a fool to myself. A desire to try new things can on occasion open your world up to new pleasures and delights. It can also thrust you headlong into the very pit of hell. A new brand of lager? Usually safe and usually lovely. A weird pint of pong? Why not but know it’s a gamble and you might shortly be grimacing.

I have long wondered what pickled eggs taste like, but never had the courage to try one. They only really appear in old man’s pubs and the hygiene standards of such establishments are often an indication that eating anything is playing Russian roulette with your health. I saw these and knew I had to try a pickled egg once in my life. I like eggs. Fried, boiled, scrambled. Very nice. I like dipping soldiers (toasted bread cut into strips) into a soft boiled egg. I’m usually not one for pickles though. I can handle red cabbage, branston pickle & sauerkraut but onions, beetroot and gherkins, nooo thank you.

So it was always a bit of a gamble to buy a jar with 6 pickled eggs in. They go very well with beer I’ve heard so sat in front of the telly, Carlsberg Export in hand I said “Fancy a pickled egg?” to the lovely lady squeeze light of my life. The look she gave me was one of perplexed confusion so I repeated the question. “Pickled egg?" "Why would I want a pickled egg?” was the eventual reply which I took to mean a rhetorical question and a “no” so I was on my own in the pickled egg adventure. I did not try to answer the question as to why one would want a pickled egg.

What are they like then? Well they are like pickled eggs I suppose. Vinegary eggs. Like a nastier version of boiled eggs. Like someone thought “How can I take a nice boiled egg and make it nasty, I know, vinegar” They really are quite rank. The first bite of vinegary egg wasn’t that bad. It was as if my mind was trying to decide whether I liked it or not. The second, my mind had been made up. Ewww, not good.

It ought not to be a surprise that an old man’s pub bar snack is horrible. Let’s face it; old man’s pubs are horrible too. It’s not a surprise that people in old man’s pubs would like this sort of thing. If you like pongy vinegary old man real ale, you are probably going to go for a pongy vinegary boiled egg.

God knows what I’m going to do with the other 5 in the jar. Suggestions welcome.

Let them die.

2010-12-15T15:02:00.003Z

Here is a fascinating insight into how pub companies manage their estates. Rather than build a sustainable model, the business model appears one of short termism and screwing both Landlord and punter alike.

On this basis, why support pubs? Why support price controls to fix the market to allow these people to stiff customers? Pubs? Let them die.

Bargains

2010-12-10T15:48:00.005Z

It is an exciting time for cooking lager enthusiasts. Xmas always brings out the bargains. Tesco currently have the 3 boxes for £20 offer on. Top stuff for Xmas. Becks, Carling, Carlsberg all feature. Remember cooking lager enthusiasts, I think we are not only stocking up for Xmas, but next year also. VAT is due to rise and whether stores absorb that rise and cut margin or pass it on will no doubt depend on trading conditions. Best be safe than sorry. Fill the garage with enough lout to last till summer.

For the cooking lager curious that are still wedded to pricier fair, Have a look in at Sainsbury’s. Meantime Wheat £1 a bottle, Fullers ESB 2 for £3, London Pride £1 a can if you buy 8, Leffe £2.49 a big bottle are just some of the offers to keep you out of the pub.

Xmas is also the time of year you buy grog for guests rather than yourself. Sainsbury’s look good here to. The wine & spirits offers will keep Aunty Marge in G&T’s and the squeeze in white wine. There is no excuse for mulled wine or egg nog. Just say no. Dressing up mulled wine as “Glühwein” doesn’t make it any better. It’s just cheap and nasty red wine warmed up with spices to mask the flavour. Just say no. You can buy a decent Merlot for the same price they flog that rot for. Same with egg nog, snowballs or any other nasty concoction. The only legitimate excuse for drinking such a thing is when all the other booze at the party has run out. Even then you’re better off heading home than hitting it.

Xmas, it’s not just a time for turkey and running along the supermarket aisle shouting “I can’t find bread sauce or cranberry sauce, will raspberry jam, do?” It’s a time for stocking up with enough cheap lager to drown an Elephant in. You know it makes sense.

Thhhppppptttt

2010-12-02T15:58:00.004Z

Minimum pricing for alcohol appears at least 2 years away and when implemented looks most likely to be a ban on below cost selling. However cost isn’t as easy to determine as you might think.

I’ve been thinking about this and to explain my thoughts I’m going to start by simplifying things. If you have any manufacturing process you have 2 types of cost, fixed and variable. Fixed is stuff like plant and machinery, variable would be raw materials, labour and the like.

It might sound quite simple to say for any given commodity, “it costs 10p to make, it sells for 15p, that’s 5p profit” A ban on below cost selling would be to say outlaw the selling of said commodity for below 10p. It all sounds simple enough.

The fact is that there are bans on below cost selling already in the world. In global trade it is possible for one country to subsidise a sector, agricultural or manufacturing and effectively dump that commodity or product on world markets below cost. This is generally considered aggressive and frowned upon and one of the purposes of the World Trade Organisation is to attempt to discourage this sort of thing. Though it has been said it doesn’t do that good a job when you consider the agricultural subsidies given to European and American farmers by their respective governments and the artificially low price of Chinese currency.

I’ve got distracted from a beer related rant, so back to the point. From my earlier point regarding fixed and variable cost within manufacturing, there are 2 forms of accountancy usually done. Financial and Management. Again this is an over simplification. The financial accounts are a legal requirement and involve such delights as Profit and Loss statements and Balance Sheets. The purpose of which is to reveal whether the company made a profit and what the book value of the company is. Book value isn’t actual value, that’s market capitalisation, but that’s irrelevant.

The management accounts are often called cost accounts because at a basic level they are an attempt to determine the costs within a business. There are numerous methodologies, one of which I know something about. Activity based costing, but as that time of my life was a painful experience I have locked away I don’t much wish to go into detail. I shiver even thinking about it.

These accounts are company confidential, and confidential for good reason. You really don’t want a competitor to know the details of your cost structure because that is a significant part of competitive advantage. Companies make attempts to benchmark themselves against competitors in order to measure competitive advantage. You might not wish a price war, as your goal isn’t to destroy the competition but to provide a return to investors, but you might wish to know whether your operation is as efficient as the competitors and whether you could win one if they picked a fight.

Now the reason for all this different cost accountancy arithmetic and different ways of measuring cost is simply that each economic process is slightly different and you want to pick a model that reflects what you are doing. For a manufacturing plant, like a brewery, your per pint cost is different if you make a million litres from if you make 2 million litres. If your plant has a capacity of 2 million litres you are likely to be operating at cost efficiency if you are knocking out the full 2 million. Your fixed cost is apportioned over 2 million pints rather than 1 million. However you might only have a market for a million pints. You could also have a market that is split into sectors. Regions of the world, or indeed on or off trade. You will also have a breakeven point. The first half million litres you are selling at a loss because you haven’t covered your fixed costs, and the rest at a profit because from there it is all variable cost. It makes perfect sense, once fixed costs are met to find a market and sell additional product with a price calculation based only on variable cost to reach capacity. That is, we need to sell a million pints at X price to meet our fixed costs, but heh, from there our only cost is commodity grains, so long as we offload it above variable cost, we are quid’s in.

But this assumes cost is only manufacturing cost. What about distribution through the supply chain as it makes its way to the supermarket shelf? It costs more to supply the shop farthest from your distribution depot than it does the one nearest. What about the cost base of the farmer producing the agricultural commodities? He is growing stuff based on last year’s commodity prices and will sell it at this years, at a loss if he has to, because if he doesn’t it gets ploughed into the ground and he gets no money back. He isn’t in business to make a loss but in a bad year minimising losses is better than losing everything.

You have to take the costs of every organisation into account, to ensure none are supplying below whatever arithmetic you’ve used to calculate cost.

So how the hell do you actually calculate cost and enforce that when cost is company confidential?

The answer is not to bother because for booze the model is likely to be duty + VAT. I.e. ignore the actual cost and implement a measure that doesn’t force an organisation to make public what is private, and provide an administrative burden.

Hardnott Dave posted an interesting post here, where he calculated some interesting things about duty and VAT, and from his numbers I’ve worked out some of my own.

As per his numbers, Carling are paying 41p a pint duty, and soon 8p VAT (at 20% next month), making a duty + VAT pint of 49p a pint. The cheapest I can find this beer for is 40p a can (£10 for 24 440ml), or 56p a pint. The cheapest offer for cheap lager is currently sold at 7p above cost.

Therefore I’d like to say to everyone that moans about irresponsible below cost selling and loss leading by supermarkets. The price of cheap lout will not be affected. Thhhppppptttt. That is the sound of me blowing a raspberry.

Thhhppppptttt. Thhhppppptttt. Thhhppppptttt. Thhhppppptttt. Thhhppppptttt. Thhhppppptttt.

Shoot the cat

2010-12-01T13:39:00.009Z

In order to tackle “binge drink Britain” the government have announced alterations to the tax structure for alcohol in the UK. This involves a reduction on tax for beers 2.8% abv and below and an increase for beers above 7.5% abv. This as far as I am aware is in addition to the impending VAT rise to 20%

The Pub Curmudgeon makes a case for special pleading for beers CAMRA members like, here. This negates an important point. All beer is more or less the same basic thing, and when considering his special case for “Old Tom” pong, the beer isn’t actually “real” by the CAMRA definition when sold in bottles. It is a brewery conditioned bottled ale. In fact I would suspect considering its production by a small regional brewery that most of its sales outside the region the brewery supplies its own pubs with, will be in this format.

Old Tom is by all accounts a well respected beer, that has won numerous awards as can be seen on the brewers’ website here. The beer is as far as I’m aware not widely consumed by tramps on the street, despite my own efforts to alter this fact here.

The Spesh, or Carlsberg Special Brew does have rather a fearsome reputation as “tramps piss”, though of late my own observations are that the Tramp community opt not for a can of Spesh but a cheaper alternative strong lager or more often a strong Cider. This I presume is related to a bang per buck assessment that the Spesh whilst being a strong beer does not actually offer the cheapest way of getting drunk quickly. The history of the Spesh is available to read here. Whilst not being “real ale” and therefore by default “chemical fizz” the beer clearly has a history unrelated to a product designed for tramps. It was produced for Winston Churchill’s visit to Copenhagen in 1950.

Arguably Old Tom claiming a history going back to 1899 trumps 1950, but at the end of the day both have a history beyond my own life on the planet.

So on what basis could you actually differentiate between Old Tom and the Spesh? Are we really to assume taxation policy ought to be determined by a narrow special interest group of beer geeks producing a list of beers they “like” and “don’t like”?

It is entirely impractical to suggest Old Tom ought to be given special consideration that is not afforded to the Spesh, and given a lower tax band.

I would add further that it there is a strong merit in taxing Old Tom far more than the Spesh. The country is broke and tax revenues need to be increased. The vast majority of CAMRA members are nice well meaning middle class types that can afford to pay a few bob more for their chosen pongy gut rot.

The tramps on the street can ill afford to pay more for the Spesh. These are people at rock bottom. Often with problems that are not solved by the simple measure of putting up the price of their Spesh. A tramp is unlikely to reconsider his alcoholism and reduced circumstances if the cost of his can of Spesh goes up by 50p and choose to dry out, get a job and become a productive member of society.

Cheap clean ethanol alcohol is not the greatest evil in the world. A far greater evil for those at the bottom of life’s ladder is illicit dirty methanol alcohol. A substance that can and does cause lifelong health problems for its abusers. Health problems that will have to treated in the UK by the NHS. The can of Spesh in the tramps hand may indeed be the lesser of available evils.

The official policy of CAMCL is therefore to agree with a higher taxation rate for anything CAMRA members drink, whilst campaigning for a lower taxation rate for the Spesh, and encouraging all CAMCL supporters to join our Christmas appeal. Share the joys of the season and regardless of personal theological belief do a Christian thing. Buy a can of Spesh and give it to a tramp today. It is what the little baby Jesus would do.

Minimum pricing

2010-11-30T16:26:00.005Z

A little bit of news for those that support minimum pricing of alcohol, here.

Public overwhelmingly opposed to cheap alcohol ban in Greater Manchester

76.3 per cent declaring it a bad idea.And 48.7pc said they would travel to shops outside Greater Manchester to dodge the cheap-booze ban.

I tip my hat to the wonderful people Manchester!