Diageo, BrewDog & the BII

No doubt you've heard about the ill-fated decision that the British Institute of Innkeeping took to listen to a representative from Diageo and stop a (supposedly) independent award that BrewDog had won being given to them.

It's only speculation on my part but I wonder if someone from Diageo felt some sort of misplaced sense of responsibility towards the Portman group, who set themselves up as industry regulators? In the past, BrewDog have hardly seen eye to eye with them after all.  Was all this, as Phil Mellows suggested on Twitter, because of someone 'trying to be socially responsible'? Which I guess can happen if you are both poacher and gamekeeper.

Thinking about the decision to respond to Diageo's threat. Why did someone from Diageo know that BrewDog were going to be given the award? Is it normal practice to inform the corporate sponsors of the winner before the award is given? How did the BII expect to get away with changing their minds at the last minute if the trophy was already engraved? And just how independent can industry awards be if their sponsorship is derived from within the same industry?

Not even Diageo beers!

Anyway, here's Diageo's official apology. It might well be that that represents an end to proceedings as far as they're concerned. A low profile will probably kept while all the inevitable hubub from BrewDog fans dies down. I still think that the BII Scotland, however quick they were to apologise (rightly) to BrewDog, still have some questions to answer.

It was certainly an interesting afternoon watching the whole saga unfold. If you want to read more here are stories from The Morning Advertiser, Caterer and Hotelkeeper, and some interesting analysis of the (rather brilliantly devised bit of PR) that was the  #AndTheWinnerIsNot Twitter hashtag from Andy at Graphed Beer.

Session Beer

A rather amusing (to me at least, even if not deliberately so) rant about what defines a session beer on Ding's Beer Blog got me thinking about drinking habits.

For me the point about session beer is that it is pretty vague, it suggests a certain approach to a day enjoying the pleasure of beer rather than your day job which might well be worrying about fractions of percentages. I'll concede you might be a bit cross if you ask for a session beer in a pub and they want a tenner off you on producing a pint of some sort of triple imperial rocket fuel. In the end though it's a legal requirement to show the alcohol content of drinks served - and it's that you should be relying on rather than a bit of ethereal nomenclature - assuming you believe the label of course. If you can't work out that a 7% beer is going to get you more drunk if you throw multiple pints of it down your neck in a short space of time than a 3.7% beer would, you probably shouldn't be drinking at all. Similarly if a pub put up a list of 'session beers' on a chalk board that weighed in at six or seven percent they'd not exactly do their credibility much good but, rather like asking for a session beer without clarifying the abv first, I think that's pretty unlikely.

Beer. Friends. Session.

I'd suggest a session beer isn't simply defined by abv - some fruit beers in particular come in at a low strength, and are perfectly enjoyable, but I'd suggest even the more ardent fan wouldn't want to be drinking pint after pint of them.* By the same token, a drinking 'session' could consist of a bottle of Chimay while reading the Sunday papers or people watching from your seat outside a café  - the beer taking the place of a glass or two of vino da tavola in another universe, presumably that European one that 24 hour licensing was supposed to transport us all to.

And now? The sun is trying to shine, and I think a beer and a session of quiet contemplation and conversation beckons. With the right approach any beer can be a session beer (to misquote Aleheads), if beer's just a route to getting hammered, none of them are.

* Yes, it's a generalisation and I'm sure there are exceptions!

Hunter's 'Full Bore' Strong Ale

There's a lot of fuss on the Twittersphere (is that the right preposition?) at the moment about the government's increase in duty as applied to beer above 7.5%. The claim is that it will stop people drinking beer that's too strong - I am assuming the likes of Special Brew. Anyone with half an ounce of sense can see that this is not going to work (White Lightning anyone?) but what it will do is reduce the sales, and the stocking, of some really interesting artisan beers, especially 'specialist' imported beers that, and it may be because I don't hang around in the classier streets, I don't see people walking down the road swigging from a can.

If the tax was fair, then OK, but it means there is more duty on these beers than wines that are half as strong again - Blossom Hill anyone? I'm guessing that the House of Commons Cellar has a lot of wine, but not a lot of Belgian beer. Anyway, more of that here, and please sign the e-petition.

All of which brings me round to Hunter's Full Bore. I think that a beer that comes out at 8% should have massive amount of character to balance the alcohol. There is dried fruit in there, and a caramel sweetness, and it's certainly not a bad beer, but it's not really that exciting. So this isn't as good as a beer that's been brewed along similar lines by monks in Belgium for hundreds of years, it's no Westmalle Dubbel for example. But I guess the point is that if the tax man kicks the arse out of the market for potentially interesting beers that can be dwelt upon rather than knocked back, then we are going to miss out on the imports, and miss out on our brewers who will be less likely to brew this sort of beer, and therefore get better and better at it. In the mean time Carlsberg will carry on, and the Brew is unlikely to be influenced by the burgeoning domestic craft brewing scene.



£2.12 (50cl) at Sainbury's

I also tried McEwans Champion Ale recently. Certainly makes the Full Bore taste good. Deep brown beer with bunt toast aromas and flavours, a harsh, artificial, sweetness which really doesn't have any fruit flavours (like in the Full Bore) to back it up. Bitter finish but unfortunately a really inelegant beer, the hops simply fail to complement the sweetness, seeming almost completely at odds with it. Not at all clear what this is the champion of, but I wouldn't fancy tasting the competition!



7.3% abv. A quick internet check and it's available for £1.65 in Asda - I didn't buy this one.

Figures Fuel UK Alcohol Debate?

The British Beer & Pub Association’s Statistical Handbook 2011 has suggested that drinking in the UK has been falling since 2004, according to an article on the Drinks Business website.

Leaving aside my suspicions of such statistics and their interpretation, there is one assumption that I would be perfectly prepared to make with respect to this survey: It won't get any press coverage.

This is a shame - it would be good to see this picked up and analysed - but if it turned out to be accurate and without bias, then it would hardly fit in with scare stories about 'Binge Britain,' accompanied by the usual photos of drunk women in short skirts sitting on a pavement/drunk men bleeding on a pavement that keep us informed (providing we read the Daily Hate) about how broken Britain is. Thus, it becomes a non-story before it even gets started, and consequently the debate never happens... Back to the scaremongering. Now, where did I leave my blue WKD?