CAMRA's Self-Harming

CAMRA vs Bloggers. A fight kicked off by a provoking jab from CAMRA’s chairman. But it’s a fight which shouldn’t be happening, especially not from CAMRA’s point of view.

We might not blog about bad beer too often, as Tandleman grumps (life’s too short to blog about bad beer, I think), but we’re quite happy to jump into battle and blog about things which annoy us in the beer world. And Colin Valentine has just mobilised a small army against him and CAMRA.

And why? What does he stand to gain from it? If anything, he’s got more to lose, especially with his bitter tone and the way he spits out the ugly term Bloggerati (even if it does compliment blogger power as one complete unit).

What CAMRA needs to do, and they really should do it quickly, is get beer bloggers on their side and work on some blogger relations. They are alienating the people who spend their time drinking and writing about beer – all bloggers promote beer and the more people who are interested in good beer, the bigger the potential audience for CAMRA. Bloggers berating them is only doing CAMRA more damage.

And guess what? All bloggers love cask beer. All of us. We all drink it, we all talk about it, we all blog about it. It’s churlish and childish to poke bloggers with sticks because we also talk about kegged beer and bottled beer, or that we use the term craft beer (which, by the way, can be real ale and doesn’t have to just contain a sack of C-hops per half pint and be poured from a keg...).

For me, the thing which connects beer bloggers is that we all love beer and we love all good beer. We don’t want CAMRA to change their focus on real ale (we do know that CAMRA stands for the Campaign for Real Ale – we aren’t idiots) but I think we would all agree that we want something which focuses on good beer above a form of beer. If that isn’t CAMRA then so be it. It’s not keg vs cask and it’s definitely not real ale vs craft beer, but it is forward-thinking vs backing-looking.

Real ale is incredibly important; really tasty, well-brewed beer is more important, however it’s dispensed. An argument over a container is stupid. It’s got to taste good and I couldn’t care less how it gets from brewery to glass as long as it tastes good when it gets there. To only be interested in one or two routes from brewery to glass is to have a closed mind on the huge potentials of what great beer can be.

CAMRA need to make some friends among the online writers and not push them further away.

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I’m late on this one and lots of people have already discussed it. Zythophile kicked it off, then Tandleman and Glyn from Rabid About Beer jumped in, Pete Brown has had his say, as has Sid Boggle, Reluctant Scooper and Mark from Beer.Birra.Bier.

And for the record, I am a CAMRA member. I have been for five years. I pay so that I can get BEER magazine (plus the occasional cheaper entry to beer festivals). 

Photo from here

Is the Good Beer Guide still Good?

The 2011 Good Beer Guide was released today. It’s the 38^th edition and this one chronicles 4,500 pubs around Britain. Inside it covers the nation in terms of pubs, breweries and beers. Each pub has a few words about it, the address, opening hours and a useful key detailing some extra information in picture form. Its annual release brings a whirl of PR, but is it still the resource it used to be?

The book is a hefty wad of paper, far from pocket-sized, which likely requires a bag, should you wish to carry it around with you. The RRP is £15.99 but you can get it on Amazon for £10.39 or £10 for CAMRA members on their website. That’s not much to spend for inside knowledge on decent places to drink and you’ll probably waste that much on bad beer in crap pubs over a year, so it’s a worthwhile investment. You can also buy a version for certain mobile phones and SatNavs and these are only £5 each. On this you can search for pubs in multiple ways, one way is via GPRS, presumably pushing a button and getting a list of the nearest GBG pubs back, which is pretty cool.

I like the GBG but I don't think I’ll buy myself a copy this year. I haven’t had the last two and I haven’t missed them. I use the internet to look for places to go, whether it’s reading blogs, Beer in the Evening or asking twitter. But... I do like to have it there as the book which promises places worth drinking in (in most cases anyway, we know there’s the odd dud and that some close over the year, but it’s 4,500 pubs put together by CAMRA members and you can’t get them all right) and the first copy I see in the shops will undoubtedly be flicked through to see what local pubs are in it and if some of my favourites are there. Actually, you know what, I might have already convinced myself that I do want it after all...

Is the Good Beer Guide still good? Do you buy them each year? Will you buy it this year? If so, will you buy the book or the mobile version? Is it your beer bible or do you look for guidance elsewhere? Is it a definitive guide to beer and pubs in Britain? Is there something better or could there be something better? What do you think...

A Campaign for Great British Beer

Oliver Thring’s piece for The Guardian’s Word of Mouth has opened up the issue of lager and CAMRA. For me, it’s one of those annoyingly frustrating topics in beer that doesn’t look like going away and just gets more and more irritating, without the hope of resolution.

CAMRA (the clue is in the name) have built themselves around pushing and progressing real ale in Britain and beyond. They have a bad reputation but that’s an aesthetic thing which will take years to shift – it took years to grow it so asking it to change is a moot point. If it wasn’t for CAMRA then beer wouldn’t be where it is now. The trouble is, beer is moving on in the UK and the CAMRA-shackles are slowing it down because of their dominant name and standing in the industry. And this isn’t going to change. CAMRA won’t shift their key ideological stance and rightly so. LOBI are new into the debate (I've written about them before). They have nothing like the standing of CAMRA and I don’t ever expect them to. LOBI are lager, CAMRA are real ale and there’s a loggerhead in the middle which isn’t shifting to allow the two to work together. This is about the loggerhead.

I’ve had cask lager at CAMRA beer festivals and that’s not the issue; it’s the kegged version which crosses the line. Would I like to see keg beer at CAMRA beer festivals? I guess so. Why not? Tandleman (in a great post) points out that CAMRA don’t have a style or category for lagers, which leaves them in the ‘speciality’ section. I think calling it speciality is making it something ‘other’. I’d love to see a cask lager category added for judging and maybe this would encourage brewers, too. But, more lager needs to be brewed over a prolonged period of time before this will happen. As there isn’t the support for it, and it’s generally more expensive to brew, then will this happen?

It’s tempting to look at the US and their dispense system, which is more keg than cask. In terms of brewing they are the front-runners in the beer world right now (sure they don’t have the history, but their influence is undeniable). If more brewers are going to follow the US footsteps then maybe we will see more British beer made for the keg. Maybe this will then see more people generally (as in, the non-real ale crowd; as in, the masses) turned on to the delights of craft brews (the stigma of the handpump is a hard one to shift). I have no problem with keg beer and I’d like to see more of it. See: Meantime, Lovibonds, BrewDog.

CAMRA won’t change their essential belief and why should they. I don’t expect to see kegged, micro-brewed lagers at CAMRA festivals any time soon. I do expect to see more lagers but I also expect them to taste like pale or golden ales, which neither appeals to the lager market nor the real ale market (call it lager, make it taste like lager – I love Schiehallion because it tastes great but it doesn’t taste like lager as I know it). One question, though: LOBI represent lager but most (maybe all) of the brewers they support also brew ale, so do they promote the ale side of things, too? The debate just spins around and around.

For me, it is, and always will be, about Great British Beer. The yeast which ferments it doesn’t bother me. The dispense doesn’t bother me (pour it straight from a jug, I don’t care as long as it tastes good). A re-seeding to cask-condition doesn’t bother me. CO2 doesn’t bother me. The staling reputation of CAMRA does bother me, but as drinkers get younger I think it will change. GBBF shows how popular beer is, even if it is like a big theme park. As for lager and LOBI, Tandleman writes, “they must stand or fall by their own ability to penetrate a market which is likely to be indifferent to them. An inconvenient truth? Maybe, but the market will decide.” I completely agree. It’s hard not to. Craft lagers are going up against the huge brands and they won’t win. It’s logical for an organisation like LOBI to start with the real ale drinkers and work their way out from there – it’s a ready-formed market. Of course, the other side of this asks: will those out-spoken members of CAMRA, whose voices raise above all the others, accept lager? The institution may accept it; the (minority of) members may not.

I don’t like these constant ‘battles’ against CAMRA. I am a member but feel no reason to defend them unless they do wrong (if they banned cask lager then I’d have an issue, although it is still the Campaign for Real Ale...). They have downfalls but it’s those ‘downfalls’ which have elevated them, and British beer, to where it is now and we should all be thankful. From here British beer needs to grow. Anything that hopes to ‘challenge’ CAMRA or promote something similar has to start from the bottom and redress what has already been done. We’re a long way off that. This isn’t a CAMRA vs. Lager/LOBI debate and they have to work together, I just wish that there was a Campaign for Great British Beer - whatever it is and however it’s served - because I think the future of drinking in Britain is much bigger than just cask real ale.

I hope that the size of the debate on The Guardian will open some eyes to beer and give it a more prominent place. I like to think it deserves it. A lot of us drink it and a lot of us really care about it. Barm has also covered the story here, focusing on the CO2 side of things, in a good, to-the-point post.