Keith Flett surveys the beery landscape of 2019, and considers what a Labour Government could do about Big Beer

You don’t need a crystal ball to know that beer in 2019 will follow trends already evident in 2018. In craft beer there is a perpetual search for new styles or takes on old styles that will prove popular. For example in 2018 we saw a proliferation of Brut IPAs. 2019 will certainly see something different.

But beer and beer drinking are much more than style wars amongst craft brewers.

We might identify a couple of areas which may influence the broader area of pubs, beer and drinking in 2019. The first is Big Beer and the potential impact of Brexit (or not) and a possible recession. The second is a potential Labour Government and what it might do, or at least plan to do, in this area in its first 100 days in office.

Following ABInBev’s acquisition of Camden Town brewery in 2015, the news that Heineken was to take a significant stake in Beavertown in Tottenham was probably the most controversial brewing news of 2018. The funding is designed to get the long talked-about new brewery ‘Beaverworld’ built. Its location is in Enfield, not far from where ABI built a new brewery for Camden. The concern of course was – and is – that over a period Heineken will simply take total control as they did at the US brewer Lagunitas.

To any Marxist it is hardly news that capitalism is about consolidation in a quest for profit and ultimately, if left unregulated, monopoly. Also in 2018 Japanese brewer KIrin bought Fourpure in South London, while Carlsberg continued to develop its reshaping of London Fields Brewery

For those who like their beer local, community-based and small-scale Big Beer is anathema. I might broadly be in that category, but it is not one that is easy to sustain within the framework of market capitalism. Alternative structures of ownership, around co-operative production might work better.

The drinker might in any case query whether this actually makes any significant difference to the beer they end up drinking at the bar, or acquire from a supermarket or craft beer bottle shop.

The answer I think is problematic for the left. Some beer pundits claim that beer produced by Camden’s new ABI brewery or indeed by Beavertown’s outsourced operation in the Low Countries (the current brewery being at capacity) is as good as anything they’ve done before. With Big Beer comes quality control (hence a more consistent product) but also cost control (hence sometimes a weaker beer). Big Beer can and does compete on price to force competitors out of the market. Again however this can mean that decent beers such as Camden Pale Ale or Beavertown Neck Oil start to appear in bars where previously the choice was much less inspiring. And the aim of most craft brewers is to get better quality beers into the hands of the public.

Whether Big Beer plans further UK activity in the craft beer area in 2019 we shall see, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the companies in question operate on a world scale and may feel they have made sufficient headway in the UK for now.

More likely perhaps is the acquisition of small-ish craft brewers by larger or regional brewers. Again it is a familiar process of industrial concentration of ownership. The end of 2018 saw York Brewery rescued from administration by Black Sheep brewery for example, itself some years ago a spin-out from Theakstons Brewery, which it stands next door to it in Masham, North Yorkshire.

A new Labour Government

Should an incoming Labour Government aim to do anything about all of this?

In the first period of a new Labour Government there will be other priorities and in any case state intervention in a situation which has seen a huge expansion of breweries and beers in the last 10 years needs to be thought through carefully.

It was tax changes introduced by Labour that promoted the boom in the first place, and perhaps a first step would be an Inquiry, a device beloved of Labour Governments in the 1960s and 1970s, to assess what issues prevent it from developing further. How much for example the activities of Big Beer on pricing and supply are anti-competitive, balanced against the reality that the price of a pint of beer is already expensive for many people on low incomes.

Combined with that might be a look at the whole structure of the industry and whether alternative methods of ownership might work both in terms of breweries and of pubs. Here we could expect to hear a considerable amount of moaning and groaning from the Beerage – breweries who support and donate money to the Tory Party

There has been a long-running lobby, primarily by the larger regional breweries, who are now the core of the Beerage, to change tax rules on the amount of beer produced. Their argument is that the tax breaks given to smaller breweries impact unfavourably on them and that the cut-off point where standard tax is paid should be raised so that they also can benefit from it.

It is a complex issue not least because while socialists are unsympathetic to the politics of the Beerage, the regional brewers support a considerable number of unionised jobs, and a pub infrastructure in the areas they operate in.

This takes us into the wider area of pubs and how beer gets into the hands of the drinker. A future Labour Government might well look at cut-price beer in supermarkets (minimum alcohol pricing may impact this but is designed to address different issues) and controlling the market. One senses that taking on Tesco and Sainsbury’s might be an even tougher battle than the Beerage.

Beer for the many not the few will require not just inquiries and legislation but popular campaigning too.

Keith Flett offers some ideas on how a socialist Labour government could improve our drinking culture.

In the stimulating essay on Culture for the Many, not the Few: Notes towards a Socialist Culture Policy, the authors state this:

In our social cultures of eating and drinking, we face the terrible effects of profit-seeking capitalist corporations, loading our food and drink with sugar, salt and fats, causing immense and increasing mental and physical health problems.

It is certainly true that the power exerted by 'Big Food' and the problems caused by the monopolistic behaviour of the big supermarket chains are a real cause for concern. The ‘food deserts’ that exist in many towns and cities are one of the key reasons why many lower income, working class people have such poor diets today.

These poor diets are often made worse by pressures from corporate capital, supermarkets and discount chains on people to consume too much alcohol. This leads to problems of physical and mental health, homelessness and crime, including violence in and out of the home, and money worries.

Corporate capital thus has a double-sided influence on our eating and drinking cultures – it is a massively powerful engine of production, enabling and enhancing the development of our social natures through the culture of eating and drinking, but it also insidiously tends to privatise, corrupt and destroy some of the pleasures and benefits of that culture, because of the drive to make profits for the few rather than meet the needs of the many.

This article aims to begin to explore these issues specifically in relation to beer-drinking and pubs, and to suggest ways that a socialist Labour government could improve this particular cultural activity.

The pub as the hub

The pub is a central part of British cultural life, certainly for the many, but not necessarily fully inclusive even in 2018. Not everyone drinks alcohol, for a range of reasons from personal preference, to cultural and religious belief. In addition pubs have been seen and actually were male centred environments – think of the Working Men’s Club – and people under 18 were not always particularly welcome.

On the other side there is what is known as the ‘tavern drinking’ school of social history. This is a subset of scholarship relating to the work of EP Thompson – who himself was certainly not adverse to visiting the pub. It sees the pub as a cultural institution of the left, very much in opposition to dominant and mainstream cultural formations.

One need only look at radical working-class history in the first half of the nineteenth century to see that from the Luddites to the Chartists, the pub was a central meeting place. This was perhaps particularly so after the 1830 Beerhouse Act, which led to a considerable increase in pubs, perhaps a little like the micro-pubs of today.

The idea of the ‘pub as the hub’ of local community activity has long been one promoted by the Campaign for Real Ale. CAMRA was founded in 1971 to combat moves by the big corporate brewers to replace traditional cask ales with bland, artificially carbonated keg beer. To its credit, it has been one of the most successful consumer campaigns of recent decades, and has also been active in trying to stop pub closures. Recent legislation in England, supported by CAMRA, allowing pubs under threat to be classified as Assets of Community Value (ACV) has helped. This would surely be one area which a Labour Government could look to strengthen through legislation.

The wider and biggest issues that such a Government would have to grapple with however are arguably twofold:

1] How to make pubs genuine centres of community activity rather than places where people down as much alcohol as possible to their own detriment, but to the profit of the drinks industry

2] How to make sure that the drink provided, beer particularly, is of a good quality and sensible price.

These two aims are surely complementary. Traditionally, pubs have supported a variety of social activities ranging from pub games through support for local music, theatre and other performing arts, to support for local football clubs and beer festivals. A pub which recognises its important role in the local community and offers well-kept beer at a fair price is far more likely to have a bright future and avoid becoming a casualty of the current wave of pub closures.

We also need to acknowledge that temperance has had and still does have a place in the labour movement. After all Jeremy Corbyn himself is certainly not a drinker. Indeed from Keir Hardie onwards, Labour leaders have generally not been enthusiasts for alcohol, the exception being Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson who drank brandy – and the tonic wine Wincarnis, according to Private Eye!

There is a need to find a way between the hardliners of Alcohol Concern, who would probably ban all drink if they could, and the drinks industry that simply wants to make greater profits out of selling as much of it as possible, regardless of the health, wealth and happiness of consumers.

Possibly the best available model is the Carlisle State Management scheme. It was introduced in 1916 both in Carlisle and in an area of Enfield with a view to controlling the drink consumption of munitions workers. It coincided with other measures to reduce pub opening hours generally and to cut the strength of beer. It took a good while to move away from the impact of both of these.

However there was a positive side to the Carlisle scheme. Good quality beer was produced at reasonable prices and before the 1970-74 Tory Government sold the brewery and pubs to Theakstons, as part of their ideological drive for privatisation, Carlisle beer was revered by drinkers. The pubs themselves were also models of community use. Food was always available, while a close eye was kept on the consumption of spirits. Initially ‘treating’, the buying of rounds of drinks, was also forbidden.

How would this translate into the modern day? A Labour Government could acquire a brewery and its associated pubs and use both to try and set a standard in terms of quality and price. Alternatively a State brewery could be set up, again with the idea of providing a template of best practice like Carlisle.

Of course the impact on the wider drinks and pub trade would be limited, so a Corbyn Government would also need to look at other measures. Controlling multinational drinks companies like ABInBev and Heineken is beyond any UK Government, and would demand international action, just as regulating and controlling media companies like Google and Facebook demands international action by democratic socialist governments. However, it should still be possible to put a national regulatory framework in place that would shift matters a bit towards drinkers and brewery workers.

A modern version of the Assize of Ale could be linked in to local licensing committees. They might also be charged with checking and regulating both prices and quality of beer sold, perhaps in association with activist groups like CAMRA.

Alcohol duty could be constructed in such a way as to both regulate the profits made by brewers, and to make sure that fair prices were charged. Regulating the market in this way would not be easy, and again the Government could set the tone and benchmark with its own version of the Carlisle scheme.

A safe and comfortable environment for all

The key remains the promotion of the pub as safe and enjoyable environment for all, whether drinkers or not. This might usefully include consideration of how to reflect their traditional role in providing space for multi-generational engagement, avoiding the social problems associated with the ‘vertical drinking establishments’ introduced in the 1980s, which are a cynical move to boost takings and ensure pubs are exclusively attractive to younger people. There are tensions here which are well known. The common good, not profit, was the motivation of the Carlisle State Management scheme, but in the modern market-dominated environment pubs that don’t make a profit close, even when they’re clearly serving the common good.

Again a Labour Government can address this and effectively downgrade the centrality of profit, by reducing business rates for pubs, and where pubs are leased from breweries or pub companies, cap the amount of rent charged. They can also act to prevent ties which mean that wholesale drinks have to be bought at higher than market prices, which then reflected in higher prices to drinkers – which also exploit the publican.

Finally, in all of this, Labour would need to be prepared to push back the complaints of the ‘Beerage’, that unholy collusion between brewers and right-wing politicians which emerged in the 19^th century, as many of the larger regional brewers and brewing groups are supporters of the Tory Party. Don’t expect any of the above to get a good reception in the Daily Mail! Which is surely all the more reason to seize the opportunity to explore the counter-hegemonic cultural possibilities offered by social institutions such as pubs.

Keith Flett considers the various references to the role beer played in the lives of Marx and Engels.

There have been many and varied attempts over the years to paint Karl Marx in particular as a disreputable character whose ideas on capitalism should therefore not be taken seriously.

In that context the story that he was more or less permanently drunk has a fairly minor place. One would not need a great deal of knowledge of Marx’s life to grasp that, certainly once he came to London, he rarely had sufficient money to fund a lifestyle of drinking.

Jenny Marx noted of Engels that when he retired to London in the 1870s that he was keen on beer, particularly the Viennese variety. How easy it was to obtain such a style in London at the time is less clear, but the authoritative beer writers Boak and Bailey suggest that Vienna lager was available in the Capital in the 1860s and 1870s and indeed was regarded as a premium ‘craft’ drink.

The episode which feeds the Marx as a drunk caricature is the well-known pub crawl up Tottenham Court Rd in central London that ended with them being pursued by police. There are not that many pubs on the road today but there were considerably more 150 years ago.

It is to be found in a memoir of Marx written by the German socialist Liebknecht in 1896 around 40 years after the event itself.

His account begins

One evening, Edgar Bauer, acquainted with Marx from their Berlin time and then not yet his personal enemy […], had come to town from his hermitage in Highgate for the purpose of “making a beer trip.” The problem was to “take something” in every saloon between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road – making the something a very difficult task, even by confining yourself to a minimum, considering the enormous number of saloons in that part of the city. But we went to work undaunted and managed to reach the end of Tottenham Court Road without accident.

In due course the drinking party Marx included got involved in a political discussion in the back room of a pub. Liebknecht recalls

The brows of our hosts began to cloud […]; and when Edgar Bauer brought up still heavier guns and began to allude to the English cant, then a low “damned foreigners!” issued from the company, soon followed by louder repetitions. Threatening words were spoken, the brains began to be heated, fists were brandished in the air and – we were sensible enough to choose the better part of valour and managed to effect, not wholly without difficulty, a passably dignified retreat.

Now we had enough of our “beer trip” for the time being, and in order to cool our heated blood, we started on a double quick march, until Edgar Bauer stumbled over some paving stones. “Hurrah, an idea!” And in memory of mad student pranks he picked up a stone, and Clash! Clatter! a gas lantern went flying into splinters. Nonsense is contagious – Marx and I did not stay behind, and we broke four or five street lamps – it was, perhaps, 2 o'clock in the morning and the streets were deserted in consequence. But the noise nevertheless attracted the attention of a policeman who with quick resolution gave the signal to his colleagues on the same beat. And immediately countersignals were given. The position became critical.

Happily we took in the situation at a glance; and happily we knew the locality. We raced ahead, three or four policemen some distance behind us. Marx showed an activity that I should not have attributed to him. And after the wild chase had lasted some minutes, we succeeded in turning into a side street and there running through an alley – a back yard between two streets – whence we came behind the policemen who lost the trail. Now we were safe. They did not have our description and we arrived at our homes without further adventures.

It is an entertaining story but not one can find repeated, meaning it was almost certainly an exceptional occasion.

Engels in his younger days was hardly exempt either from occasional beer influenced activities. He wrote on 1^st September 1838:

Excuse me for writing so badly, I have three bottles of beer under my belt, hurrah, and I cannot write much more because this must go to the post at once. It is already striking half-past three and letters must be there by four o'clock. Good gracious, thunder and lightning’ you can see that I've got some beer inside me. [... ]

However there is a more serious and political side to Marx’s views on beer both in terms of practical political campaigning and in respect of theory.

Marx wrote in support of an 1855 demonstration organised by the Chartists in Hyde Park in what had become known as the ‘Beer Bill’:

The first measure of Religious coercion was the Beer Bill, which shut down all places of public entertainment on Sundays, except between 6 and 10 p. m. This bill was smuggled through the House at the end of a sparsely attended sitting, after the pietists had bought the support of the big public-house owners of London by guaranteeing them that the license system would continue, that is, that big capital would retain its monopoly.

Marx was here defending the right of working people to enjoy a beer on the one official day of the week they didn’t work, against what he terms ‘religious coercion’. Marx associated a Chartist leaflet for the protest which made the point that the aristocracy who of course enjoyed their drinks elsewhere than pubs could continue as normal.

Marx also defended the right of working people to enjoy beer in a more theoretical context, In Capital Volume One, chapter 24 he noted the tendency of capitalists to force down the wages of workers. He quotes an eighteenth-century author who complained that workers indulged in such things as drink:

“But if our poor” (technical term for labourers) “will live luxuriously ... then labour must, of course, be dear ... When it is considered what luxuries the manufacturing populace consume, such as brandy, gin, tea, sugar, foreign fruit, strong beer, printed linens, snuff, tobacco, &C.”

In terms of 2018 it is perhaps interesting to speculate whether Marx would have been a member of the Campaign for Real Ale. He was clearly interested in defending the right of ordinary people to drink beer and was keen on drinking beer himself, at least on occasion. He would certainly have been much less keen, and more critical than CAMRA sometimes is, of the activities of brewers and he would have the theory to back the point up.

One can see Marx, a lifelong activist, being in CAMRA, enjoying his beer, but organising to keep its focus firmly on pubs and beer while maintaining criticism of what is known as ‘big beer’, the worldwide beer companies such as ABInBev.

Keith Flett offers a brief survey of Bolshevik policy and practice towards alcohol consumption.

Drink and the left has been an issue since the labour movement was born or made in the 1820s and 1830s. The left, trade unions and political groups often met in pubs for want of other venues, and Marx and Engels themselves were famous imbibers. Yet inebriated workers and the culture of the pub and beer was something promoted rather by the Tories, who after all represented brewery owners, the Beerage. People who had a drink or two were not the easiest to organise or to get out on demonstrations.

Temperance was a feature of the labour movement again more or less from the beginning although we need to be careful about usage. Abstinence from drink did not usually mean beer and wine but spirits. It's in this context that we can consider what the attitude of the Bolsheviks was to drink, and what impact the 1917 revolution had on the question in Russia. The Bolsheviks were after all part of a European labour movement familiar with the politics of drink. Before 1917 Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party was a confirmed non-drinker while the revolutionary Labour MP Victory Grayson, by contrast, certainly was not.

This makes the question of what the Bolsheviks did on drink after they took State power in Russia in late 1917 of particular interest, as they were the only left party of any hue that had the opportunity to put into practice policies on alcohol during this period.

There was certainly from the early 1920s a distinctive Bolshevik practice on drink that differed by degree from the United States, but perhaps rather less so than the policy of the First World War Government in Britain.

While Prohibition in the US was driven by temperance groups, and by local ballots in both Russia and Britain after 1914, restrictions on drink were determined by concerns for a healthy workforce and that if drinking did occur, then what was drunk should be of good quality and in an appropriate, controlled environment.

In Russia the Tsarist regime banned alcohol at the start of World War One in 1914. In Britain drinking was not banned, but pub opening hours significantly curtailed and the alcoholic strength of beer lowered. In both cases these measures did have a real impact.

When the Bolsheviks took power in late 1917, the issue of drink was not central. Even so in December 1917 the Petrograd Soviet appointed G. Blagonravov Special Commissar to combat drunkenness.

The concern of the Bolshevik Government was widespread, small scale and home distilling of spirits. This meant the unregulated development of capitalist enterprise as well as large scale drunkenness. It led to the denunciation of ‘home brew fascism’ and police efforts particularly in rural areas to uncover, prosecute and jail at least those who were brewing commercially and on occasion anyone at all, even those brewing just for home consumption.

By 1923 well over half of the prison population of Moscow were home brewers. This was hardly a sustainable position particularly because at the same time the Bolsheviks were reducing police numbers, mainly for financial reasons.

Once the Civil War was won, the Bolsheviks could turn their thoughts to reconstruction and building a socialist society and it was at this point that the issue in particular of vodka production came under serious scrutiny. There was a division between those who argued that drinking and drunkenness led to an unhealthy and inefficient workforce, precisely what the infant USSR did not need, and those who saw the importance of State control of the drink trade and the money this could make for an infant socialist State with little source of finance.

Interestingly, the British Government towards the end of the First World War pursued a similar policy. In areas where munitions factories were sited, in particular Carlisle, it took over and shut breweries and used instead a State-owned brewery that sold beer to State-run pubs. The quality of the beer almost certainly improved as a result and the State ownership scheme in particular was keen to keep a very close eye on spirit consumption and to encourage eating with drinking.

This general attitude was also to be found in Communist Parties other than the Russian. The US CP published a magazine, Health and Hygiene, which while not supporting Prohibition, which it saw as simply promoting gangster control of the drink trade, certainly did not feel alcohol was something to be encouraged in the proletarian lifestyle.

The magazine also pronounced on diet:

(it) recommended a recognisably healthy diet of vegetables, fruits, cereals, dairy products, soups, meat and fish, but also recommended ‘miscellaneous’ foods, such as ‘ice cream, cake, pie, mayonnaise, olive oil, gelatin [sic], custards, puddings, jam, marmalade, nuts, candy in moderation and so forth.' Alongside these dietary suggestions, the same article recommended ‘a certain amount of exercise’ and a ‘sufficient amount of sleep. (Hatful of History blog)

By the mid-1920s the drink issue in Russia had reached a point where action had to be taken beyond simply attempting to punish home brewers.

Stalin argued in 1925 that socialism could not be built with white gloves on, and on this occasion, he was referring to support for State production of vodka. One result was that between 1924 and 1927, the number of annual arrests for drunkenness in Leningrad rose from 11,000 to 113,000. Full-strength vodka sales had resumed in 1925.

Distribution of State produced vodka appears to have been patchy in a country as vast as Russia recovering from a Civil War but the political point was clear. It could begin to undercut home brewers, particularly those who brewed for profit beyond personal consumption. It could also address the vital issue of grain supplies and direct them to the production of basic food rather than drink. The link between a healthy workforce, a basic diet and alcohol could not have been clearer.

For much more detail see Neil Weissman Prohibition and Alcohol Control in the USSR, the 1920s campaign against illegal spirits, Soviet Studies Vol 38/3 (1986)

Keith Flett offers a brief survey of Bolshevik policy and practice towards alcohol consumption.

Drink and the left has been an issue since the labour movement was born or made in the 1820s and 1830s. The left, trade unions and political groups often met in pubs for want of other venues, and Marx and Engels themselves were famous imbibers. Yet inebriated workers and the culture of the pub and beer was something promoted rather by the Tories, who after all represented brewery owners, the Beerage. People who had a drink or two were not the easiest to organise or to get out on demonstrations.

Temperance was a feature of the labour movement again more or less from the beginning although we need to be careful about usage. Abstinence from drink did not usually mean beer and wine but spirits. It's in this context that we can consider what the attitude of the Bolsheviks was to drink, and what impact the 1917 revolution had on the question in Russia. The Bolsheviks were after all part of a European labour movement familiar with the politics of drink. Before 1917 Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party was a confirmed non-drinker while the revolutionary Labour MP Victory Grayson, by contrast, certainly was not.

This makes the question of what the Bolsheviks did on drink after they took State power in Russia in late 1917 of particular interest, as they were the only left party of any hue that had the opportunity to put into practice policies on alcohol during this period.

There was certainly from the early 1920s a distinctive Bolshevik practice on drink that differed by degree from the United States, but perhaps rather less so than the policy of the First World War Government in Britain.

While Prohibition in the US was driven by temperance groups, and by local ballots in both Russia and Britain after 1914, restrictions on drink were determined by concerns for a healthy workforce and that if drinking did occur, then what was drunk should be of good quality and in an appropriate, controlled environment.

In Russia the Tsarist regime banned alcohol at the start of World War One in 1914. In Britain drinking was not banned, but pub opening hours significantly curtailed and the alcoholic strength of beer lowered. In both cases these measures did have a real impact.

When the Bolsheviks took power in late 1917, the issue of drink was not central. Even so in December 1917 the Petrograd Soviet appointed G. Blagonravov Special Commissar to combat drunkenness.

The concern of the Bolshevik Government was widespread, small scale and home distilling of spirits. This meant the unregulated development of capitalist enterprise as well as large scale drunkenness. It led to the denunciation of ‘home brew fascism’ and police efforts particularly in rural areas to uncover, prosecute and jail at least those who were brewing commercially and on occasion anyone at all, even those brewing just for home consumption.

By 1923 well over half of the prison population of Moscow were home brewers. This was hardly a sustainable position particularly because at the same time the Bolsheviks were reducing police numbers, mainly for financial reasons.

Once the Civil War was won, the Bolsheviks could turn their thoughts to reconstruction and building a socialist society and it was at this point that the issue in particular of vodka production came under serious scrutiny. There was a division between those who argued that drinking and drunkenness led to an unhealthy and inefficient workforce, precisely what the infant USSR did not need, and those who saw the importance of State control of the drink trade and the money this could make for an infant socialist State with little source of finance.

Interestingly, the British Government towards the end of the First World War pursued a similar policy. In areas where munitions factories were sited, in particular Carlisle, it took over and shut breweries and used instead a State-owned brewery that sold beer to State-run pubs. The quality of the beer almost certainly improved as a result and the State ownership scheme in particular was keen to keep a very close eye on spirit consumption and to encourage eating with drinking.

This general attitude was also to be found in Communist Parties other than the Russian. The US CP published a magazine, Health and Hygiene, which while not supporting Prohibition, which it saw as simply promoting gangster control of the drink trade, certainly did not feel alcohol was something to be encouraged in the proletarian lifestyle.

The magazine also pronounced on diet:

(it) recommended a recognisably healthy diet of vegetables, fruits, cereals, dairy products, soups, meat and fish, but also recommended ‘miscellaneous’ foods, such as ‘ice cream, cake, pie, mayonnaise, olive oil, gelatin [sic], custards, puddings, jam, marmalade, nuts, candy in moderation and so forth.' Alongside these dietary suggestions, the same article recommended ‘a certain amount of exercise’ and a ‘sufficient amount of sleep. (Hatful of History blog)

By the mid-1920s the drink issue in Russia had reached a point where action had to be taken beyond simply attempting to punish home brewers.

Stalin argued in 1925 that socialism could not be built with white gloves on, and on this occasion, he was referring to support for State production of vodka. One result was that between 1924 and 1927, the number of annual arrests for drunkenness in Leningrad rose from 11,000 to 113,000. Full-strength vodka sales had resumed in 1925.

Distribution of State produced vodka appears to have been patchy in a country as vast as Russia recovering from a Civil War but the political point was clear. It could begin to undercut home brewers, particularly those who brewed for profit beyond personal consumption. It could also address the vital issue of grain supplies and direct them to the production of basic food rather than drink. The link between a healthy workforce, a basic diet and alcohol could not have been clearer.

For much more detail see Neil Weissman Prohibition and Alcohol Control in the USSR, the 1920s campaign against illegal spirits, Soviet Studies Vol 38/3 (1986)

Keith Flett outlines how market capitalism undermined the principle of a fair price for a pint of beer. 

The price of a pint of beer, or perhaps as accurately the price of a half or third of a pint of beer, has been the source of considerable controversy in recent months.

A pub guide found that the most expensive pint of beer in the UK was no longer in London but Surrey and was over £4. That is indeed a fair sum of money if you are on a low income. A survey by the trade British Beer and Pub Association found the average price of a pint of beer is now just over £3 across the UK. Lager, typically on keg rather than cask, is more like £3.50 a pint.

If you like beer in this price context you might prefer, for example, the four for £6 offers on cans of Brewdog’s punk IPA that can be found in nearly all supermarkets.

There is a wider argument about the cost of beer and the impact of this on pubs then but I want to focus here specifically on the price issue, and how it also relates to the style and quality of beer.

The controversy arose particularly because someone had spotted a double ipa from the Manchester brewery Cloudwater on sale at the Rake in Borough Market for £13.40 a pint. Of course since the beer was 8-9% ABV you’d be drinking it in thirds or halves anyway but at £6.70 a half the price was still well above the ‘going rate’ for such a beer in London pubs, which would usually be around £4-4.50 a half.

I understand that the price neither deterred customers or put them off drinking the particular beer which quickly sold out – as Cloudwater beers invariably do. But it made the pub trade paper the Morning Advertiser and sparked a huge social media controversy.

Just how awkward the matter is to judge can be seen by a subsequent non-controversy over a 3.6% beer brewed by the US brewery Jester King and the London brewery Kernel, that was selling in a Hackney pub for £13 a pint. How much, one might say? Except of course the beer had been matured in barrels for a lengthy period and then specially flown in from the US. It was probably one of the only UK outlets. In this case the cost of production and the importation justified the price.

The main impact on the price of a pint is Government taxation. Some will be able to remember the days when the Chancellor’s decision to raise duty on beer in the annual Budget led to news headlines that beer would increase by 1p or 2p a pint. It was invariably more once that increase had worked its way through various middlemen, but the underlying point was that there was a fairly clear idea of how much a pint of beer cost and hence how much changing the tax would change it.

The Campaign for Real Ale still campaigns for a reduction on beer duty as much as health campaigners and temperance advocates push for minimum alcohol pricing. Certainly the tax on beer in the UK is amongst the highest in Europe, and it seems unlikely therefore that Brexit will have a helpful impact on it for beer drinkers

Yet the world is now more complex than the notion of the average cost of the average pint.

Most of this in one way or another amounts to regulation of the market – or lack of it – and as we shall it leads back to eighteenth century debates about a moral economy, one of whose key features was the concept of a ‘fair price’ for consumers and producers.

The debate about the price of a pint revolves around what is reasonable for drinkers to pay particularly in the age of the 1% public sector pay cap. But it also raises issues about how much profit, if any, pubs and pub companies should be making and how much a brewery should expect in terms of a financial return for the beer it brews.

This equation around price, profit and also supply and quality of the raw materials like malt and hops, was central to the work of the Assize of Ale.

The Assize, a local Court, met to fix the price of beer and its quality. Aletasters were used to visit each brewery, often small brewers, or before the nineteenth century, brewsters, and check beer before it was sold to customers.

The Assize would go into some detail about the appropriate price for a pint, depending on the cost of supply of essential ingredients such as malt and the type of beer being produced. A high quality stronger beer would be allowed to be sold at a higher price than a lower strength standard beer. Also taken into account was the view that the Brewster or Brewer should be allowed to make enough profit to allow their business to continue and to be able to live on, but no more.

How was this enforced? If Aletasters found an issue with quality or price then this was reported to the Assize and the offending brewer or Brewster was brought before the Court and fined. It might be argued that some regarded the fine as a necessary part of doing business the way they wanted to, particularly as surviving records in some areas indicate a level of frequent offenders.

The system broke down as market capitalism started to intrude on purely local brewing, with some more successful brewers supplying a numbers of pubs and the role of middlemen, or forestallers and regraters as they were sometimes termed, also becoming of increasing importance.

Yet the Assize, for the many issues that existed with it and how it functioned, did represent in principle the ideas that there should be a fair price to be paid for beer by the drinker and a fair profit, but no more, to be achieved by the brewer. For the many, not the few, as the slogan has it!

Keith Flett gets the round in again, tracing the political impact of Mrs. T on bright fined beer with his usal wit and clarity (geddit?). 

It’s not often talked about but there is the issue of what Mrs Thatcher did to your glass of beer.

The ‘free choice’ capitalism where the market ruled, didn’t really do a great deal for the profitability of British industry, indeed it managed to destroy a fair bit of it. It did however open an era of choice in consumer goods, whether you wanted the choice or not.

You might think, for example, that what you want in a telephone, these days often a mobile, is one that works reliably, you can make calls on and access the internet and do so at a reasonable cost. In reality there are many, many phones to choose from, mostly not all that different from each other.

The same is true for beer.

Pre-Thatcher there were mainly regional brewers, with a few (by comparison with 2017, very few) smaller independents. They served a mainly tied pub estate. What they served in terms of beer were pints or half pints (definitely not thirds or two-thirds, though both are legal measures) of amber or brown beer.

That beer was, or should have been, fined and crystal clear. Whether it was in good condition - that is to say whether it tasted fresh and had some limited natural sparkle to it, and depending on whether you were north or south a big or a small foamy head - was another matter.

Very often, before the rise of the Campaign for Real Ale in the 1970s, cellar skills of landlords were not great, and nor was the condition of the beer. When I first started drinking around in the early 1970s - under age of course, quite possible in London then - a common drink was a ‘light and bitter’. That is to say, a half of cask ale and a bottle of brewery conditioned beer (not real ale) poured in to give the cask beer some life and often mask its less than great taste.

If you stuck with drinking pints from the handpump, clarity in your beer was important and the beer you drank was likely to be much the same in, week in, week out. Hence the expression you can hear in old films ‘a pint of the usual’.

The beer was of course ‘fined’ with fish bladders to ensure clarity. There are now alternatives, though many beers will still use this method unadvertised to those who may prefer not to ingest such things.

Hence the first thing you did when you got your pint was to look at it - and then sometimes sniff it - to check that it was clear. If it wasn’t it might well go back.

Of course there were barpersons across the country who would respond that since real ale was a living product, it was ‘meant to look like that’ and if there was also a twig sticking out of the murky liquid that just proved how natural it was. That last bit by the way, is, as far as I know apocryphal. I’ve never seen an actual pint with a twig in it.

It was the work of CAMRA to rescue living cask beer from old style, poorly served murk, and get across the point that the beer in the glass was meant to be clear.

Was it the case that if the beer was cloudy it tasted awful? Sometimes it was particularly if the haze was due to a yeast infection or some other off-note in the beer.  But not always. Sometimes cloudy beer tasted fine, if not in the most desirable condition. Most who drank pints like that though knew that it was like consuming liquid All-Bran – with very similar results.

Then along came Mrs Thatcher and market choice. Guest beers were allowed in pubs owned by large breweries – this the work of CAMRA – and in due course another exponent of the free market, albeit in a rather different format to the Iron Lady appeared. Gordon Brown as Chancellor changed duty on beer to make it much easier for small brewers to set up and turn a profit.

And many did, hundreds and hundreds of them. Ten years ago in London there were less than ten breweries. Now there are over one hundred.

This expansion of breweries coincided (perhaps it was a bit more than coincidence, the jury is still out) with a vast expansion of the types and ranges of beers brewed.

Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, not all of these beers were clear in the glass and nor were they meant to be.

To underline how far the process has gone with what some might call London Murky, at the end of July I was in a well-known craft beer pub in central Hackney drinking a half pint of a 5.9% beer on key. It was in fact a keykeg beer- another way of serving real ale, not in a cask but in a plastic container where gas is used to force the beer to the pump but does not come into contact with the beer, so it is not ‘fizzy’.

The beer was crystal clear. All concerned were not happy. It used to be unfiltered and murky and everyone thought it had tasted much better when it was served like that.

At CAMRA beer festivals you will still see signs saying that a beer is not ready, often because it has not ‘dropped bright’ that is, it’s not clear. These days this is often more to do with it not being in the best condition and needing a little more time. You may also see signs warning that a beer is a little hazy - that is it tastes fine, but check where the nearest toilet is, and also signs pointing out that beer is meant to be cloudy.

This is the world of beer that Mrs Thatcher ushered in. Is it a step forward? Again I’d say the jury is still out on that one, but what a great time to be interested in sampling beer!

Keith Flett continues his selfless quest at beer festivals to identify the economics of producing craft beer in a competitive, capitalist market - and what tastes nice.

Further to my earlier thoughts on craft beer I travelled to Manchester in early October to attend the Independent Manchester Beer Convention (IndyManBeerCon). This event, held in an old swimming baths a short distance from the centre of Manchester, has become one of the key events of what might (or might not) be called a craft beer movement.

It takes place over 4 days and contains (currently almost exclusively keg) beers from well-known and up and coming ‘craft’ breweries in three large spaces. It is not particularly cheap. While the entry price is modest (and tickets highly sought after) this year a beer token cost in the region of £2.25 for which you could buy a third of a pint of beer. That was irrespective of strengths which ranged from 3%ers to above 10%. Even so on the two days I attended there was a mixed crowd there both gender and age wise.

IndyMan is not just about the beer though- interesting as it is. There are also beer tastings and discussions about the industry. A relevant debate on the Thursday evening was about Craft Beer where it is now and where it is going. The panel included Paul Jones, an owner of the Manchester based Cloudwater Brewery, Ian Garrett from CAMRA, Sue Hayward from the Welsh brewery Waen which has just closed its brewery in favour of 'cuckoo' brewing at other sites, Jenn Merrick the brewer at Beavertown in Tottenham, the beer writer Matt Curtis and Claudia Asch from the IndyMan organising team.

I didn’t quite last for the entire debate (I had to visit the toilet- this does happen at beer festivals) but it must be said that a good deal of the discussion was quite familiar to me. Not just the beer bit but also questions about what makes businesses tick and what doesn’t. As a trade union officer in the private sector I often have these discussions with employers.

I wasn’t taking either minutes or notes so my discussion of what was said is firstly only a summary (not in order) and secondly unreliable. Not however hopefully so unreliable as to attribute to someone something they didn’t say.

While I wouldn’t be quite so evangelistic about craft beer as Matt Curtis, preferring to see the world in neither black or white but shades of grey, he did make a very good point that in the US even the most depressing of bars usually offered a good range of craft beer. That is far from the case here. But is beer drinking so different in the US that this could not reasonably be expected to happen here?

Paul Jones noted that Cloudwater had never styled itself as a ‘craft’ brewer focusing instead on brewing ‘modern’ beer- styles that appeal to changing tastes in the beer world.
Jenn Merrick, previously the brewer at Dark Star, one of the UK’s most well-known producers of cask beers such as Hophead, took a broader view. Beavertown produce mainly keg beer but she felt that they were very much in the same marketplace as the large scale producers of cask beer. Further she didn’t think cask was particularly on its way out (Sue Hayward argued that the future was keg) and that there was a possibility that new developments in cask could put current trends towards keg in the shade. Interestingly she also noted that the largest selling beer in Fuller’s pubs was often a Beavertown brew- probably Gamma Ray which is unpasteurised but sold under light gas pressure.

Ian Garrett added an important corrective by underlining that the vast majority of beer currently drunk in the UK is in cask and this can’t simply be ignored. The point was made during discussion that larger and better capitalised ‘craft’ brewers were one thing but many smaller, microbreweries found difficulty in getting on bar tops in a very competitive market. Sue Hayward felt that many smaller brewers struggled to get by, but this is often the case with small businesses in general. They are squeezed out by larger competitors.

In the case of beer we have been here before. It was in large part what led to the formation of CAMRA in 1971. A Company like Grand Metropolitan which had no history in brewing managed to acquire both Trumans and Watneys breweries, merge them and in due course destroy them. No doubt the thirst of shareholders for value was satisfied. Drinker's thirsts were not.

An attempt at a Craft Brewers Alliance a couple of years back- with some of the larger brewers at its core- has not been taken forward. Perhaps not least because one of the brewers, Camden, sold to mega-giant ABInBev. The reality is that without a sustained campaigning effort to keep and protect breweries that produce good beer- however defined- rather than good profits with an industrial product tasting vaguely like beer as the commodity concerned- the pressure for takeovers and closures will remain.

The elephant in the room was of course the now completed takeover/merger of SABMIller by ABInBev to create mega giant brewing concern operating in 70 countries across the world. SABMiller is quoted on the London Stock Exchange and it was the largest ever takeover deal there.

The Editor of the Good Beer Guide, Roger Protz, is certainly right that the big picture in beer is the battle between ABInBev and much smaller breweries whose concern is making excellent beer not huge profits (welcome as the latter obviously are).

Views on the matter of craft beer are as numerous as those who drink it. CAMRA has decided to delay the decision of its Revitalisation Project because there is so much to consider.
As someone who stays resolutely on the drinking side of the bar, I have a simple test though. If a beer tastes good (looking good is another matter) then I’m not too bothered how it's dispensed or what it’s called. This should be about enjoyment.

Keith Flett continues his series with a question: is there a link between class and what you drink?

The upper classes are supposed to drink fine wines and champagne but these days both are available at prudent prices in supermarkets. Besides, as Nye Bevan famously proclaimed, nothing is too good for the workers. Yet when it comes to beer, there are often attempts made to link class and what is to be found in the pint or half pint glass. Beer, mild, bitter, and stout have been seen as the drink of the working man (but certainly not the working woman who may prefer gin according to stereotype).

Refinements on this, what nowadays the Campaign for Real Ale persists in calling ‘speciality beers’ - one, Bingham’s vanilla stout, was voted Champion Beer of Britain in August - are held to be for the middle classes. Beer and class and the link between the two is a constant refrain. The beer writers Boak and Bailey have uncovered a 1960s comment about the time when cask beer was removed from pubs in favour of keg beer. A docker had noted that nearly all of his fellow workers in the East End had immediately preferred the keg. More recently in the Morning Star this summer, a correspondent claimed that pubs were being taken over and ruined by men who wore their hair in buns. The implication here is that they were middle class individuals, no doubt sipping ‘craft’ beer.

Before tap water became safe to drink beer with meals ‘table beer’ was a common drink for all classes. Table beer is available today usually at around 3%. In Victorian times it would mostly have been a little stronger. The rise of heavy and manufacturing industrial production was what really underwrote the link between beer and the working class.

A glance through Raphael Samuel’s classic History Workshop article, Workshop of the World, makes the point. Samuel emphasises that the introduction of machinery into British industry was a lengthy process. Machines are expensive and labour power can be cheaper for an employer. But whether involved in heavy manual labour – mining for example – or industrial processes based on machinery such as steel, the amount of liquid lost by labour had to be replaced. The replacement was often quantities of beer. The link between beer and class therefore had a strong material basis to it, and hat has now mostly disappeared in the UK. In the former industrial heartland of South Wales for example, where there is no deep coal mining left and steel is just hanging on, some of the beers that were popular are in something of a decline. Brains Dark, a relatively low strength, but classic and award winning dark mild, is rather harder to find in bars than it was even 20 years ago.

This leads us to the, in some senses, modern issue of craft. On a train returning from the (craft) Leeds beer festival recently I noticed a group of young men drinking train beers which the can described as ‘crafted’. The beer was Fosters which is produced in a mega industrial brewery. It no doubt has very high quality control to ensure consistency and hence profits, but you might struggle to find a definition of ‘craft’ that covers a mechanised industrial process.

Indeed the beer writer Pete Brown has noted that the Oxford English Dictionary does in fact already have a definition of craft beer:
craft beer (also craft brew) noun (US) a beer with a distinctive flavour, produced and distributed in a particular region. - OED 2003 Edition.

Brown points out that most of those who have a problem with craft beer are not really that interested in a dictionary definition. The idea of a craft beer is often focused on a small scale production of a specialist beer style. It might be a strong double IPA or a low-alcohol Berliner Weisse but it’s not something you are likely to come across in the beer aisle of Tesco.
Except of course confusingly it is. Tesco have long sold an own brand double IPA at 9.2% which is produced by Brewdog, who are generally held to be one of the leading craft brewers.
I prefer ownership as a better benchmark of craft beer. For example Camden Brewery, a well-known North London craft beer producer, was bought by the giant ABInBev last year. The beers are still decent enough and it may be that the accountants and bottom-line watchers of ABInBev don’t focus in too much detail on Camden’s brewing activities. But across industry that does tend to be what happens after takeovers, sooner or later.

To take another example: the UK distributor for the well regarded US craft brewer Brooklyn is Carlsberg. That may well just mean more efficient distribution, but it underlines the point that independent, smaller craft beer production, where the beer comes first, is under constant pressure from those for whom profit matters above all.

How does that fit into class? Craft beer tends to be drunk in third, half or two-third measures rather than pints and would typically in a pub be more expensive than cask beer. Breweries will often suggest that the more expensive price for craft beer more accurately reflects production costs and that the market squeezes margins on cask. All this, it might be said, tends to make craft beer – at least that served in keg – the drink of the middle classes.

Yet that is far from the reality. Many of the new wave of craft breweries have taprooms where they sell their beer direct to drinkers, on and off the premises. At my local Tottenham brewery, Beavertown, the beer is unfiltered and unpasteurised and sold under light gas pressure for £2.50 for two-thirds of a pint. Unsurprisingly, those attending are young and old, the well off and less well off. In short – a beer drinking democracy.