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The Editor assures me that, contrary
to what I inferred from the conversation
detailed in the June Edge, the
public don’t actually want to read the
same article every month. So, it’s
back to the grindstone, when I was
looking forward to graceful retirement….
All this controversy has got me
thinking. Whatever the tedium and
disenchantment engendered by reading
the same content month after
month, year after year, there are certain
things we expect to have a similarity
time after time. Take, for example,
the Dickens novel to which I
referred (also June Edge). Obviously
no-one would want or expect
Dickens to write out the same novel
every few yearsw and submit it for
publication in the same form with the
same title; that would be crazy and
pointless, wouldn’t it? Suppose,
however, you had fond, schoolday
memories of reading one of his
tomes and decided to buy a new edition
of it and rediscover its prolix
delights. You wouldn’t, in those circumstances,
expect to find chapters
presented out of order, new characters
inserted and the ending
changed, simply because the editor
had thought it would sell more
copies, would you? You’d clearly
want to re-read the book you remembered.
And so it is with beers. We all look
forward to a certain degree of innovation
and experimentation when
experiencing a new beer we’ve not
tried before, even though these days
that often results in an excess of citric
bitterness more suited to washing-up
liquid than beer. But we don’t
expect to find that someone has
played around with a good beer
we’ve returned to time after time,
almost to the point of it being a new
beer under an old name.
Oft-times, however, that’s exactly
what happens, particularly when an
established brewery with a certain
reputation gets snapped up by one
of its competitors. Is the buyer, often
a large multi-national company, really
interested in the flavour of the
beer and the heritage surrounding its
production? Or are they actually
interested in the reputation that goes
with the name?
David Sherman’s
BEVERAGE
REPORT
It’s notable that many people, even
those with some knowledge and
experience of the world of beer, will
‘drink the name’ instead of tasting
the beer, rather like people who went
to see Bob Dylan in the nineties and
‘applauded the memory’, rather than
booing the performances. The first
brewery to benefit from this lack of
objectivity amongst the ale-drinking
public was Greene King. “I remember
in the 70s,” one fifty-something
drinker told me, “CAMRA members
used to travel for miles to drink
Greene King IPA.” He doesn’t
remember that at all, of course,
because there was no beer called
Greene King IPA in the seventies;
it’s a mid-80s re-badging of Greene
King Bitter. “They won’t touch it now,
but it hasn’t chnaged,” he continued.
It has changed. Last time I saw any
form of ingredients listing for Greene
King IPA, it included First Gold hops,
a new variety developed in the late-
80s. Unless Dr. Who is one of GKs
brewing consultants, it’s unlikely
they were in the beer 35 years ago.
One has to wonder if the same fate,
or worse, will befall Sharp’s beers.
Brewed in Cornwall by one of the
most successful new micros, their
beers have now been absorbed into
the portfolio of mineral-water producers
Molson Coors. Is this giant
American piss-merchant really interested
in keeping a small brewery
churning out five or six beers in a
remote corner of England? Or are
they just after the flagship session
bitter, Doom Bar? Doom Bar has
developed, in recent years, a national
reputation (which is, of course,
what first brought it to the attention
of the asset-stripping arm of the
brewing industry), and rightly so. It’s
a good, solid beer of reliable quality,
striking the right balance between
lightness of touch and fullness of
flavour.
Or so it was. It could just be an
unfortunate blip, cask beer being
naturally variable and all, but the
other weekend at a pub of generally
impeccable quality, my pint of
Molson Coors Sharp’s Doom Bar
(a name which sticks in the throat for
reasons other than length) was
bland, featureless and dull.
Anyone remember Boddington’s?
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