Sad Demise of an Iconic Beer

I read without much surprise about Carlsberg withdrawing the availability of Draught Burton Ale. It was formerly Ind Coope's Draught Burton Ale and once upon a time a Champion Beer of Britain. In 1990 in fact, though it had been around a fair length of time before that. Since 1976 in fact.  The 1977 edition of the Good Beer Guide describes it as "pale and well hopped". It had an Original Gravity  of 1047.5 - no alcohol by volume then - and by the time that became the norm, in 1990, it had settled at 4.4%.    It wasn't always described as a pale, hoppy beer, but sometimes as "sweet and malty" or "pale and fruity". It gains some rather grudging praise in 1990 and 1991's guides, but much more generous comments in 1992 when, such is the lead in time for the Good Beer Guide, it was the current (for that edition) Champion Beer.  By then the alcohol content had risen to 4.8% and praise was much more fulsome, though I for one take the 1992 description, which amongst other things misses out the distinct complex spiciness, with more than a pinch of salt.

Now I have a relationship with ICBA that goes back quite a few years.  When I worked in Leeds it was the premium beer in quite a few Tetley houses, including the Palace Hotel near my office and where, of a Friday, I used to go for a few lunchtime pints.  Long before I retired though, the lunchtime pint was frowned upon, but these were halcyon days. My lass worked in the same building at the time and was, (not always entirely willingly) able to drive me back over the Pennines when, with other reprobates, I had (over indulged) in a few pints of Burton Ale. Pale, perfumed, spicy from the Styrians and with a lovely, delicate, fragrant bitter, flowery, hoppy finish, it was simply divine.  One was never enough, but it went for you. Many a Friday lunchtime was extended by "flexitime" to an afternoon session and we all left pretty much the worse for wear. For me, it wasn't so bad. I was in charge of my area and my bosses were in Edinburgh. Should I be ashamed of that little abuse of power? Not a bit of it. Those were the days my friends.

Sadly over the years I encountered ICBA less and less, though when I did it was always consumed with relish. When Tetley's closed and as part of the deal for JW Lees to brew Carlsberg under licence, Burton Ale, now shorn of its Ind Coope name, was moved to Greengate.  They didn't make a bad fist of it at all and I sometimes had a taste of it in the Head Brewer's sample room, where a cask of every beer in trade is kept.  Michael Lees-Jones, Head Brewer of  JW Lees had told me that volumes were falling away, but I wasn't aware it had gone. If I had been I'd have nipped down to Lees for a sentimental last pint, but maybe such things are best left in the memory.

There has been some surprise expressed about the sadness with which some commentators have described the demise and loss of this beer. Those expressing sadness are right to say so. I don't think it too generous or fanciful to describe Draught Burton Ale as iconic and the loss of any icon is a moment for regret and reflection. I am grateful to Boak and Bailey for the information here about the early beginnings of ICBA, though I do think their conclusion about it being a "sop to CAMRA" seems more than a tad wishful.  Perhaps I would, wouldn't I, but I did enjoy the tales of how Ind Coope buttered CAMRA up so as not to dismiss this big brewer's beer out of hand. It had the ring of truth, though nowadays that would just be seen as "sensible marketing."  Sadly though ICBA was a victim of a changing brewing industry and uncaring owners. It's death was slow and lingering, but it is good to remember it in its heyday. All pomp and swagger.

Goodbye Old Friend. It really was good while it lasted.

And no. In historic terms, it wasn't a Burton Ale, but an ale, made in Burton. An IPA in fact.  I used to see the drays from Burton coming into Tetley's, no doubt loaded with ICBA.  I can picture them yet, Dark Green, with Ind Coope on the side and front.

The photo is from my own study where this plaque is on the wall.

What's in a Name?

One of the things I quite like about Wetherspoon is that in the main they name their pubs after some local aspect.  In the case of my adoptive town Middleton, the JDW is the Harbord Harbord after the landowner that gave the land to the town where the main street was then built and where the pub now stands.  Mind you it is such an ugly name that nobody calls it that.  As a matter of fact good old HH later became Lord Suffield and that would probably have tripped off the tongue a lot better, though no doubt it would still be called Wetherspoons.

Now in my actual home town of Dumbarton I learn that the long awaited Wetherspoon (long awaited by me as it will bring real ale back to the town) will be called the Captain James Lang.  "Who?" I thought.  Despite living there until I was 25, I'd never heard of him and had kind of thought that the pub would likely be called the Peter Denny after the famous shipbuilder of that name.  For those that don't know it - and I'm assuming all my readers here - Denny's was synonymous with Dumbarton and its decline as a town can clearly (in my view) be traced back to the fateful day in 1963 when William Denny and Bros closed.  This is an event I remember, as my father who died that year, took me to see the final ship (MV Melbrook) being built at Dennys in 1962. I can picture it yet in my mind's eye, much as I can the bright blue and orange plexiglassed Denny Hovercraft, which sat across from the closed Leven Shipyard, in McAllister's Boatyard, long after the yard closed.  As kids we used to clamber all over it until being chased away with a swift kick up the arse.  I wonder what happened to it?  Denny's also built Mersey ferries including the well known Royal Iris. Most famously of all was that it was Denny that completed the Cutty Sark in 1869.  I wonder what happened to that?

So who was Captain James Lang?  Well it seems he was a well known captain in the town in the early 1800s. According to Wikipedia,  "He was born in Dumbarton in 1805, and was educated there. James became a law clerk in the Town Clerk's office, but he later served on the town's steamers. In 1830, he became the captain of one of the Dumbarton Steamboat Company's vessels. He commanded, in succession, the "Dumbarton", the "Leven", the "Prince Albert", the "Lochlomond", and the "Queen". Contemporary accounts show that he was irreproachable in character, a man of good morals". Like me really.

I did think of suggesting to JDW that the pub be called the Peter Denny, but I didn't.  So it serves me right that they didn't pick it.   I suppose Captain James Lang will have to do.

There is also a pub on Dumbarton's High St called the Cutty Sark.  It sold cask beer in awful condition around ten years ago.  Or more.

The Past Revisited

I'm still on my "Pubs near my London flat" theme. There's one very near indeed that I had (until yesterday) never been in despite our fifteen years or so of it being just round the corner. The Dog and Truck I am told was rebuilt in 1935 in its present form and survived the wartime bombing unscathed. Hidden in Back Church St in East London it could be considered as a hidden gem. Well certainly hidden, though it is just five minutes off busy Leman St. But is it a gem and why despite its nearness have I not called in? I suppose the answer is that the time was never right.

The first thing you notice about the Dog and Truck is its faded Watney Combe and Reid livery.  Inside you step into the 1970s.  One single room, long and bare boarded is served from a long bar.  Typical of the seventies, there is a food servery on one side of the bar, from which astonishingly cheap (for London) food is dispensed. Think three Cumberland sausages and mash for under a fiver.  The menu has a kind of retro feel too, though food service was finished when I called in.  There are three handpulls offering Greene King IPA, another GK one turned round and thankfully, Harvey's Sussex Best which I chose and which was in splendid form. Clean, vibrant, cool and conditioned.  Lovely. I looked around. Inevitably there was a dart board and a pool table plus fruit machines.  No Space Invaders though, which was disappointing and no pink formica topped tables either, though I wouldn't have been at all surprised if there had been. Also typical of the seventies was a set of framed banknotes from around the world above the bar.

The pub had three other customers just finishing their pints when I arrived and within five minutes, there was just me and three - yes three barmaids - plus the landlord and landlady.  The boss was tilling up and the landlady sorting out some baked potatoes .  The barmaids scurried about busily.  It was a slightly surreal scene as I was completely ignored as if I was invisible, but not in a remotely unfriendly way.  One barmaid served me twice.  The only words exchanged were "£1.90 please" for my halves of beer.  No warm East End welcome, but I didn't make any effort either, serenely content as I was, sipping excellent beer in my time capsule.

I liked it a lot.  I'll be back and I'll make an effort to chat and hopefully too, I'll find it busier. I'm looking forward to it already.


It was a funny old day pubwise yesterday. More of that soon.

Three Years Ago Today

I thought I'd look back on my blog on today's day in past years. Well in this instance three years ago. I was writing about a rant by a geezer from Marston's, which was wide ranging, but gave CAMRA a good kicking. There are some good comments from a guy called Woolpack Dave (whatever happened to him?) and a wide boy called Gazza.

Even if I say so myself, it is pretty good and the comments seem equally valid today.  We haven't moved on that much in three years. Or have we? Read it all here.

This day in 2008 I was singing Glasgow's praises, but the rant is far better.

The Joys of Smooth

Remember Woolworth's? Woolies to us old'uns. They used to be big around here and had a large distribution depot a few miles from where I live. Now big businesses (remember them?) spawned social clubs and Woolies had a fine one, up a leafy (well not at this time of year obviously) side street, not far from the now closed depot. This still carries on and I read in a notice in the bar when we called for our quiz match last night, that the club has been bought from the receivers, which is good news. As part of that new freedom, they have immediately tied themselves (by loan I assume) to a brewer. Oh well, needs must and all that.

I have rather a long history with social clubs. It started with Denny's Social Club in Dumbarton, another club which long outlived its parent (shipbuilders in that case). In Liverpool it was the Docker's Club and through my years in the Liverpool Social Clubs Darts League, many others. Almost without exception, the ale (old fashioned CO2 keg) was bloody awful, requiring recourse to that old Scouse favourite, brown bitter, which accounts for my almost encyclopaedic knowledge of North Western bottled brown ales. The one exception was Walton Ward Labour Club, where a lone unmarked handpump dispensed Burtonwood Dark Mild. I don't recall cask in any other club back then.

Things have changed. In our quiz league, we often come across clubs with cask beer, though bright fonts still dominate. Back to Woolies. Their new supplier is Hydes and all the beers are smoothflow. I had the Hydes Black, a mild which knocks Guinness into a cocked hat flavour wise and doesn't taste "just cooked" and which, despite its Arctic temperature, was a decent beer well worth drinking. The boys had various Hydes' smooth beers and professed themselves as more or less content. As they pointed out, Hydes aren't known for pronounced flavour, so it was put uppable with.

My own view is that smoothflow only really suits milds and stouts. If only it wasn't served at 3 or 4° C!

The Start of the Revolution?

Not many who read this will know of Brendan Dobbin. Many will know of the Marble Arch and the Porterhouse Breweries though. Brendan designed both of them in their original incarnations. He was an advocate of heavy hopping and more than that, long before it became a usual thing to do, twenty years ago, he used American and New Zealand hops in his brewery in the bowels of the King's Arms in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester. (That's the rough one, not leafy Chorlton-cum-Hardy in case you are wondering.)

I knew Brendan a little as he supplied the pub I used to drink in, which sold among other beers of his, Ginger Beer, a forerunner of many. His bottled lagers (all done laboriously by hand) were interesting too (the diat pils had an OG of 1040 and an ABV of 5.5%) and his Guiltless Stout cocked a snook at a certain large Dublin brewer. His Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, later changed under threat of legal action to Yakima Grande was the stuff that set him out from the crowd. If you tasted it, you'll remember it. He even brewed an ESB as I recall. Famous "scooper" Gazza Prescott, now of Steel City Brewing rightly has him down as one of his "hop heroes". You can read what Gazza says here. There is also some interesting background about the area the pub was in. If anything Gazza is kind to it. It was decidedly scary.

The guy was a legend and still consults and builds breweries apparently, though he was also known to be growing bananas in Ireland! Why this nostalgia? The labels again. When I visited Brendan many years ago for a tour round the brewery, he gave me a few labels. Some of them are in the photo.

So was the micro brewing revolution started by Brendan Dobbin? Maybe not, but he was a pioneer and where he went, others have followed.  That's worth raising a new world hop filled glass to surely?

Guinness took Brendan to court for alleged infringement of copyright. Read about that here. I won't spoil it for you by telling you who won.

The Great Days of Keg

Inspired, not by morons, but by a look at some old stuff, I was drawn back in time to my early days working in the pub in Scotland. I can remember the beers. Hell I can remember which order the fonts were in. Nearest the door, Lorimer's Dark Heavy, a malty brew. Then Younger's Tartan Special, then McEwan's Export. In between them was Norseman Lager, Guinness and Tennents Lager, the biggest seller. We sold a lot of Tartan too. And Guinness before the "theatre of the pour" had even been thought of. These days it was way thicker, blacker, denser and took forever to settle. People ordered Guinness in advance then.

We had some interesting bottles too. Large pint "screwtops" of McEwan's Pale Ale and Whitbread Pale Ale, smaller bottles of McEwan's Double Century Strong Ale and of course, Fowler's Wee Heavy. We even sold bottles of Belgian Stella. The Boss called it Stella Artoys. The keg beer came a long way from a "cellar" on the same level and fobbed like a bugger. Bar staff did all the jobs from cleaning the toilet's, re-stocking the shelves, sorting the bottles, wiping the bottles, polishing the gantry and all the spirit bottles and hoovering the carpets. There was never a second when you were allowed to do nothing and the place was like a new pin. There was no cleaner employed and the pub had to be ready for the next session when we left. There wasn't much time to skive anyway. The pub was generally heaving until ten o'clock (later eleven) when we threw them all out, sometimes physically and always accompanied by a screaming electric bell to emphasise the point.

On a Sunday it was worse. All pubs were closed in Scotland then (1974 ish) and the only places open were hotel bars and "bona fide inns" such as us. It was absolute mayhem for the two lunchtime opening hours.

After they all went and we'd readied the place there was a blissful hour drinking Export and playing pool. I didn't work on Sunday night. No-one but the Boss could face two such sessions.


Of course all our wages went straight back over the bar.

My favourite beer in these days was Diamond Heavy, or at a pinch, the Export, brewed by Ind Coope (Alloa). We didn't sell it, but the nearest bar to work did. I can still remember its taste. I'd never heard of cask ale.

The Villiers

When I lived in Liverpool I often used to frequent the Villiers when in town. A street corner Higsons pub, it was cosy and welcoming with good beer. My old mate RedNev and I, among many others, stopped a lot of Higgies going sour in there.

There was a fearsomely steep set of stairs down to the toilet, so much so, that after a few pints, it looked like a ladder. You needed these pints to have the courage to tackle it.

Like Higsons, I wish it was still there, but it made way for a shopping centre over 20 years ago.

I am grateful to RedNev for the photo and the memories.