Champion Ale

I picked up a bottle of McEwan's Champion Ale from Sainsbury's last week. I'd seen mixed reviews of it online, but you can't really go wrong at £1.50 for almost a pint of a 7.3% beer. A strong ale in the Scottish "wee heavy" style, it was first sold in 1998 after winning a competition, hence the name, and is the British version of a beer brewed for the Belgian market, 8% Gordon's Scotch Ale.

William McEwan's, who began brewing at Fountainbridge on the outskirts of Edinburgh in 1856, joined the twentieth century merry-go-round of brewery mergers and acquisitions by linking up with local rivals William Younger's to form Scottish Brewers in 1931, before becoming part of Scottish & Newcastle in 1960 (one of my childhood memories is of driving into Manchester along Princess Parkway past their Moss Side brewery with the McEwan's Laughing Cavalier on the side) and then Heineken in 2008; their beers are now brewed by Marston's at the former Wells & Young Eagle Brewery in Bedford.

The label describes the beer as "smooth, full-bodied and complex", and it's certainly that. The first thing that hits you as you pour it into the glass is the waft of alcohol. There's quite a pronounced metallic taste and some sherryish notes, a bit like Fuller's 1845, one of the few remaining Burton ales, a style not a million miles away from Scottish "wee heavy".

I expect a few similar beers will be brewed for the coronation of King Charles III next summer.

O Caledonia

Heineken is to shut the Caledonian Brewery in Edinburgh, leaving the Scottish capital without a large brewery for the first time since the eighteenth century (a host of English cities are in the same position, including Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and Nottingham, and London might ultimately join them following the Asahi takeover of Fuller's). 

Founded in 1869 by George Lorimer and Robert Clark, Caledonian has passed through a number of hands since, being acquired by Sunderland's now defunct Vaux Brewery in 1939 and Scottish and Newcastle in 2004, not long before S&N were themselves taken over by the Dutch megabrewer Heineken in 2008.

As part of the S&N/Heineken portfolio, Caledonian's Deuchars IPA became a nationally distributed brand - at one point, it seemed to be on the bar of every Wetherspoons pub you went in - and still ranks in the top ten cask beers by sales.

Caledonian beers will now be contract brewed at the Greene King-owned Belhaven Brewery in Dunbar, although I wouldn't be surprised if, like Manchester's Boddingtons Bitter, they eventually embark on an odyssey of multinational breweries where once famous regional beers eke out a strange half life in keg or cask form.

Scotland: that was then, this is now

Two things happened yesterday, the death at 79 of the former Celtic player and manager, and captain of the first British club to win the European Cup, Billy McNeill, and the announcement by the Scottish FA of a rather thin shortlist for a new head coach after the national team's lacklustre start to their Euro 2020 qualifying campaign, that somehow seemed to sum up the state of Scottish football now.

All but one of the so-called Lisbon Lions team which lifted the 1967 European Cup, with a 2-1 win over the favourites Inter Milan, was born within a few miles of the club's home ground, Celtic Park, and while the next generation of top Scottish footballers largely chose to ply their trade in England, with Celtic and other Scottish clubs becoming almost feeder clubs for big clubs south of the border in the 70s and 80s, the national side which they continued to represent was still a force in world football (the former Manchester United midfielder and Scottish international Lou Macari tells the story of how, when they were boarding the plane at Glasgow Airport to fly to Argentina for the 1978 World Cup, a worker there shouted up the steps from the runway that he'd see them back there the next month with the trophy). Now, of course, as in England, players in the Scottish leagues are as likely to come from other countries in Europe, or further afield, than they are the cities which the clubs in them represent.

The football writer Jonathan Wilson has pointed out that if you invent a sport (England and Scotland played the first international football match in 1872) and then export it to the rest of the world, the only way is down, and although I suppose Scotland's decline isn't quite as dramatic as that of two-time World Cup winners Uruguay or inter- and post-war central European powerhouses Austria and Hungary, the current national side and the performance of its league clubs in European competitions still stand in sharp contrast to those that I remember from the 70s and 80s.

RIP Hugh McIlvanney

The sports journalist Hugh McIlvanney, who has died aged 84, was one of the country's most distinguished football writers in a career which spanned more than five decades, and several Fleet Street newspapers, until his retirement only a few years ago.

I think I first became aware of McIlvanney when I watched the TV programme he wrote and presented about the trinity of legendary Scottish football managers of the fifties and sixties, Matt Busby at Manchester United, Bill Shankly at Liverpool and Jock Stein who led Celtic to European Cup glory in Lisbon in 1967, as Busby did with United the following year at Wembley.

McIlvanney came from the same working-class background, the mining villages of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire in the West of Scotland, a world of hard and dangerous manual labour from a young age and a culture of self-reliance and self-education that has now all but disappeared.

I can imagine McIlvanney chatting to Busby,  Shankly or Stein with a glass of Scotch whisky in hand at the bar of a lounge above the stand at Old Trafford, Anfield or Celtic Park after a big European night under the newly-installed floodlights in the sixties, analysing in their soft Scottish brogues the team's performance in the match just played, reminiscing about the junior football they would all have known in their youth, and maybe marvelling at how far they had travelled in their different paths from that time and place.

Macbeth in Manchester

I went to a talk by beer historian and blogger Ron Pattinson yesterday afternoon, part of the so-called Macbeth Tour he's doing to promote his new book about Scottish beer.

The event took place at the Beer Nouveau Brewery Tap, a microbrewery housed within a railway arch in Ardwick half a mile south of Piccadilly station, and featured tastings of historic Scottish beers recreated by them as well as some produced by Manchester homebrewers.

The beers, which spanned the years 1879 to 1894, were shilling ales, designated according to the wholesale price of a hogshead which, at least in the nineteenth century, gave the drinker some idea of their strength: the ones we tried began with a 1879 Youngers 50/- Sparkling Ale at 3.7% abv and ended with a 160/- from the same brewery and year at 7.8%.

The Scotch ales brewed and sold in Belgium and the United States tend to be dark, strong and malty but shilling ales like the ones we drank yesterday are nothing like that, being pale and well-hopped. Many also had an appealingly sharp sourness and some woodiness picked up from the oak casks they'd been racked into. My favourites were probably the Youngers 1879 160/- and Ushers 1885 100/- which reminded me of pale barley wines.

Thanks again to Ron for the talk, which as always was packed with masses of interesting and informative stuff interspersed with lots of humour and myth-busting, and to Steve at Beer Nouveau for kindly hosting us.

Go South!

The Labour Group on Northumberland County Council has sparked a political row by arguing that the council should run an advertising campaign to attract Scottish drinkers when a minimum alcohol unit price is introduced north of the border.

There is of course nothing the Scottish Government can do to stop incursions of Pictish proportions into the unregulated English alcohol market. But what if Scotland votes for independence? Will bootleggers be chased over the Tweed by Scottish sheriffs? Will Glasgow become the new Chicago with speakeasies selling cheap imported English booze?

The Catholic Church and children in care

A Scottish sheriff's inquiry in Paisley yesterday found that the deaths of two teenage girls who committed suicide jumping off a bridge could have been prevented if there had been more staff on duty at the care home where they lived and safety precautions had been taken.

Niamh Lafferty and Georgia Rowe died in October 2009 after absconding from the Good Shepherd unit in Bishopton, Renfrewshire. The home, now closed, was originally run by nuns before being taken over by a charity called the Cora Foundation, described by the Catholic Media Service at the time as "an Agency of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Scotland." The Good Shepherd home has since been the subject of allegations of physical abuse of the teenage girls sent there.

That the care of children has been transferred from local authorities to unelected and unacountable mangement boards is alarming enough — one of the trustees at the Good Shepherd home, ex-Scottish Conservative leader Annabel Goldie has dismissed the scandal, remarking "Girls are going to abscond. That is just one of the predictable consequences of the challenged girls who go to the centre and the environment which the centre has to manage." —  but for them to be placed in the hands of the Catholic Church given its appalling record in this area is a sick joke.

Scots Wha Hae

Although there's been a lot of politiciking on the part of the Tories and SNP over the timing of it, the question to be asked and rules for who can vote in it, a referendum on Scottish independence now looks likely to be held within the next couple of years.

Scotland is clearly a nation with its own history, culture, language, literature and education and legal systems.  If the Scottish people want to separate from the rest of the United Kingdom they should be allowed to. But what would they gain?

Nationalism is a divisive force but some nationalisms are more understandable than others, especially those of oppressed peoples such as Jewish nationalism (Zionism) in the late nineteeenth and first half of the twentieth century, Irish nationalism from the late eighteeenth to early twentieth century and black nationalism in the US in the 1960's.  Scottish nationalism is one of the least understandable, being a mix of romantic longing for a past that never was, a drive to sell Tartan and tweed to the tourists and anti-Englishness.  In no way are the Scottish people oppressed and nor have they been in history.  Scots have been prime ministers, top judges, generals and colonial administrators.  There has been no discrimination against Scottish people in the United Kingdom or British Empire akin to that experienced by black, Jewish or Irish people.

Things like the Highland Clearances happened all over England as land was enclosed and peasants driven into the towns.  Scotland was ruled for much of the twentieth century by Tory governments despite only electing a handful of Tory MP's but then so was the North of England.

The SNP is clear that Scotland would remain a monarchy post-independence, a member of the EU, with no border controls with England, and would keep the pound at least initially.  Whether an independent Scotland would leave NATO is unclear.  Would anyone in an already devolved Scotland notice any difference if independence were won?

Scotland leads the way on standing

The Scottish Premier League has announced that top-flight clubs in Scotland will be allowed to reintroduce standing at their grounds after its twelve member clubs voted on the question yesterday. Celtic, Rangers, Kilmarnock and Motherwell have already said that they want to to reintroduce standing.

The SPL chief executive pointed out that if large, safe standing terraces were possible in the German Bundesliga why wouldn't they be in Scotland, an argument whose logic is unanswerable.  He also said that he was "delighted we have been able to respond positively to supporters' views on improving the match day experience."

Don't expect a similar announcement from the FA any time soon but if its leadership actually reflected the views of the fans who pay their wages we might be able to avoid disputes like this.