The shape of CAMRA to come

I've just completed the online questionnaire issued by CAMRA as part of the Revitalisation Project set up to look at the future of the organisation and will go along to the consultation meeting being hosted by my branch this summer.

It's good that CAMRA is reviewing its aims and I'm quite relaxed about whatever outcome is finally reached. The battle to save traditional, draught cask beer in England was won some time ago and it's inevitable that the focus of the campaign will shift away from that to other things.

The consultation document, Shaping the Future, lists what it sees as the other achievements of CAMRA and the challenges facing pubs. I'm not sure that I agree with most of the things on either list.

On the achievements, while the tax relief for small brewers and scrapping of the Beer Duty Escalator are both obviously good things, all day opening has benefited the diner more than the drinker, making many licensed establishments feel more like restaurants than pubs, and the 1989 Beer Orders led directly to the pubcos which CAMRA now rails against.

As for the challenges facing pubs, the link between the smoking ban, drink driving limit and cheap supermarket booze and the decline in the on-trade is not at all clear. And neither "craft keg" nor inactive members pose an existential threat to either cask beer or CAMRA: the first is a niche product which may well turn out to be a passing fad and the second will probably lead to a looser structure, more emphasis on the social side of the campaign and paid organisers substituting more for volunteers.

A few thoughts about Brussels

This time last year, I was in Brussels, flying back at the end of my first trip to the Belgian capital from the airport at Zaventem which on Tuesday morning was the scene of two of the three bomb attacks which struck the city.

As I suppose is natural, it's more shocking when a bomb blows up somewhere you've been to or know well, with the inevitable thought of "there but for the grace of God go I". I must admit that, even after I'd been to Brussels, I wasn't really aware that it had a sizeable population of North African Muslim immigrants or that its Molenbeek district was home to large numbers of jihadis who had returned from fighting in Syria: like most people who go to Brussels, I stuck to the the tourist quarter around the Grand Place with its bars and cafes.

After a massacre such as this week's, the inevitable question is asked: what we can do to stop it happening again? Last night, in a special edition of the BBC's Panorama programme, the investigative journalist Peter Taylor sought some of the answers.

For the the last decade or so, Taylor has been investigating the role of the intelligence agencies in the fight against Islamist terrorism (before that, he spent much of his career looking into their covert operations in the thirty-year conflict in Northern Ireland). A few things soon become apparent about those suspected of carrying out the Brussels attacks and the ones in Paris last November: they tend to have friendship or family links with others in their terrorist cell, to be from not particularly religious backgrounds, to be involved in petty crime and are often recruited whilst in prison.

If the alienation felt by many young Muslim men in Europe, which leads some of them to become jihadis, has socioeconomic rather than religious roots (albeit that it often take a religious form), the answer to the violence perpetrated on the streets of its cities becomes clear: tackling the lack of integration in housing and schools and providing decent jobs as an alternative to the low-level gangsterism which sees some of them eventually enter the ranks of Islamist terrorist networks like ISIS. The real question is whether European governments have the desire to do it.

Reassuringly inaccurate

I saw the new Stella Artois advert for the first time yesterday and it got me thinking.

Did you, like me, think that the first pale lager was brewed in Pilsen in 1842?  Did you also think that Stella Artois was launched as a Christmas beer in 1926? Well, it seems that we were all wrong and the boys from AB-InBev are here to set us straight: Sébastian Artois started knocking out the stuff shortly after he took over the Leuven brewery in 1717. The beer history books are clearly all going to have to be rewritten.

A pie and a pint

I've been highly amused by the extensive press and TV coverage of the controversy caused by a pasty winning the British Pie of the Year award.

Although I don't really go in much for the idea of beer and food matching, there is nothing finer than a pork pie and a pint of bitter. So what qualifies as a pie, and what doesn't?

To me, a pie has to be fully enclosed, so a dish topped with a pastry lid isn't a pie, whatever it says on the menu. On the pie/pasty issue, I'm instinctively with those who say that they're two separate things, but I'm not really sure why. It's nothing to do with the filling, sweet or savoury, or whether it's served hot or cold, so maybe it just comes down to the shape.

Remembering Burnden Park

Today is the seventieth anniversary of a disaster at Bolton Wanderers' home ground Burnden Park which claimed the lives of thirty-three football fans.

When you read what happened at that FA Cup quarter-final in 1946, it's hard not to think of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989: policing and communication failures, a build up of pressure outside the turnstiles, an exit gate opened to relieve the crush leading to a sudden influx onto an already overcrowded, and badly designed, terrace, people at the front unable to escape being asphyxiated and the press subsequently blaming the fans' behaviour for their deaths. But whereas Hillsborough has rightly been remembered every year for the last quarter of a century, the disaster at Burnden Park has been all but forgotten.

A number of theories have been put forward for that: the death toll not seeming particularly high at the time given the military and civilian losses of the Second World War which had just ended, the fact that unlike the football disasters of the 80's (Bradford, Heysel, Hillsborough) the game wasn't seen live on TV by millions of people at home, and the lack of a campaign to hold people to account for what happened, Whatever the reason, we should remember its victims today.

Pub of the Year 2016

I went to Stockport last night for the presentation of my CAMRA branch's Pub of the Year award to the Boars Head, a Sam Smith's pub on the marketplace which serves their only cask beer, Old Brewery Bitter.

I drank in Sam's Smith's other pub in the town, the Queens Head, a few times when I worked in Stockport in the late 90's and early 2000's, but hadn't been to the Boars Head before. It has the older male working-class clientele you expect in a Sam Smith's pub, no doubt attracted by the very reasonable prices: a pint of Old Brewery Bitter is £1.80 (not a typo, London readers). It has also the kind of rambling corridor and multi-room layout and Victorian-type decor that I'm a big fan of.

I'd guess that the Boars Head is the only CAMRA Pub of the Year in the country which only serves one cask beer. I hadn't drunk Old Brewery Bitter for a while; it was the heavy malty, bready Yorkshire bitter I remembered and was well-kept. I also tried Sam Smith's keg Extra Stout on draught and was impressed by its roasty taste, a cut above that of the Guinness it replaced.

Lenten beer?

The start of Lent last week got me thinking about why, in England at least, there are no beers associated with this part of the liturgical calendar.

There are beers brewed for the seasons (golden summer ales and darker winter ones) and for other religious festivals, especially Christmas when most breweries bring out a seasonal beer. Maybe it's because Lent doesn't lend itself to Yule Love It/Good Elf-type puns. There's also probably the thought that, unlike at Christmas, people will be giving things up rather than enjoying them,

Strong, malty beers are drunk in Lent elsewhere in Europe. The Doppelbock known as Fastenbier in Bavaria and the high-gravity Trappist beers of Belgium were both supposedly first brewed by monks as sustenance, "liquid bread", when fasting in Lent. Whether that's true or not, it does show that at least some of our continental cousins see beer as an essential part of daily life, rather than an occasional luxury, which also reflects different attitudes to drinking in Catholic and Protestant areas.