Many hoppy returns! CAMRA's 30th anniversary

CAMRA recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. Phil Mellows tells the story

My drinking life coincides almost exactly with the history of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) - certainly if you include those clandestine nights sharing bottles of Worthington E up in Pete's bedroom.

By the time I was old enough to do my drinking in the pub, cask ale was a scarcity in our part of North London.

Apart from a Saturday night trek across Walthamstow Marshes to find one of the few Young's pubs that side of the river, I drank keg bitter and thought little of it. I drank Watney's Red Barrel, Whitbread Tankard, Worthington E and Double Diamond according to which of the big brewer's pubs I was in. Sometimes I drank lager.

It's not something I'm proud of, but there wasn't much choice. When Tim Martin opened the first Wetherspoon pubs he opened them in North London because that was where they were needed. South of the river they had plenty of Young's and Fuller's pubs serving cask ale.

Things slowly began to change though. In Charrington's pubs, which dominated North-East London at that time, you started to find Charrington IPA and, occasionally, Bass. Nearly every Courage pub put on Courage Best and Directors. Watneys tried something called Stag and something called Tap.

Watneys was never any good at the cask ale game.

After virtually abandoning the traditional product for keg ales, the big brewers quietly reversed their strategy.

Why? Quite simply there had been a consumer revolt and, at the heart of it, channeling and focusing the gut feeling of thousands of drinkers, was CAMRA.

Certain individuals, such as the Guardian columnist Richard Boston, had been complaining about the proliferation of keg beer for years. But, as he writes in his 1976 book Beer and Skittles, "what was needed was some kind of organised body, and this was provided with skill and some panache by CAMRA.

"I think that three years ago the most anyone hoped for was that our protests and derision might, if ever so slightly, slow down what the big brewers were doing to beer and pubs. Within two years it was apparent not only that this was happening but also that the brewers were actually changing tack and reversing previous policies.

"The consumer revolt against the big brewers that has taken place in the past three or four years is unique. I know of no other industry of this size that has been checked in the direction it had taken by the massive resistance of consumers."

Speaking at the lunch-cum-dinner that marked CAMRA's 30th anniversary, Roger Protz, editor of the Good Beer Guide and the most high profile personality among the organisation's leadership, went so far as to say "if we weren't here, there wouldn't be cask beer today".

CAMRA was the brainchild of four journalists in a pub. Exactly which four journalists is a bit hazy. At the dinner, Roger had it down as Michael Hardman, whose recent heart attack cast something of a shadow over the occasion, Chris Hutt, who now heads Wizard Inns, Graham Lees, now in Australia and a mysterious Fourth Man.

Michael Hardman, however, tells a different story in the 1993 Good Beer Guide. There were four of them all right, he recalls: himself, Graham Lees, Jim Makin and Bill Mellor. Chris Hutt, who was writing a book called The Death of the English Pub, came along a couple of years later and had a dramatic impact on what Michael admits was "a jokey little drinking club...we knew little about beer".

They produced a magazine, What's Brewing, and a Good Beer Guide to point out which pubs still sold cask ale. They also launched a propaganda offensive against keg beers which effectively destroyed the credibility of brands which had been built by massive ad campaigns, most notably Red Barrel.

Grand Met, which owned it, had gone so far as to extend the branding to its pubs, which all had a little red barrel hanging outside. That was eventually withdrawn along with the beer itself under an onslaught of ridicule.

Regional brewers were, in the main, holding the fort for cask ale but some of them had joined the rush to keg through the 1960s. Leicester brewer Everards, for instance, only started brewing cask ale again in 1975, once the tide had turned.

The problem with having a successful consumer campaign is that once you have achieved your objectives it tends to lose momentum. That happened to CAMRA and by the late 1970s it was in deep financial trouble.

This fact was recognised at the dinner when a special award for outstanding services to CAMRA went to Neil Kellett. There was a barely muffled "who?" as the name was announced but this, it turned out, was the man who had taken control of the finances and kept the show on the road.

Over the last decade, CAMRA has bloomed once more, trebling its membership to 60,000. Its strength lies in its grassroots membership, the people who nominate the pubs for the Good Beer Guide. Whatever you think of the results, you have to admit that they are close to the ground. In the first ever, typewritten guide a pub that served after-hours drinks was indicated by a code - two full stops at the end of the entry.

As you might have noticed, CAMRA has not lost its nose for controversy. The decision to ban two Greene King brands from the Great British Beer Festival this summer - based on the fact that they are no longer brewed at the original plant - brought criticism from beyond the usual suspects.

Chris Hutt said he thought the organisation had "laid itself open" to attack with the move and it prompted a debate on Sky's Pub Channel in which Mark Dorber, who has assumed near god-like status among beer lovers for his work at the White Horse on Parsons Green, and Michael Hardman both questioned the direction of the organisation. Even Roger Protz raked over the old row about cask breathers which CAMRA opposes and Roger, personally, doesn't.

There are mutterings about CAMRA "losing its way" and it seems in continual danger of alienating people who should be its best friends. Charles Dent, managing director of Timothy Taylor, for instance, believes that its determination to widen choice "has to be at the expense of quality".

Maybe it has always been a bit like that with CAMRA. "It has often been too doctrinaire and at times shown signs of confusing beer with religion," Richard Boston wrote back in 1976, and even then there was a split over cask breathers.

At the dinner, Roger Protz alluded to uneasy relationships with publicans, recalling that in the 1970s one trade organ refused to call the organisation by its name, referring to it merely as "the real ale society".

So, if anything, CAMRA is getting along better with licensees than it did in the beginning, when many perceived it as a threat. Serving cask ale, of course, takes a little more trouble.

There is no sign, however, that CAMRA is going to go soft in its old age. "We have always stood up for drinkers' rights and we will continue to do so - we have no other reason to exist," said Roger.

If we are going to have CAMRA, we are going to have to accept the rough with the smooth.

At the end of the anniversary dinner, the predominantly booted and suited guests were handed a goodie bag containing the 2002 Good Beer Guide, a bouncy ball with flashing lights and one of those pens that hang round your neck - one part indispensable, one part fun and one part you weren't sure was of any value at all. A bit like CAMRA itself, really.