'Beer festival closes after customers drink all the beer'
A beer festival had to close a day early after customers drank the bar dry. The Beer on the Wye festival in Herefordshire was due to run until Sunday night but it had to close after running out of beer, cider and perry on Saturday. Mark Haslam, the festival organiser, said around 3,800 people had turned up to the festival - 30 per cent more on last year - The Telegraph
Diageo has refused to rule out moving its bottling operations out of Scotland altogether. Its managing director in Scotland, Brian Donaghey, fuelled concerns about more job cuts when he told a Sunday newspaper that "Scotch has to be distilled and matured in Scotland, but it doesn't have to be bottled in Scotland". A spokesman for the company said yesterday it could make economic sense in some circumstances to move bottling closer to export markets - The Scotsman
Dozens of stars turned out to pay tribute to actress Wendy Richard yesterday. A plaque at the Shepherds Tavern - the pub in London's Mayfair her parents used to run - was unveiled by Are You Being Served? creator David Croft - The Sun
No one seems to have picked up, until it was too late, that for all Cobra's glitzy marketing efforts — it spent £40 million on marketing over 20 years — people rarely drank the stuff unless in Indian restaurants, that the company had never been profitable and that, in the year to July 2007, the latest for which accounts are publicly available, Cobra lost £13 million. Indeed, the story of Cobra highlights a number of awkward truths for the business world, the first of which is this: business journalists rarely get the full truth about companies. The fact is that, despite all the awards we enjoy giving ourselves, with the exception of one or two individuals, we failed to predict almost all the crises enveloping us: the Ponzi schemes, the frauds, the credit crunch, everything in fact, including Cobra. Not that it's our fault: journalists are only as good as their sources and if there's one thing we've learnt this year it is that the people running businesses are as clueless as everyone else - Sathnam Sanghera in The Times
Comedian Alan Carr regulary plays secret gigs in London pubs, despite his TV success. "I just turn up in pubs. It's to see if the jokes work," he explains. "I'm a stand up by trade and if ultimately TV is sick of me I will just go back on the road" - The Independent
