Forget the feuds, love the beer
My fellow columnist and I used to have some quite colourful spats in the pages of this and other trade magazines, but that’s mostly behind us now. Last season, Roger Protz even took me to Upton Park to watch his football team convincingly beat my football team.
I think one of the breakthrough moments we had was around an article I wrote about beer festivals. I’d written often in the past attacking the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) for its narrow-minded attitude, provoking it by saying events such as the Great British Beer Festival should allow any and all kinds of beer in.
Roger took exception to this every time. And then I wrote a piece saying that anyone like me who was interested in beer beyond cask ale and wanted to see it celebrated in a broader sense should forget trying to change CAMRA, and should instead set up an alternative to the traditional real-ale festival that had nothing to do with CAMRA.
To my surprise, Roger contacted me to say he agreed completely.
CAMRA was not against other beers, he argued, but it was the Campaign for Real Ale. That’s what it did, that’s what it was for. If there were other events beyond CAMRA’s remit, all well and good — the more the merrier.
That was around four years ago, and as the definition of what ‘good beer’ can be continues to extend further beyond cask ale (though I believe cask ale will always be at its heart) this is a sentiment expressed with increasing frequency by CAMRA’s higher-ups. On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, founder Michael Hardman gave an interview in which he said CAMRA had always been an organisation for something, not against something. It doesn’t always come across that way, but it is true.
Common sense
This year, CAMRA’s real-ale festivals are selling out way in advance. And at the same time, the number of alternative, craft beer-focused beer festivals is growing. IndyManBeerCon, which took place in Manchester last autumn, was a huge success and is being repeated again this year.
Craft Beer Rising took place in London a few weeks ago, and the London Brewers’ Alliance is holding its own festival this bank holiday weekend. More are being planned — my inbox is busy with communication from enthusiastic organisers.
Within the industry and within beer-geek circles, we all get too close to the issues. We lose sight of how the vast majority of beer drinkers see things, what excites and interests them, what loyalties they have. We forget, for example, that many CAMRA members join the organisation simply because they love great-tasting, well-made beer, and to them that’s what CAMRA stands for.
We start to form factions. Some craft-beer fans seem able only to express their enthusiasm for amazing beers by slagging off more traditional ales and the people who make and drink them. And they are met with equal disdain from the other side.
At CAMRA’s recent AGM there were two motions attacking craft beer, one proposing the extraordinary idea that the term should be banned from CAMRA publications. These motions were voted down after much sensible debate, with opposition to them led by (beer writer) Tim Webb — and our own Roger Protz.
It’s brilliant to see common sense breaking out. Those who see one type of interesting, flavourful beer or beer drinker as ‘the enemy’ of another need to slap themselves across the face. Because ordinary drinkers are showing us that all that matters is great beer, and that well-made cask ale, lager, experimental beer and ‘craft-keg’ all go hand in hand.
Real-ale festivals and a new breed of craft-beer festivals are both growing. Real-ale volumes and craft-beer volumes are both significantly outperforming the rest of the beer market. Many of the people who go to them are the same people, drinking both.
We should celebrate the diversity of beer we have now, and the fact the appreciation of it seems to be spreading beyond beer-geek circles and sparking the imaginations of mainstream drinkers. We should be happy there’s traditional real ale, and well-made lager, and decent keg ale, which has a different character to cask and is neither better nor worse, just different, and a whole new range of beer styles.
When even tireless champions of CAMRA from its earliest days can see this, it’s time for the more militant people on different sides of a needless debate to start to relax, and simply enjoy the beer.
