OPINION: Why pubs need systems, not hobby-publicans

Many pub operators think buying or renting a pub is a lifestyle choice. That’s only true up to a point – you certainly have to enjoy it!

However, it needs a business plan and an attitude where you are willing to put in the many hard hours of work, or you won’t have it for long. You have to be prepared to do anything that you would ask your staff to do. One day, they may not be there and it will fall on you to fill in for them.

You have to trust your team members up to their level of competence. I have had a few over the years that I could not trust to do the job consistently and competently – that is a major pain. It’s better to put the time into recruiting and training the right people so you can trust them in the future.

Next comes cleanliness – the pub cleaner is a vital part of the team. I see many pubs where the licensee does the cleaning. Is that REALLY the best use of their time? Occasionally it might be but developing the business and understanding the market are surely more time and money-efficient. Are you really giving up precious sleeping time to go in and clean the pub in the morning? Think it through…

Talking of cleaning brings me on to the specialism of the wet-led pub. Cleanliness behind the scenes is absolutely critical, particularly if you are selling cask beer. The cellar has to be clean and tidy. Spillages have to be hosed away. Beer lines have to be cleaned regularly and we could not operate our intensive cask offer without a Beer Piper machine, having bought our first one over 30 years ago.

Washing your lines after every cask and keg is second nature at the Crown Inn, not just once a week as many pubs do. With the 14 handpulls at the Crown Inn, this is particularly important, because we may start the week with (say) a Hobson’s beer on a particular line, changing onto a Burton Bridge beer after a day or so, then a Purity beer a few days later.

It is not unusual to have three or four beers with different yeasts going through a handpull in the space of a week, so one clean a week is not adequate. If you do not clean the line between each one, you have major contamination risks. Taps and filters must be cleaned likewise. Just swilling them under the tap is just not good enough. Ours are taken apart and cleaned by hand after every use.

Speaking of contamination risks, over the past couple of years, we have introduced dedicated gluten-free cask and keg lines to cater for a growing market. More gluten-free beers are becoming available and, if you are going to be serious about them, you can’t just put those beers on any old line, as some (sadly) do.

Spare capacity needed

No matter how good your cleaning regime, you can never be completely sure that you are not risking the health of a customer if you do not isolate your gluten-free lines, taps, filters, dipstick, etc. from the rest of your offering. We completely stripped down the lines that we wanted to use for this, even going to the extent of installing a new cylinder on the relevant handpull. We even use a separate cloth to wipe the separate dipstick that we use for measuring gluten-free beers, which are kept on a separate stillage to avoid confusion.

Even though we do not use all the handpulls at once, you need some spare capacity to have beers ready to replace those that are due to run out. A good cellar management system is key to this. How do you keep a ‘balanced board’ with a range of beers of different strengths and styles?

Cellar record systems will help you avoid the situation I see all too often where, for example, the only four handpulls might have Bass, Doom Bar, Pedigree and Butty Bach as the only options, all brown-ish beers of a similar style and strength, all competing with each other for the same customers and all with a poor rate of sale.

You need to cater for all your customers, which is why we have low-gravity beers on such as the pale 3.4% ABV Hobson’s Twisted Spire at £3.90, at least one mild, stout or porter (usually two in winter), some mid-strength beers at 4.0% to 4.3% ABV and some stronger ones at 4.5% to 5.0% ABV. Our only permanent beer is Hobson’s 3.8% ABV Best Bitter at £4, which we have been selling since the day we opened in 1995.

Add in a few more beers, both from the area and from around the country towards the end of the week and, with a handpulled cider, we are quickly up to a good range of styles and strengths to maximise the interest of our customers.

My staff have heard me many times saying “If you have a business and don’t have systems, it’s not a business, it’s a hobby”. Most industries will have amateurs coming and going and ours sees a lot of ‘hobby-publicans’, those who think it would be nice to sit at the bar and drink for free! Remember, if YOU drink for free, how can you be sure that your staff aren’t copying your example? We use a stock-taker, essential if you want to know that your stock is being correctly sold and recorded. If you can see that one particular product is not getting the right yield, you can hone in on that problem but not if you are the problem, drinking your own profits!

More than two thirds of our sales comes from beer and the majority of that is cask beer.

Since Covid, most retailers will tell you the ‘pattern of trade’ has vanished. For no apparent reason, we might have a brilliant Monday or a deathly Friday. This makes the planning of staff and stock much harder. We all know that some customers got used to drinking at home in 2020 and 2021 – some of them have never returned to pubs, while others come a lot less frequently. This makes it even more important to get the cost of a pint right.

We have refused to get involved with price wars that others may want but offer consistently good beers at a fair price. That way, we build up the trust of new customers, including those of all ages.

Too many breweries and pubs

In truth, the real competition does not come from other pubs. It comes from the myriad of other opportunities for people to spend their leisure time and money.

Some people would say cask beer is sold too cheaply and it should be priced closer to keg beer, much of which is becoming exorbitant in price. However, I don’t see many complaining that the supermarkets were selling slabs of cheap muck for around £8 during the World Cup. This remains one of the major problems affecting pubs – that many people see pubs as ripping off their customers – because we are not selling our quality products at the same low price.

However, the supermarkets are selling alcohol at a loss and claiming back those losses against VAT and corporation tax. In other words, we taxpayers are subsidising the supermarkets to sell drink at a loss in competition with ourselves. Is this country really so well off that we can afford to subsidise supermarkets to sell alcohol at a loss? The sooner the industry wakes up to this problem, the sooner we can get a Government to realise that it can save money by helping solve this problem! OK, rant over… for now.

How do I see the future for cask beer? Well, at the moment, there are too many breweries and pubs for the current market, yet I see some tentative signs of growth, particularly as Andy Burnham seems to be making all the right noises. If he increases economic confidence in the population, I expect to see that growth continue, giving opportunities for those quality operators who are prepared to put in the effort.

Consolidation of various independent breweries may help some to survive, whereas consolidation among the national and international operators is reducing the amount of cask beer that they seem to want to brew. The distinction between the boring, identikit pubs selling boring, identikit beers versus independent pubs selling a greater range of interesting products is only going to increase and I know which ones I would rather visit.

So, finally I get out from the cellar, out from behind the bar and out of the office. I’m sat in a pub, enjoying the hubbub of a friendly crowd, bit of light-hearted banter with strangers, some background music (not too loud to interrupt the flow of conversation, unless I’m there to see a band or a comedy night). What do I want? Friendly conversation with happy bar staff, a comfy seat and a pint of well-kept real ale, preferably approved by Cask Marque and CAMRA.

I’m often asked by my customers what is my favourite pint. Having sold well over 21,000 different beers over the years, the answer is easy. It’s the one in front of me at the time.