For centuries, the wooden real ale pump has been the hallmark of a good British boozer. But now problems are brewing for the proper pint, as the Campaign for Real Ale has seen its membership sink to an eight-year low and its accounts show it is firmly in the red, making an £800,000 loss last year.
Real ale is a traditional draught cask beer, a “living” product that is produced and stored in its cask. It differs from a cold, fizzy lager, in which the yeast is killed and carbon dioxide is added. Real ale contains live yeast so it continues fermenting until it is served.
Outside the Devonshire pub in Soho, central London, there is an ever-present horde of drinkers downing pints of Guinness, a stout made by the multinational company Diageo. But the landlord and co-owner Oisín Rogers says: “Real ale is all I drink.”
He says: “It is a properly handmade British product produced in exactly the same way it has been for centuries. It has never been industrialised like some of the other drinks that are for sale in bars in London.” His favourite tipple, is, appropriately, a pint of Landlord, made by the family-owned Timothy Taylor brewery in Keighley, West Yorkshire.
Tom Stainer, Camra’s chief executive, says independent breweries are facing unfair competition from multinationals. If you walk into a pub on the high street, you are often confronted with the same few beers, most of which are made by the same large companies, Stainer says.
“Our recent beer report highlighted that the beers people want aren’t available in bars because of the ways the huge international brewers operate – they have a stranglehold on the industry,” he says. “We call it an illusion of choice – a lot of people walk into bars and don’t realise everything in front of them is owned by the same big company.”
He says these “big global brewers who have deep pockets and huge influence” make it “hard for small brewers to get to market”. The incentives offered to large pub companies include cheap packages for beers, wine and soft drinks, with a multi-year tie-in, and minimum purchase orders where “pubs are forced to sell a certain amount of this product”.
Stainer adds: “We have heard of pubs taking off independent beers because they are too popular and stop people buying that product they have a minimum purchase order for.”
Camra is calling for the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate the big beer companies’ stranglehold on the market.
There are no such problems at the King Charles I pub in King’s Cross. As an independent, community-owned venue, the team can choose what’s on tap. They have a healthy range of cask beers, swapped out every five weeks.
Matt Roberts, the manager, says: “I like to choose local beers – today we have one from Southwark, some from Kent and one from the West Midlands. Cask ale is still very popular, it makes up around 30% of our sales. We are lucky we don’t have a big pub company telling us what to sell.”
Despite the delicious range of cask ale on offer, including the very drinkable Bankside Blonde by Southwark Brewing Company, Guinness still appears to be the order of the day among the customers.
Camra is facing a nadir: last September it announced it had been forced to cancel its pivotal Great British Beer festival, formerly the largest of its kind in the UK, for the foreseeable future due to financial pressures. Writing in the accounts, the chair, Ash Corbett-Collins, said it had been “one of the most challenging years Camra has faced”, pointing to a restructuring in which “a number of roles were sadly made redundant”.
The cost of living crisis is making it more difficult to run a membership organisation, Stainer says. “When you look at your bank balance each month, membership might be something you might economise to offset your huge energy bill or the rise in food prices.” A Camra membership is £35 a year.
