Visit provincial English cities like Birmingham, Bristol, Derby, Norwich, Nottingham and Sheffield and you’ll find an abundance of independent pubs offering an enticing variety of cask beers mostly produced by local breweries. Local ales in local pubs – what’s not to like! Most branches of CAMRA have promoted them under the ‘LocAle’ banner for the last 15 years.
In Greater London such pubs are very few and can be hard to find. Several of them advertise from time to time in this magazine, and they are well worth seeking out. They tend to be busy, given the attractiveness of their choice of cask beers from the many small breweries that we have in London and the surrounding counties. This year’s Good Beer Guide lists 45 Greater London brewers of cask beer (as at July 2023; the few openings and closures since then have roughly balanced). In my thirsty experience, most of their beers are exciting and several are wonderful. So why is it that we find these local ales in so few London pubs and, moreover, that the majority of London’s microbreweries, some 60%, seldom or never supply cask beer but rely on KeyKeg, canned and bottled products?
The answer seems to me to lie in the strength and the subtlety of organised opposition. The trade magazine, the Morning Advertiser has repeatedly been trumpeting ‘top brands to stock’. Of cask beers, in descending order, these are Doom Bar, Taylor’s Landlord, Greene King IPA, Fuller’s London Pride, Marston’s Wainwright, Greene King Abbot, St Austell Tribute, Marston’s Pedigree, Butcombe Original and Harvey’s Sussex. Don’t get me wrong, there are some fine beers in that list, but might their ‘top brand’ status reflect not so much the preferences of cask beer drinkers but a ubiquity driven by the profit available to pub companies on bulk discount purchasing mostly from global and national brewers?
With the obvious exception of J D Wetherspoon, whose business model allows customers to benefit from competitive beer costs, most non-brewing property companies have long been identified by CAMRA as detrimental to the viability of their pubs as lessees and tenants are tied to stocking limited ranges of beers from a restricted list of suppliers at artificially inflated prices. In London, by comparison with other parts of the country, too many of our pubs seem to be owned mainly by such companies.
CAMRA believes that no pub owning business should have the right to impose supply ties relating to any product that it does not manufacture and specifically that tied pubs should not be forced to pay more for their choice of draught beer, cider and perry than they would if they bought it directly from the producer. Three years ago we explained to the Competition and Markets Authority that, in this context, the retention of the Vertical Block Exemption Regulation – the derogation from legal constraints under which such anti-competitive behaviour could otherwise be challenged – was anything but beneficial to consumers.
We want brewers and publicans to prosper from sales of cask beers of which customers can afford to drink enough to keep them in fresh condition on the bar. Addressing a crowded house at a recent certificate presentation, an award-winning local publican emphasised the ability to buy his ales directly from their brewers as the key to his success. If only more of our pubs could enjoy such freedom!
Geoff Strawbridge