So all that hard campaigning has paid off! It’s a nice
reminder that democracy does work sometimes; if you shout loud enough with
enough voices those in power occasionally listen. I’d like to think that common
sense also won over when the pub closure numbers and unemployment figures were
examined. Good Ol George even went one step further and took 1p off the price
of a pint! They must have been serving a strong ale in the House of Commons bar
today. Although his expectation that the saving will be passed on to consumers
was perhaps a little optimistic, but you never know.
There are certainly some local pubs that should lower
their prices, that’s for sure, along with a handful of micro breweries with an
inflated sense of self importance that could knock a little off a barrel of
beer. I don’t think I need to name names, I’m sure everyone can think of
appropriate examples!
By whom that expectation should most definitely be honoured
by, however, is by the unfair pub companies and perhaps the national and
regional breweries as well. But I think that a lot of free houses that rely on
passing trade would do well to keep that extra penny. What is better, beer that
is the same price or a closed public house?
But then again the argument could be made that all pubs
passed on the VAT rise in 2010, so why would they not pass on a saving? Now I
know a 1p is not a lot but according to the BBC’s budget calculator I’ll save
£6.94 a week! That’ll do me thanks George, I’m sure you’ll make it back off me
somewhere else.
On a separate note, I attended Beer X last Friday which
was the beer festival that followed the Society of Independent Breweries (what
on earth does the A stand for??) AGM and award ceremony. Well... I wasn’t
really very impressed to be honest. To say it is the Society of Independent Brewers it looked very
corporate with low lighting, purple and red spot lights, a PowerPoint style
display on the screen above the stage and an eclectic music selection. Not that
I was expecting a mahogany bar with a sawdust floor. Although...
To be fair the style of the event was quite a welcome
change having been to a good many CAMRA beer festivals. But what really upset
me was the lack of organisation of the available beer on the bar. Because there
really was no logical order to what was on offer, which was very little. They
started running out of beer sooner than last year’s Steel City Beer Festival!
The substantial programme had the beers listed in regional order, only the bar
did not. In fact not all the beers were on at once so looking at beers in the
book was completely pointless, you had to walk up and down the bar and hope
that could get a beer of something good before it went off. Suffice to say my
party and I did not stay all night. We checked out the new room at the
Sheffield Tap, which is very impressive, and then visited the Rutland Arms and
the Red Deer which pulled the night back nicely.
I’ll try and blog more often! Not that I don’t have any
interesting thoughts (insert joke) about the beer industry, I just stopped
writing them down. And believe me, real ale is always being drunk!
