Beer Escalator and Beer X

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!