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19-01-2018, 11:34
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Making a flying visit to our local, The Drapers Arms, on Tuesday night we got drawn into a puzzle: who brews Bass, and where is it*from?This question arose because the pub has a cask of Bass ready to go live in the next day or so, in time for the weekend. Policy at the Drapers is to write the origin of each beer on both the jacket covering the cask and the blackboard in front of the bar. That’s easy when the beer is by Stroud Brewery from Stroud, or Cheddar Ales from Cheddar, but Bass is complicated.
As far as we know, the keg and bottled versions are brewed at Samlesbury in Lancashire, while the cask is brewed by Marston’s in Burton-upon-Trent. (Though there’s sometimes talk of production having moved, or overspilled, to Wolverhampton.) And the brand is owned by AB-InBev whose head office is in Leuven in Belgium.
Our instinct was to make an exception — Bass is Bass is Bass, so just write Bass. But that won’t quite do.
In the end, after wiping the chalk away a couple of times, the last version we saw before leaving was something like:

BASS
William Bass & Co
(Marston’s)
Burton-upon-TrentThe landscape of classic beers (you can read that as sarcastically if need be) has become quite muddled with brands, brand-owners and brewers moving around, being taken over, contracting and licensing all over the place. Where is Pedigree actually brewed these days (https://retiredmartin.com/2018/01/18/straight-or-handle-sparkled-or-flat/)? What about Young’s Ordinary, or Courage Best? Newcastle Brown is now being produced in the Netherlands (https://www.bevindustry.com/articles/90712-newcastle-brown-ale-unveils-a-new-look-new-plan), along with HP Sauce.
Of course big brewers like to keep it vague so they can shunt production here, there or anywhere, based on business need, but this shouldn’t be information consumers or retailers have to hunt around for, not least because the vacuum leaves room for conspiracy theories and bar-room gossip.
More generally, though we find a certain romance in this grand industrial jiggery-pokery, isn’t the whole real-ale-craft-beer thing of the past 50 years really about making sure we don’t have to ask this question? About insisting that, good or bad, the beer we drink should clearly, and without footnotes, be from*somewhere?
Where is Bass From? (https://boakandbailey.com/2018/01/where-is-bass-from/) originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog (https://boakandbailey.com)


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