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21-03-2018, 14:14
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The above film was made by Watney Mann (Watney’s) to help their sales staff understand Watney’s Red, which replaced Red Barrel as the firm’s flagship keg bitter in 1971.It was unearthed by Nick Wheat who collects
British documentary and industrial films and writes occasional beer
articles for Dronfield CAMRA’s Peel Ale magazine. The copy above was made by projecting the 16mm film onto a wall and pointing his phone at it but it doesn’t look bad for all that.
From an article Nick dug up from*Film User for July 1971 we know that it was one of three films produced to help with the roll-out of the new product as part of what Watney’s called ‘Operation Cheka’ in reference to the Bolshevik secret police. The suit of films cost £5,500 pounds to make (about £80k in today’s money) and this one is ‘Cheka 2’, highlighted in this infographic from*Film User:
https://boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/operation_cheka.jpg
The film itself is an amazing relic. It features various plummy senior executives explaining, rather stiltedly, the thinking behind the change, accompanied by footage of lorries and brewing plants around the country (our emphasis):

You see Red Barrel has been with us now for fifteen years and is still the same. In the meantime other beers have come along in keg with new flavours, and meeting new ideas of taste. Therefore Red Barrel might be said to be old fashioned. So what we did was to study the whole situation in great detail with our colleagues in the group marketing department. We wanted to find out just what it was the customers liked, what their ideals were, what were the faults, perhaps, in earlier beers, and altogether how we could make it right for the seventies.
What we’ve done is to give the beer a new smooth pleasant taste. We’ve also given it a much better head and altogether a more attractive appearance. Gone is any suggestion of bitter after palate; instead, there is a pleasant malty mealiness…. We’ve studied flavour, studied people’s reaction to flavour, and produced experimental beers, testing out all the variations we can think of in such things of sweetness or bitterness.
That confirms what we’d heard from other sources (https://boakandbailey.com/2014/11/brewing-watneys-red-not-red-barrel-1971/), and what we said in*Brew Britannia: that Red Barrel and Red were quite different beers, with the latter an altogether fizzier, sweeter beer. But this would seem to suggest that, unless they’re outright fibbers, that people in the company genuinely believed they were responding to public demand rather than cutting corners for the sake of it.
There’s some solid historical information in all this, too. It tells us, for example, that Red was developed primarily at the Watney’s plant in Northampton, formerly Phipps, and that the beer and point-of-sale material was scheduled to hit pubs in March and April of 1971.
There is also an awkward interview with Mr Horsfall, a publican in… Eldon? Oldham? Answers on a postcard. He had been tasked with selling the new Red on the quiet to gauge customer reactions to the reformulation and, though hardly jumping for joy, seemed to think his customers preferred it, on the whole.
Arguably the most exciting part comes at the end: a reel of original TV ads from the time starring (we think) Michael Coles (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0171326/bio) as a hard-boiled counter-intelligence operative tasked with stopping ‘the Red Revolution’. These ads seem to us to be parodying Callan,*a popular TV programme of the day starring Edward Woodward, with the seedy sidekick ‘Friendly’ clearly a reference to Callan’s ‘Lonely’.
Thanks so much for sharing this, Nick! And if anyone else out there has this kind of material, we’d love to see it.
Watney’s Red on Film, 1971 (https://boakandbailey.com/2018/03/watneys-red-on-film-1971/) originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog (https://boakandbailey.com)


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