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Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Writing about beer and pubs since 2007
It can*sometimes feel as if*drinking anywhere but the pub is a betrayal of*‘proper beer’, but it’s actually*played a huge part in developing the culture Britain has today, and has broadened the palates of many.
That thought was prompted by this Tweet from Zak Avery, who runs legendary bottle-shop Beer Ritz:
In conversation recently, we said that we didn’t particularly enjoy beer festivals because they aren’t*‘how we like to drink’, which prompted the question,*‘Well, how do you like to drink?’ The honest answer is either (a) in the pub (once or twice a week) or (b) in the front room (more often).
Unless you live conveniently close to a good multi-pump real ale pub or a craft beer bar, then home is the*only place to satisfy a spontaneous craving for a bit of strange. As we’ve said before, we like St Austell Tribute, but we don’t want to drink it every night, which is where a case of oddities from Beer Merchants or Beer Ritz, or even a few things from Tesco,*fill the gap.
The majority of our most profound beer experience have, as it happens, occurred*in pubs or beer gardens, but, for example, the first really aromatically-hoppy beer that ever made us say ‘Wow!’ we drank at home — Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, from ASDA, in, we think, around 2005.
Drinking fancy-pants beers at home is a fairly recent phenomenon which arose alongside the Campaign for Real Ale, meeting a demand among newly-assertive consumers for better beer.
Belgian beer didn’t start appearing in Britain in any great variety until the 1980s with*‘bottle shops’, run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. One of the first, and perhaps most famous was the*one on Pitfield Street. The founding of Cave Direct (Beer Merchants) is covered briefly in our book. Another such shop we read about but didn’t look into in great detail was*Grog Blossom in Notting Hill, which was profiled in the Financial Times in 1989.
As for bottled British beer, here’s how*Richard Morrice, a long-time industry PR man, put it when we interviewed him last summer:
You have to remember that, in the seventies, ‘premium bottle beers’ didn’t exist. Bottled beer was Mackeson’s, Bass, Forest Brown, that kind of thing, and usually came in 550ml returnable ‘London pint’ bottles, or in ‘nips’. There was a limited choice of regional brands and that was it.
In the late eighties, Shepherd Neame released a range of 500ml bottled ales, which was a risky enterprise, and there was a limited take-up by supermarkets. These ‘PBAs’ (premium bottled ales) sat in a price gap between the very cheap drink-at-home lager and draught beer in the pub, on a pence-per-litre basis, and the supermarket buyers just weren’t convinced. When Marston’s launched their range of PBAs as late as 1991, there were still no retailers really willing to take them.
[But, fairly] quickly… you started to get things like Marston’s Head Brewer’s Choice series, and seasonals, until there was quite a lot of choice.
If you want to experience the Michael Jackson vision of a world where beer comes in every shade and strength, from the beefy blackness of imperial stout to the barely-intoxicating pallor of Berliner Weisse, your own front room remains the place where you’re most likely to find it.
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