Author Archives: Hugh

About Hugh

Proprietor and landlord of the Tynemouth Lodge Hotel

BUSINESS RATES & VAT, 2021

I have been paying £16,000 pa approx. in BRs since 1983 at the Tynemouth Lodge, which is a small one room lock-up pub serving drinks only.

I have always cynically regarded Business Rates as just a tax on jobs.

The fact that the government has currently abolished Business Rates until April 2021, because of the virus, is a disguised admission that BRs are financially toxic to businesses small and large.

So how do Business Rates impact on public houses?

It is a system of crude taxation based on the annual level of trade (excl. VAT) that a pub is expected to achieve if operated in an efficient way.

The Valuation Office Agency (VOA), an off-shoot of the Inland Revenue, uses mathematical formulae to quickly calculate the Rateable Value of a pub which is based on ‘fair maintainable trade’. The figure is supposed to take into consideration such factors as: the type of pub; the area it is in; the various services it offers (e.g. food, sports screening).

Having reached a figure for Rateable Value, the actual rates payable are calculated by multiplying this figure by the correct ‘multiplier’ – a figure set by central government.

This is currently about 50p in the pound, so a pub with a RV of £35,000 will pay half of this in Business Rates p.a.

The VOA works closely with just one drinks trade body, the British Beer & Pub Association, membership of which is restricted to brewers and property companies that own chains of pubs, so zero representation there for the many thousands of privately owned free houses which have an entirely different business model from that of brewery or ‘pubco’ owned pubs.

Unfortunately, there is no effective trade body that free house owners like myself can join to represent them in appealing Business Rateable Values and having used a few agents to submit appeals I finished up appealing myself, as all of them achieved zilch.

The old Licensed Victuallers Association, which shut down in 1992, was tied up with the Big Six Brewers of yesteryear and represented their tenants and managers.

The British Institute of Innkeepers, of which I used to be the regional secretary, was also impotent when it came to rates appeals.

In one instance, spanning a couple of years, I employed the services of a specialist Chartered Surveyor, who formerly worked for the VOA, and who assured me that my Rateable Value was ‘ridiculously high’, but he also failed to achieve a result.

To illustrate how useless the appeal process is, a director of Harrods of Knightsbridge on the BBC Today program recently explained that even if they win an appeal to get a Rates reduction, nothing happens for 5 years.

Business Rates are adjusted, usually every 5 years, to reflect changes in the property market, the most recent revaluation came into effect on 1 April 2017, based on rateable values from 1 April 2015 (work that one out).

At revaluation, all properties are given a new rateable value and the multiplier is also revised.

Bearing in mind that about 25% of pubs have closed since 2000, it is clearly a difficult and rapidly declining market to trade in, and yet the Rateable Value of pubs are set extremely high compared to most other commercial premises. I put this down to VOA being cosy with the BBPA and their Pubco members, many of whom charge absurdly high rents to their tied tenants, who in turn seem to be an expendable commodity as they can always find someone else to sign a lease.

It was the Big Six brewers with their tens of thousands of tenants who used to liaise with the VOA in the old days before the Beer Orders legislation forced them to sell most of their pubs, most of which were sold to property companies – the aforementioned dreaded ‘Pubcos’.

In my opinion, Business Rates are outdated and now is a golden opportunity to abolish them during the current one-year Rates-free period.

A fair way of making up the deficit from lost Business Rates is possibly to increase the rate of VAT from 20% to 25% for all online non-food purchases, which would be like a breath of fresh air for our floundering high street retailers and the tenants and indeed landlords of shopping malls.

The VOA would then be defunct, with a big savings. Local councils would be able to levy Council Tax on the owners of all B&B/holiday/Airbnb type properties, many of whom are currently avoiding both Council Tax and Business Rates, courtesy of getting 100% Rates relief if their RV is under £12,000 – a tax loophole enjoyed by the owners of hundreds of thousands of such properties.

At the top end of the hospitality sector, hotels (which employs a large workforce) would no longer pay Business Rates, making them much more sustainable and pubs would likewise be relieved of the millstone of paying rates.

Tempus fugit

The Campaign for Real Ale was founded in St. Albans by four young beer-loving journalists over a few pints of traditional beer on 16th March 1971 and became one of the most successful consumer pressure groups in Europe.

 The Tyneside branch of CAMRA had its inaugural meeting upstairs in Balmbra’s pub on the Cloth Market in Newcastle, followed shortly after by a well-attended social in the Crown Posada pub on The Side, Newcastle, where we just about drank them out of Draught Bass.

Local radio presenter Paddy MacDee was one of our founder members, as was my old friend Len Winters who at the time worked for Stewarts Tea in Byker.  Len, who died aged 89 about 5 years ago, wrote many interesting articles and poems for our local CAMRA newsletter.

I recall Len telling me that when he returned to England with his Regiment from France in 1945 at the end of the war, the Shepherd Neame pubs in Kent had signs outside stating ‘Free beer for our Troops’.

In the 1970s the Crown Posada public house, being in close proximity to the old Newcastle Crown Court, was frequented by many learned members of the legal profession, including my pal Wilf Steer, QC,  from Tynemouth, who also drank at the Tynemouth Lodge until he passed away not that long ago. Wilf loved his Bass.

In these early days of CAMRA, Scottish and Newcastle Breweries was the biggest player on Tyneside but had taken all real ale out of its huge estate of tied pubs.

I was given the unenviable job of being the first CAMRA Brewery Liaison Officer for S&N, which at the time seemed like an uphill task.

It’s been said that the North East was a beer desert in the 1970s, but not true as outside of the S&N estate of pubs there was plenty of Bass ales, Tetley Bitter, Camerons ales, Lorimer’s beers from Vaux and Sam Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter (just over the water in Jarrow and South Shields) – and as just one or two handpumps on a bar was the norm in those days, the real ale was usually in good fresh condition.

On a technical level – it  is now not uncommon to see beer/lager lines being cleaned (using a potentially lethal caustic solution of line cleaner) by staff when bars are trading in these supposedly enlightened times, but, and give them their due, if an S&N or other big brewery manager or tenant was seen to be doing this by an Area Manager during opening hours in the old days, the penalty was instant dismissal, as this practice was and still is extremely dangerous. It defies common sense that it has not been legally banned on public Health & Safety grounds to protect unsuspecting customers from possible life-changing accidents, if cleaning fluid were to be ingested in error.  The message is quite simple : beer lines should only be cleaned outside of trading hours.  One would never ever see a beer line being cleaned while drinking in a pub in the 1970s.                                                               

The two errant brewers in the North East when CAMRA Tyneside started up were S&N and also the Federation Brewery, as neither supplied a drop of real ale to their large tied estates of pubs and clubs. At least we knew that when we saw an illuminated S&N  blue star sign outside a pub it was one to pass by on the other side.

It’s not long to the 50th Anniversary of CAMRA so maybe time to reflect through misted glasses :

There were very few privately run free houses in Tyneside in the 70s and not many pubs served any hot food. There was also a very limited choice of the real ales that were available.

Pub trading hours were 11-3 and 5.30 to 10.30 on weekdays and 12-2 and 7 to 10.30 on a Sunday, with an extra half an hour on weekdays at the ‘coast’ for 3 months in the summer.  The two hour session on a Sunday lunchtime was the busiest of the week in most pubs, as no shops were open and there was no live sport on TV.

Football players were not paid much in those days and it was not uncommon for an ex-professional player to sign up for a brewery tenancy when he retired. Vaux Brewery of Sunderland took on a lot of former football and cricket stars in their tied estate, as their celebrity status was good for trade.

Northern Real Ale Agency and Legendary Yorkshire Heroes sprang up in Newcastle as real ale wholesalers run by Dick Attlee and Tony Brookes respectively and did sterling work sourcing ales from far and wide in the early days of the Tyneside real ale revival.

The first few CAMRA Newcastle Beer Festivals were in the historic Guildhall on Newcastle Quayside with the beers were being drawn by gravity straight from the barrels, which were racked on scaffolding. We couldn’t start moving beer into the hall until a day or two before the festival as annual Chartered Accountancy examinations took place in there. 

I can remember having a last few pints of ‘Burton Union’ brewed Bass in the Crown Posada after working on the bar at an early beer festival, as after that the old Burton Unions were mothballed by Bass & Co and Draught Bass, produced by a  more modern process, has never been quite the same.

Since CAMRA Tyneside was founded most of the major North East breweries have ceased trading, including Castle Eden (formerly Nimmo’s), Vaux of Sunderland, the Northern Clubs’ Federation Brewery and Scottish & Newcastle Breweries, with the loss of many thousands of good jobs.

S&N is now owned by the Dutch company Heineken and their beers are delivered by the Swiss global transport company Kuehne & Nagel. Crazy times ?

The Federation Brewery, set up after the Great War to provide affordable beer primarily for working men, was originally in a prime site behind the Central Station in Newcastle and was owned by the CIU clubs of Tyneside. That site would have been worth a fortune now, but the brewery sold out and moved to a small drab site near the Metro Centre in Dunston in 1980. This brewery uniquely had the name of their Chief Executive on the side of all of their lorries and the Original Gravity of all of their beers and lagers was clearly stated on their beer fonts.  It all went a bit pear shaped years ago when their CEO was involved in a scandal which hit the press, so plenty of work for their signwriter.

In 2004, the now failing Federation Brewery was bought by S&N, who had announced the closure of their huge Gallowgate brewery and it continued trading briefly as the Newcastle Federation Breweries until it was closed by Heineken in 2010.

Vaux Brewery of Sunderland, founded in 1806,  ceased trading in 1999 on the advice of their financial advisors. They had supplied excellent real ales from their Lorimer & Clark brewery in Edinburgh, which they had bought in 1946. Vaux however ceased brewing there in 1987 and tried unsuccessfully to have the city centre site cleared for lucrative redevelopment, but it has survived to this day (having been protected by being a Listed industrial property) as the Caledonian Brewery. I recall being told on a brewery visit that this was the last coal fired brewery in the UK.

The old Vaux Brewery site in Sunderland was flattened having been bought by Tesco. At the time of closure they still employed a number of ‘Horse Drivers’, for the few old fashioned drays that they kept until the end, but fortunately the magnificent heavy horses went to a good home and not to a supermarket.

One long-term survivor is Camerons Brewery of Hartlepool, established in 1865, it is now the largest brewer in the North East. It has had a chequered history, losing its independence to Ellerman Lines in 1974, acquired by the secretive Barclay Brothers in 1983, then by Brent Walker in 1989 who spun off most of their pubs into a separate company called Pubmaster, which was acquired by Punch Taverns in 2003. Camerons still has a small tied estate of pubs and is the ninth largest brewer in the UK, with most of their production being contract-brewing, including big brands such as Fosters Lager, for the multi-national companies.

In the 1970s it was common to see Camerons excellent real ales dispensed in their pubs using electric metered see-through cylindrical glass units on their bar tops into outsize pint glasses, which effortlessly produced a lovely big head and exactly 20 fluid oz of ale. Strange that this efficient and speedy system has not survived.

At local CAMRA branch level, the first edition of Canny Bevvy was produced in 1979, the Editor being Andy Chapman, who had just finished at university in Bristol. I was also editor for while and did a stint as Social Secretary, organising many brewery visits.

Fast forward to 2019 and it’s good to see so many small real ale breweries in the North East and it is healthy for the trade that new pubs of all shapes and sizes are opening here, there and everywhere.

As there are so many shops and other business premises closing, the planners seem to have thrown the formerly strict rule book away when it comes to granting permission for new bars.

I can recall that in about 1980 a large empty bank premises on the corner of Park View and Marine Avenue in Whitley Bay was refused change of use to a pub as it had no car park – but today it would have been rubber stamped.

The fight to preserve real ale goes on, as history is repeating itself – but instead of big faceless brewers going over to fizzy filtered keg beer, many micro-brewers in recent years have done exactly that, under the guise of it being ‘craft ale’ as the noun ‘keg’ had fallen into disrepute.  

 The big incentive for them, just like the Big Six national brewers of old, is that keg/dead beer keeps for weeks, is idiot proof as takes no looking after, so not many ‘returns’ of sour beer from bars and more profit for the brewery, but I for one have never enjoyed drinking keg beer.  An old CAMRA produced T-shirt stated that ‘The chemical formula for Keg beer is K9P’.

Some of this modern keg beer is even supplied in sturdy one-trip plastic kegs, so no empty barrels for the brewers to pick up but absolutely no guarantee that this plastic gets recycled, so arguably these containers should be banned as the beer could easily be supplied in reusable stainless steel casks which last for decades. 

For my money there is still nothing better than a fresh pint of a decent quality real ale.

Hugh Price   (Tynemouth Lodge Hotel)

CAMRA Embraces Keg

CAMRA’s definition of real ale: Real ale is beer brewed from traditional ingredients (malted barley, hops, water and yeast) matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide. [Link]

CAMRA National Executive backed the wrong horse big-style in 1989 when it supported the Tories’ ill-fated Beer Orders, belatedly revoked in 2003, by which time irrevocable damage had been done to our brewing industry and thousands of pubs were closed as a direct consequence.

The wretched and ill-conceived Beer Orders gave rise to the hated Pub Companies and forced some superb large breweries to shut, courtesy of them having to reduce their estates to 2,000 outlets. So, a huge mistake by CAMRA in this instance and thousands of workers paid with their jobs.

I argued in a letter to CAMRA’s monthly members’ newspaper prior to this event that if the legislation got the green light it would probably lead to far less experienced companies running pubs and sadly I was proved correct.

I also pointed out that the proposed draconian legal measures were unfair, as big brewers such as Bass and Whitbread had built up their large estates of pubs legally and had paid full market value for these properties over many years, so what was proposed amounted to retrospective legislation, which in hindsight they could have challenged in Court.

CAMRA’s National Executive now appear, from what I read in printed communication to members, to want the organisation to embrace modern keg beers, now masquerading as ‘craft ales’. History is in danger of repeating itself. I suspect vested financial interests may be behind this move and fear that CAMRA could be lurching headlong into another faux pas, which could lose the organisation both credibility and many members.

Not that may years ago, CAMRA rightly condemned McMullens Brewery of Hertford for selling real ale in their pubs using a ‘cask breather’, which technically puts a gentle blanket of carbon dioxide over the beer so that it keeps longer. Now the elected hierarchy want to abuse their position by attempting to persuade the membership to endorse keg beers under gas pressure and this would be a catastrophic U-turn, as these are not real ales and are clearly outside CAMRA’s raison d’etre.

McMullen’s pubs were rightly excluded from entry in the CAMRA Good Beer Guide as carbon dioxide gas is so highly soluble in water/beer that even blanket pressure renders beer fizzy and ruins a real ale.

I joined CAMRA in the early seventies, the motivation being because of the increasing dominance of gassy keg beers and I feared for the existence of traditional British cask-conditioned beer.

Sadly, the real ales in existence at the time of CAMRA’s creation, usually with high yeast/hop/malt content, full flavour and brewed with pure well water (called ‘Liquor’ in the trade), that we fought so hard to protect, are largely dead and buried, replaced in the main by sediment-free thinner pale offerings, frequently produced using fluoridated mains water and often sold in outlets where staff and management have no interest in real ale.

The Campaign for Real Ale should be pushing for high quality British real ales and not get side-tracked by getting into bed with the powerful keg/craft beer industry.

Keg/Craft beers under gas pressure are for lazy landlords, not proper publicans.

Our top quality real ales, such as those brewed by Fullers of Chiswick, Hawkshead of Staveley and Black Sheep of Masham are the envy of the world.

It was no accident that the enduring cartoon strip by Bill Tidy in CAMRA’s monthly newspaper is called Kegbuster, as in ‘craft’ guise this remains the big threat to real ale to this day.

I for one would like to see more real ales brewed by the complex and unsurpassed Burton Union System, which was invented by Bass & Co, as those of us who were weaned on Union Bass and Union Marston’s Pedigree know that these ales were in a class of their own, with no modern equivalents.

Hugh Price, Tynemouth Lodge Hotel

MODERN REAL ALES AND CRAFT BEERS

CAMRA Definition of Real Ale is on the lines of : Beer brewed from traditional ingredients (malted barley, brewer’s yeast, hops & pure water) , matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed and dispensed without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide or other gas.   Real ale is unfiltered, is not centrifuged, is not Pasteurised and is still fermenting in the container, whether it be a barrel or a bottle, as there is live yeast and nutrients from the barley present.

The new generation of so-called craft beers are not real ales as they are either filtered or centrifuged to remove all or most of the yeast then dispensed from fonts under gas pressure, German style, but they probably appeal to a lot of bar owners as they are just keg beers under a different label and need little or no looking after.

A former Head Brewer at Belhaven Brewery in Dunbar explained to me that German beers are brewed correctly, it’s just what they do to most of them afterwards that makes them differ from our real ales.

There is however a blurring between some modern real ales and craft beers, as many of today’s cask ales have little or no sediment or secondary fermentation and have simply been racked off from storage vessels in the brewery leaving active yeast behind.  Such beers are not proper real ales by definition and are imposters.

The real ale that the CAMRA founding fathers set out to protect bears little resemblance to some of the current thin offerings that arrive in the pub cellar ready to sell immediately.

When I started trading in my pub in 1983, all of the beers on sale had much heavier yeast sediments and most were extremely lively when broached. For example, when dipping a barrel of Belhaven 80/- ale, the heavy sediment was clearly visible on about an inch at the end of the dip stick.

Marston’s Pedigree had such a heavy sediment that it had to be tilted slightly backwards on the gantry, so that the yeast settled away from the tap, then very carefully chocked at the back when on sale. Pedigree and Draught Bass took up to 3 days to settle, but the end-product was packed with flavour.

There were also hop petals present in most of the brews I sold, something rarely seen today, rendering hop-filters on the pub beer line connectors attached to barrels almost obsolete.

In short, some of the current breed of real ales have been made idiot-proof, at the expense of full flavour and secondary fermentation in the pub cellar.

Gone are the days when all brewers left the beer in barrels at the brewery to condition for a couple of weeks before adding finings and dry-hopping (for some brews) prior to delivery.

Also, most of the so-called bottle-conditioned ales on sale in the shops today bear little resemblance to traditional offerings of yesteryear, as the emphasis is on a long shelf life in the supermarkets.

It says on the neck of a 500ml bottle of Worthington White Shield,  ‘Closer to Cask’, but it has very little flavour.

The bottled White Shield that I regularly drank when CAMRA was formed in 1971 was a much more flavoursome product.  It had a heavy yeast settlement in the bottle, a short sell-by date and had to be poured carefully into the glass, leaving the yeast behind.

The modern offering has just a few flecks of yeast present in the bottle and has a very long shelf life compared to its forebear.

Lots of live yeast in a bottled ale really does give it a much fuller flavour and many of today’s array of bottled conditioned ales may well be unpasteurised but are not Real Ales by definition, as there is not enough yeast left in the bottles for further conditioning to take place.

Sadly, bottle-conditioned Guinness was discontinued years ago, to be replaced with a filtered version, but which lacks taste and has no sediment.

One brewer that I think stands out as a producer of really good bottled-conditioned ales is Shepherd Neame of Faversham, Kent.  Their beers are lively, yeasty and flavoursome.

About time more  brewers got back to basics and produced Real Ales as defined by CAMRA.

Hugh Price

Tynemouth Lodge Hotel

BASS & CO.

IN THE BEGINNING

The first time I drank a pint of proper beer in a pub, it came straight out of a wooden barrel on the end of the bar and it was Draught Bass, otherwise known as Bass Pale Ale (4.4% ABV).

This beer was created by a haulier of beer, William Bass, who came into the brewing trade at tender age of 60, which in 1777 was older than the average male life-expectancy He bought a house in Burton-on-Trent which contained a brewery and malthouse on adjoining land, having sold his haulage firm to Pickfords Interesting to note that in those days it was normal practice for brewers to malt their own barley grains, whereas nowadays malted barley is usually bought in from a specialist maltster.

Burton was already a thriving brewing town, when William bought his little brewery, exploiting the growing export trade via the local canal network to the Baltic ports of Russia, mainly St. Petersburg. William established the Bass Brewery, catering for the local market, then in 1784 he started exporting ale to Russia. He died in 1787, aged 71, was succeeded by his sons William and Michael, then in 1795 Michael took the helm and beer production increased dramatically.

The company’s famous red triangle was the UK’s first registered Trade Mark.

It is common knowledge that Burton owes it eligibility as a beer-making centre to the quality of its water. It stands in a basin surrounded by hills which contain large amounts of the minerals marl and gypsum. The water impregnated with these substances percolates into the underground water system and the sulphate of lime (gypsum) is of importance in brightening beers as it saves on the use of finings to clarify the beer. Also, because of the composition of this water, Burton ales will tolerate larger amounts of hops being added, this being a natural preservative, thereby giving the ales a longer life and more suitable for export in the days of sail. But this water also adds much to the distinctive flavour of Burton brewed ales.

Gypsum is incidentally widely used as a building material in plasters including decorative plasterwork, in mural paintings (including Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, in which the painting was done on wet plaster), in medical plasters, in fire protection and in dentistry when false teeth impressions are taken.

To this day, real ales from Burton often exhibit the Burton Snatch, this being a pleasant sulphurous smell exuding from the vent hole of a cask when it is broached in the cellar. Other brewers outside the region may ‘Burtonise’ their ales by adding various salts in the brewing process, but there is no substitute for natural Burton-on-Trent brewing water or ‘liquor’ as brewers call it.

In the early days of brewing in Burton a brewer had only to sink a shaft-well some 30ft deep, but as consumption increased and the water table dropped it was necessary to bore down to a depth of up to 200ft. Controls are in force in the vicinity of Burton to prevent farmers from putting chemicals into the soil that could contaminate this unique water.

THE GLORY YEARS

By the late 1800s, the brewery of Bass & Co was one of the largest in the world and Draught Bass Pale Ale was the biggest selling beer in the United Kingdom by a mile.

The original Bass brewery was built on a plot the size of a modest house garden, but by the end of the 19th century the business occupied an enormous site of over 45 acres.

William Bass had used heavy carthorses over rutty roads to haul barley, hops and other materials into the brewery and barrels out to customers, but by 1880 the brewery had nine locomotives and 12 miles of private railway sidings on site for shipping barrels out to all parts of the country and beyond and had a close working arrangement with the Midland Railway Company. Bass also owned a huge vaulted storage facility at St. Pancras railway station in London.

The company supplied barrels of ale to private families. In 1880 the price for an 18 gallon barrel of Bass Pale Ale was 33 shillings (£1 13s), which worked out at less than 3 old pence a pint, which is a penny a pint in today’s money. The brewery also offered a 5% discount for cash!

In the late 1800s, Bass employed over 2000 brewery workers, with a total weekly wage bill of £2,500, or an average weekly wage of £1 10 shillings (£1.50) per employee.
The brewery was turning out an industrial volume of over a dozen different real ales and consuming a huge volume of coal at the brewery complex.

Their price list included India Pale Ale, six Burton Ales of different strengths including an Old Ale and three stouts, the premium of which was Double Stout.

Barrels were handmade on site from English oak and Bass owned a total of over half a million assorted barrels, the biggest size being butts (108 gallons), then hogsheads (54g), barrels (36g), then kilderkins (18g). In those days the brewery had a large building in which 200 men worked just mending damaged wood barrels. The noise in there must have been deafening.

Interesting to note that the largest size that Draught Bass is now supplied in is kilderkins, which are made of stainless steel and the most common sized barrel now used by today’s micro-breweries is just 9 gallons.

Consumption of draught beer in the UK has dropped dramatically in recent years and there is only a small volume of bottled-conditioned ale sold in our supermarkets.

In 1880 beers from the Bass brewery were bottled by appointed Wine and Beer Merchants around the country, having received wooden barrels of beer from Burton and some of these firms bottled Bass ales for exportation. Bass bottled ale had the Royal Seal of approval.

bass_mirror

The history of Bass as a company is quite complex as there were many mergers and buyouts of other brewers over many years and companies absorbed into the Bass empire include :
Charrington, Meakin, H & S, Stones, Walker, Salt, Bell, Worthington, Burton Brewing Co (known then as BBC!), Eadie, Mitchell, Butler, InterContinental Hotels.

Bass supplied beer to customers for over 240 years, but this ended abruptly in 2012 with a letter sent out to publicans by Inbev simply stating : ‘in 28 days time your supplier for our products will be Matthew Clarke Wholesale Ltd’.     No apology, nothing !

DISASTROUS POLITICAL INTERFERENCE

The demise of the Bass brewery in Burton was down to political interference in the form of the disastrous ‘Beer Orders’ in the late 1980s, which was ironically supported by CAMRA. The legal proposal was to force all brewers with large tied estates to reduce them to just 2,000.  And yet all of these large tied estate public houses had been purchased at market value or above over many years, so this was grossly unjust.

In my capacity as a CAMRA Life member, I had a letter published in CAMRA’s monthly newspaper, What’s Brewing in 1988, in which I condemned their support for the Beer Orders, arguing that if they expected the thousands of brewery tenancy pubs to switch to free houses, that this was most unlikely to happen. I argued that the big tenanted estates were on the whole successful and were owned by old-established brewers who knew the trade inside out.

Bass owned more pubs than any other brewer in the UK. Their estate of about 9,000 pubs was the best of all of the brewers’ estates and contained some of the finest hostelries in all of the provinces of the UK, including many historic Listed buildings. It was this large estate of brewery-tied public houses that kept the Brewery intact at Burton and it kept Draught Bass on the bar throughout the country. The same argument applied to the other large breweries that were to be affected. But Parliament voted in this misguided retrospective legislation ordering all brewers to reduce their estates to 2000 tied houses maximum. So Bass, like most of the old-established brewers with large estates having been sold down the river by meddling politicians, predictably decided the best option was to sell out, as their excellent companies were effectively to be legally dismantled.

David Young (Baron Young of Graffham) spearheaded the Beer Orders for the Tories. David was forced to resign as an enterprise advisor to David Cameron in 2010 when he declared in the Lords that (even in the depths of a Recession) “We have never had it so good”. He also stated more recently that the loss of 100,000 state sector jobs was in “an acceptable margin of error in the context of a 30m strong job market” !  Then in May 2013 he stated that a recession is a good time to start a business as it is cheaper to take on workers !  So much for his credentials. The groups of individuals that were not deemed worthy of consultation by David Young were the working publican-tenants, their employees and the huge workforce at the breweries with estates greater than 2,000 tied houses. Perhaps Lord Young was oblivious to the glaringly obvious reality that the Beer Orders would put many of these hard-working people on the dole. Maybe he acted in good faith but had just not done his homework. What on earth did this Tory millionaire former public-schoolboy know about our precious pubs and breweries anyway? His legislation inadvertently put many tens of thousands of tax-paying workers on the scrap heap.

THE FALLOUT FROM THE CRAZY BEER ORDERS

The net result of this political interference, and the Conservatives’ (and CAMRA’s) disastrous legacy, was that the big brewery-owned estates were taken over by private equity-funded Pub Companies a.k.a. Pubcos, who were not only allowed to tie their tenants, but offered them what have turned out to be mostly toxic leases and charged them way over the odds for their wet goods. The new pub companies were also allowed to own unlimited numbers of pubs, which made a mockery of the 2000 retrospective threshold imposed on the brewers.

A typical new Pubco lease was for a period of 25 years, assignable after a couple of years. Yet common sense dictated that most licensees do not last long-term and that the former 3 year brewery tenancy agreements were much more suited to publicans. A former Bass pub manager told me that the Bass tenants that he knew personally who opted to sign leases with Punch Taverns, or get out of their tenanted pubs, lost ‘everything’.

This Pubco model, fuelled by corporate greed, was absurd and has failed miserably, leading to the unnecessary closure of thousands of potentially viable public houses. The only substantial beneficiary of the Beer Orders is the Wetherspoon managed chain, as they can sell their beer cheaper than some Pubco leaseholders can buy in for. Brewery tenants who switched to Pubco leases were metaphorically thrown to the lions.

When the old Bass tenanted estate was still intact, I am reliably informed that there was always a waiting list of carefully vetted tenants for their pubs. However, when the Pubcos started dishing out their long leases, it became a common site to see viable pubs boarded up and patently obvious that many of their new leaseholders were not cut out for the trade, but had simply stumped up the dosh to enter into a lease. I can not recall seeing any PUB TO LET signs prior to the Pub Companies springing up. They really screwed things up.

The wretched Pubcos even installed beer-monitoring equipment into their pub cellars to ensure that their tenants did not buy outside of their iniquitous tie, yet none of these pub-owning companies brewed a drop of beer between them.

To this day, it beggars belief that non-brewing pub companies are still legally allowed to tie their tenants to their own list of beers and to charge them way over the odds for the privilege. This has got to be a breach of the tenant’s Human Rights and non-brewers ties should be abolished.

The Pubco tenant places his order with his non-brewing landlord, who then debits his bank account before the goods will be delivered. That is a common scenario and is appalling. The big breweries gave their tied tenants a much better deal before the Beer Orders came in.

I was recently shown two price lists by a northern micro-brewer – one for the free trade and the other for Pubco tenants.  In round figures, the tenants were being charged twice as much as a free house by their Pubco for the same beers and yet the brewer sells to the landlord at rock bottom discounted price, so the Pubco gets the best of both worlds : high rent and high profit on the beer, while the tenant struggles to make ends meet and usually goes bust.

Punch Taverns acquired the Bass portfolio of tenanted public houses in 1997. This new company was established by former Pizza Express supremo Hugh Osmond and Cafe Rouge founder Roger Myers.

The Beer Orders were revoked in January 2003, by which time irreversible damage had been done to the UK pub and brewery industries, with many, many  job losses. Needless to say, there was no apology from any politicians or from CAMRA for getting it wrong. IF THE BEER ORDERS HAD NOT COME IN, THE PUBCOS WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN CREATED. One consolation however is that several of Pubcos have gone into Receivership and some others are deep in debt and on the way out.

THE DEMISE OF THE BASS BURTON BREWERY

There is now no Draught Bass brewed at the old Bass brewery in Burton, which was acquired by US giant Molson Coors in recent years, and where they now primarily brew Carling Lager. Molson do not own the Bass brand, which was sold to Belgium brewers Interbrew.

Bass is currently brewed under contract from Inbev by Marston’s Brewery in Burton, so at least it is still made using the same brewing water and by a old-established Burton brewery, using the finest ingredients under the guidance of highly qualified brewery personnel, some of whom worked in the old Bass brewery.

Draught Bass is the No 1 selling ale at my pub. Bass drinkers are surprisingly loyal to their product, as it still one of the finest beers brewed in the UK. It’s all down to the flavour, as well-kept Bass is in a class of its own.

Many of today’s modern boutique brewery ales are thin pale offerings brewed in small industrial units and some of these so-called real ales, often brewed using fluoridated mains water are little better than home-brewed kit beers. However, to their credit, some of the new breed of breweries are turning out good quality, full-bodied, traditional ales.

Even back in the 1800s, university-educated industrial chemists were employed by Bass, as malting and fermentation are extremely complex chemical processes that have to be carefully monitored by experts at all stages. So impressive was the Bass set-up  that microbiologist Louis Pasteur visited the brewery to cast his eye over proceedings.

To learn more about the history of brewing in Burton on Trent, visit the Museum at the National Brewery Centre in the old Bass brewery in Burton on Trent, which to their credit Molson Coors have funded, although they did close it for a while after buying the brewery. They have also installed a small real ale brewery for the production of Worthington cask ales.

REFLECTIONS OF A BASS DRINKER

So what is the difference between modern day Bass and the draught product of yester-year? About 30 years ago Bass stopped using the Burton Union System, which they invented and which was credited with maintaining the unique strains of their Brewers’ Yeasts in a stable state until the mid 20th century. The Union System was a row of large wooden barrels in which the beer was fermenting, connected by swan-necked pipes to a common trough above into which rose the excess yeast, pushed up by carbon dioxide gas (as yeast multiplies during fermentation and carbon dioxide is a by-product of fermentation) and which separated from beer in the troughs, the ale returning to the casks below to continue fermenting. Surplus yeast was removed and sold to make the likes of Yeast-vite tablets, these being rich in Vitamins B1, B2 and Nicotinamide, but some yeast was always retained for future brews.

Burton Union fermentation system, Coors Visitor Centre

Burton Union fermentation system, Coors Visitor Centre

Nothing is wasted in the brewing process, with spent malted barley used as cattle feed and spent hops finish up on fields as a soil conditioner.

When Bass ceased to be brewed using the Unions, there was a marked change in the character of the ale, which was lamented by devotees of the beer, myself included. Union brewed Bass had a pleasant “sulphury” flavour and a fuller taste, but it has to be said that overindulgence gave rise to extreme flatulence, for which Draught Bass was infamous and which was the subject of many a pub joke. Also, Bass was often seen to be served slightly cloudy if put on sale prematurely, as Union-brewed bass had a very heavy sediment and needed two or three days to settle. Elderly Bass drinkers tell me that they used to flock to the pub where the Bass was said to be in the best condition on any given day.

The Burton Union System is a brilliant system for separating the yeast from the wort, but far from being just a yeast-clarification mechanism, the Unions also deliver more robust and flavoursome beers than other real ale brewing plant.

Draught Bass was a ‘must stock’ product in many pubs and in the North East of England many Newcastle Brewery houses sold Bass and by reciprocal agreement some Bass houses stocked Newcastle Brown Ale, which in those days was also a superb product.

Marstons-brewed Bass has a superb if slightly modified flavour, but is brighter in character and with a much lighter sediment in the barrel, which bodes easier on the stomach. It is still brewed to the old Bass recipe using two unique strains of brewers’ yeast, which contributes greatly to the flavour of the ale along with Burton water and finest English hops and malted barley.

Marstons brew Bass using traditional Yorkshire Squares (as used by Black Sheep Brewery) which is a two deck system: The liquid extracted from the malted barley (the sweet wort) is fermented in the lower chamber, while the yeasty head settles above and during the first stage of fermentation the fermenting wort is pumped from the bottom chamber over the yeasty head to keep the yeast well mixed with the wort. In the second stage of fermentation the wort in the lower chamber is allowed to settle and cool gently and most of the yeast rises to the upper chamber and is left behind when the fermented wort (beer) is drained off. This process takes at least 6 days.

Beer straight from the Yorkshire Squares can be a bit harsh in flavour and so the residual yeast in it is allowed to ferment any remaining sugar, producing a mellower and more robust beer. The final slow fermentation takes place in tanks in the brewery and continues after the beer is put into barrels, hence the term ‘cask conditioned beer’.

The Squares were originally constructed from Yorkshire sandstone, but Welsh slate proved to be more suitable. A modern version, as used by the Black Sheep Brewery in Masham, is circular and made of stainless steel.

Burton Unions and Yorkshire Squares both extract maximum flavour from a brew and are greatly superior to less complex modern brewery plant used today. The Unions, however,  have the edge when it comes to the end-product and they were widely used nationwide many years ago, but are an expensive and complex way of brewing beer.

Although Marstons are now brewing Bass in Yorkshire Squares, it is now the only brewery left in the UK that still uses the Burton Union System for brewing some of its own beers. Marstons are to be applauded for keeping their Burton Unions intact.    It is just a shame that Marstons do not brew Bass in their Unions, as this would regenerate a huge amount of interest in Draught Bass and return the character of the beer to its former glory.

FURTHER AFIELD

Another brewery that has invested heavily in a Burton Union System is the Firestone Walker Brewing Company in Paso Robles, California.  One of their directors, David Walker,  was aware of the exceptional quality of  Burton Union brewed ales from the Old Country. Brothers-in-Law Messrs. Firestone and Walker set up their brewery in 1996 and believed that the perfect pint could be created in 60 gallon oak barrels.

Firestone and Walker

Sure enough it has paid off handsomely, producing rich and complex ales. Paso Robles (full name El Paso de Robles ‘The Pass of  the Oaks’)  is a small city more famous for wineries and hosting of the California Mid-State Fair. It is located about halfway between LA and San Francisco in the county of San Luis Obispo. As far back as 1795, Paso Robles was described as California’s oldest watering place, because of the excellent quality of its natural mineral water – so a lot in common with Burton on Trent and a good reason to visit the Firestone Walker Brewery in sunny California! Brewery Website : www.firestonebeer.com

FAST FORWARD TO 2013

Modern-day Draught Bass is now clear at the barrel tap within a few hours of being delivered. But like all real ales, it needs to be sold quickly to ensure a healthy turnover of barrels and no real ale is in tip-top condition if the barrel is on sale for more than about 3 or 4 days.

It is to be hoped that global brewer Anheuser-Busch Inbev, which owns the Bass brand, will see fit not to discontinue this most famous of all English beers. An optimistic scenario would be for Molson Coors to buy the Bass rights from Inbev and to resurrect it at their Bass Brewery in Burton on Trent, as surprisingly the historic brewery complex is still intact. Failing that, perhaps Marstons could conceivably acquire the Bass brand and continue brewing it long term.

The future for Draught Bass is uncertain.

Hugh Price   (hughprice@hotmail.co.uk)
Tynemouth Lodge Hotel,  public house.