News in Brief #44

Johnny Rotten would be Proud

All Money to End Up at BrewDog Eventually

This week, the latest peculiar crowdfunding scheme from narcissists and sometime brewers BrewDog closed with only 80% of its funding acheived.  Chairman Admiral James Watt however has proclaimed it a great success.

"Our Equity For Punks VI has been an awesome victory for Craft Beer fans who don't want breweries to be controlled by faceless big business money men in the City." shouted Watty to his unsceptical acolytes.

"By the way, you can still apply to be an Equity Punk by post. Simply download the form, fill it in, and post with a cheque for £185 to Corporate Money Funding Solutions, London WC1"

We asked symbolic transactional token system Money about the future "Yes, by the looks of it, pretty much all of me will end up at BrewDog by 2023. But that's OK."

"I mean, I'm sure they'll be different from every other business in the whole of history that's ever got hold of me. Right?"

Curty's Institute of Education

Beer Communicator Saves Airport Drinkers From Dreadful Fate

Today at Heathrow Airport Wetherspoons, three Americans were seen drinking keg Boddingtons from atypical glassware. Shockingly, most travellers appeared not too bothered. But not awesome expertise expounder and storyteller Curt Mattis.

"I had to say something. I mean, for a start dimple mugs are so 2014." burbled Mattis "And Boddies is made in, like, Preston or something. I thought of all the wonderful London made beers they could be drinking. Or at least the bottles of Meantime Pale in the bar fridge."

"So I went up to them and asked them how they would feel if I went to their country and drank their crappy beer in front of their drinks experts. Then I explained my credentials as a Beer journalist to them. Went rather well, I thought."

Curty continued "Anyway, I managed to get a later flight after I explained everything to the Border Police. They accepted my hand luggage was a bottle of Cloudwater DIPA and not a bomb like my American friends joked."

"It's good to, like, share my knowledge with a receptive audience."

But where's the CHOICE?

Campaigner Bemoans Local Beer Choice

Living fossil and man who preferred it when this was all fields Mudgie Mudgington this week condemned the Ale selection at one of his local pubs, The Silver Horseshoe, Marple.

"I was on my local CAMRA's Friday crawl and walked into the bar expecting a simple choice." ranted Mudgie "But I was confronted with a choice of twenty different beers. TWENTY."

"I mean, most of them were Pale and hoppy. There were only three dark beers, and I only knew six of the lineup from having them before. I told the barman there should be more choice at this time of the week. He just gave me a strange sideways look."

"I'm sure had I asked the 120 other patrons in the pub that night they would have been as equally disappointed with choice of beer as I was. It's terrible. What are the local wet-led pubs coming to?"

"To be honest," confessed Mudgie " I preferred this place twenty years ago when it only had Holt's Bitter and Mild."

Old Beer Ads #3 - Boddingtons (1993)

Amazing as it seems now, in the mid-1990s Boddingtons Bitter was the third best selling cask bitter and the best selling canned bitter in the UK.  Such success was mostly built on the success of advertisments like this.  They all had the same basic plot.  30 seconds of some lavishly shot glamorous situations, and then a few seconds revealing it was actually about Mancunians drinking beer.

Personally speaking, and I was only a teenager at the time, I found these commercials appalling.  Looking back, I see them as a typical example of Soho adwankers taking a much-loved regional product and turning it into something to brayingly laugh about over cocktails in a poncy central London bar.  Parodies of contemporary ads may have made their fellow "creatives" applaud at the next workshop, but for those who can't grasp the intent, it's alienating and patronising.  I, and many other Northwesterners, would have gladly responded to such "affectionate ribbing" by demolishing the brewery at Strangeways ourselves.

It took another 14 years, but the charming fellows at AB-Inbev did it for us.  Boddies time in the sun was short, and the brand slowly tanked after it fell out the fashion these ads expensively promoted.  The can and keg stuff is still made at an enormous beer factory (I hesitate to call it a "brewery", myself) near the M6, but cask Boddingtons is long gone.

I have not seen it on either a font or handpump for nigh on a decade.  Surely somebody knows where the Boddies is buried?