Wandering Through Rona Land

Coping Skills

I had intended to do a post before now, but something always changes in the whole COVID-19 situation, rendering all my ideas obsolete overnight.  But now we're in a period of relative stability (at least until next week when our Beloved Government makes its Christmas plans clear), I can finally get something in writing.  So apologies to any readers who may find this stuff even more bizarre and disjointed than usual.

While the pubs were still open, I did my bit, shall we say.  I doubted my custom alone would keep the town's pubs going, but let it be said here - I gave it my very best shot.  Every Sunday and Monday I did my usual crawl, sinking many pints in the process and reassuring people in social media that though these places were open, the much-expected non-social distancing disasters was not happening.  At least where I was going, anyway.

That was in August, and pretty much stayed steady in the vast majority of the pubs I went to until Preston was placed in Tier 3.  I made sure I stuck by the rules (one thing about being autistic is that I'm good with "rules" once I'm made aware of them) and stuck it out despite the ever-increasing restrictions.  I carried hand sanitiser at all times.  I never took my mask off except at my seat.  I downloaded the NHS App and checked in at every venue.  I even, when usage of public transport was "strongly advised against" for all but essential journeys, walked to town and back instead of taking the bus (a 7 mile round trip).  I've served my time in the Rona Trenches to support pubs.  I really have.

The final straw for me was the aforementioned Tier 3 announcement.  All pubs not serving a "substantial meal" were to close.  That kiboshed most of my typical weekend.  I contemplated walking to Spoons, or any of the nearby places that do food, sitting on my own with a pizza and 2 pints, then going home (how many "substantial meals" can anyone consume in one day).  Any fun I'd have just wasn't worth the effort on top of everything else I'd have to do.

That was 6 weeks ago.  We're now 10 days from the current lockdown being lifted.  I don't know about you but I'm not holding out much hope for anywhere I'd want to go being open before January at the earliest.  Christmas I can see being a total farce, as what business would bother opening (presumably under heavy restrictions) for a week and being shut down again for another month to compensate for the inevitable increase in Coronavirus cases?  The ones that do will probably end up sharing the fate of this place near me.

No.  I think I'll likely be staying home until 2021.  Luckily (?) the Christmas period means we retail workers have plenty to do, so I'm unlikely to be bored.  And for leisure - well, plenty of whisky and Green Devil here.  Plus "Uncle Matt's Mixtape Factory", the results of which some of you may have seen on another blog.  So I'll see you all next year.  Probably.

Well, that was depressing, wasn't it?  Never mind - for those overly affected by this post, here's some Herb Alpert to cheer you up :

 

Cost

A few years ago, there was a blended whisky on the market called Bailie Nicol Jarvie.  While not the highest seller in the "Premium Blended" sector,  it was highly regarded by it's buyers and regularly got good reviews from the whisky pundits. Unusually, it was made with 65% malt whisky, as opposed to the 30% you find in Bell's, Grouse etc.

There were regular mutterings about how LVMH (the company who owned the brand) could knock the stuff out at £18 a bottle. Some even said things such as "I hope BNJ never becomes popular,  they'll never be able to make it viable." 

And so it came to pass in 2014. LVMH discontinued it. The 65% malt they put in it was worth more than they could sell it for as BNJ. Being a maker known for the "Luxury Goods" sector, they decided to withdraw from the blended whisky market. Had the brand been as strong as say, Johnnie Walker (a bottle of JW Black has increased in price by 50% since 2009), they possibly could have increased the price commensurately, but the average BNJ punter was reckoned to have been unwilling to stump up the extra £7.

Events like this are starting to happen in the beer world. Cask beer is reckoned to be, as the experts put it, "a faff".  The sheer effort of brewing it, casting it, delivering it and getting the empties back is a pain, and even after all that,  there's no guarantee the pub they've sold it too will look after it or serve it properly.

What most sectors in the food and drink sector do when faced with such things is simply reduce package size or increase prices. The former is out, as beer is sold by the pint and drinkers would take a dim view of having a Toblerone done on them.

The latter is just as difficult for many reasons. Cask drinkers invariably have some kind of formula in their heads about what a pint "should" cost, and God help any pub that goes over this. This varies from place to place. In Preston,  a 4% cask bitter is usually priced at £3, but in Lancaster (20 miles away) it's generally at least 50p more. As most people, even now, rarely travel to drink, it's not often noticed.

With the (frankly ridiculous) every-growing number of breweries and (sadly) decreasing numbers of pubs, this price is being pincered.  Pubs and punters want it cheap, and there are always breweries willing to cut corners to offer their beer as cheaply as possible.

The main loser in this is the"premium craft cask" producer. They simply can't compete with someone brewing two barrels at a time in their (hopefully clean) garage with their lower duty rate and overheads.  And a lot of pubs simply want cheap, new beer and will gravitate away from the premium brewers towards the shed merchants.

My fear, and indeed my prediction, is that brewers of Premium Cask will do a Buxton/Cloudwater and simply abandon the cask market with all it's vagaries for the keg market with it's better margins. The cask market will be left to National and Large Regional brewers with their economies of scale, and the garage and 2bbl people with their clapped-out Transit van and their well-thumbed local order network.

I pondered this yesterday in my local micropub while drinking a £2.90 pint of Hawkshead Lakeland Gold. The days of this sort of thing are numbered, I thought.

I hope I'll be proved wrong, but I fear I won't be.

Provenance

Notice the absence of "brewed by"

So, the alleged best selling cask ale turns out to have it's bottle equivalent brewed far, far away from where drinkers assumed? Colour me surprised, as they say.

Doom Bar, as any person with even reasonable discernment knows, is crap. But it has traded on being "Cornish", so those places that have flogged the bottles on this premise are a bit miffed.  It's really no different from what Thwaites have done with Wainwright, but Blackburn (a less romantic location than Rock, it has to be said) isn't plastered over the packaging in a similar way.

There's a long history of such duplicity in the drinks industry. Whisky is the drink with the most notorious reputation for it. Now, Scotch is always distilled and matured (for 3 years in an oak cask) in Scotland. By law it has to be. But with every other aspect, anything goes.

Take the whisky in front of me at this minute, Black Bottle. Now, this is a mid-range blend. It proclaims it's made to an old family recipe on the bottle. Now, I know that it uses a lot less peated malt in the blend than it did 5 years ago (their source of sufficiently cheap Islay has been cut off, presumably) . How old is this family recipe, I wonder?

The whisky industry is run on myth and legend, and it tries it's damnedest to hide the truth about itself in it's marketing material. The truth is that it's made industrially, by a very small workforce compared to even 40 years ago.  I went on the Aberlour tour in 2011, and there were more tour guides and shop staff than whisky makers (as I recall, it was one bloke next to the washbacks sat at a computer). One Islay distillery, Caol Ila, can apparently be run without a single person onsite.

Caution : Pay no attention to the industry behind this image

The whisky industry is 75% owned by 2 companies, Diageo and Pernod Ricard. Even those distileries that are not, and proclaim their independence are owned by companies based in places like Trinidad (Bunnahabhain), Japan (Bowmore) or Thailand (Old Pulteney).  One hitherto furiously independent Islay distillery, Bruichladdich, soon accepted a big enough offer from the French drinks giant Remy-Cointreau.

All the stuff about tradition, age old methods and heritage is bullshit. The reason the truth is never mentioned is because it destroys the image the Scotch industry has spent decades promoting.

That such things have reached the beer industry is no surprise. The only thing that's odd is that it's taken 2 years for Molson Coors/Sharp's antics to be made public.  Even the truth behind whisky is easily discovered if you care to look.  Beer, with it's more diverse locations and history of names being shuttled about between brewers, finds these things easier to hide it seems.

Enjoy your drinks, or even dislike them if appropriate. But don't think too hard about the actual provenance of the marketing behind them. You will, more than likely, be disappointed.

The Parody Account

Once upon a time, in a land far far away (in this case my bedroom), I created a Parody Twitter account.  I'm not a man for broad strokes.  I like the minutae of things.  So, my subject was a fictional whisky blender, Richard Proboscis, a wafer-thin spoof of real whisky blender Richard Paterson.  I got his posting style down to a tee, and recounted unlikely adventures of whisky-spilling and vociferous salesmanship.  Apparently, the people at Whyte & Mackay loved it, though Mr. Paterson himself was apparently slightly dubious.

I was possibly a bit sharp, but I don't think I was ever abusive or cruel.  And anyway, Mr. Paterson reduced his tweeting frequency and changed his style somewhat after a few months.  I do feel slightly guilty as I wonder if I was responsible for that.  I stopped posting to the account after three months, if for no other reason than it meant I ran out of material.

Which brings me to today's events.  Recently, an alleged spoof accout targeting famed beer bloggers Boak & Bailey has appeared.  I would post a link here, but it's likely the account will be deleted in the next few hours.  To say the output has been obscure and esoteric is putting it mildly.  Spurious ratings of blogs and non-sequiturs about online habits were the main topics.

But for some reason, today they have targeted the blameless Melissa Cole.  I'd love to be able to say the results have been needle-sharp, coruscating satire of beer bloggery.  I'd even love to be able to say it even turned the corners of my mouth up for a millisecond.  But sadly no.  It's been more along the lines of what the Daily Mail do to people they think their readers need to hate.  An unflattering photo here, thinly-veiled abuse there.  And always crying their rights in the name of freedom.

I appreciate that you get utter knobs on the Twitter as much as in the real world.  But the aforementioned knobs tend to use their psedonymity to avoid the  much deserved kicking they'd get in the so-called "real" world.

Freedom is a good thing, but how some people use it makes you despair