Author: Andy Cullen

It is the time of the year in CAMRA that is AGM season. Our Dronfield sub-branch has just held theirs and their committee has been appointed for the year ahead with lots of discussion on things they wish to achieve including upgrading to full branch status, publish a local pub guide, put on a beer festival and more. The Sheffield & District branch AGM is coming up on the 7th April and the national AGM & Members Weekend is in Nottingham 17th to 19th April. It is a time of year that I – and others currently on the committee – think about what we are trying to achieve as a branch of CAMRA – or even as a member of CAMRA. You may recall my comments in the February issue that we’ve never had it so good in terms of the availability of real ale and good beer in general, there are beers of many different styles out there, lots of pubs and bars serving it and a record number of breweries producing it with more and more opening! I think CAMRA does still have a role of getting people excited about good beer, celebrating it, helping people understand it and engaging with the brewers producing it – but this now apart from putting on beer festivals should probably be more on a social level. On the campaigning front the focus has moved on. We need to focus on issues like perfectly viable pubs closing down, looking at behaviour of pub companies and planning law for example, there are also issues on tax to continue campaigning on – things are generally improving on beer tax thanks to very good campaigns jointly with other like minded organisations – however there is a new European tax threat to small Cider producers so we aren’t entirely winning. There are also the little consumer issues in pubs that still irk some members too – short measures, being served off beer, prices not clearly displayed etc – although of course in most good pubs and bars the customer service is good enough to rectify such things without argument. With all the above in mind, it still frustrates me that I’m still reading and hearing the whole cask and keg thing and whether CAMRA should embrace keg beer if it is good, tasty beer. Obviously CAMRA’s heritage is campaigning to save and ensure the availability of traditional cask beer – aka real ale – in the days when keg was the threat to real ale because it was cheap, nasty and had a longer shelf life. To be able to campaign for something, you have to be able to define what it is you are campaigning for. Real Ale has a specific definition – Good or Craft beer doesn’t. Tom’s article about defining craft beer this month picks up an element of this, however my view is spending so much time debating such matters is a complete waste of time given that the current campaigning priorities are more about saving pubs rather than beer….. So for the year ahead in Sheffield CAMRA I think we are looking at a much improved programme of social events, not just brewery visits but getting out and about visiting pubs outside the City Centre and the usual popular circuits like Kelham Island – come with us and try a pub you’ve never visited before. We also need to revitalise the Pub of the Month award – this is another way of helping promoting good pubs across our area. Also we need to repeat the success of last years beer festival at Kelham Island Museum – all the signs are it will be even better this year with more beer and a bigger capacity. To achieve want we want to we do need new people involved on the committee. Many of the old faces are stepping down due to other commitments – some work, some family. Others remaining on the committee have been doing multiple roles for a few years now and are looking at taking a lower profile. Therefore it is the perfect time for some new volunteers with enthusiasm and ideas to join the committee and start making things happen and get members more engaged and involved! If you think you could do that, please come along to the AGM and put yourself forward! Don’t worry if you don’t know ‘how things work’ – there will be people to help with that! Finally, April is National Community Pubs Month – celebrate with a pint in your local – Cheers!

Three years after Dronfield was established as a sub-branch of Sheffield CAMRA, we invited all new members to a social evening and buffet at the Coach and Horses in Dronfield. We were pleased to see several new faces in a cheerful atmosphere, We hope that more members will join in with us in the coming years so that we can extend our activities and trips. Ruth Hepworth

(or… oh no, not this subject again!) Craft beer is regarded as being quite the in thing at the moment. Pubs, bars and off-licences are offering more and more beer described as “craft” and a number of brewers have gained big reputations as craft breweries. Many article and blog posts have been devoted to the subject, and the letters page of CAMRA’s monthly members newsletter “What’s Brewing” tends to be full of fulminating on the subject, often from people seemingly convinced that craft beer is nothing more than an evil conspiracy to bring back the dreaded keg beers of the 1970’s. But what is Craft beer actually meant to be? The official American definition of a craft brewery is one that has Annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less. Under that definition even the biggest of the big UK brands such as Carling and John Smiths would be defined as “craft”. And in any case, it is possible for big breweries to produce good, well made beers. Just because a brewery is small doesn’t automatically make it better. Craft beer is often described as being much hoppier then other beer, but does a beer have to be a massively hopped IPA in order to be considered craft? The answer to that is a firm no. For one thing the terms is often used to describe a huge variety of beer, from imperial stouts to Belgian-style sour beers. I have yet to hear any proper explanation of how a beer like Might Oak Oscar Wilde Mild (CAMRA’s champion beer of Britain in 2011) is any less of a craft beer then the likes of Thornbridge Jaipur. Some people have claimed that craft beer is beer made from new world hop varieties such as Simcoe and Nelson Sauvin. Really? Even the likes of Brewdog have made beer using English hop varieties such as Challenger and Goldings. There are some people who argue that craft beer tends to be much stronger than non-“craft” beer. But I don’t buy that argument. I don’t see how a beer such as Oakham Citra is any less of a craft beer then it’s stronger bigger brother, Oakham Green Devil IPA. It’s also worth noting the current trend for “session IPA’s” at lower strength then your usual India Pale Ales. There are those to claim that craft beer is nothing more than a euphemism for keg beer. This is simply a load of nonsense. A beer such as Magic Rock High Wire does not become any less “craft” when it’s served out of a cask rather than keg. There have even been some people who have claimed that craft beer is pasteurised and filtered. Well, a few beers being marketed as “craft” might be but a heck of a lot isn’t. It’s worth remembering that these days unpasteurised, secondary fermented beer can be, and is served on keg and even in cans so the boundaries of what an unabashed unpasteurised beer loving CAMRA member like myself might consider acceptable are being blurred. And if pubs replace the likes of Carlsberg & Stella with much better keg beers from the likes of Kernel then surely that has to be a good thing? Is craft beer expensive? Again not necessarily. Although a lot of the new keg beers are undoubtedly pricey, the term encompasses such a wide variety of beers that inevitably, it includes beers made for much less cost. Is craft beer automatically good? Well no. I’ve had quite a few craft beers that I haven’t tasted good at all. But equally, it’s absurd to portray any beer marketed as being “craft” as being automatically rubbish. Is craft beer the beer that’s fashionable? Well that might be the closest we can get to what craft beer might possibly be, although even that doesn’t cut the mustard as a definition. For one thing, fashions change. For another, who’s to say that a beer such as the excellent Darkstar Partridge Best Bitter is made with any less “craft” then Revelation IPA from the same brewery? In summary, it is actually quite futile to provide any sort of clear, workable definition of what craft beer is. There have been many developments and improvements made to the British beer scene in recent times, and a great deal of this is to be welcomed. But trying to pin down what people actually mean by craft beer can all too often be like trying to nail jelly to a wall. And on that note, I could have been drinking nice beer instead of writing this! I shall rectify this by heading off to my local to drink a pint of real ale. Thomas Sturgess