Category: Opinion

Dear CAMRA member As Chairman of CAMRA Sheffield & District Branch I would like to take this opportunity to ask members to actively support the Sheffield Branch in 2020. The Sheffield Branch Committee is seeking support from members to arrange social activities, edit our monthly magazine Beer Matters and communicate with National CAMRA. The committee meet monthly @ The Dog and Partridge and it will be difficult to continue with our current activities without some extra support. If you are interested please contact a member of the committee. I would like to invite all members to attend the Sheffield Branch Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Tuesday 14 April (8pm) in the function room (disabled access) at The Greystones on Greystones Road (S11 7BS). At the meeting we will chose the committee for the next year, and debate and vote on any motions submitted. The deadline for submission of motions is four weeks in advance of the AGM (March 17) to Phil Ellet at a Branch meeting or Email secretary@sheffield.camra.org.uk . Formal business includes reports from the Chairman and Treasurer. Following the AGM a short Branch meeting will take place to share pub, club and brewery news. Social activities and future meetings will be announced. As I mention above Sheffield Branch are always keen to encourage CAMRA members to get in involved in social activities, judges and join the committee. Please consider an active role to support Sheffield CAMRA Branch. The Greystones can be reached by bus 83 (stop outside the pub) or 81/82 and 88 (stop near the Coop on Ecclesall Road and a steep 10min walk up Greystones Road). I look forward to meeting you at the AGM. Cheers Glyn Mansell, Chairman Sheffield & District CAMRA

January is one of the most difficult times of year in the pub business with reduced customer levels, mainly due to people being a bit skint after Christmas with all the extra spending on gifts and everything else involved with the celebrations. It is being made even worse for the pubs and breweries that supply them now by various campaigns to encourage people to turn their back on the pubs they love, stop drinking and give the money to charity instead! We say instead of dry January, get the new year off to a good start with “Tryanuary” whilst still supporting the pubs, specialist beer shops and breweries that supply them. Why not make an effort to try new beers or beer styles during January? Be that a mild, traditional bitter, Blonde, IPA, Stout, Porter, Barley Wine, Saison, Sour or one of many others, there is plenty to choose from. Wanting to be sensible after Christmas and new year excesses? You could still socialise at the pub and enjoy a session strength beer or a low/no alcohol alternative – or even look out for those pubs and bars with an interesting choice of soft drinks. Another way of enjoying Tryanuary might be to visit pubs you haven’t been to before, there are lots of good ones in our area!

Pulling together to support pubs and clubs Pubs face a huge tax burden, including VAT, excise duties, business rates, corporation tax and other pub-specific costs. In total £12.7bn in taxes are paid across the beer and pubs sector per year. Tax makes up around one third of the cost of a pint sold in a pub. Pubs pay 2.8% of the total amount paid in business rates, but account for only 0.5% of total business turnover. Various relief schemes have been brought in, but these have been time limited and haven’t affected licensees coping with the largest rates increases. The next Government needs to undertake a full review of business rates in England to fix the unfair overpayment by the pub sector permanently. In 2016 the Government introduced a Pubs Code and Adjudicator in England and Wales to govern the relationship between large pub companies and their licensees. This followed many years of CAMRA’s campaigning against the shortterm business practices of large pub companies which led to underinvestment in pubs, pub closures and high prices. The Code is currently under review, and it needs substantial changes to the legislation underpinning it to make it finally deliver for tenants. This includes fixing loopholes that allow pub companies to game the Code and making sure that tenants have access to the same levels of information as their pub companies. The new Government needs to seize the opportunity of the review to make changes to the Pubs Code Regulations to fix the problems with the existing Code. Pulling together to support beer and cider Three consecutive cuts in beer duty from 2013-2015, followed by a freeze in 2016, gave the sector a huge boost. Despite a further freeze in 2018, beer duty in the UK remains much higher than other nearby brewing nations, meaning that brewers are unable to properly invest in their businesses. Should the UK leave the EU, this will present an opportunity for the UK Government to re-balance the tax differential between the on-trade and the off-trade and demonstrate support for the vast majority of consumers who drink responsibly and in social environments. A lower rate of duty for draught beer sold in pubs could be introduced to recognise the social benefits of alcohol being consumed in regulated, social environments. This year the Government introduced a new duty band for cider between 6.9% abv and 7.5% abv in strength. This measure was brought in to target cheap, low cost ‘white’ ciders that are nothing like the natural, high quality and price point product that real cider producers make. The existing duty band should not be widened, and the rate of duty should not be raised above any other across the board duty increases.

According to the Long Live The Local campaign; more than 3000 pubs have closed their doors for good in the last 3 years and over the course of the next 5 years more than 1 in 10 pubs will join them, costing thousands of jobs in the process. It’s long been known that the pub scene is in decline, caused by rising beer tariffs, competition from supermarkets and partially, in my opinion, a failing on our part, as a community, to evolve with the times. We, as a community could be doing so much more to encourage more people to use independent pubs and to make them feel welcome when they do. There are many contentious subjects in beer (cask vs, keg, big money buy-outs etc.) but the key to moving forward is shifting focus from the things that divide us towards the things that bring us together, because at their core that is what pubs are about; bringing people together. Pubs are at the heart of our communities and yet so many people don’t feel welcome or comfortable utilising this cornerstone of British society. It’s a sideways, judgemental look from the man sitting at the bar when a woman orders a pint instead of a half. It’s a glance over the shoulder of the girl behind the bar to ask the barman behind her what beer he’d recommend. It’s the shifting in the seats when a visibly queer person walks up to the bar and the audible scoff when they order a gin and tonic in a “traditional real ale” pub. This is everyday, it is pervasive, sometimes it’s unconscious but for many it is the reality and it’s important for everyone to remember that just because it isn’t happening to you, doesn’t mean that it’s not happening. So how can we move forward? A great starting point is to operate zero tolerance policies in our pubs, train staff to deal with issues regarding discrimination and make sure that customers know that if they are discriminated against that staff will have their back and remove/bar offending parties. A great example of this is the Everyone Welcome Initiative, which provides solid guidelines for businesses on how to deal with discrimination and how to make everybody feel welcome in their venue. Another positive move is to avoid supporting businesses that use discriminatory branding; a move which was taken at the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) this year by banning the sale of beers and ciders with discriminatory pumpclips. Both this and the choice of Stonewall as this year’s chosen charity at the festival are positive moves by CAMRA and GBBF emphasise a growing movement to end discrimination and encourage diversity in beer, but the resulting backlash also highlighted the sheer amount of resistance there is to progressive moves like this from within the beer community. We’re certainly seeing an increase in the number of women and queer people feeling comfortable enough to engage with the beer community at the moment, in part thanks to initiatives and organisations such as Ladies That Beer, Women on Tap, The Queer Brewing Project and Sheffield’s Out and About to name just a few. Supporting these organisations, encouraging diversity and making newcomers to the beer scene feel welcome within our community is extremely important, not just for the individuals who currently feel marginalised but it is also essential if we want to encourage new markets to help save independent pubs and see our community not just survive but thrive. Michael Deakin

It was way back in 1984 when  I wrote my first ever article for Beer Matters. The first of many I was to write over the next few years. It was an article bewailing the fact that various breweries were using low interest loans to free houses in return for their product, narrowing the choice of beers available and creating a backdoor monopoly. This was back in the days of the tied estate, now fast becoming a twentieth century relic. The tied estate has largely been replaced by the pub-owning chain, who are at liberty to buy and supply beer from any brewer these days. Progress. Though at the time I and several others in CAMRA questioned whether this was entirely a good thing, coupled with the move by the owners of the tied estates to change from the old-style rents, to leasehold agreements, meant that many pub landlords were forced to leave the trade. Plus it sometimes meant that some old, favourite pubs suffered less than sympathetic renovations that, along with a fetish for giving pubs gimmicky and silly names, meant that the changes weren’t always welcomed. Ah well, progress always comes at a price. And it was progress. The changes within the brewing industry did lead to far greater choice for you, the drinker. When I started to write for Beer Matters, Sheffield had four breweries. Four. Down from over 40 individual breweries that had served Sheffield at the beginning of the twentieth century. Whitbread, Stones, Hope & Anchor and Wards, now all gone. All that remains are the names of the beers, brewed by other brewers. Progress? I don’t think so. Neither did anyone else in CAMRA. Breweries swallowed up by bigger breweries, which in turn were swallowed up by even bigger breweries in a feeding frenzy of eat or be eaten. Big is beautiful, biggest is best. That was the prevailing  dogma, and sod the drinker. And the they got away with it. Why? Drinker apathy. “I have always drunk Tennant’s” was something I heard a lot from older drinkers. Well no you didn’t, Tennant’s brewery was swallowed up by Whitbread many years before. So long in fact that I bet you never drank Tennant’s, just a beer brewed by Whitbread using a name they acquired when they bought the brewery. I recently heard a similar sentiment expressed, “I have always drunk Stones.” Well not any more you can’t. Stones has gone, all that’s left is the name. Likewise, Wards, now brewed by Robinson’s with different yeast, different hops, and different water. The yeast is especially important as they used both foculating and semi-flocculating yeast; part of what made Wards distinctive, love it or hate it. A marmite beer but distinctive, unique, and now sadly vanished for good. Though truth to tell, Wards had long ceased to be Wards, as changes in brewing and how long it was conditioned in the brewery, from two weeks to a week to three days, meant that it lost its distinctive nose and taste. The members of CAMRA, weren’t apathetic drinkers. We campaigned to halt the slide towards bland, mass-produced keg beer, we campaigned for choice, for real ale. Through Beer Matters and all the other local newsletters, across the country. Getting our message into the hands of drinkers by taking copies of Beer Matters into pubs right across sheffield and district. And it worked. Over 40 breweries at the start of the twentieth century. By the late twentieth century only four. Now, at the start of the twenty-first, 24 breweries, and counting. Real progress. The tie, originally a good thing, allowing breweries an outlet for their beers, became over time a noose, strangling choice. Not just in terms of beers but in every aspect of sales, from wines and spirits to soft drinks and crisps. I wrote about the absurdity of, pint for pint, soft drinks being far more expensive. Soft drinks. Hard prices indeed. The big breweries used their tied pubs as milch cows, squeezing every once of profit from them. CAMRA actively campaigned both locally and nationally against the tie, finally forcing the government to act, limiting the tie to 500 pubs and introducing a policy allowing publicans to buy two beers from outside the tie. A small start but a start. Opening up the market to the microbrewery, and increasing choice. The brewers tried to get round the break up of the tie by setting up their own pub chains; remember the Scream and the All Bar One chains, amongst others? Identikit pubs selling identical beers. But the genie was out of the bottle, and we saw the arrival of the Wetherspoon chain of pubs, a genuine chain of freehouses. Finally more choice for drinkers. And that choice has grown, but what limits choice now, is geography. Lots of choice in and around city centers but, in the suburbs and outskirts, we have seen the loss of so many local pubs. Local pubs, so much a part of national heritage, are vanishing at an alarming rate and, if we lose them, an important part of our national identity will vanish with them. Use them or lose them. I mentioned drinker apathy earlier but it was more than that, it was also loyalty to your local. The local was the hub of the community; it was where you met your friends, your family. No family celebration was complete without a trip to someone’s local. Mums, dads, aunts, uncles, cousins; weddings, christenings, funerals, birthdays; all celebrated down your local. So when the beer range changed, due to yet another takeover, you complained for a while but got used to it. The big brewers dominance was so great that they could offer the same choice offered by the infamous Hobson: it’s this or nothing. I’m reminded of the two chaps drinking in a pub, one says to the other “beer’s rubbish in here since the new brewery took over, I don’t know about you but i will be glad when I have had enough.” A sour joke with more than a grain of truth. Well CAMRA wasn’t willing to accept Hobson’s choice and we began campaigning for a real and greater choice of quality beer. The reason CAMRA’s campaign was so very successful is entirely down to grassroots activism, local branches producing a local newsletter that informed the drinker about what was going on in and around their pubs. The first thing anyone looked at when they got the latest issue of Beer Matters (and I, as editor, was keenly interested in knowing) was not (as I hoped) my usual rant about some topical issue, but pub news; and then who had won this months pub; and finally future events, which part of Sheffield and district we were visiting. This raised awareness of the pubs that were out there. The pub at the bottom of your road that you had never visited, but had always wondered about. Above all, where to go for a drink. So much more important than my ranting. But my rants did raise awareness… and get me in bother. Legal action was threatened on several occasions. Thankfully threats to sue came to nothing. It was an eventful and fun few years as editor. But Beer Matters was never a solo effort. I was entirely dependent on my contributors, the dedicated branch members who sourced the pub news, organised walkabouts, and wrote articles. And the general public who would write in on a variety of subjects. Big thanks to them all. Without them there would not have been a Beer Matters . Some months, filling eight A5 pages took some doing. Other months, just too much to include in our meager eight pages. Special thanks must go to the late Mike Hensman and his partner Liz. Both former chairs of Sheffield CAMRA who guided my first fumbling steps as editor, patiently correcting my poor spelling and appalling grammar. They also made material contributions with a number of excellent articles and helped in redesigning Beer Matters masthead. Also thanks to Jenny Lightowler and Dave Staves, who took over typing duties and helped improve the look of Beer Matters. so much so that it won CAMRA’s award for most improved local newsletter. Result. Thank you also to everyone who turned up every month to staple Beer Matters as it came as 4 A4 sheets that needed stapling and folding. Special thanks are due to the late Jack  Ware and his lovely wife Carol, they never missed a stapling night and more importantly distributed copies to pubs in their area. Thank you everyone who, over the years, has helped distribute Beer Matters to the pubs around Sheffield. After all, if it’s not available in pubs, it cannot be read. Finally a special thank you goes to my friend John Beardshaw. He has been with Sheffield CAMRA from its earliest days, helping organise its first and all subsequent beer festivals. He has also been from the start, and continues to be, a contributor to Beer Matters. All the way from back in the days when it was called the Parish Pump, and was two sheets of A4, photocopied and stapled together, to the present. From such humble beginnings, great things have grown. In truth, the current format of Beer Matters is a great improvement on my own humble efforts. It is now a highly polished and professional looking magazine and not just a simple newsletter. Talking of humble beginnings, the big four breweries that dominated the brewing scene in Sheffield have gone, fallen over like ancient trees in a forest, leaving space and light for the saplings to grow. And they are growing. From four to 24 breweries. Marvelous. And joy of joys, an exciting new range of beer styles. Plus the rebirth of old (and I thought long since vanished and forgotten) types of beer. In particular, oatmeal stout and milk stout. I thought milk stout had vanished in the 60s with the demise of John Smiths bottled Milk Maid Stout. Ideal for nursing mothers, invalids, and of youngsters, “but don’t tell your mum and dad” as my fun uncle told me. Now a proper cask version is available. Oh joy. We really have come a long way from days when lager was the new, hip drink, and bitter was what your dad drank. Now lager is the dad drink and cask beer is the choice of a new more discerning generation of drinkers. 500 issues of Beer Matters. here’s to the next 500, cheers. Adrian Staton Former Editor

I first joined CAMRA at Sheffield beer festival when it was held at Hallam Student Union’s Nelson Mandella Building, which has since been demolished. I was actually recruited to join a national committee before I attended any local branch event – it was a new initiative to better recruit and involve younger members in the 18-30 age group. That would have been about 20 years ago. Like any volunteer organisations, you need new younger people coming in and getting involved in order to keep things going in the future as the old timers step down from active roles – and also to keep fresh ideas coming an ensure we are in touch with the modern scene. The thing with younger volunteers though is naturally many drift off as a result of living live – they start to get careers and families taking up time! The additional challenge for CAMRA back then was getting younger drinkers interested in real ale in the first place – it was viewed as an old man’s drink, lager was the cool choice, although some did buy into the marketing for smoothflow keg bitters that were the new thing. When I first started drinking, Sheffield could still be divided up into quarters of bitter loyalty based on where the breweries had pubs – there were Tetleys, Stones and Wards areas, plus Whitbread still had a lot of pubs where you could get the likes of Trophy Bitter or Boddingtons on cask. Mansfield also had a notable estate of pubs in the city. Some of the classic regional/family brewers beers did appear too – so the likes of Timothy Taylors, Theakston and Black Sheep for example. I can remember standing up at a CAMRA national AGM & Conference in Blackpool when policy on alcohol advertising was being debated and someone suggested big brewers should be banned from advertising but micros should be exempt. I disagreed – the likes of Tetleys was well marketed nationally and was considered a gateway into real ale for younger, inexperienced beer drinkers who may try that and then become a little more adventurous. Not long after I joined CAMRA we saw Wards and Stones breweries close, leaving Kelham Island Brewery as the biggest in the city. Abbeydale was smaller and quite young back then and that was about it in Sheffield although there were one or two other small local breweries around Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster. Another point to note back then was all pubs had to shut at 11pm (10:30pm on Sundays), if you wanted to drink later you had to go to a nightclub. Generally anywhere that was fun and lively around town on a Friday or Saturday night didn’t have decent beer and the fall back safe, widely available option for the discerning drinker was a bottle of Becks German lager. Kind of the role Brewdog Punk IPA plays these days! A few key landmarks in the years that followed that changed the beer scene for me

• introduction of progressive beer duty so small breweries pay less tax, giving them a chance against the big boys with big budgets. This resulted in a massive wave of new microbreweries opening. I admit some were better than others, some have stayed in business and some haven’t! We now probably have the most varied choice of beers we’ve ever had on the bars! On the negative side the market is crowded and not helped by restrictive beer supply ties operated by some big pub companies.
• The launch and successful sales and promotion of Abbeydale Moonshine. When first introduced this was something of a revelation – a pale ale with New Zealand hops offering a citrus character.
• Licencing reform – pubs and bars can apply for a licence to open for whatever hours suit their business, subject to local authority approval. It hasn’t led to 24 hour drinking and fighting that the media predicted, nor have we gained a European pavement cafe culture some hoped for either (probably the weather) – but you can now get a decent beer and relax in a proper pub after 11pm and there is no longer pressure on takeaways and transport when all the pubs kick out together at 11pm and the clubs kick out on mass at 2am
• The craft beer revolution – OK, it is an American term and a lot of the language is marketing hype and fashion. There is also no definitive explanation of what exactly ‘craft’ means in terms of beer. However at the end of the day it has meant beer is speaking a language that appeals to a wider audience, it has people interested in different beer styles, discussing beer and enjoying it. It means there are lots of breweries producing good quality beer across a massive spectrum of styles and more pubs and bars are stocking it – across cask, keg, can and bottle.

Now going back to my earlier comments about younger drinkers, there has been a huge cultural change and generally it is the younger drinker that is embracing trying new things. OK the old fashioned brown, malty bitter still doesn’t necessarily appeal – I remember a despairing conversation with a manager at the Varsity bar on West Street who had clearly had a memo from head office to try and be better at selling the ale but complained they were a student orientated bar and young people don’t drink real ale… looking down at his three handpumps, all filled with national brands of boring brown bitter I suggested he attended the student union beer festival where they sell out of over 50 different ales over 2 days to see how they did it… The thing now with the craft beer revolution, those younger drinkers we struggled to attract to real ale are now drinking and experimenting with all sorts of different beers and enjoying it. OK, not all those beers are on cask or real ale and they don’t really care, but the important thing is they are choosing beers on the basis of taste and enjoyment and have the choice on the bar to do so, and that is why CAMRA was formed back in the 1970s – to keep quality, tasty beer options available on the bar. (It just happened real ale in a cask was THE quality option back then). So the challenge for CAMRA now – well we still need to encourage people to join up and more importantly get involved, volunteer and enjoy – and in the current “craft” scene we need to ensure our image is relevant. Meanwhile from a campaigning perspective, the priorities have changed. Whilst we can take a step back from pushing for real ale to be available on the bars and to some extent from pushing some of the consumer issues – there are big campaigning issues keeping community pubs alive, keeping the cost of beer reasonable and keeping the anti alcohol lobby at bay – amongst other things. Still plenty of campaigning, promoting and enjoying of beer to be done for many years yet! If you aren’t already a CAMRA member do consider joining. If you are a member we’d love to see you get more involved, be that coming along to socials or pub award presentions, helping deliver magazines, updating pub entries on whatpub.com or ultimately joining the committee and helping make things happen. Sheffield’s beer scene is currently fantastic, vibrant and full of great people, great pubs, great beer and some fantastic initiatives -and we’d love to continue to be part of it! Andy Cullen

My earliest beery memories of Sheffield are sad ones. I recall going past Whitbread’s enormous Exchange Brewery which the group upgraded at a cost of £12 million then closed a couple of years later, such was the profligacy of the beer giants at the time. There were two Bass breweries in the city and I visited one on the outskirts with views of the moors. It had open Yorkshire Square fermenters and – if memory serves me – was producing Worthington White Shield, the legendary Burton IPA that had become a beer on wheels when Bass got tired of brewing it in its native town. Bass owned Stones, a fine beer that rivalled Boddingtons in its pallor and equally refreshing character. It was brewed elsewhere in the Bass group when the brewery closed but is never seen these days. Closer to the centre, Wards was a Sheffield icon, producing soft, malt-driven, creamy but refreshing beers for legions of thirsty steel workers. I visited shortly before it closed, a victim of the shocking asset stripping that destroyed the Vaux group. And then came Dave Wickett, who started the beer revival in the city, first with the Fat Cat and then Kelham Island Brewery. I got to know Dave well as we shared a love of both beer and football – I think we spent more time discussing the mixed fortunes of Sheffield United and West Ham United than we did brewing! Dave told me a wonderful story of how he bought the Fat Cat, refurbished it and was ready to open but he didn’t have any beer. He phoned Wards, who were still brewing, and none other than the head brewer came round and asked to see the cellar. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he told Dave. “I’ll put a cellar tank in with pressure points on the bar and away you go.” “I don’t want that,” Dave said. “I want casks and handpumps.” “Nobody wants to drinks that anymore,” the man from Wards said and stormed off in a huff. In desperation Dave phoned Timothy Taylor in Keighley and asked if he could buy an 18-gallon cask of Landlord and was told Sheffield was outside the brewery’s delivery area. So Dave drove to Keighley, put the cask in the boot of his car and took it back to the pub. Two days later he phoned Taylors who said they expected he’d been unable to sell the beer. “No,” Dave told them. “It went in two days and I want two more casks.” “In that case, we’ll deliver,” Taylors said and with just three cask of ale Dave Wickett helped the brewery turn Landlord into a national brand. From small acorns…today there are 20 breweries in the city. The choice is amazing, with superb beers in some equally superb pubs. And what better way to greet visitors to Sheffield than to offer them a pint or two in the Tap at the station. Behind the downbeat address of Platform 1B stands an architectural gem serving fine pints. Beer Matters has been recording the ups and downs of Sheffield beer and pubs for 500 editions. It’s a remarkable achievement and underscores all that is best about CAMRA – volunteers devoting many hours of their time to support good beer and good pubs on their local patch. Many congratulations – and here’s to the next 500! Roger Protz