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Oddly, I re-read that myself just a couple of weeks ago & agree it’s a very interesting read.

I was particularly interested in the fact that the CAMRA founders were most worried about the loss of variety and quality. At the time they identified cask as better meeting those requirements than the homogeneous pasteurised keg bitters that were being rolled out at the time. So essentially they weren’t precious about cask as a dispense method, it was just that at that time cask was what happened to provide them with the two things they actually wanted.

Of course, since then CAMRA have made cask their sole raison d’etre, rather than focussing on the variety and that their founders craved. Hardcore CAMRA-ists in my branch will now ironically choose a pub offering 3 identikit cask bitters of average quality from big brewers over a craft bar offering 15-20 different beers in a dozen different styles from microbrewers.

While there’s no doubt that CAMRA have achieved many fantastic things since they were formed, it’s intriguing to wonder what their “bearded hippy misfit” founders would be drinking and campaigning for if they were in their twenties now… I have a funny feeling they may actually be against CAMRA and for the choice offered by the craft keg bars!

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Indeed, I have wondered myself. This book has really helped to understand what the beer drinking culture was like in the 60s and 70s. The big six breweries had really dominated back then, having embarked on consolidation practices, swallowing up regional breweries (and closing many down) and were saving huge amounts in tax by weakening bitters & using cheap malt. One brewery was using 25% rice. Bland, nationally available bitters with misleading advertising about ‘premium quality’ followed. Local cask with real ingredients was the only solution.

In ten years they largely succeeded, thanks to their early Fleet St journalist members. But despite high quality foreign beers being imported early 80s, the anti-keg dogmaticism had taken root.

I believe back then the early members just wanted quality. Clearly you had it with traditional Belgian and German beer. But the fact Cask almost disappeared meant some protected it with all their heart, in case foreign beer or keg took over again. Fast forward today and cask is thriving, served alongside craft keg as it should be, but I think older members will never stop seeing it as under threat. This over zealous approach, made worse by moments like Chairman Colin Valentines 2011 speech at the CAMRA agm deploring modern craft beer, has done more harm than good.

What does “unveiling a Twitter handle” mean (Nik Antona, page 5)?

I sounds painful.

<*))))))><

I think CAMRA certainly lost its way somewhere along the line, the single-minded focus on cask ale and sneering attitude to any other dispense method, even whilst the latter was introducing the world to some fabulous beers in the 2000s, was a lost opportunity and they’ve missed out on a generation of beer drinkers I reckon. They’re finally catching up to a certain degree, but not helped by the ageing membership still being stuck in their ways. Always get the feeling they can’t win, whatever path they decide to take …

When did the ‘craft’ scene come to Britain? And by Britain I mean not just London. I can remember cask ale being the only quality beer available anywhere outside the biggest cities from when I came here in 1998 to well into the 2010s. You couldn’t even get Belgian beer easily, or at least I didn’t know where to look. When I started on Ratebeer in 2013, I had been a cask ale only guy for 15 years except for my visits home.

Before Ratebeer (and Untappd and the rest of the online sites), my main go-to for sourcing good beer was the GBG and CAMRA knowledge. I still use WhatPub when deciding where to drink in a new town. It’s just one piece of the puzzle, but an important one.

Most of my favourite pubs Leicester - the Real Ale Classroom and the Two-Tailed Lion - do both cask and keg to an incredibly high standard, and another of my locals, the Blue Boar, is almost completely cask (one or two keg on occasion) but the quality is out of this world. I’m talking about the quality of the beer itself, not the cellarmanship, which I can now take for granted will be of a high standard almost anywhere in town. Now that I think about it, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a bad pint of cask, when 10-15 years ago this was a common occurrence. Gone are the days when cask pubs were overrun by nationals and mediocre breweries like Cottage. A lot of cask beer can truly claim to be craft.

Today, CAMRA is as mixed a bag as mixed bags get. Some branches are very open-minded, and some are incredibly old fashioned, with everything in between. Every branch has the old guys whose love of cask has a bit of a nationalist feel about it. They prefer British (mostly English) cask ale over everything else, and even the best Belgian and German beer is derided as ‘foreign muck’. Then again I was introduced to wild fermentation beers at a CAMRA get together.

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Quick answer: 2007 and a very noticeable shift with Brewdog, national distribution of Punk IPA in Tesco and their well publicised war against CAMRA and the Portman Group which gave others the confidence to pursue American style hoppy beer

Long Answer: Brendan Dobbin (West Coast Brewing) was the first to try Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in San Francisco and copy it in the UK, by recipe and name in his Manchester brewpub, winning Silver at GBBF 1989. James Clay was the first to start importing American craft in the 1990s. Microbar opened in London 2001 and started using the term craft beer to describe modern beer that was different to real ale. Progressive Beer Duty inroduced in 2002 halved the tax rate for small brewers, encouraging many new breweries to start, including Thornbridge in 2004 where Martin Dickie developed Jaipur the first of the new wave of US hopped IPAS, leaving shortly after to start Brewdog. I think its hard to underestimate their impact.

Personally I drank sierra Nevada in the US 2002, but Punk IPA knocked me for six in 2010. I went to Euston Tap and Craft Beer Co in Clerkenwell shortly after they opened, drinking the house lager brewed by Mikkeller. Then Borough Wines, trying Kernel and Camden Town. Little did I know at the time how embryonic this scene was… all these had literally just started.

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My memory is hit and miss … but I always recall that in the early days of Cask Pub & Kitchen, Pimlico, late summer 2009 into 2010, they often had Brewdog on Cask, including some earlyish Paradox releases!

15% cask beer that tasted great and not some hot fruity mess.

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I do remember drinking Punk, 5AM Saint and Dead Pony Club and being blown away. I’ve always liked SNPA and Goose Island but this was a whole other level.

It does seem like it’s almost everywhere now - an excellent newish craft bar in Bedford, good places in smaller towns like Rushden and St Neots. Hopefully most of these places will make it through the aftermath of the pandemic.

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