Meantime reduces strength of beer. Are we surprised?

Meantime IPA has a new label. It also has a new strength, dropping from 7.5% to 7.4% ABV. Not a surprise in view of the new increased duty on strong beers and not in itself cause for great concern. But I'm worried that the 7.5% threshold will be reduced in future years either as a continued attack on drinkers egged on by the health lobby or merely as a blatant tax grab. Either way the emasculation of beer is underway.

CAMRA - Stuck In the Past and Complacent

I've had a few days to think about CAMRA Chair, Colin Valentine's rant against bloggers as publicised by Beer.Birra.Bier and Pete Brown.  I presume that like me most  bloggers are long standing CAMRA members, so it seems strange to criticise a section of your membership.

His comments have already been refuted by the aforementioned bloggers but one important point in favour of 'craft beer' went unsaid. CAMRA has consistently ignored the huge number of licensed premises which are resistant to cask beer. Clubs, restaurants, cafes, cinemas, theatres, concert venues and sports events mostly never stock cask beer mainly due to the irregular patterns of trading. CAMRA has never had a coherent policy for promoting bottle conditioned beers in these places which would be an improvement for the discerning drinker. In fact CAMRA branches rarely do much campaigning at all to increase the number of premises selling decent beer preferring to concentrate their efforts on disparaging the output of the larger brewers and praising the microbreweries.

The emergence of quality keg beer should be a cue for a concerted assault on the non-cask venues to persuade some to stock high quality British beers from the likes of Freedom and Meantime or any of the large number of good keg beers from U.S., Belgium or Italy. Some could even convert to cask further down the line. The truth is that CAMRA is ageing fast. They're happy with their 70s outlook hence the proliferation of Jazz Bands, Folk Groups (yes I know it's getting cool again) and Morris Dancers at beer festivals. How can the the Twitter generation relate to CAMRA?

Fuller's Vintage Ale in Sainsbury

This is becoming less of a beer blog, more of a public service message board! Anyway, it is worth alerting you that I visited my local Sainsbury branch at lunchtime to do my weekend shop and was surprised to see Fuller's Vintage Ale 2010. This particular branch didn't stock the ale when it was first issued in late autumn. So it may be that further stocks have been supplied to the branches.

 £3.44 a bottle is not bad - it costs more in Fuller's own shop. Sainsbury stock the Meantime 75cl botte conditioned ales in many branches so if you find the Vitnage Ale as well you've got a couple of classy beers.