New micropub for Southport

The first Beer Den

Some good news for a change! Parker Brewery has just been given planning permission to convert a former shop at 125 Rufford Road, Southport, into a new micropub. The brewery already runs the popular Beer Den which opened just over two years ago on Duke Street, Southport. Work has only just begun on the new pub, and it will be run in a similar way to its older sibling serving local cask ales, wines, fizz, spirits and coffee.

Parker Brewery is in Banks, just north of Southport, and it produces both traditional and modern ales in casks and bottles. The new Beer Den (as it will also be called) will sell the brewery's real ales alongside local guest ales. This micropub will be a welcome development in Crossens, a beer desert at present, with thirsty drinkers currently having to trek either to the Shrimper or to the pubs in Churchtown. I'll let you know the opening date when it becomes available.

► This is taken from an article that I wrote for the CAMRA column in our local papers, the Southport Visiter and Ormskirk Advertiser.

Liverpool's Dispensary to shun real ale

You can see part of the original sign (top left) from when the
pub was called the Grapes. ('Borrowed' from the Liverpool
Echo, just as they've used my photos without asking)

I was chatting to Dave in the Lion Tavern in Liverpool on Tuesday; I was there for our monthly singaround. He was telling me the the current licensee of the Dispensary on Renshaw Street, also called Dave, is retiring.

I wrote about this pub almost exactly 6 years ago on 19 September 2013: "This pub has won Liverpool CAMRA's Pub of the Year award in the past, and I have spent happy afternoons and evenings there. The licensee once took the mickey out of me when he saw me at the bar writing down all the beers that were on. He obviously didn't believe me when I told him I was making notes for my beer blog."

He actually declared in a loud voice that "We've got another ticker in!" One thing I am not is a ticker, but I took it as banter, even though Dave's reputation was such that I doubt he'd have been bothered if I had been offended. His approach to customer service has been described as eccentric, but I always found that the beer was on good form.

Dave in the Lion told me that the Dispensary will now be focusing on craft ales and cocktails and that no real ale has been included in the next order. This is a shame, and I see no reason why a pub cannot sell both craft beer and real ale, as the Tap & Bottles in Southport does.

► P.S. on 8.11.19. I went in last week (31.10.19) and they do still have real ale on and it was in good condition. It seems that the reports of real ale's demise in this pub were premature.

Death of a pub

"Borrowed" from the Liverpool Echo article,
which used a picture I'd taken without credit.

The Blundell Arms in Birkdale was for more than 30 years the home of the Bothy Folk Club of which I'm a resident singer. Regrettably, over many years the pub was run into the ground by the pubco and deteriorated from respectable street corner local to scruffy and, frankly, slightly dodgy dive. The Bothy was increasingly made to feel unwelcome, despite the amount of custom it brought in every Sunday night, and moved elsewhere. Finally, and perhaps inevitably, on 6 March 2016 the pub closed its doors for the final time.

Shortly afterwards, a campaign to convert it into a community pub was set up by Jason MacCormack and succeeded in gaining Asset of Community Value (ACV) status for it. The site on which the pub sits is large, and developers bought it to turn it into housing, leading to something of an impasse.

There the matter had remained until last weekend when, according to the Liverpool Echo, a huge fire swept through the building. The cause of the fire has not yet been announced, but empty buildings with no gas or electricity supply don't tend to go on fire spontaneously. I have read three different speculative explanations, although obviously I have no idea which is the right one:

• Vandalism.
• An accident by homeless people who, it has been said, were staying in the building.
• A convenient fire to scupper the community pub campaign.

The campaign has said it will try to get an estimate of the cost of repairing the fire damage to see whether they can still proceed, but even if they can, there's no doubt their task has become considerably harder. I wish them luck, but I fear it will soon be a building site.

The EU, free speech, and Tim Martin

I wrote a few days ago about how some people can, in my opinion, be quite snooty about Wetherspoon's pubs. In recent weeks I have been hearing another explanation for avoiding them, a more political one. As I said in my earlier post, anyone who chooses not to patronise Spoons because of Tim Martin's strident views on leaving the EU is of course perfectly entitled to do so, but although I completely disagree with him on that issue, it won't stop me using the pubs.

Why not? Quite simply, I take the view that Tim Martin is entitled to his views, although I must question the business sense of potentially alienating up to 48% of your potential customers, but that's his problem, not mine. As I also previously said, if I knew the views of senior directors of a lot of pub chains, breweries, or indeed any companies that get money from me, I'm sure I'd find plenty to disagree with. Sensibly from a business perspective, most people in such positions will be much more guarded in their public statements than Tim Martin.

This second post on the subject of Spoons was prompted by a friend giving me a few vouchers, saying that she'll never use them because of Martin's public statements on leaving the EU, so I might as well have them. Fine by me. While I'm a very political animal, having been involved in unions, political parties, demonstrations and campaigns for most of my adult life, I accept the principle of free speech.

So let's define free speech: it doesn't just mean that you have the right to say what you believe in, it also includes other people having the right to say things that you fundamentally disagree with. In this country, there used to be an attitude of, "I disagree with what you say, but I defend your right to say it", often more simply expressed by agreeing to disagree. Increasingly the attitude is, "How dare you say that!", very often accompanied by insults and abuse.

I believe this change began with Mrs Thatcher because that was very much her approach, but she is not solely, or even mostly, to blame: social media have given very public voices to people with genuinely nasty attitudes who are incapable of tolerating, not only views they don't like, but people they disapprove of, often for irrational reasons such as gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, political views, or even just because they don't find them physically attractive. In other words, bigots. Bigots don't respect free speech in others, which is one of the reasons why we have laws against the hatred they spew out.

The tone of some discussions, especially on-line, has become distinctly unpleasant: calling your opponents 'Brexiteers' or 'Remoaners', by no means the worst terms I've seen, isn't likely to encourage a respectful exchange of views, which is why I have never used them: I prefer 'Leavers' and 'Remainers'. Besides, adults engaging in such silly name-calling is an unedifying sight.

Getting back to Tim Martin. As far as I know, he has not demonstrated any bigotry; he simply has very strong views on leaving the EU and has used his public profile to try to persuade others. He is, in short, exercising his right to free speech. Unfortunately, this issue has become so toxic that rational discussion is becoming increasingly difficult, but as long as he stays within the bounds of civilised debate on an issue about which we've all had the chance to have our say through the ballot box, I have no intention of boycotting his pubs.

One thing I have observed is that the old convention, one I have never fully agreed with, that you don't talk politics in the pub seems to have gone out of the window. In the last month or so, I have heard several animated conversations in pubs about leaving the EU.

Fuller's Brewery sold to Asahi

Coming to a local near you?

It was announced last week that the well-known British regional brewer, Fuller's of London, has sold its brewing concerns to the Japanese brewing multinational, Asahi. Fuller's Griffin Brewery in Chiswick is home to the famous London Pride which is popular across the UK and often seen locally in Merseyside and beyond. Fuller's will now concentrate solely on running its pubs with Asahi as its primary supplier, so I expect that in the short term drinkers may not notice much difference.

Over the years, Asahi has taken over many other breweries, such as Meantime, also in London and mainly known for craft beer, Grolsch in the Netherlands, Italy's Peroni, and Pilsner Urquell from the Czech Republic. As a truly international concern, it also owns many other brands not so well known in the UK.

It's always worrying when a piece of Britain's traditional brewing heritage falls into multinational ownership, not for Little Englander reasons, but mainly because the breweries acquired in this manner are in the control of boardrooms thousands of miles away. Fuller's has gone from being an independent traditional British brewer to just another brand in Asahi's large international brewing portfolio; as a result, decisions will be made by executives who are unfamiliar with the individual breweries concerned and who would be inclined to see them as little more than entries on a profit and loss account.

I expect that some drinkers will say that it's no great loss - someone usually does - but such a 'dog in the manger' attitude is quite contemptuous of the tastes of the many drinkers, the majority in fact, who have no wish to experiment on their nights out and consequently find a beer, or a few beers, that they like and stick to them. For many such drinkers, Fuller's beers, especially London Pride, fits the bill.

There have been all the usual reassurances about maintaining the production of the popular brands on their traditional site, and I do hope that those promises are kept. However, beer drinkers with long memories will remember similar commitments were regularly made after takeovers in the past - and almost as regularly betrayed. The fact that Meantime Brewery remains open might give us some reason to hope.

Asahi and Fuller's have both expressed satisfaction with this deal and complete confidence in the future of their two companies. As Mandy Rice-Davies might have commented: they would say that, wouldn't they?

Corn flakes, treason and dogs

Three unexpected stories from the world of beer that I've come across recently.

 

Seven Bro7hers Brewery in Salford has teamed up with cereal giant Kelloggs to produce a beer out of unused corn flakes. The flakes will be completely safe for human consumption, being those that are too big, too small, broken or overcooked. The first beer to use the flakes will be called Throw Away IPA with a strength of 5%. The limited edition beer will use the flakes to replace some of the wheat grain in the mix. Alison Watson from the brewery said: "Kellogg's recognises that it has an important role to play in reducing food waste, and that includes finding uses for edible food that doesn't make it into the cereal box. We plan to create three beers, including a hoppy IPA which will be launched this month."

I had to check the date wasn't 1st April for the next one. Scottish brewery BrewDog is introducing Subwoofer IPA, which they say is the first beer produced just for dogs. The idea was developed by the Brewdog team in Liverpool, who reported that the prototype was popular with local dog lovers. Subwoofer is made with wort from the brewery, the same malted barley and hot water that are used in their human IPAs. There were three rounds of tasting trials with 25 dogs before the team was satisfied with the product. The beer is hop-free and not carbonated; it is also alcohol-free, which is just as well, seeing that most dogs are under 18.

Newby Wyke of Grantham is brewing a beer in response the government's draft Brexit declaration: cheekily called 'Treason', it is a 4.2% ale. They've produced this beer before in relation to government ministers from all three major parties; they must like taking pot shots at any senior politicians who poke their heads above the parapet.

Brewer Robert March said: "One landlady said to me politicians and beer do not mix, but I replied they raise the beer taxes, so we can take the mickey. With what is going on with Brexit, I thought we should bring it back."

Public Meeting To Save The Blundell Arms

The Blundell Arms on its final day of opening

The campaign to save the Blundell Arms in Birkdale, Southport, held a successful public meeting at Birkdale Conservative Club on Friday 30 November. An attentive audience listened to speakers discussing various aspects of the campaign, including the possibilities of success and the obstacles that still remain to be overcome. There were speeches from two of Southport's parliamentary candidates: Labour's Liz Savage and the LibDems' John Wright, both pledging support for the campaign. Three of us from CAMRA attended, and Mike Perkins addressed the meeting on behalf of the local branch. After the speeches, the meeting was opened to questions from the floor, some of which were quite searching.

While there is no doubt that in its final years the Blundell fell on bad times, the campaign is clear that they don't intend to return to that sorry period of the pub's existence. Instead they wish to recreate it as a community centre as well as a pub with plans that include a dementia café, a children's play area, food and a venue for functions.

My own memories of this pub come from attending the Bothy Folk Club there on most Sundays for 25 years until 2003 when the club moved. Until the final years, it had been a perfectly decent street corner local, sadly the kind of pub that is disappearing from our communities. I attended quite a few functions there myself, such as weddings, wakes and birthdays, including one of my own.

At the meeting, Jason McCormack stated that a video of the meeting is to be posted on the group's Facebook page: "The Blundell Arms Community Pub" - have a look for it. He also mentioned an on-line petition; I'll give details here when I get them.

Mad Hatter calls time

I was sorry to hear that Liverpool's Mad Hatter Brewery has ceased trading. Launched in 2013, it was situated in the Vauxhall area of Liverpool and was one of the few breweries to be run by a woman, Sue Starling. It produced a number of interesting and sometimes quirky beers, a few of which were named after local places such as Penny Lane Pale and Toxteth IPA.

Some commentators have been suggesting that there are now too many breweries in a slowly declining market. There's probably some truth in that, but I don't get the impression that was the case here. Sue has said the pleasure of brewing has gone after the departure of her co-founder, Gareth Matthews, whose creativity she has sorely missed. That loss, coupled with a change of premises, means that she no longer wants to run the business herself, but she is open to offers to buy it "so it could live on".

It's certainly a pity to lose a distinctive presence on the local beer scene, so you've always fancied running your own brewery, this may be your big chance.

Launch of new brewery in Southport

The Grasshopper, venue of the launch of Tyton Brewery

Exciting news for local beer drinkers: a new brewery in Southport will be launched at a popular local pub next month. Tom Anderson from Tyton Brewery in Ainsdale will present his first beer at the Grasshopper, Sandon Road, Hillside, on Monday 3 December at the start of a meeting of CoLAPS (the Coast of Lancashire Ale Preservation Society). The meeting opens at 7:30pm.

This group is a branch of the Society for Preservation of Beers from the Wood (SPBW), CAMRA's older sibling. The SPBW has similar aims to CAMRA but tends to have a more social focus; quite a few people belong to both, and if you wish to join CoLAPS, why not apply on the night?

As well as presenting Tyton's first beer, this meeting will double up as a Christmas Social, and attendees are encouraged to bring partners, friends and family (over 18s). There will be a buffet with a £2 per head contribution towards costs, and for planning purposes the Grasshopper requests that you give them an indication of how many will be coming along (tel: 01704 569794).

Extract from an article I wrote for the CAMRA column in the Southport Visiter and Ormskirk Advertiser.

Bass and the Mad Hatter

In my early days of beer appreciation, Draught Bass was regarded as the Rolls Royce of beers which we would go out of our way to find. The bottled version, Bass Pale, was similarly well regarded; it was slightly stronger than the draught and was known all over the world, being shipped to many countries, especially India, and was the first foreign beer to be sold in Japan. Edouard Manet depicted bottles of Bass in his painting ‘Le Bar Aux Folies Bergere’ in 1882, and thirty years later 12,000 bottles went down with the Titanic. Bass Pale was a world-wide phenomenon whose history, it has been claimed, goes back to 1777.

The brand is now owned by global brewer AB InBev who will relaunch it next month. In 2013, they decided to rename this iconic beer as “Bass Trademark Number One” to acknowledge the fact that the famous Bass red triangle was the first registered trade mark in the UK. This move was described by beer blogger Zythophile as “a classic example of How To Royally Screw Up Your Brand” (see his full post here). AB InBev say they are bringing this beer back with its original name to “invigorate the premium ale category”.

The beer scene has changed a lot in recent decades, with a younger generation of beer drinkers who have a far wider choice of real ales, craft beers and bottled ales than ever before. Classic brand or not, it will be competing in a very crowded market place and the beer will have to be very good to make any serious inroads. Still, I look forward to giving it a try.

Closer to home, I was sorry to hear that Liverpool's Mad Hatter Brewery has ceased trading. Launched in 2013, it was one of the few breweries to be run by a woman, Sue Starling, and produced a number of interesting and sometimes quirky beers, some of them named after local places such as Penny Lane Pale and Toxteth IPA. Sue has said the pleasure of brewing has gone after the departure of her co-founder, Gareth Matthews, whose creativity she has sorely missed. That loss, coupled with a change of premises, means that she no longer wants to run the business herself, but she is open to offers to buy it “so it could live on”.

It's certainly a pity to lose a distinctive presence on the local beer scene, so you've always fancied running your own brewery, this may be your big chance.

This is one of a series of articles that I write for the CAMRA column in our local papers, the Southport Visiter and Ormskirk Advertiser.

It's a gas!

Disappointed gas cylinders await the call

In case you haven't noticed, there is Europe-wide carbon dioxide shortage. I've been reading that brewers are running low or have run out of products because of the shortage; some have temporarily had to stop brewing and packaging altogether.

Some pubs and bars have been complaining that they cannot receive deliveries of popular beers such as John Smiths Extra Smooth, Amstel Lager and Fosters. It's not just the big boys who are affected: one craft brewery was uncertain they could get through the following week, while another has stopped packaging some of its beers to allow the brewery to continue working.

Any pubs and bars affected must be spitting feathers: it's been sunny and the World Cup is on - perfect conditions for beer sales. It's not just keg bitters, stouts, lagers, ciders and craft beers that are affected; the same problem applies to soft drinks as they too are served using CO2.

As a real ale drinker, I'm not too bothered in the short term for obvious reasons, but if this goes on, drinkers like me will be affected. As the Good Book* says: "Pubs shall not live on real ale sales alone". As we all know, keg products usually constitute a large percentage of a pub's turnover.

I'm reminded of the power cuts in the 1970s when pubs were lit by candles and none of the electric beer dispensers worked. Only in the very small number of pubs that had retained their handpumps could you still get a pint of draught beer when the power went off; the same applied to the only two pubs that I knew were still serving beer by gravity dispense at the time.

* GBG.

Maghull Folk Club - new venue

Thwaites Brewery evicted by travellers

Illegally excluded from their own premises

I find this quite extraordinary. According to the Lancashire Telegraph, staff at Thwaites had been due to turn up for work in Blackburn on Monday for a normal working day but a group of around 100 travellers in 30 vehicles were occupying the site, having arrived at around 8.00 pm on Saturday. A spokesperson for Thwaites said:

We have effectively been evicted from our head office and brewery site by a group of up to 100 travellers who are now denying us access in an aggressive stand-off. They are putting our family business in real and present danger.

We have been in Blackburn for over 200 years and have never experienced anything like this. They have no business on our site and are carrying out criminal damage as we speak. We are in discussions with police who have supported us during the course of the day and have the powers to evict this group immediately under Section 61 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which they have not yet exercised. We desperately need their help to remove these people as soon as possible.

Hourly the site is being degraded and in the space of a day has become a disgusting mess. We call on the police to act now to address this situation. We have established a crisis centre to ensure our customers can continue to do business with us, but every hour's delay, or awaiting the courts opening on Tuesday after the bank holiday to get an eviction notice will mean further criminal damage to our site and our business.

We find ourselves powerless victims in this situation and I find it incredible that these travellers are allowed to get away with this sort of behaviour.

Many years ago at the Cambridge Folk Festival, a plain-clothes police officer didn't want me standing where I happened to be loitering: he assaulted me, dragged me backwards by the neck and threatened me with arrest. I was in a public place which happened to be near the police drug squad tent, although I wasn't aware of that fact until the next day when I had a chat with the people on the 'Legalise Cannabis Campaign' stall.

They could act aggressively against a lone, peaceable, and rather drunk music lover when it suited them, but faced with determined opposition, it seems they become powerless. Strange: they weren't so bashful at Orgreave.

• For the record, I don't take illegal drugs: you don't have to be a cannabis user to support the principle of legalisation. 
• I'm not anti-traveller, but actions like this reinforce the hostile attitudes that many people do have.

Postscript: the police have at last persuaded the trespassers to move. My friend Sam who works for Thwaites reported her impressions on Facebook as she returned to her desk:

Today I had to walk a gauntlet of broken glass, dirty nappies, burnt out pallets, and trash just to reach my office. Couldn't see my desk, because the contents of my drawers had been rifled through and thrown around, along with my colleagues' possessions, photos and work. Our proud brewers watched as their last week of hard work brewing was destroyed and poured away ... everyone has rolled up their sleeves and cleared up the damage left behind by travellers, filling 3 skips in the process. I seriously can't believe how much damage can be caused in 24 hours.

Tetley's Returns to Leeds

Mike Perkins in front of Tetley's Brewery
before closure (photo: Ms Sam Thomas)

In June 2011, the iconic Tetley's Brewery in Leeds was closed by its owner, Carlsberg, thus bringing 189 years of brewing history to an end. The production of Tetley's Bitter, once the best-selling real ale in the UK, was moved to Banks's Brewery in Wolverhampton. A few months earlier, CAMRA's Southport and District Branch had visited the brewery while they still could - a trip suggested by Mike Perkins, a proud Yorkshireman and my predecessor in writing this column (in the local papers). I wrote about the CAMRA trip and the brewery closure here.

Surprisingly, Tetley's beers are to be brewed again in Leeds. No 3 Pale Ale will be based on a recipe from the Tetley’s beer 200-year old archive. The beer will be brewed by Leeds Brewery in partnership with Tetley's. At first it will be available in the Leeds area, but they intend to distribute it nationwide in the future.

The new beer is based on a recipe that was originally brewed between 1848 and 1868. Sam Moss, who founded the Leeds Brewery in 2007, said: “Joshua Tetley himself died in 1859, so there is every chance he would have drunk the very beer this recipe is based upon.”

While the original Tetley's Bitter will still be brewed in Wolverhampton, there are plans for other beers derived from recipes from the archive to be brewed by Leeds Brewery.

Emily Hudson from Tetley's said: “We felt it was a fantastic opportunity to team up with Leeds Brewery – one of the region’s leading brewers – to recreate the recipe within a mile of where it would have originally been brewed 150 years ago.”

It is unusual for a large company like Carlsberg to recreate beers from its archives and, recognising the increasing importance of provenance in the beer world, brewing them in the city where the brand originated. It makes a change after decades of beer production being centralised, often far from where the brands originated. Big breweries trying to garner some real ale credibility have in recent years preferred to take over an existing small brewery, such as SABMiller buying Meantime and Molson Coors acquiring Sharp's.

Locally Tetley's was once very popular: the only real ales the Cheshire Lines used to sell were Tetley's Bitter and Mild, kept to a standard that ensured the pub a place in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide. 

I'll give these beers a try if they appear locally.

Apart from the text in italics which I added later, this is one of a series of articles that I write for the CAMRA column in our local papers, the Southport Visiter and Ormskirk Advertiser. Some previous reviews are here.

Normal service will be resumed asap

My home Wifi is currently disconnected as my landline has been accidentally cut - either that or Special Branch have finally managed to catch up with me!

I'm writing this brief post using the free Wifi in my local, the Guest House. I hope to get my own fixed soon.

CAMRA - losing its Marbles?

It's been interesting to see the spat between Manchester's Marble Brewery and CAMRA, with Marble claiming that they were blacklisted from the Great British Beer Festival. According to the brewery, a Marble staff member was victim of a sexist remark by a CAMRA volunteer at Manchester Beer and Cider Festival (MBCF), in January 2016. The brewery e-mailed the festival organisers to resolve the matter and have subsequently said that they felt great headway had been made with this. They are now asserting that their complaint led to their being blacklisted at the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF). CAMRA has investigated and states there is no evidence to support such an allegation.

Ultimately, I've no idea who's right here, but I have not read of any demonstrable evidence of a link between these two incidents. Marble seems to saying: "We had this problem at the MBCF, and then we weren't selected for the GBBF - there must be a connection." Well, not necessarily.

I know there are people in CAMRA with sexist attitudes, just as there are in most walks of life; for example, a long time ago I used to know a union rep who thought it was okay for him to crack sexist and racist jokes, not a view most of us shared. Nowadays most people who do hold such crass attitudes usually know when to keep them to themselves, but occasionally some idiots don't, as seems to have happened at the MBCF. From the very few incidents in a CAMRA setting that I've been aware of, I know that the campaign generally takes them seriously.

As I see it, there are three possible scenarios here:

1. The brewery is mistaken: there is no link.
2. They are correct: they were blacklisted.
3. Publicly slagging off CAMRA is good publicity.

I don't know which is correct, although I tend to think point 3 is the least likely because such publicity is short term - next week's chip paper, in fact. In addition, to use an allegation of sexism for publicity purposes would downplay the seriousness of the complaint.

Bearing in mind that no brewery has an automatic right to be at the GBBF, and if one puts the suggestion of blacklisting aside for a moment, there are two possible explanations:

• There are lots of good beers that have to be left out simply because the GBBF cannot accommodate them all; Marble was just unlucky.
• Marble's beers simply weren't as good as the competition on this occasion.

Again, I don't know which applies. Any satisfactory resolution to this dispute seems unlikely in the near future, but I doubt anyone will gain by continuing it in public. There will have to be either an agreement to disagree or a permanent falling out, because this public war of words is going nowhere and benefits no one.

High as a kite

The BBC reports that arrests of passengers suspected of being drunk at UK airports and on flights has gone up 50%: 387 people were arrested between February 2016 and February 2017; the figure for the previous year was 255. Seeing that there are around 236,000,000 air passenger journeys in the UK annually, that represents roughly one incident every 600,000 passengers, which doesn't sound much at all, but it's not as simple as that.

19,000 cabin crew members of Unite the Union were surveyed; 4,000 responded, with one in five saying they had suffered physical abuse. Ally Murphy, a former cabin crew manager with Virgin, said: "People just see us as barmaids in the sky. They would touch your breasts, or they'd touch your bum or your legs. I've had hands going up my skirt before." I get her point, badly expressed though it is: barmaids in pubs are entitled not to be groped as well.

How come 387 incidents constitute such a big problem? The answer is that the real figure is not 387: for every incident that results in an arrest, there will be loads that don't get that far. Calling in the police will seriously delay flights, with a knock-on effect for connections, so I expect that they are called out only in the worst cases. 

It's not only the cabin crew that are affected: other passengers can find raucous, perhaps aggressive, passengers unpleasant and sometimes intimidating: a couple of badly-behaved drunks can ruin a flight for hundreds of people, as well as directing sexual and violent assaults at the crew, who are just trying to do a job which nowadays is not as well-paid as it used to be. I'm not suggesting good wages justify assaults: just that assaults, aggression, noise and arguments from drunks are more likely to make the employees conclude: "I'm not paid enough to put up with all this!"

Why do these idiots get this way, when drinking in the UK in pubs and bars is for the most part a peaceful matter? These is my speculations:

• Some drink too much because they're nervous of flying. Others have taken sedatives to relax themselves, then add alcohol. Neither is a good way to deal with the situation.
• As people are going on holiday, inhibitions are down and the holiday begins in the airport bar.
• Drinkers don't take account of the effect of alcohol on the system at unusual times of the day. For example, drinks taken in the morning can have a stronger effect.
• Similarly, drinkers don't take account of the effects of altitude which can also increase the effect of alcohol.
• Being on holiday, some are consuming more alcohol than they are used to and go beyond their personal tolerance level.
• Again, being on holiday - as opposed to being in the real world of getting up for work, etc - does in some people engender a feeling that the normal rules of behaviour don't apply.
• Similarly, but even worse, some people are just bad-mannered, abusive slobs anyway - they don't need much excuse to show their true colours.

It seems clear to me that air crews need more support; no matter what training they have, dealing with irrational drunks is not an easy task, especially when, unlike in pubs, throwing them out of the door is not an option. 

Some suggestions include making the consumption of your own alcohol on the plane a criminal offence and limiting the amount supplied to individuals on planes. There are voluntary codes but they're clearly not working. This is one area where serious restrictions on alcohol wouldn't bother me in the slightest: no one wants drunks disrupting flights thousands of feet in the air.

Although I've not flown for some time now, I did quite often many years ago. I never once had a drink on a flight, and if I were on a plane now, I wouldn't particularly want one. It hardly seems an ordeal to wait until you've arrived before getting stuck in.

A new Head of Steam for Liverpool

I was interested to read in the Liverpool Echo that the Head of Steam pub chain is taking over the Abbey on Hanover Street in Liverpool. There was a Head of Steam previously in Liverpool on Lime Street in what is now the North Western, a Wetherspoons pub that I wrote about here. That Head of Steam began well, but ended being a dingy, unwelcoming, under-used dump, which was vastly improved when Spoons took it over and expanded it.

The Head of Steam chain was taken over by Cameron's in 2013 and seems to have been given a new lease of life. The Abbey is in Hanover House, underneath the Epstein Theatre; it is large, modern-styled bar with bare floors, big screen sports and a couple of real ales. Cameron's say it will have 34 keg and 10 cask lines, and will be "a very different proposition to the previous the Head of Steam pub that had previously traded in Liverpool" - just as well, considering how that ended up. Apart from the name, I don't see much of a connection between this pub chain and the old Head of Steam group.

It's due to open in September, and it should be an interesting addition to the fine array of pubs that Liverpool already boasts.

Sam Smiths - the dotty auntie of brewing

The increasingly eccentric Sam Smiths brewery has been accused of banning bikers. One biker recently rolled up at The Royal Oak at Ulley, near Rotherham, and was told he could no longer be served because of an instruction from the brewery. The owner of the brewery, Humphrey Smith, told a woman biker who had been using the pub for many years that "local people have no wish to have them in this establishment" and he did not want "undesirables" in the pub. This particular diktat follows the brewery's announcement in April that swearing is banned in all its pubs.

Unlike the swearing ban or the ban on music that arose from a fit of pique about 'New' Labour's absurd pub music licences (mentioned in a post here in 2009), this particular ban seems confined to one pub. The bikers' magazine, MCN, is distinctly unimpressed, stating that Sam Smiths' pubs "all feature a Victorian theme and don’t have televisions or play music ... It would seem that Mr Smith’s attitude towards bikers is as Victorian as the theme that runs throughout his pubs."

Having drunk in pubs favoured by bikers, I have found that there is no more trouble than in any other pubs, and in fact rather less than some. Is this discrimination? Certainly, because a whole group of people has been banned, regardless of how the individuals in that group have behaved - imagine the reaction if the members of any ethnic or religious group had been described as "undesirables". However, as bikers are not a "protected group" under the Equality Act, there is no recourse in law.

The brewery has ignored requests for comments from several journals and newspapers. I wonder what Humphrey will find to ban next?

Elvis 1 - Brewdog 0

The King of Rock & Roll

I see that the increasingly risible owners of Brewdog have come unstuck with the name of one of their beers, Elvis Juice. The estate of Elvis Presley had objected as they did not want anyone to assume that the beer had been endorsed by them.

In relation to a copyright case involving one of their own brands, Brewdog had previously declared on their website:

"By protecting our trademarks, when we have to, we are just looking after our business and our team. We own trademarks just like we own our buildings, our brewing equipment, and our dogs. If someone stole our dog or our bottling machine we would not be happy, intellectual property is no different."

However, when it came the Presley estate's intellectual rights they tried to brazen it out, declaring that the move was "baseless litigation" and that they had not chosen the beer's name to massage the egos of late celebrities. To support their case, the two owners both changed their names by deed poll to Elvis to 'prove' that the name was not exclusive. I'd have thought the word 'punk' was not exclusive, but that hasn't stop the duo from copyrighting the word. 

Will Brewdog ever appear on a stamp?

Furthermore, their scorn for "baseless litigation" didn't stop them from setting their lawyers earlier this year onto a Birmingham pub which had the cheek to call itself the Lone Wolf, not knowing this was the name Brewdog use for their spirits. With Brewdog, when anyone else does it, it's theft, but when they do it, they try to trample any objections under foot by a combination of gimmicky publicity and rapacious lawyers - more bully than punk, surely?

The UK's Intellectual Property Office has decided that they cannot use the name Elvis on the grounds that it is so closely associated with the King of Rock & Roll that people could wrongly conclude that it was an officially licensed product. Oliver Morris, the Trademark hearing officer, ruled: "I consider most average consumers, on seeing the name Elvis alone, are likely to conceptualise that on the basis of Elvis Presley." Brewdog have been told to pay £1500 costs.

I have no particular objection to a business protecting its copyrights, but I find it distasteful when a company demonstrates such hypocritical double standards as Brewdog have. They have the right to appeal; on previous form, I think it unlikely that they will give in gracefully.