COLAPS at the Grasshopper in Southport.

Views of the Grasshopper, home of COLAPS

I have been sent this information about a new beer appreciation group being set up in Southport. It will be a branch of Society for Preservation of Beers from the Wood, (SPBW) which I joined many years ago at a CAMRA beer festival, but I let my membership lapse as it had no local presence in Merseyside or Lancashire at that time. That now looks like changing.

A new branch of SPBW is being formed in Southport by a group of local beer enthusiasts. The branch will cover Merseyside and the Coast of Lancashire and inland areas served by transport links to Southport and will name itself the Coast of Lancashire Ale Preservation Society or COLAPS for short. 

SPBW was founded in 1963 and predates the beer campaigning group CAMRA by several years. Whilst it shares many of the same aims as CAMRA, the emphasis is less on political lobbying and campaigning, and more on the social side of things. The intention is to promote good beer by drinking the stuff.

The new branch describes its aims as:

1. to stimulate the brewi ng and encourage the drinking of traditional draught beer, drawn direct from the cask by gravity, or by a hand pump, or by other traditional methods. 
2. to lend support to those brewers who brew good quality cask conditioned beer and those pubs who serve cask conditioned beer in excellent condition. 
3. to encourage consumption of cask conditioned ales served in convivial environments without modern distractions such as television, loud music and gambling machines.
4. to encourage the revival of traditional serving methods such as the use of wooden casks for beer dispense. To support and encourage breweries and pubs who use wooden casks and coopers that produce them.

The first meeting of the group is at 7.30pm on Monday 6 March at The Grasshopper Micropub, 70 Sandon Road, Southport. Everyone with an interest in beer or having a good time is welcome to attend. They plan to have regular monthly meetings on the first Monday of every month at the Grasshopper and a series of guest speakers are lined up.

Chairman Simon Barter said, "We want to make the meetings as friendly and welcoming as possible. They will be more social than procedural. We want people to come along and pitch in with ideas for outings to great pubs, breweries and beer festivals and the like."