Pints of View Summer 2026 - the branch magazine of Mansfield & Ashfield CAMRA.
Opinion
"There's no room for complacency" - they were the wise words of CAMRA's national chairman Joe Goodwin when he addressed annual meetings in the 1970s. He stressed that while the Campaign could record many successes, the battle to save real ale was far from over.
Today, as we celebrate CAMRA's 55th anniversary, Joe's mantra is as true as ever. We can indeed look back with pride on our undoubted achievements but we face an even more daunting battle to save and promote this country's unique contribution to the world of beer.
From the 1970s to the end of the century, the Campaign's opponents were known as the Big Six. They owned half the country's pubs and dominated 75 per cent of the so-called “free trade”. Their size and power was awesome, accounting for more than 80 per cent of all the beer consumed in Britain.
And they had either axed or sidelined cask beer in favour of keg - beer that was filtered, pasteurised and artificially carbonated.
The Big Six was made up of Allied Breweries (Ansells, Ind Coope and Tetley), Bass Charrington, Courage/John Smiths, Grand Metropolitan (Watney, Mann, Truman and Wilsons), Scottish & Newcastle and Whitbread. They used the power of modern advertising, including commercial TV, to promote at huge cost such truly abysmal beers as Watney's Red, Bass's Worthington E, Whitbread Tankard and S&N Tartan.
But - and it's an important but – they were all British-based companies. They still produced or had the ability to produce cask-conditioned beer and in many cases they were persuaded to return to the path of brewing righteousness.
As a result of the Campaign's vigorous work and the evident success of such cask beer producers as Young's, Ruddles and a clutch of breweries in Manchester and Yorkshire, the Big Six saw the errors of their ways. The likes of Draught Bass and Charrington IPA were promoted once again and the "real ale revolution" was given a massive boost when Allied launched Draught Burton Ale at the end of the 1970s to nationwide acclaim. The opposition is a very different one today. The market is dominated to a greater extent than in the days of the Big Six by global lager brewers.
. Carlsberg, Asahi, Molson C
Is and AB InBev. Asahi of Japan ha
The main players are Heineken, Carlsberg, Asahi, Molson Coors and AB InBev. Asahi of Japan has kept faith with Fuller's ales since it bought the Chiswick brewery but the others have little or no interest in cask.
Society of Independent Brewers and Associates (SIBA) chief executive Andy Slee puts it well when he says the global brewers want to produce the same liquid in every market where they operate: a filtered and pasteurised beer with a long and profitable shelf life.
If you tell them cask beer has to be consumed within two or three days or it will oxidise, their accountants will I have a fit of the vapours.
As a result, an alarming number of cask breweries have been shuttered. Heineken axed Caledonian in Edinburgh, Molson Coors has closed Sharp's in Cornwall, while Carlsberg has gone on the rampage, closing Jenning's, Banks's, Ringwood and Wychwood.
Jenning's has been rescued by local entrepreneurs but the remainder are on the scrapheap. These acts of vandalism were carried out when the Carlsberg Marston's Brewing Company was created in 2020. That has since morphed into Carlsberg Britvic and Marston's, once one of the most revered names in British brewing with Pedigree pale ale and the historic Burton union fermentation system, has now been reduced to the status of a pub company.
When the Danish giant says it has to close the breweries as a result of falling demand for real ale it's being - as a politician once remarked – “economical with the actualité”.
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