Good things

A few good things have happened over the last fortnight. Fulham have trounced Manchester United (If only I were still in contact with Andrew from Huddersfield) Autumn has well and truly started and I have got a gig as a beer columnist for the Capital Times.

Autumn Ales Fest this Sat, the beers are tasting great.

Bring back the old Beer

And the old What’s Brewing for that matter. Some months ago CAMRA decided it was time to revamp their publications What’s Brewing and Beer. It was decided that Beer would become a quarterly publication of a stapled semi-magazine nature rather than the monthly paper it had been and that What’s Brewing would be redesigned to bring it up to date. What they didn’t tell us is that the amount of time and money that was to be invested in the reformatting and design would be taken away from the content.
Now if I am honest I was never that keen on the idea of going from monthly Beer issues to quarterly. I used to relish the arrival of the two papers in the post each month and the thought of receiving only What’s Brewing didn’t actually make me want to jump for joy. However I hoped that as promised the new Beer would be so much better that it would make up for the loss. Unfortunately the exact opposite has happened, someone has obviously decided that Beer should be used to reach out to potential young members rather than aimed at existing members, and as such the content has been dummed down. It’s a real shame because many of the people involved in producing Beer are bloggers and writers who I really rate, and some of the concepts for content sound really good. For example the head-to-head where two writers are meant to debate an issue. So far we have had Jeff Bell and Melissa Cole tackle Gastro pubs and Jeff Evens and Zak Avery debate bottle conditioning. In both cases sadly all we have been treated to is the opening statements with the bemused and bewildered reader left to imagine how the actual argument might have gone in their heads!
It was however the Last Orders from the current edition of Beer that really left me scratching my head. Here we are treated to a piece from Dylan Jones an editor of trendy magazines recounting his recent conversion to cider, to introduce and get the CAMRA audience on side he makes clear that he has no truck with real ale

“its warm and appeared to taste of red wine mixed with marmite"

wow that does the campaign a world of good. Perhaps Decanter should feature some geezer who thinks all wine tastes of vinegar! Not only do I think this doesn’t befit CAMRA I’m also not sure it will win new members. Do we have to be dumb to connect with the average punter?

I realise I may be out on a limb with my opinion of the new Beer and What’s Brewing, the letters pages are flowing in praise from other members , selectively chosen mail or am I the only one to see that the emperor has no clothes? Well not quite