Tuesday 9 March 2010

The Taste — another world

In search of an image and associated story about a Whitbread lager dispensed from a tap-like fount, I gather together copies of The Taste, which ran — I seem to remember — from around 1998 for a couple of years. The issues have busy covers, lots of headlines, pre-Photoshop pix of beer bottles and the logo ‘Britain’s Brightest Beeriodical’. Cover shots include Santa behind the bar, Harvey’s and the river that runs past it (and would flood it not long afterwards), Lemmy, a pub with a cut-out of Mick the Tick in front, Jo Guest and a bevy of cheesy looking sub-Page Three women holding pints (they are clothed, just). It’s beer as beer was then, manly, trade-like, beery, sweaty, yo-ho-ho, freemasonish, whiskery, clubby, Bass and some other biggies, ruby-faced porters in bowlers, some class but a lot of foam plus CAMRA, though the magazine always reserved the right not to agree with the Campaign (when Roger Protz returned to edit the Good Beer Guide in 1999 he was described as an ‘old hand’). Writers from then still serving time at the coal-face of beerwriting (© Bumper Book of Clichés) include Brian Glover and Martyn Cornell (I was also a contributor), while Roosters’ Sean Franklin contributed a couple of interesting articles on tasting beer. Looking through the news pages it’s a time of carnage; breweries whose demise the magazine recorded include Vaux and Flowers (did I really care?), while there’s an attempt to list all the microbreweries that were extant then. There was also a regular barmaid of the month… It had an old-fashioned feel though it did try and do one thing differently; as What’s Brewing’s headlines thundered CAMRA’s outrage at whatever brewing duplicity was going on then in the manner of Arthur Scargiill denouncing class traitors, The Taste tried to get away from the hectoring but sadly went too predictably down the nascent lads’ mags route (in fact I remember the editor telling me that WH Smith didn’t have a clue whether to put his mag next to Loaded, BBC Food or Heritage Steam Engines). One issue in January 1999 had the headline ‘free internet access with Breworld (who I remember being very useful with brewery info in 1996 prior to a trip to New England). I don’t know when the magazine finished, it was either 1999 or 2000, but I stopped it in November 1999 when the issue featured a really shoddy pic of a barmaid in Blackpool in a spangly pink bikini — it was enough to put me off my evening’s beer. 

10 comments:

  1. The "served from a tap" GB Lager which you refer to must be one of the biggest beer marketing disasters of all time - while lager undeniably has a laddish image (and back then had more of one) the last thing lager drinkers wanted was an image of nostalgic Britishness.

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  2. Yes, have just been looking for info on it, the fact that the beer came from something resembling a bath tap would presumably have given off the subliminal message that the stuff was water; I seem to remember not long before then Brendan at Iceni launched a lager called LAD (I think). Talking of laddishness, the Taste had a report on a Whitbread report that had identified various drinkers, one of which was streaming, which normally meant people on the piss; they were quite happy to feed this market in their pubs, whatever the streamers drank, usually premium lagers that made them feel good and feel shit the next morning in the cells.

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  3. I wrote one of my favourite series of articles for the Taste (the editor was an old mate of my brother's), on deeply obscure beers found lurking in the back of dodgy off-licences, like Canadian-labelled pst-its-sellby-date Schlitz. Deliberately taste-testing shite beer was actually great fun.

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  4. I remember, there was another article of yours, about cans I think? A solid gold out-take from Beer Memorabilia, perhaps?

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  5. GB lager was admittedly a disaster, but the logic behind it understandable. The Fosttrailia lager advertising of the 80’s repackaged lager within an anglicised culture and less of a European lederhosen wearing image. A UK lager brand and image was a long time coming. Carling are doing the same with Carling today, marketing it as a British lager and ignoring its Canadian roots. Ask most people what country they associate with which beer, carling will be associated with Britain. The off-putting thing about GB lager wasn’t so much its laddish adverts or bar fronts, it had a really tacky generic brand logo. Carling on the other hand got the distribution bang on, the soccer related marketing bang on and are now banging on about the providence of their ingredients and knowing who your mates are. The idea of GB lager was spot on, its implementation piss poor.

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  6. ‘The idea of GB lager was spot on’
    another one for the BCJP to pontificate on…

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  7. The British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology have a view on lout? Good on 'em.

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  8. Yeah, expect a quango-funded announcement full of tosh any day now, on how it makes you go blind and also causes bullying in the workplace.

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  9. "it makes you go blind and also causes bullying in the workplace"

    So that's what Gordon Brown's on …

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  10. He is a Scot after all and his country is the spiritual home of lout or tosh as I prefer to call it, as in Tennant’s Tosh.

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