Cheapest beer in the North-West CAMRA's national price survey of 7,000 beer prices in over 1200 pubs shows very wide variations in the prices of beer in pubs across the UK but that overall price rises are below the rate of inflation.

In summary
Average price of a pint of real ale in a UK pub - £1.92
Average price of a pint of lager - £2.11
Lowest priced pint of real ale - North West - £1.69 (23p less than the national average)
Most expensive pint - Lager in London hits £2.31 a pint with real ale at £2.12
Real ale prices have risen by 3.33% on average – less than the rate of inflation

CAMRA's Mike Benner said "Real ale remains great value compared to lager which costs 19 pence per pint more on average. It’s good news that beer prices have not risen above inflation, despite the high levels of excise duty paid on beer in the UK. It just goes to show that enjoying a decent pint in your favourite pub is still great value."

Sports sponsorship goes teetotal There's an interesting piece in the Guardian about how sport seems to be moving away from the drinks companies in their search for sponsorship. commercial shift is taking place in sports sponsorship. Having been forced by the government to cut its ties with tobacco firms there now seems to be a growing trend to move away from alcohol also. For example in rugby union financial services company Zurich has replaced Courage , and the cup competition which used to be backed by Tetley's is now covered by Powergen.

Sport has certainly done well by the drinks companies - by 1988 sports sponsorship and associated activities accounted for more than a quarter of the drinks industry's aggregate advertising budget of £158m. In 1993, the Bass brewery had persuaded the F.A. to name the new league "the Carling Premiership" and five years on were spending more than £1m a month sponsoring the Premiership alone - but by then sales of Carling had risen by 31% to become the UK's top alcoholic brand.

In his article, Frank Keating suggests that maybe drink companies are trying to get out while the going is good.
Perhaps ... recent government campaigns against "yob culture" and the banning of drinking in public are laying the basis for a wider assault on alcohol's association with sport, especially if there were to be any resurgence of football hooliganism (although no alcohol-related blame was suggested by last week's Home Office revelations on the rise of violence among First Division supporters).

Zzzzzzzz Well we're back. More on Olympia later, but time for a quick check through the pub news.

Time Out #1 Bibendum will be taking a short break now for a week so that your hard working editorial staff can run off down to Olympia to work at the Great British Beer Festival. Normal service will be resumed as soon as the hangovers subside.

Three pints of lager and a... box of hand-grenades? It would appear that regulars at the Weather Vane pub in Stoke on Trent have been buying more than the traditional beer and peanuts after Private David Meredith was arrested yesterday on suspicion of selling live hand grenades at the pub. Private Meredith, from the Staffordshire Regiment, was arrested at his home in Stoke by armed officers from the Royal Military Police.

Booze cruising a matter of balance We've reported in these pages before about the huge trade in illegally imported booze which is flooding into the UK and causing special problems to brewers and licensees in the South East. According to the Brewers & Licensed Retailers Association, around 1.5 million pints a day are being imported of which around 75% is then being illegally resold into the trade, primarily into clubs. However, yesterday's decision in the High Court seems to indicate that HM Customs and Excise have been over-zealous in their attempts to crack down on this very real problem.

Broadly speaking, the ruling says that customs officers will no longer be entitled to stop and search anybody returning from the Continent without reasonable grounds for suspecting those individuals of smuggling goods for commercial resale in order to avoid duties. The court specifically noted that Customs had been guilty of "reversing the burden of proof" and re-enforced the legal position that it was definitely up to the authorities to prove that an individual is engaged in smuggling, not for the individual to prove that they weren't.

One week and counting... As has been mentioned in these pages before, we are now drawing close to that orgy of real ale quaffing that is the Great British Beer Festival. Held at London's Olympia between August 6th and 10th this year, it is a fantastic opportunity to find more bitter, stout, mild, porter, cider, perry (and all manner of interesting things on the foreign beer bar) in one place than you're likely to find err... until this time next year. Book your leave now !

Beer and Bowls - last bastion of the Empire? There was a quite amusingly whimsical piece in the Guardian on Monday about the Commonwealth Games. Frank Keating makes the point

Who has not supped at "The Bowling Green", although its green has inevitably long gone? "From time immemorial," rhapsodised the Licensed Victualler in 1900, "bowls has been linked with the village inn and drink." In 1950 the Birmingham brewer Mitchell & Butlers reckoned it still owned 150 pubs with an adjoining bowling green. Sir Francis Drake, by the way, was not playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe itself when he was told of the Spanish Armada's approach in 1588, but on the green attached to the nearby Pelican Arms tavern.

Drink to avoid the stock market crash As someone pointed out to me in an email the other day...

"If you had bought $1,000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00. With Enron, your $1,000 would be worth $16.50. With WorldCom, you would have less than $5.00 left. If you had bought $1,000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the 10-cent deposit, you would have $214.00. Based on the above, current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle."

Not bad advice, but please can I drink something other than Budweiser?

Molson don't exclusively own the word "Canadian" In the astonishing world of trademarking and copyright ICANN - the people who allocate domain names on the internet - have had more than their fair share of controversy. Pleasingly, however, common sense occasionally seems to win out as in the case of Ottowa businessman David Black who contested their allocation of the "canadian.biz domain name. Bizarrely enough Molson owns the trademark for the word Canadian, as it applies to beer, but many firms have Canadian in their name and an Ontario Superior Court judge decided that Molson had no particular plans for canadian.biz, unlike Black who told the court he intends to use the domain as a meeting place for Canadian businessmen.

MPs gag themselves in protest against live music restrictions To many, a group of MPs sitting around with their mouths taped over sounds too good to be true, but the protest - by the all-party Parliamentary Music group, with the assistance of singer/songwriter Billy Bragg - was over the continued exiestence of the archaic and arcane law on live music in pubs. Under the law, licensed premises must have a live music licence if more than two people are performing and in the past licensing officers often turned a blind eye to minor infringements, but now they have clamped down in what the Musicians' Union is convinced is a way for local authorities to raise revenue.

The law as it stands is almost unenforceable as shown by recent cases including one where a pub in Greenwich was threatened with prosecution when the audience stamped their feet to folk music, and a pub in Dorset where the landlord got a formal warning after pensioners sang Happy Birthday.

The difficulty for pubs is often that the cost of the licence can be up to £5,000 in some areas, a crippling extra cost for small community pubs especially if they only have live music on an occasional basis. The result is a collapse in the number of pubs with live music, particularly pubs formerly well known among musicians for informal sessions. Reform has been promised by the government, but has failed to happen due to lack of parliamentary time despite the fact that more than 200 MPs have signed an early day motion demanding urgent action.

So its bye-bye Brakspears After 200 years of brewing and because of an alleged "declining market" for real ale Henley-upon-Thames' Brakspears brewery now plans to close by the end of the year. There has been much opposition to this with a multi-way campaign supported by staff, customers, CAMRA, and even local MP Boris Johnson but to no avail. There are strong concerns that this will now result in the loss of Brakspears' tied estate to one of the other PubCo groups.

Beer is bad for the young After a series of articles about how moderate alcohol consumption is good for you see links here), in the interests of balanced reporting, we must now pass on the views of a group of Cambridge medical statisticians who feel that this only applies to men over 34 and women over 44 . Younger people who drink on a regular basis, even if their intake is less than recommended safe alcohol limits, can "substantially" increase the risk of death, the study says.The analysis of drinking habits of men and women in different age bands from 16 to 24, 25 to 34 etc. up to over 85 estimated the relationship between alcohol consumption among certain age groups and the risk of death.


Guidelines from the medical colleges advise men to drink less than 21 units of alcohol a week and women to drink less than 14, but the study shows that among women aged 16 to 54 and men aged 16 to 34, the risk of death from all causes increases in proportion to the amount of alcohol consumed. For women, the risk of dying increases by five per cent if they drink between eight and 20 units of alcohol a week, as opposed to none. Men incur a similar risk if they consume five to 34 units a week.


To limit this risk, the researchers advise both men and women to drink well below the recommended levels. Women should limit their drinking to one unit a day until they are 44, two units a day up to age 74 and three units a day for those who are older. Men, on the other hand, should ideally limit their alcohol intake to one unit a day if they are under the age of 34, two units a day up to age 44, three units a day up to age 54, four units a day up to age 84, and five units a day if they survive beyond 85.

Pub jokes I'm REALLY not sure if I want to be starting this, but here we go.

A brain and a jump lead go into a pub and order some drinks. The barman says "I'm not serving you two!" "Why?" asked the brain. The barman replies, "Because you are out of your skull and he's bound to start something."

A man walks into a pub, and notices Vincent Van Gogh is standing at the bar. "Do you want a pint, Vince?" he asks. "No, thanks," replies the artist. "I've got one 'ere."

An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walked into a pub, followed by a lesbian, a dog, and a white horse. The barman says, "is this a joke or what?"

A neutron goes into a bar and asks the barman, "How much for a beer?" "For you, no charge," the barman replies.

Beer is good for you. Part III Our Plymouth correspondent has pointed me to this article from Prague where gerontologist Dr Pavel Zemek has been quoted as saying "If men drink two beers a day they can stave off impotence." Apparently beer in moderation works well to stop arteries becoming blocked which is not only good for your health generally (as reported previously in Bibendum here and here) but is also one of the major causes of erectile dysfunction.

How on earth did you get here? One of the things about having been effectively off-line for new postings over the last week or so, is that we've had a chance to go back through some of the server logs and see where people are coming to us from. Unsurprisingly, there are a large number from people Googling for "Bibendum", but modesty leads me to think that they are in fact searching for a well-known wine merchant or restaurant rather than your humble editor.

I've started picking up a few hits from homebrew.com who have been kind enough to link to me from their blog page. The ever-reliable daypop - a specific news and blog search engine - consistently throws people my way, and most of the rest come from various webring links. Wherever you have come from, I hope you find something that entertains, educates or amuses you.

Hmm, looks knackered from in here, but looks OK to you lot out there...

Is it still broken? Kick, thump, twiddle