However, he admits to not knowing very much about real ale. In my only conversation with him we discussed cellar management for it and he admitted he had next to no experience of it.

keep to the Fen Causeway

You could call it the unintended consequence of well-intentioned legislation, aka the road to hell. In the early 90s legislation was introduced to break the almost monopoly ownership of pubs by large breweries offering a bland range of beers. So the ownership ceiling was set at 2000, which meant that the breweries had to dispose of thousands of pubs very quickly to comply with the legislation.

It also meant that pub ownership companies had to be set up very quickly with little consideration for how their business model might work. Owning a pub was generally considered a licence to print money, so all should be fine. Shouldn't it?

Well, actually no, it hasn't.

If you own a pub without debt, then yea. Fill your boots with money, ching ching. But if you have a mortgage, which the pub owning companies did cos they had to buy the things and owed tens of millions, then you need a high revenue and you need to maintain it more or less forever. And, cos they were buying their beer from breweries and then selling it on to the landlord of the pubs, they weren't making profit on the brewing of beer, just the selling of it and they were adding a markup of anything up to £50 for a 9 gallon firkin (1/4 barrel), which meant that the pubs were uncompetitive with any other pub in the area and especially with supermarket beer.

So, the only other revenue the companies could manage was the selling off of the asset itself. And pubs are very lucrative pieces of real estate, some have large amounts of land, epsecially if they can have a change of use for planning permission to convert to homes. In London the pub, as a business, can be worth a fraction of the real estate value for property development. Eg one pub in W london, worth possibly £2 millin s a pub was sold for £27 million for development.

And so, companies are using every trick in  the book to flog off their pubs for residential use.

The Brown Bear in Berwick was one such victim. Fortunately somebody who cares more for their local community than the profit has bought it. I think it's a great plan, but the issue is that you still need colossal amounts of money to buy a pub.

Which is why micropubs (pubs installed in shops premises) are psrining up everywhere. But that's another story

keep to the Fen Causeway

Labour spokesperson on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Alan Kelly, has launched a bill aimed at boosting craft beer tourism in Ireland by removing a major regulatory barrier for breweries, microbreweries, cider makers and distilleries.

The Intoxicating Liquor (Breweries and Distilleries) Bill 2016 would allow these businesses to sell their own produce to tourists and other visitors on site, which is not the case under current licensing laws.

Deputy Kelly said: "The ability to fully capitalise on this potential for `craft beer tourism' is being hampered by current licensing regulations, which require producers to have a pub license or an off-licence to sell their produce, made on site, to tourists and visitors.

"For example, can you imagine a situation existing in Italy, France or Spain, where tourists visiting vineyards are prevented from purchasing wine at the end of their tour?

"The Bill includes safeguards such as time restrictions of between 10am and 6pm for sales, and fines to ensure owners don't sell alcohol that is not brewed on site. And there's a clause preventing the license holders from applying for the types of exemptions and/or extensions to opening hours that pubs and clubs for example, can apply for.

"The objective here is simple: to remove a regulatory barrier to growth and support an expanding industry in Ireland."

Protz on Beer - Roger Protz - Mark Dodds is back pulling pints

Mark Dodds is living proof that you can't keep a good publican down. If you'd lost your pub and livelihood and been declared bankrupt you might throw in the towel. But he's just re-opened a "failed pub" and is happily pulling pints once more.

Mark is one of the great pub campaigners. His experience at the hands of giant pubcos has turned him into their most vociferous critic and the Twittersphere is emblazoned almost every day with the latest attack by J Mark Dodds.

His brush with the pubcos took place in Camberwell in London but I met him some 350 miles north in the border town of Berwick-on-Tweed. It was good of him to see me at 10 in the morning as the Brown Bear had only opened the previous night and he was understandably exhausted.

But he has a tale to tell,....

tbh I don't understand why Mark even wasted his time talking to Molson Coors or Carlsberg, but he is a traditionalist and that means crappy fake eurofizz and mas produced crap beer for the masses. thank goodness it fell through and he's got decent products instead

keep to the Fen Causeway