Barcelona was the setting for the latest stage of the Beautiful Beer campaign. Adam Withrington reports.
What do you think of when you hear the word "Barcelona"? One of the world's great romantic port cities? The centre of the fiercely independent Catalan population of Spain? Or indeed, the birthplace of a fictional, incompetent waiter who found himself in a Torquay hotel at the mercy of a moustachioed snob named Basil?
Whatever you may think, surely one of the most important characteristics of Barcelona is its growing reputation as a centre for good food and drink. Great restaurants and bars line the streets of this wonderful city. In El Bulli the city has arguably the greatest restaurant in the world.
It was into this environment that the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA) decided to launch the latest stage of its "Beautiful Beer" campaign, by helping arrange a British beer tasting for more than 100 of the great and good of the Spanish hospitality industry at the exclusive members club Circulo Ecuestre.
The campaign
The Beautiful Beer campaign was launched in March, with the BBPA proclaiming it as a mission to "revitalize the image of beer".
BBPA members have committed to invest £300,000 a year into the campaign as it seeks to banish beer's negative associations with beer bellies and lager louts.
"Beer has been associated with a certain lifestyle and we want to change that," says Peter Kendall, the outgoing chief executive of Coors Brewers and chair of the BBPA Beautiful Beer steering group. "This is just the beginning of a long campaign to change the image of beer in this country."
And a major part of the campaign is to "sell" this new image to the national press and to get feature writers for weekend supplements and major consumer magazines to write about beer in the same way they wax lyrical about wine.
Food and beer matching
One part of the required image change is to convince consumers of the opportunities presented by matching food with beer. The first official Beautiful Beer event was hosted in London at the start of May at the Ifield pub in Chelsea. TV chef Ed Baines, who presents Great Food Live on UKTV Food and owns the pub, put together a special menu for the gathered members of the national press and beer industry, carefully matching each course with a beer.
British beer tasting, Circulo Ecuestre, Barcelona, May 17To reinforce the beer and food message the BBPA invited three major consumer journalists to Barcelona to sample the best in British beer and how it can match with that most Spanish of snacks - tapas.
While this was a beer and food event, the real interest was whether the journalists would be sold on the idea of writing about beer in their publications. Ross Anderson from The Times, food writer for Elle Jo Pratt and Mitzy Wilson, editor of Delicious magazine, are exactly the type of people that need to be got on-side if the BBPA is to succeed with Beautiful Beer.
The consumer press is an untapped area for beer. Michael Jackson with his Beer Hunter TV series and articles for The Independent may have struck a blow, but compared with writings on other drinks categories beer is just a drop in the ocean.
There were seven British brewers at the event and for them the Spanish market is as untapped as the British press is for beer writers. All the brewery representatives present said their main aim was to get Spanish consumers interested in British beer.
Colin Cordy, managing director of St Peter's Brewery in Suffolk, said: "We need a distributor who is interested in British beer and is willing to take it out into bars here and market them. We want the whole Spanish market to experience our beers, not just the ex-pat community."
Lawrence Olsen, who owns Gale's export rights, says it is simply a matter of changing the mindset of consumers: "Our beers are as regional as their wines. Each of the beers here should be treated like that and once you tell people that, they start to understand where you coming from."
At the tasting event guests were invited to walk around the tasting tables set up by the seven brewers and try the beer and tapas matchings put together by the head chef.
The beer and tapas matchings were:
- Adnams:
- Broadside (4.5 per cent) - Duck with a sauce of cherries
- Suffolk Strong Bitter (4.3 per cent) - Prawns in beer with crujiente garlic
Belhaven
Belhaven Scottish Ale (5.2 per cent) - Rolls of veal with vegetables and sauce of beer and skewer of ox
St Andrews Ale (4.5 per cent) - Ox sirloin stroganoff
Black Sheep Brewery
Black Sheep Ale (4.4 per cent) - Manchego cheese and dry fruits
Holy Grail (4.7 per cent) - Steamed monkfish with paprika
Gale's
HSB - (5 per cent) - Grilled rib of lamb
Prize Old Ale (9 per cent) - Bitter chocolate truffles
Greene King
Abbot Ale (5 per cent) - Warm goat's cheese
Old Speckled Hen (5.2 per cent) - Assorted Spanish cheeses
Scottish & Newcastle Iberia
Newcastle Brown Ale (4.7 per cent) - Squid with potato and pimenton (smoked paprika)
John Smith's Extra Smooth (4 per cent) - Assorted chorizo sausages
St Peter's Brewery
St Peter's Organic Ale (4.5 per cent) - Tuna in a white wine sauce
St Peter's Lemon & Ginger Spiced Ale (4.7 per cent) - Sorbet of lemon and beer
For Patrick Green, director of sales and marketing for Black Sheep, tastings like this are just part of a slow process of educating the consumer about British beer: "We are just dipping our toe in the water here. It is quite rare for these guys to try anything other than lager or Guinness. Similar BBPA tasting events around Europe have worked wonders for us," he said.
Greene King's Michael Campbell-Lambert, who chairs the BBPA's export panel, believes that the work that is going on in the tastings should be happening more frequently at home.
"I do a lot of work raising the profile of British beer abroad and yet funnily enough I don't think we do enough of that at home."
Which brings us back to our group of journalists. What did they make of it all? Did the event work and does Beautiful Beer have a future back in the UK?
All three indicated to me that they would be writing pieces on the event and the campaign for their publications. Ros Shiel, PR manager for the Beautiful Beer campaign, was happy with their response. "I was pleased with the quality of journalists we got to come along and that we were able to spend a lot of time with them. That meant we were able to try and build long-term relationships with them, which is the most important thing."
But what of the criticisms? All three told me that the food matchings did not seem to work, which is a problem given that food is central to what they write about.
Ros disagreed: "It doesn't really matter if some of the matchings didn't work. The important thing is that it raises the debate about beer and food."
She believes that trips such as these are hugely relevant to the campaign as they show beer in a light that consumers are not used to.
"We took the journalists to Barcelona because we want to link beer with interesting and stylish ways of living. Consumers won't naturally link beer and Barcelona, so if we can do that we have achieved something," she said.
- Jo Pratt, food writer for Elle magazine
"I think the campaign is something that will take a bit of time to work. It has started working already, what with the different shaped glasses used for beers such as Leffe, which is a popular beer with friends of mine. If the presentation isn't right then people won't want