Your say
Britain's brewing heritage at risk
Burton-on-Trent is quite simply one of the greatest brewing towns in the world. Within it is the Coors visitor centre, the United Kingdom's premier museum dedicated to brewing — and Coors has said it is to close the site at the end of June.
The brewer cites a lack of interest in the museum — attendances are down from 250,000 a year to 48,000 in recent years.
Yet in Denver, Colorado, Coors operates one of the most successful brewing visitor centres in the world, attracting more than one million visitors a year. And in Ireland the Guinness visitor centre in Dublin is even more popular than the Blarney Stone.
The Coors visitor centre, formerly known as the Bass museum, was set up in 1977.
Its galleries include an exhibition on how beer is made, a collection
of vintage vehicles used for transporting beer and an interactive display about Burton's history.
The collection is priceless. If it closes we would lose an invaluable, unique, irreplaceable resource and be denied the only real large-scale beer tourist attraction in the land.
Coors said it cannot sustain the £1m a year it is losing on the site, but it must be persuaded to delay the closure at the end of June or the opportunity to create a viable visitor centre and museum under a new management will be gone.
The collection of artefacts should be kept with the archives. Nothing on its scale exists anywhere else in Britain. And Burton is the natural place to keep it.
Burton and the museum are intertwined and it is essential that we try to preserve the heritage, not only of the brewing industry, but of the town itself.
Coors must relent and give the project to create a National Museum of Brewing in Burton-on-Trent something almost as valuable as the collection itself — time.
Tim Hampson
Chairman, British Guild of Beer Writers, Botley, Oxford
Unifying organisation absolutely vital now
The comments of Licensing Minister Gerry Sutcliffe on the alcohol increases (MA, 3 April) emphasise the need for a national organisation to represent the interests of self-employed proprietors of public houses.
One of the functions of the previous National Licensed Victuallers' Association (NLVA) was to make representations at national level in the pre-Budget run-up.
We were able to explain first hand to the Chancellor the dramatic impact that duty increases would have. While we could not claim 100% success, we certainly mitigated the increases.
I am sure that everyone has forgotten that when he was Chancellor, Dennis Healey actually cut beer duty.
Sadly, this good work was lost with the demise of the NLVA, which was due to the reluctance of the national council to accept that the structure of an organisation established in the 19th century was inappropriate at the end of the 20th, and certainly not suitable for the start of the 21st century.
I do hope that there are sufficient enterprising licensees in the country to recognise the need for a new organisation.
John C Overton
Former chief executive NLVA
Torrington, Devon
