Going green from the grass roots up

The LocAle scheme is working hard to reduce "beer miles" by encouraging pubs to stock local brews

If I ask you for your view of the average Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) member, leaving aside the cartoon caricature of beer bellies and bird's nest beards, you might suggest a degree of introspection, that nothing much exists outside the struggle for good ale.

Concern for the environment? Forget it — just pull me another pint of Buzzard's Old Throat Strangler.

It isn't like that any more. The Campaign for Real Ale has always been a grass-roots movement. It has a busy head office with a full-time staff, hard-working and dedicated people who look after 92,000 members, lobby brewers, pubcos, MPs and MEPs, supply equipment for hundreds of beer festivals, and publish a growing number of books.

But the full-timers would be the first to agree that the heartbeat, the well-spring of the campaign comes from the hard-core activists. Come rain or shine, they run the branches and festivals, and monitor pubs for local and national beer guides.

And those activists are changing. A grass-roots campaign that started in Nottingham is now mushrooming as other branches take up the issue of supporting local craft brewers and cutting back on "beer miles".

The scheme is called LocAle and it was the brain-child of a mustard-keen activist in Nottingham called Steve Westby — a beer nut who spends his spare time monitoring the craft brewers section of the industry to see who has arrived and who has quit. As a result, he has an enviable database of small breweries and he is passionate in his support for their cause.

He was not best pleased when Greene King bought and closed his local brewery, Hardys & Hansons. Along with other Nottingham Camra members, he thought the H&H beers brewed by Greene King no longer tasted quite the same.

That's a subjective assessment. But what really riled Steve was the undeniable fact that H&H beers were being trucked several hundred miles from Suffolk to the Midlands, at considerable cost to the environment as lorries pump diesel fumes into the atmosphere.

Steve did some research and found from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), that food and drink transport account for 25% of all HGV vehicle miles in Britain. He estimates that some global beer brands notch up more than 24,000 miles when you take into account the ingredients that are flown all round the world to feed giant centralised breweries.

LocAle was launched to encourage pubs to support local craft brewers. The scheme doesn't make outrageous demands of licensees. Steve Westby knows full well the economic reality of the modern pub trade and that many licensees are tied to the supply lists of their owning pub companies.

But, wherever possible, he urges them to stock at least one cask beer from a brewery that is no more than 20 miles away. He further suggests they should consider using the direct delivery scheme run by the Society of Independent Brewers (Siba).

This scheme also cuts back on wasteful lorry trips by allowing Siba members to deliver direct to local pubs rather than to the pubcos central warehouses for wasteful onward journeys.

Steve Westby and his colleagues estimate that £10 spent on locally-supplied goods generates £25 for the local economy. Keeping trade local, they say, helps local enterprises, creates more economic activity and local jobs, and makes other local services more viable. LocAle will also generate consumer support for local craft breweries.

The LocAle scheme has been taken up with enthusiasm by Camra branches in Sheffield and York. All three branches supply participating pubs with posters, window stickers and leaflets that tell pub-goers more about the scheme.

The outcome, they hope, will be more trade for craft brewers, more awareness of the microbrewery revolution in Britain — and a small but important contribution to combating greenhouse gases.

LocAle will be rolled out nationally in the coming months. You can learn more about the scheme from www.sheffieldcamra.co.uk.

And you may consider that Camra members, far from being a pestilential nuisance, are firmly on the side of the angels.