Pete Brown: Craft beer bars

The Jolly Butchers​ on London's Stoke Newington High Street was legendary, for all the wrong reasons.

During the day it would be haunted by a handful of old men wearing what the late, great Pete McCarthy referred to as 'Irish drinking suits', the shiny, stained, dark suits that are the uniform of a certain tribe of dogged drinker. They'd watch the racing and drink the occasional pint of Guinness or Foster's, their cauliflower faces turning redder as the afternoon wore on. Later, the 4am licence meant the Butchers was the last resort of drinkers coming back from nights in the West End or pub crawls around London N16.

Notoriety didn't turn into takings though. When the old Butchers closed its doors for good in January, Stoke Newington's Twitterati moaned: "Where are we going to go for a late-night drink and a fight now?"

In late April it re-opened, with eight real ales, cider and perry occupying 10 hand pumps, draught Belgian ales and imported German lagers on keg. It serves no brand that anyone who isn't an outright beer fan would recognise.

Its second weekend open was the May Day Bank Holiday. The day after, licensee Martin Harley slumps exhausted into a seat next to me and passes me a pint of Brodie's Amarilla golden ale.

"I'm running out of beer!" he says. "We shifted 20 firkins in our first week. Sunday morning I had to get Mr Brodie out of bed and plead with him for some more."

Eclectic and unusual

This is not just another story about the real ale revival. Sure, real ale is part of it, but there are many pubs serving good ale selections - and they're faring much better than pubs that don't.

But this is more. We've had the gastropub: this is the dawn of the specialist craft beer pub - a place where Foster's, John Smith's Smooth and Stella Artois are nowhere to be seen, where every single beer is an eclectic or unusual choice.

In planning the Jolly Butchers, Harley took inspiration from Cask Pub & Kitchen​, which opened in Pimlico, South West London, last July. Again, this was a failing pub, in this instance a Greene King outlet.

"It was a troubled site and they were desperate to get it off their hands," says licensee Martin Hayes. "It's a one-off; they gave me carte blanche to do what I liked with it."

Again, this resulted in a range of up-and-coming real ales together with the kind of specialist imported lagers and ales you simply don't see in most pubs. Again, it's paid off.

"I thought it would take a long time to establish itself, but we were busy when we first opened and we've grown consistently since then. People travel quite a long way to find our beers," Hayes says.

This phenomenon is not just confined to London. In December Jamie Hawksworth opened the Sheffield Tap​, a joint venture between his company Pivo and the Thornbridge Brewery. It has 10 Thornbridge ales on tap, plus unfiltered Czech pilsner Bernard, a range of other eclectic brews and a vast range of bottled beers. On the night of its unadvertised soft launch it took £3,000.

"People told me I was mad to do this," says Hawksworth. "Sheffield is a big beer city, but we're not on any of the main pub crawls and we don't stock the usual range of Sheffield brews. But we're growing constantly.

"Last Thursday and Friday we did 27 firkins in cask, and the equivalent volume in keg."

Not just for beer geeks

Are all these beers being drunk by beer geeks? Harley doesn't think so. "It's the locals drinking in here," he says. "Look at the farmer's market round the corner. And the Wholefoods Store across the road from it. Have you ever seen a Wholefoods as busy as that? They're coming in here and they've never heard of any of the beers, but they love going through them and trying them."

With established specialist beer pubs like London's Rake​ and White Horse​, Leeds' North Bar​ and Hawksworth's other venue, Pivo​ in York (The Publican's Beer Range Pub of the Year in 2009) all just as busy week in, week out, this all begs one rather obvious question: why are there not more specialist craft beer pubs in the country?

Obviously this is not a recipe for success for every pub. It will always cater to a discerning, interested minority.

But when so many pubs are doing so badly, at a time when people are prepared to travel miles to drink in specialist craft beer pubs, there are clearly not enough of them in the pub mix to meet the burgeoning demand for interesting beer.

The three licensees I spoke to are very clear on why this is the case: the two Martins lay the blame squarely at the door of the pub companies.

Harley says: "I've always wanted to do a pub like this in Stoke Newington, but my other place is on a Scottish & Newcastle lease. I kept trying to persuade them to broaden the beer selection, to go with something different, but they seemed completely uninterested.

"I had to wait until I could get a place that was free-of-tie before I could get beers in that I knew would work round here."

Cask Pub & Kitchen's Hayes agrees: "It would be impossible to create something like this in, say, a Punch Taverns pub. They're not amenable or flexible enough. You do always have the option of buying beers outside the tie, but the agreement means the cost of doing so would be prohibitively expensive. The only pubs belonging to pubcos you can do this in are the failed pubs, where they'll try anything to turn them around."

It seems odd that, given the roaring success of every well-run specialist craft beer pub, pubcos wait until everything else has failed before giving the concept a try. Maybe it's because it's such a new idea, and the industry is slow moving.

Fighting conservatism

But Hawksworth disagrees that the problem lies with the tie.

"Look what happens whenever The Publican asks licensee what beers they would buy if they were free-of-tie: it's a list of the same old brands they already stock," he points out.

"There's an inherent conservatism among publicans. Talk to some people and they think the world would end if they took Guinness off the bar. I really don't think it's the pubcos holding people back."

Nevertheless, there are new publicans who would be keen to swap Stella for Schlenkerla and Bud for Bruges Zot if given the chance.

It's not a guarantee of success, of course. As Hawksworth says: "Anyone can pick up the James Clay list and buy the lot. But you need to understand the beers, know a bit about them, and understand your locality and customer base before deciding if they're right."

But with no more than 20 craft beer specialist pubs in the UK, it's a reasonable bet that with a bit of help and a more forward-thinking attitude, there's room for plenty more.