Hamish Champ: Choice and the beer tie

In last week's edition of The Publican​ - and on thepublican.com​ - appeared a column written by a customer of the Nightingale pub in Clapham, South London.

Ian Bull - for it was he - wrote that as a customer as far as he was concerned the Beer Orders had been rather a good thing.

The new regime that followed the Orders resulted, he believed, in him being able to drink more beer than before. By that he didn't just mean he could pour more down his throat, though he didn't seem to mind people drawing this simplistic conclusion.

No, he meant the range of beers available, the choice on offer, appeared to have widened considerably as a result of the breaking up of the brewer's monopoly.

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that Bull found himself on the receiving end of some rather hefty comments from some of our regular online readers, who used his piece to raise the issue of the beer tie, the operation of free markets and the salient fact that one monopoly had been broken up to be replaced by another.

I made the point to one reader - who argued most freehouses have "at least 10 real ales available" - that from a consumer's perspective not all such pubs are an Aladdin's Cave of choice, their walls glittering with reasonable prices, just as not all tied pubs are overpriced hellholes bereft of good beer.

The nearest pub to where I live is a freehouse. It only has one real ale pump, which is rarely in use, and the usual array of Scandinavian and Midlands-brewed cooking lagers. I don't go in there. Ever.

The best pub in my manor by far is the Dacre Arms, a cracking boozer with at least three real ales on at any one time. It's an Enterprise Inns pub, but as a customer you wouldn't know this when you walked in. One just finds a brilliant pub, run, in spite of all the issues he doubtless has to face, by a top notch licensee and great staff.

Would it be an even better pub if it were a freehouse? For the licensee, financially probably yes, but from a consumer's perspective I doubt it could be as good as it already is.

Commentators on Ian Bull's piece said the beer tie has ruined the market in their part of the country. It could well have done, but then again wasn't there always a tie?

Speaking as a consumer, 35 years ago when I began venturing into pubs in South East London and I wanted real ale there were basically two choices: one went into a Courage pub, like the one my mate's dad Vic ran in Greenwich, the Rose & Crown. Or you went into the Princess of Wales in Blackheath Village, which was a Bass pub and where you drank IPA. That was it.

And as a consumer, prices have always been far too bloody high for their - my - liking whichever pub one goes into.

Whatever your view on how the industry should look in the years to come it's hard not to agree with Ian Bull's point that from his side of the bar at least there's more choice on offer now than there was pre-1989.