Why I’m kind of against LocAle

LocAle is a CAMRA scheme that’s effectively two fold, to encourage local pubs to stock local beer to encourage local production and secondly to lower the carbon footprint of beers delivered all over the country. Quite how this second goal is achieved when local beers travel to big distribution chains to then get delivered back again, I don’t know.

After the mergers & monopolies report in ’89, the big winners were the breweries who instantly tied in with one of the big boys for a mutual ‘swap-shop’ type deal. Sudden every Charles Wells pub stocked Newcastle Brown while S&N pubs started serving Bombadier. The limited choice on offer to the drinker was suddenly ever so slightly less limited.

One outcome of the LocAle scheme is that pubs tend to veer towards the more popular local beers. Castle Rock, and in particular, the seemingly ubiquitous Harvest Pale, have done remarkably well out of this. So well, in fact, that Castle Rock now have to brew some of their beers in far-away Burton. Do these still class as LocAle ? Was the scheme devised to help small / medium sized breweries grow even bigger rather than the true local micro-breweries ?

The other more noticeable impact on the drinker is a lessening in choice, rather than an extension. The Horse & Groom in Basford, for example, still stock a wide range of beers from all over the UK, but have to advertise specially for their Yorkshire & Coastal beer festivals. Special events aside, ideally these non-LocAle beers should be on regular rotation rather than just for the odd special weekend. Smaller pubs, and those with maybe only one hand pump, who stock a LocAle beer will therefore never stock any thing outside our immediate area, and most likely, nothing except from Castle Rock or Nottingham Brewery for example.

The latest SIBA beer festival at the CanalHouse highlighted a wide range of quite frankly stunning beers from all over the UK, all styles, strengths and colours. Yet the majority of these will be unheard of outside their regional areas, with now less opportunity to get local pubs trying them out for fear of upsetting their local CAMRA branch they’ve worked so hard to impress.

Like the beer orders of ’89, the bigger breweries find their way through the legal, and possibly more importantly, moral meaning of the legislation. Maybe then the LocAle scheme needs to be revisited before the only chance of drinking ‘foreign’ beer is by travelling away from home, away from the LocAle pubs and increasing rather than decreasing the carbon impact.