Pub Odyssey 43

Tuesday, 1 November:  OLD CROSS, HERTFORD (Mike Horsman, Elvis Pile, Steve Stott, Andrew Swift, JohnWestwood)

COMMENT:  This super pub provided a really nice, and really cheap, occasion.  £9 each for a total of  two pints each plus as many sandwiches as anyone could want to eat!  Normally the Old Cross doesn't provide food, at Tuesday lunchtime anyway, but through the good offices of John Westwood the landlord provided the sandwiches.

I thought the Old Cross was terrific.  It represents one branch of the great real beer movement, beginning in the 1970s when the British public rose in revolt against crap like Double Diamond and Watneys Red Barrel and demanded proper beer, made in the correct way and properly presented. The success of this movement, fronted of course by CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale), has been amazing.  Nowadays "real beer" is defined pretty much as CAMRA wants (the ultimate marketing triumph, all other not-approved products are by definition non-real or inferior);  The total number of breweries is four times what it was when CAMRA was founded in 1971 and more since any time since the 1940s.  Although pubs face tremendous challenges in the recession and are faced by predatory government taxation, real beer sales have held up much better than other forms of alcoholic purchases.  The strength of the real beer movement is demonstrated in many ways; craft-type pubs like the Old Cross; big commercial operations like J D Wetherspoons (our next week visit); huge festivals, attended by tens of thousands, like the Great British Beer Festival or the Cambridge Beer Festival; but above all by the fact that nearly all pubs seem to have real ale on offer.  There is a lot about CAMRA I don't go for, although I have been a member for decades, my reservations being succinctly summed up by the beer writer Pete Brown when he said that stereotypical CAMRA activists were "bearded, beer-bellied, wear chunky sweaters or tight,stained T-shirts, are pedantic, Luddite and have difficulties relating to girls".  Having said all that, we owe them a lot.

And the Old Cross was great.  As I stood watching them brewing their own beer in a back room before stepping back into the bare but pleasant parlour to drink it at £2.20 a pint I knew I was in the right place.