Daily Telegraph rubbish

No. Would you care to enlighten us?

Starts:

"If you think Campaign for Real Ale festivals are populated by characters from Middle Earth, you are right.

"Beards, long ones, were in abundance at the Olympia exhibition centre in London yesterday, adorning men with pigtails, homely pot bellies, hearty laughs and foam around their mouths. The only thing missing was an orc."

Hmm, I've met some distinctly orc-like CAMRA members ;-)

Roy Bailey wrote in news:Q33qsNDmeO8CFwy$@freeuk.com:

If this isn't a piss take, what did you write? Did you sign it Humour Less Pratt?

M.

Don't get too worked up about this, it's just the usual lazy journalism you get with this sort of story. There *are* plenty of middle aged beer gutted bearded men around at GBBF if that's all people want to see. Mainstream journalists writing beer stories generally rely on either brewery press handouts or easy stereotypes. This is why CAMRA lays on media stunts to coincide with GBBF - to give lazy journos something to write about.

Tweedie will probably be writing about iPods or dirty vicars or split capital investment trusts tomorrow.

Best regards, Paul

-- Paul Sherwin Consulting

horses & courses, I actually thought it was mildly witty, yes, ill-informed ("Lager is an accepted part of the real ale industry with

70 per cent of the beer market") yes, dully, lazily stereotypical/cliched (beards, guts, dead sheep in cider, or cider tasting of goat) but thought TheTelegraph a surprising place to read this - "The real ale industry is, unlike many of its denizens, in rude health. Drinkers tired of bland, mass-produced brands are seeking out its wares in greater numbers"

A couple of other things - would an asst bar mgr at the cider bar really have called one of the products "ghastly"? & I wonder why the writer found Cain's Lager "so-so-ish", it's been very good when I've had it from cask. The only 2 drinks he seemed to like were Crouch Vale Brewers Gold & Hobgoblin. Cheers, MikeMcG

Probably because it doesn't taste like the Stella or Bud I imagine he normally drinks.

Best regards, Paul

-- Paul Sherwin Consulting

When I had a sample at the GBBF on Wed, it was sour. Unfortunately, the friend who gave it to me couldn't be bothered walking all the way back to the Cain's stand to return it!

How do I get rid of that awful "house" which sits over the web page advertising some Barclays mortgage? OTOH it does obscure the trash written underneath :-)

"Some 45000 CAMRA beardies" would be a good place to stop I think.

Brian

In message , Roy Bailey wrote

You have obviously not read too many of the CAMRA press releases. Just enough information missing or so badly written that a lazy journalist has to make up some of the information.

Often CAMRA, collectively, seems to assume that EVERYBODY knows their aims and that the 'internal shorthand' is understood. I have read press articles liberally sprinkled with the word poty, rather than being about a Pub Of The Year. Give the press meaningless TLAs (or in this case FLAs) and you don't have to wonder why a distorted message is presented.

I can't see it, so I presume it's a pop-up advert. If so, just use a browser that blocks them. I can recommend Firefox: .

CAMRA has certainly greatly increased the appreciation and understanding of beer, but it must be said that less real ale is being drunk now than at any time in the movement's history. That can't be be regarded as an unqualified success story.

In message , MikeMcG writes

You'd normally say you *thought* it was ghastly, since you know someone will love it.

BTW that's where the orc is.

As a small organisation with mostly volunteer activists the achievements are way beyond what you could expect.

M.

What has it achieved, then, beyond "greatly increasing the appreciation and understanding of beer"?

(I am one of those volunteer activists, but I feel that much of CAMRA's activity has been in putting up token resistance to the inevitable)