Good Beer Guide 2011

Unless you get yourself off to a branch meeting of course. Our branch is selling them for a tenner (nice round figure, saves the Treasurer a lot of work).

-- Pat Ricroft, City of Salford, UK ===============================

here, too here hear!

In message , awavey wrote

CAMRA could stop these sales by not supplying Amazon in the first place, I suspect however neither CAMRA or Amazon are losing money on sales of the discounted GBG.

There are local branches of CAMRA that promote the sale of the GBG from Amazon through their own web sites. The branch then gets a commission on the sale for their branch funds.

BTW, the Amazon price has dropped by another 10p today.

Apparently not. From what I've been told, CAMRA don't supply Amazon direct, they sell to a wholesaler who then sells on to Amazon, amongst others. And there could be legal ramifications anyway if CAMRA tried to restrict trade in that way. But from the Campaign's point of view, anything that gets more copies of the GBG into the hands of more drinkers has to be beneficial.

-- Pat Ricroft, City of Salford, UK ===============================

More to the point, is it worth buying at all?

It's generally too cumbersome to be taken about on a day out; it's out of date on the day it's published (by 2011, the year it is supposed to represent, how many landlords will have changed, pubs closed, new pubs opened, new breweries opened, old breweries closed, beers changed etc?); and given the space limitations of the guide, it only scratches the surface of pubs in any given area.

In the years before the Internet, I used to photocopy the relevant pages of my guide - a couple of sheets of A4 being a lot more portable than 800 or so pages of mainly irrelevant information. When I mentioned this once to an CAMRA executive he turned pale, demanded that I immediately destroy the photocopies under the threat of prosecution for copyright infringement!

But now we have the Internet. We have local CAMRA branch pages, often lisitng every pub in the area. We have sites like Beer in the Evening (to be treated with a certain amound of scepticism, but still a pointer). We have individual pub websites, often listing current guest beers. We have far more relevant and detailed information on any specific area than a mere book could provide.

So, if we're visiting an area for a pub crawl, I'll go to the regional CAMRA website, go to the pubs' own websites, look at some of the pub consumer sites, print out a map on Google Maps, and put red blobs where there are promising looking pubs. I'll even suss out bus and train routes. Cost? Nil! Up to date and comprehensive? Certainly better than the GBG!

I once got told off by a self righteous person at the Fat Cat in Sheffield for daring to have copies of the Sheffield pages of the GBG in my pocket.

Nowadays as you say its a lot easier to trawl the local camra branch website, but I understand that they have STRICT instructions not to have a web page featuring their GBG listed pubs.

What I tend to do is read the local camra mag if its on there. The adverts and comments soon point you in the right direction. And it's more up to date.

Anyway looks like it's off to Mr Amazon for me.,

..and I almost forgot, we also have this site, which is frequented by knowledgeable CAMRA members et al ; )

Users are legally entitled to photocopy small extracts from a copyrighted work for personal use.This is a perfectly reasonable action.

I wonder if there's one jobsworth touring the country telling the [people off.

Or wether there's a whole army of them..

Thinking about it, this being Camra , must be the latter.