Old Speckled Hen

Yes, I saw something on cask-uk about it.

GK have failed in various attempts to promote a flagship mid-range beer to compete with Pedigree and London Pride (Triumph, Ruddles County etc) so this presumably is their latest effort.

I wonder if the ABV of the bottled version will be reduced too.

I bet the price in pubs doesn't go down, though!

I think I would stop short of describing Old Speckled Hen as a "fine ale". But PeterE is right of course - they will reduce the strength but not the price.

Wait a minute. One of our local pubs (Miners, Adlington, Peter) sells it, so it should be easy to check it out.

"Greene King has also pledged to pass on the entire duty saving to the wholesale price, meaning that licensees may make a £2,300 additional profit by selling 30 barrels of the new 4.5 per cent, compared to the existing 5.2 per cent."

That's nice for them.

Ollie Clark ( snipped-for-privacy@ollieclark.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

"and bottles will features a glass imprint of a fox near the bottom."

I used to love OSH and even recomended my local pub for selling it. But I don't know what's gone wrong in the last 5 years. The GK beers all taste the same but I guess that's more to do with how they're kept.

Ruddles County has gone the same way (cannot remember when that came into the GK fold) but that used to be more than 5% too ...

Things are so bad at the local GK I've had to resort to Guiness. The big shame is that there's a local micro which, if could provide a guest beer, would make a big difference to the pub. Is it true that GK don't allow guest beers at all?

-- Grumps

GK themselves do offer beer from breweries other than those they have taken over, but I don't know how universally available such guests are. As a general rule, GK tenants / managers have to buy their beer via GK, but there are occasional exceptions, special events for example, but not for general bar trading . And unless GK are different to others in the industry, a tenant landlord could do an outside bar (ie village fete) and use whatever beer he chooses.

As ever, all rules seem to have an exception, but the above is how I understand it from a micro brewery standpoint.

Steve B