One of the curious things about the timing of the Beer Orders, that as far as I know nobody has ever touched on, is that they came into force just one month after the Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia. To us at the time it meant that the liberated brews of a beer-super power, facing westward for the first time since 1947 , were going to find a ready sale in the UK’s pubs, freed from the controls of their brewer owners by the UK’s Beer Orders coming in a month later.
It was the perfect “they all lived happily ever after” scenario of the classic fairy tale, but it didn’t work out like that, or maybe we forgot that real fairy tales usually have dark endings. This one certainly did. The big names in the newly liberated Czech brewing industry, with the exception of far sighted Budvar, were quickly eaten for breakfast by Big Brewing, who immediately set about undermining the traditional practices of the Czech beer industry; practices that had been sustained and cherished even during the nightmare years of the German Protectorate and the Soviet hegemony. Thus proving nothing is more destructive of the individual and the local than global capitalism. Fortunately there was no tradition of tied estates in the Czech lands so the international invasion ended at the brewery gates. In the UK meanwhile it soon became evident that the Beer Orders were not going to lead UK drinkers and hosts to the promised-land. Rather they were simply going to shift the centre of power from the big brewers to new equally big pub groups. The road to hell is certainly paved with good intentions.
Besides being a singularly half-arsed attempt to tinker with a the natural evolution of a complex sector of the economy the Beer Orders can be seen as the beginning of the non-stop, almost demented interference in our business which has characterised government ever since. It opened Pandora’s box with the Beer Orders and ever since has been trying to shut it again with increasing bureaucracy and legislation or, put another way, with ineptitude and incompetence.
On the Czech side however a feather light administrative touch is the order of the day. Hosts can stock what they like, open when they like and close when they like and decide whether to smoke or not to smoke. It also follows they are not plagued with hordes of local government weasels whinging about earth shattering matters like where you can place an A board , medics declaring jihad against alcohol and senior Policemen just putting the metaphorical boot in.
.Since the Beer Orders we in this business has more or less sunk into a nauseating servitude to government, our representative bodies seeming to do nothing more than appease the enemy. While the Czech business can celebrate its real freedom 20 years on we have been busy reversing the other way. It’s about time we had a revolution here as well.
This Article appeared in The Publican and reproduced by kind permission of The Publican.
