July 21, 2006

Drink-sodden Armageddon, update

Around 10 months ago, a number of people were predicting that the UK was about to descend into some kind of drink-sodden Armageddon. I mocked their use of this phrase at the time, thinking it unlikely. So imagine my glee when, in yesterday's newspaper, I found this:

The 24 hour drinking laws have not led to any more violence or vandalism after pub closing time, new figures show. [...] Their [the Home Office] report, Crime In England and Wales 2005-6, concluded: "The data show no indication of a rise in the overall level of offences as a result in the change in the opening hours."

Stick that up your Daily Mail and smoke it.

(Speaking of the Independent, their front-page infographic today is great.)

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November 08, 2005

Don't get angry, get photos

Witnesses said the women were having sex in a stall with each other, angering patrons waiting in line to get into the restroom at the club in the Channelside district.

Folks, please. Next time this happens to you, don't get angry, get photos. Sheesh!

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September 11, 2005

Drink-sodden Armageddon

In a smidgeon under 3 months time, the law in the UK regarding licences to sell alcohol, to put on various forms of entertainment, and to sell hot food/drink after 11pm (late night refreshment) will be changing. The 6 separate current licensing schemes will be brought under a single banner, and in the process the current statutory limits on when a licence to sell alcohol can apply will be relaxed. This isn't to say a licence won't be needed (it certainly will), or that licences will all be 24-hour (they most certainly won't!), but there will be the potential for 24-hour drinking across the UK. Which for some reason has upset people.

Admirable as upsetting the Daily Mail editors might be, it's slightly scary to think that we might be plunging towards a drink-sodden Armageddon. But are we really? Lots of other European countries trust their citizens with the right1 to drink alcohol at just about any time of day they choose, after all, and we're told they don't suffer from our "yob culture" — I suppose the question is, do we need a shift in our culture before we can have late night drinking, or do we need late night drinking before we can have a shift in our culture? And if it's the former, how else do we go about causing this change?

I personally don't think people in general will drink more at a time, more frequently, or more in general, under the new licensing regime. What they will do is get just as insanely drunk as now at a bigger variety of times to normal (making them easier to deal with?), and perhaps start their nights out later. People also won't feel rushed to squeeze as many pints in as possible between the end of Eastenders and last orders, so we should see fewer people getting drunker than they planned, and fewer people throwing up outside pubs/takeaways. Bonus!

The "late night" part of the new licensing rules is just one aspect of the act, anyway. More significant to me is the reduction in bureaucracy for places that currently need multiple licences, and the introduction of distinct "personal" and "premises" licences, which makes sense in a whole bunch of ways, and ought to save licensees a whole bunch of court appearances in the future. For one thing, anyone working for a pub chain as a "relief manager" will simply be able to have a personal licence, and be the Designated Supervisor for any premises in the chain whenever they need to be. At present, I understand every relief manager would need to make a court appearance to be made the temporary licensee at the new premises every time they went to a new pub, although I'm willing to stand corrected on this one.

Some new licensees will face significant problems of course, since currently kebab shops and burger vans don't need a licence to operate at night, and will soon need one to sell anything hot after 11pm. The reasons for introducing these requirements (as explained in that article) are pretty sound, though.

Something else those complaining about the new laws don't seem to realise is that people can already drink until silly hours of the morning if they so decide — pubs I've worked in have had "lock-ins" previously which extend well beyond the hours they've applied to extend their licence to under the new regimes. I can think of at least 2 pubs locally where drinking to 3am or so isn't unheard of, but I can't think of any that have applied for a licence beyond 2am. I suppose some nightclubs in the city centre may have applied for more hours.

So to conclude, the new licensing laws will piss off Daily Mail editors, reduce city centre violence, reduce occurences of vomiting on pavements near pubs, shut down dodgy backstreet kebab shops, regulate the surviving ones better, and allow people to drink legally later avoiding the need for things like lockins, while reducing paperwork for publicans. Sounds good to me.

1 I don't mean to imply that 5am-drinking is some kind of fundamental human right, here, just that some countries allow their citizens to do it.

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July 28, 2005

Half and half

I had no idea people drank so many "cocktails" made from beer/cider. I always thought that, when you went into a typical pub, the beers on the bar were all intended for separate sale, with the possible exception that student bars expect to sell vast amounts of Snakebite and black. The last few weeks working in pubs has taught me just how wrong I was — these are just some of the concoctions I've been asked for, or heard about:

Now I think about it, there are some gaps in this list; where, for instance, is the cider/bitter combination? Is it so vile that nobody ever drinks it, or have I just not encountered it yet? If anyone tracks down this elusive cocktail they should let me know, and if it's not utterly vile I might try it. My experience with Black Velvet doesn't give me much hope, though...

Update: cider with bitter is apparently bitter snakebite, and cider-based Black Velvet is apparently Guinness snakebite. So, that clears that up, albeit somewhat unimaginatively.

In the comments, lonecat points out that a floating stout shandy is called Fade to Black, but in fact this blog seems to be the only place on the entire Internet where that term has been used in conjunction with Guinness, so clearly more investigation is required. Also Joe reminds me that Snakebite is also known as both Snakey B and Diesel, the latter particularly in its blackcurrant-containing form.

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July 18, 2005

Well under a quid

Nobody likes to feel ripped off. And a lot of people do, when they drink soft drinks in pubs. But, is this fair? Everyone seems to assume that because there's no tax on soft drinks, they should cost significantly less than beer.

Now, first of all, let me make a suggestion — if you're thirsty and can't bear to part with £2 for a pint of coke in a pub, I suggest drinking cordial with soda water. Most pubs will charge well under a quid for a pint of blackcurrant and soda; if you're feeling flush, consider asking them to put a small dash of lemonade in it as well, it tastes lovely.

That settled, what does a pint of coke in a pub actually cost? Well, to you, around about £2. To the pub, the syrup to make that pint of coke has probably cost £35 for a bag-in-a-box of syrup, which gets diluted 5.4:1 - apparently that's 141 16oz servings of coke in an ideal world, which I'm going to call 105 pints1, after you allow for what ends up in the drip trays behind the bar and so on. So, the syrup mix in your pint alone costs 33p. Then, there's the cost of having someone come out to maintain the dispenser, to fill up the gas cylinders, and the (marginal, admittedly) cost of the water. It wouldn't surprise me if this lot took the price to 50p on a pint of coke. Now consider that, of your £2, 30p is lost straight away as VAT.

So, £1.70 goes to the pub, who lose 50p of that straight away on supplying the drink. The rest has to pay for the glass you have the coke in (and replacing the glass when it breaks), the ice (and maintenance of the ice machine) you have in it, the slice of lemon, the bendy plastic straw, the staff to serve you the drink, to collect your glass, to wash the glass before it gets reused, to slice the lemons, to collect the ice from the cellar, to supervise the people doing all of the above, to organise their wages and make sure their tax is correct... and then, at the end of it all, it would be nice if the pub could make a profit, don't you think? It might encourage people to continue to run pubs.

Compare this to a pint of, say, Grolsch, in my local. As I understand it, he effectively pays about £1.14 a pint for his barrels of Grolsch, which then retails at £2.35 a pint. 35p of this is presumably VAT, so his "margin" is 86p, compared to £1.20 on the coke example. So, sure, the margins on coke are bigger, but not as significantly as some people would have you believe.

If anyone has any better figures on this stuff, I'd be interested to see them. I only started looking into this to see who was right out of the people who told me "coke in pubs is a rip off, it costs them something like 2p/litre", and the landlord who told me that he actually saves money by just having 2 litre bottles from Tesco behind the bar, instead of a postmix machine (so, he's paying about 50p a litre upwards, depending what offers are on). Turns out the truth is somewhere in between.

1 This is assuming 20oz == 1 pint; I'm not too hot on this Imperial stuff, so if somoene knows better please shout!

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March 20, 2005

Sipping my Wrath

There is a bar in Nottingham which sells 7 cocktails, named after the 7 deadly sins. As I sat sipping my Wrath earlier this evening, I decided I quite liked the look of Envy, that some of my friends were drinking; I liked it enough that I went and got myself one.

Which is almost as good as the chav girl next to me at the bar ordering "5 Gluttonies"...

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January 04, 2005

Public Inhalation

On Monday, Toby posted an entry about smoking in public places where he proposed a free-market style alternative to a smoking ban. I fail to see how this proposal is noticeably different from the status quo, which suggests to me that, not only does it not work in theory (as I will demonstrate), but it also doesn't work in practice (as recently demonstrated in East Yorkshire).

The proposal doesn't work in theory because people are not divided neatly into social groupings of smokers and non-smokers. I don't smoke, but one of my housemates smokes regularly, and the others "occasionally". If there were a mixture of smoking and non-smoking pubs here in Beeston, I imagine when we went out we would invariably end up in the former type of pub, so I as a non-smoker would gain nothing at all from the existence of non-smoking pubs. Only pure non-smoking groups would be likely to frequent non-smoking venues, and I would be surprised if these groups are numerous enough to make running a non-smoking venue profitable. I can think of few social groupings I'm in that are exclusively made up of non-smokers, but perhaps I'm atypical — answers on a comment/trackback to that one, please!

So I don't know what to do about the problem of smoking in pubs, and other public places, to be honest. I do know I'm fed up of my clothes stinking of smoke, of my hair stinking of smoke, of coughing up crud after every night out, and of enduring the smell of smoke while I'm out. I also know I'm even sicker of these things happening to me at work1. But while I can't see a solution other than a ban, banning something because some people find it unpleasant doesn't appeal to my fluffy liberal values. Banning something because it's a danger to the health of people nearby seems more justified, but the people in the smoky pub (with the notable possible exception of the staff) are there entirely out of choice, so the number of relevant affected people is relatively low.

So if a ban isn't the right answer, and a purely free market system won't work either, what will work? Anybody?

1 You might choose to argue that I'm entirely free to find a job somewhere else, instead; this isn't entirely accurate, though. When I took on my current job, it was chosen because the hours would fit around my existing schedule, and with no relevant experience any other pub might have been less keen to take me on. I couldn't afford to factor smokiness into the decision as well.

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December 26, 2004

I'm an evil criminal

[Some of you already know this story. I'm recording it here for the sake of the people who don't, and so people who know part of it can have the complete picture. Also it gives me somewhere to point people.]

I'm sure this comes as news to nobody; I mean, most people reading this have probably broken some law at some point — either some minor misdemeanour, such as speeding, or maybe experimenting with drugs in their youth, or something more major like losing the password for an encrypted file, the mark of a true terrorist. But no, I actually got caught in the act, by a carefully orchestrated police sting.

See, a couple of weeks ago, I was caught selling alcohol to a minor. In a carefully planned police operation, 18 bars in Nottingham's city centre were visited on a busy Saturday night, by 4 minors accompanied by plainclothes police officers. In 10, the minor managed to get in (in many cases past door staff), and to get served alcohol. Including at Number 10, the high class establishment (*cough*) I currently work in. In fact, I served him.

3 hours later, they came back and told me what had happened, and the possible consequences: if they chose to prosecute, I could face a fine in the region of £200, and a criminal record. My boss (as licensee) could have lost her licence, although it being a first offence was more likely to get a fine somewhere between £1500 and £20,000 — this despite not even being on the premises at the time. A few days later we (and all the other evil perps) had to report to the city's main police station, and as it happens she only got a caution, which I believe remains on her record for 6 months. I got an £80 fixed penalty notice, which presents me with two choices: I can pay the penalty, never need to admit guilt, and go on with my life; or, I can refuse to pay, and demand my day in court. This latter approach risks a much larger fine, a criminal record, and loads more hassle. It's a no-brainer.

It appears there is no defence of entrapment in UK law, if it seems that the suspect was not coerced into doing something they would not normally do. It also appears that, under the Licensing (Young Persons) Act, 2000, and therefore section 169A of the 1964 Licensing Act, what I did is certainly illegal. It's not entirely clear whether or not I had a defence under section 169A(2), but it's a slim enough chance that I wasn't about to demand my day in court.

Ironically, the reason I'm going to be more careful in the future isn't really the risk of further fines, or penalty notices; while obviously I'd rather not have to pay them, I could probably work something out, or get bailed out by my parents. But if it happens again, my boss would lose her licence; that would really, really suck, because she's lovely, and the only reason I'm still working in that crappy pub. So since the incident, I've been ruthlessly asking for ID from anyone looking under 21. Please, if you get asked in a pub somewhere, don't be offended; we're just in fear for our wallets, and our bosses' licences.

Meanwhile, your recommended reading for today is Barlow being far less cowardly with the law than I.

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