July 16, 2006

Enjoy responsibly

Top tip for the day - if you're in charge of one of the world's largest breweries, and in a position where it's your responsibility to promote the responsible use of alcohol, it's probably best not to lose your licence for drink-driving.

And while you're there, Peter, what were you guys thinking with the lager slush-puppies?

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December 22, 2005

Partial ban on blankets

It looks more and more like smoking in pubs (or at least some pubs) is going to be banned. Personally I'm in favour of a partial ban — dry-led pubs serving plated, sit-down meals would become non-smoking, and wet-led pubs, which are often "community" pubs, would continue to allow people to smoke1. This means non-smokers taking on bar jobs will be able to find pubs to work in without exposure to environmental smoke, pub food will taste better, and those pubs which would die under a smoking ban get a reprieve. Most of the sort of people who don't like smoking in pubs probably already mostly go to dry-lead pubs anyway. Everybody wins, or at least nobody loses all that badly, I think.

However, recent research from some economists at UCL, reported in the Observer, adds an interesting twist.

Children's health will be put at risk from passive smoking if the government bans smoking in all restaurants and bars, according to dramatic new research out today.

The study, which will provoke fresh controversy over whether a partial ban would be the better option, concluded that parents, particularly poorer ones, who are prevented from smoking in bars tend to smoke more in front of their children at home. Passive smoking has been linked to breathing difficulties and asthma among children.

Source: The Observer, 18/12/2005

Now, I think that these stereotypical poor parents prone to smoking in pubs tend to go to "community" type pubs most of all. Which in my experience tend to be wet-led. So would it be fair to say that, for the sake of the children, a partial ban is actually a better bet than a total, blanket ban on smoking in pubs? Then again, this all flies in the face of research showing that a ban on smoking in enclosed public places is likely to reduce the amount of smoking at home. It's all so confusing.

I guess that if the balance of research shows that public health is best served by a total ban, then I can live with it; I do worry that it marks the beginning of the end for community pubs, though. But then I work in one, I would worry about that kind of thing, wouldn't I?

1 Dry sales in pubs are food sales, generally excluding things like crisps and nuts. Wet sales are everything sold over the bar, roughly. Hence a wet-led pub is one where the focus is on drink, whereas a dry-led pub makes most of its money through meals.

[Update 1: I mean led, not lead, apparently.]
[Update 2: Looks like a blanket ban is now more likely ]

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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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September 06, 2005

How big's a barrel?

Everyone knows oil comes in barrels. The price of crude is something like $60 a "barrel", and among its other horrendous effects, Hurricane Katrina has reduced world oil production by a couple of million barrels a day. But, almost none of this oil ever sees a barrel, instead being transported/stored in tanks, or via pipelines. Barrel is just a macro for "35 gallons".

Beer, on the other hand, almost always comes in barrels. In beer land, a barrel refers to 36 gallons, but in the cellars of most pubs you'll mostly find barrels of just 11, or maybe 22 gallons. Except casks of ale, which tend to be 9 gallons or multiples thereof.

I hereby propose that people stop using "barrel" as a unit, and just use it as a term for a type of container. Right now. Thanks! Anything else is just too firkin complicated.

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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 27, 2005

Tracks that might offend

Last Monday, I concocted a plan, together with Some Guy I Met In The Pub, that would make us both incredibly rich. However we're both far too lazy to implement it, so I'm going to go ahead and tell you all in the hope that someone else gets rich off it instead. Just remember you saw it here first, OK?

Modern pub jukeboxes, it seems, offer the capability to download tracks from a vast selection (2 million according to Leisure Link's sales bumf), downloaded over now-ubiquitous broadband. This is something of a step up from a classic pub jukebox which might offer 50 or 100 albums, totalling maybe a couple of thousand tracks at best. Of course, not all 2 million tracks are stored on the machine at once, but those which are stored on the machine can be played for half the price of those needing to be downloaded, and those which are downloaded frequently tend to "evict" the less frequently played tracks from the disc. So far, so good, although clc points out the risk this system creates, that someone might choose tracks that might offend the delicate ears of other pub-goers.

But why stop there? Why make people pissed up on a night out stagger up to the jukebox and try remember the name of the song they suddenly really fancy hearing? OK, for some people that's the whole fun of jukeboxes, but wouldn't it be cool if you could identify some tracks in advance, before you go out, and have the machine recognise you and play them? So, my scheme is to issue RFID tags of some kind to people containing a unique ID, along with login credentials for a website. Then you just top up your account on the site with credit, and let it know the tracks you want to hear; perhaps it could hook into an audioscrobbler/last.fm type system, and "learn" your musical preferences, although there would need to be a facility to override your choices for a given night, and pick tunes to suit particular occasions. Then when you get to the pub or bar, you just walk up to the machine, wave your ID token at some sensor, and away it goes, taking credit from your account for every track from your selection it plays (up to some limit you can set, perhaps.)

And why stop there? How about if the RFID tags operated over a slightly longer range, so the machine would know who participating in the scheme was in the pub at any given moment. When not playing paid-for tracks, most of these machines play a "random" selection of tracks, so why not base this selection on the preferences of those present, weighted fairly between everyone with an ID token? Given the machines are also capable of communicating over the Internet, it would be possible to set up a "no repeats" system, too, whereby every person who buys into the scheme is guaranteed (or as close as possible) to not hear the same track twice in, say, any 3 hour period — and here's the clever part — even if they move between several different venues.

OK, so in the cold light of sobriety it doesn't seem quite as groundbreaking or at all likely to succeed, but it seemed a really good idea at the time.

(An aside we didn't think of at the time: perhaps the scheme could let users specify songs they truly hate, and endeavour to avoid playing said tracks in the presence of those users...)

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