Re-capping my last, the tie made a certain amount of sense as part of the consolidation of British pub trade, in the context of the generally anti-competitive run of business over the later 20th Century. But it didn’t really do any good for anyone except brewers. There were even advantages from the advent of keg lagers, and the occasional keg bitter: they are point and click. To be a real ale cellarman is a craft, with physical and intellectual skills that must be taught and learned, practiced and honed. You have to know the beer, you have to know the tools, and you have to use them every day. This meant that a bad landlord could really mess up your beer (I’ve heard dark tales of the drip trays going back into the top of the mild every night, for example). With keg, you’d have to take an axe to it to really mess it up.
But the over-all consolidation of the trade was, as I said, not really good for anyone except capital accumulators. It made the beer worse, it made pubs worse, it made publicans lives’ hell and it radically reduced competition within the UK market. We’ve gone some way to fixing that, partly through the work of CAMRA and others, partly by just making better beer. Where there were 60 independent brewers in Britain at the start of the 80s there are over 600 now. Brewing is beginning to be a competitive industry again. But the pub trade is getting even worse: 35 pubs a week have been closed in the last year. Think about those numbers for a moment.
The view across the bar. 