Michael Jackson at the UK's Biggest Beer Festival:
Writing about a Writer talking about a Writer!

CAMRA's Great British Beer Festival (GBBF), which is held in London (Olympia in 2005. Earls Court, from 2006), for five days, in early August each year (typically, the first Tuesday to Saturday), clearly has a lot of Real Ales (Cask Beers) on offer, since CAMRA (www.camra.org.uk) is short for the Campaign for Real Ale. Real Ale is a termed coined by CAMRA to describe the UK's traditional beer. Following its birth, in 1971, CAMRA quickly established itself as the UK's premier beer consumers' organisation. The formation of CAMRA truly did save Real Ale for the nation, at a time when the big brewers were seemingly trying to kill it off, by forcing the beer drinking public to drink poor imitations of Pilsner style beers (called Lager in the UK), along with ghastly, pasteurised and filtered fizzes, such as the infamous Watney's Red Barrel; Real Ale is unpasteurised and unfiltered. The Great British Beer Festival is CAMRA's showpiece event of the year with regard to their promotion of Real Ale; hundreds of different Real Ales can be sampled from the cask.

One aspect of the GBBF that I particularly like are the tutored tastings that take place each day. In 2004, I could not resist booking the one entitled "British Bottle-conditioned Beer", especially as it was given by the world's number one beer writer, Michael Jackson (1942-) (www.beerhunter.com, Bookmark). Bottled-conditioned beer has yeast present in the bottle, so it is often called "Real Ale in a Bottle".

Michael's presentation contained much adlibbing, not always about beer and he threw in some superb jokes, including just about all the late Ronnie Scott's - Michael is a big Jazz fan. At one point he mentioned that the short story by Welshman, Dylan Thomas (1914-53), called Old Garbo, contains, in his view, the best description that he has come across of someone enjoying a pint. However, he did not read it out, so I could not resist getting a copy. It is in a book of short stories, first published in 1940, called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (New Directions paperback, ISBN 0-8112-0207-0). The following is the passage in question, the scene, which is semi-autobiographical, the time being 1931, is set in The Three Lamps, a pub in Swansea, South Wales. Dylan has only been working for three weeks, so will have been below the legal drinking age:

I leant against the bar. drinking bitter, wishing that my father could see me now. He could not fail to see that I was a boy no longer, nor fail to be angry at the angle of my fag and my hat and the threat of the clutched tankard. I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet-brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners.

'Same again, miss.' She was middle-aged. 'One for you, miss?'

'Not during hours, ta all the same.'

'You're welcome.'

Was that an invitation to drink with her afterwards, to wait at the back door until she glided out, and then to walk through the night, along the promenade and sands, on to a soft dune where couples lay loving under their coats and looking at the Mumbles Lighthouse?

Of course, Dylan would have been drinking Real Ale in The Three Lamps (no longer exists), but it would not have been called that at the time, see above. The term "Real Ale" and its originator, CAMRA, are now widely enough known to be included in the guardian of our language, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (www.oed.com). Note that, it is generally stated that Dylan Thomas died in New York, from drink, on the 9th of November, 1953, indeed his doctor diagnosed Delirium Tremens after a drinking session in which Dylan boasted that he had had ". 18 straight whiskies: I think it's a record". In fact, in a book entitled Dylan Remembered 1935-1953, Volume 2, by David Thomas and Dr Simon Barnes (Seren (www.seren-books.com), 2004, ISBN 1854113631), a strong case is put forward for the fact that he actually had pneumonia and that the treatment given for Delirium Tremens was not at all good for pneumonia and actually killed him:- three doses of morphine, administered in the Chelsea Hotel (www.hotelchelsea.com). Other guests of the most Bohemian of hotels have included: Bob Dylan (1941-) (who is said to get his surname from Dylan Thomas) and tells you in his 1975 song, Sara, that in the hotel he wrote "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you [Sara, his one-time wife]" ; Leonard Cohen, who engaged in hanky panky in the hotel with Janice Joplin, as detailed in his 1974 classic Chelsea Hotel No. 2; and Sex Pistol, Sid Vicious (1957-79), who, in 1978, murdered his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in the hotel. The biography also claims that Dylan only had eight whiskies, his boast of eighteen clearly not helping with the diagnosis! In the Speciality/Specialty/Craft Beer world, there is a Belgian Beer called Delirium Tremens, which has lots of pink elephants on its glass and opaque bottle. It is brewed by Huyghe (www.delirium.be), in Melle, who are also involved in the Delirium Café (www.deliriumcafe.be), in the Belgian Capital, Brussels, this bar having over 2,000 beers and pink elephants hanging from the ceiling. The Delirium Café is covered in the White Beer Travels guide to Brussels, which can be obtained from the Downloads page of the site.

Note that the Dylan Thomas book, mentioned above, and the Dylan Thomas Biography, also mentioned above, can be purchased from www.amazon.com, or from www.amazon.co.uk. An excellent feature of the .com site is that once one finds the details of a book that you are interested in, that one can click on "Look inside this book" and read sample pages from it. I used this feature to ascertain that the required Old Garbo story was in this particular book of short stories. Note that Old Garbo is a character in another pub that the young Dylan Thomas went in. Old Garbo collects money for a dead child, which she is then seen to be spending generously on drink. The people who contributed to the collection then discover that no child has died.

In 1976, Michael produced an excellent, now out-of-print book, entitled The English Pub. His comments above about being surprised that he found himself liking a beer from a major brewer, and praising the things that Britain does well, such as Farmhouse Cheese and Real Ale, reminded of an expression that he uses in this book, which has to be introduced by way of mentioning a particularly silly, commonly used expression: "Best thing since Sliced Bread". This is frequently churned out when some new thing comes along, and is meant to imply that the item in question is good, when, it should actually mean it is not very good, since Sliced Bread is almost always very poor quality pap. Of course, Michael knows this, so his twist on the expression that he uses in this book, when referring to mass market beers is as follows: "'National Brands' are the worst thing since sliced bread." At the time that he wrote this book, Michael was nothing like as well know in the beer world that he is today; the main man in the UK then was Richard Boston, who Michael describes in the acknowledgements page of the book as: "The best known of England's ale-fanciers". I still remember, with great affection, Richards' marvellous articles in The Guardian and his own 1976 classic book, Beer and Skittles.

John White (1945-), .

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