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Cream Turns Sour for Manchester
One of the great things about returning home to Blackpool in the 70's was visiting The Dunes – not the sandy hillocks, but a great pub, for not only did it have a full size snooker table, a snug and stand up drinking lobby, but it also sold one of the greatest of beers – the straw-coloured and immensely bitter, Boddingtons. What great drinking days those were – in Reading there was The Dove, selling the sublime Brakspear's Bitter and back in the North West, there was Boddies, the Cream of Manchester. It was the sort of beer that, as you took your first sip, you were already savouring the pleasure of buying the next pint. It captured both the taste buds and the drinking public's hearts. Boddingtons had already fought off challenges to their independence led by their redoubtable Chairmen, Geoffrey and then Ewart Boddington and now themselves embarked upon a period of expansion, through acquisition of regional brewers such as Oldham and Higsons. They became a regional powerhouse of brewing and it was the beer every pub needed on the bar to demonstrate its credentials for selling bitter.
But somehow the dream then began to go bad. Following the retirement of Ewart Boddington, the company turned its back on 150 years of independence and sold the brewery to, of all people, Whitbread. Whitbread had once had a whole string of regional breweries turning out good lo- cal beers, but one by one these were closed and so they found themselves without a premier cask ale brand. And there was no point in developing one when they could go out and buy one. Give someone like Whitbread a new toy and they will surely break it. And true to form, what had been essentially a cask conditioned beer was diluted by using it as a brand name to push packaged beer, a million miles away from the straw coloured cask bitter some of us cut our drinking teeth on. Eventually, Whitbread got bored with brewing and sold out to Interbrew, who had a catchy little tag line – “the world's local brewer”. Now called InBev, following a merger with a huge Brazilian outfit, the world's local brewer has decided it does not need the tag line and nor does it need a local brewery in Manchester. So Boddingtons is to be closed and the cask beer may be brewed under license by another Manchester brewery.
Needless to say, CAMRA is fighting tooth and nail to prevent the closure and in this, is being joined by the brewery's workers, local unions and the city council. The battle has been taken to InBev's home in Belgium, and you can help the fight too by signing the on-line petition at
John Cryne
Reproduced from the Full Pint, Issue 28.
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