Who let the dogs out ?

 "Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war" #Shakespeare400

Brewdog have been busily expanding into bars recently and Norwich is their latest location. It just so happened I had a day free and could pop on the train up to Norwich and visit on opening day.

I was surprised initially when I worked out where the location of the new Brewdog venue is, its slap bang in the middle of what Id call "party night out Norwich", anyone who was walked back to the train station along Prince of Wales drive knows its full of nightclubs and lager drinkers, and Brewdog are kind of at the top end of that area opposite a Revolution cocktail/vodka/rum bar, this is not the real "City of Ale[1]" territory part of the city for sure.

And yet actually it kind of works where they are, just round the corner as Ill come on to later is the Norwich Tap House craft bar,and it feels right where Brewdog are as the punk child pushing in.

Norwich once its said had a church for every week, and a pub for every day of the year, and very much in that vein  Brewdog in Norwich are offering a unique, so they say, daily-changing tap selection,which will  amount to a 365 beers offering.

It was raining somewhat outside and the guy in the Brewdog caravan looked somewhat underused.

I got there after theyd been open for an hour, but the place was still buzzing and full with people, some on their lunch hour from nearby offices just popping in, others like me Im sure just making the effort to turn up.

Based on the 1st beer of the day recommendation, I went for the Jet Black Heart stout, albeit the bar staffs best attempts to get me to sample a few beers first and then just wandered round the bar which extends quite a way back from the main bar area into a seating/dining area as the bar also serves food (mostly grilled/deep fried), and also includes a Brewdog shop which includes merchandise, books and a selection of not just Brewdog bottled ales to take away.

 The daily draft promises 25 beers, albeit the menu only showed 24 :) but I was impressed by the Jet Black Heart stout, even though generally not a fan of keg beer infused with too much CO2 served at ice cold temperatures, this was actually really nice as a beer on its own merits, if all craft beer was as good as this I think CAMRA would have a much easier time accepting it.

Swiftly dispatching the stout I moved onto the Hop Fiction,the Jet Black Heart Stout as first daily recommended beer had already run out after less than a few hours which shows how popular it was.Though I first had to "fact check" a rumour some people had been putting around that Brewdog would be serving cask ale, they werent & wont be, but then again the rumour might have been started as an April Fool, so fool me but it was worth making sure.

But on both occasions at the bar, the staff were exemplary, prompt, friendly, and wanting to serve you, and it wasnt just me I noted multiple times the staff were chatting and helping customers with anything and everything, it actually felt like we were being spoiled.

Id only been to another Brewdog before in Leeds where the service was pretty average, as was the beer, this was much more like the Brewdog bars Id heard and read about and Id certainly recommend any visit to Norwich, even during City of Ale, its worth paying a visit.

So I reluctantly moved on to the next pub as Norwich has a selection of pubs and it was about investingating the whole rather than just the singular. But the next bar less than a few hundred metres walk away was the Norwich Tap House, which till now would probably have claimed to be one of Norwich's premier craft bar venue, at least on price matching London if nothing else.

It was empty...

I mean properly empty,I was the only person in the whole bar, having just come from a bar where I was struggling to find places to sit and having to stand & with lots of bar staff,to venture into a bar where there was no one around bar the lone bar staff & there seemed to have been no-one around nearly all lunchtime...suddenly the location of where Brewdog had placed themselves made sense. Basically anyone who previously had gone to the Norwich Tap House had found their new bar to go to at Brewdog.

Suddenly from seemingly being the bar who could charge £7.80 for a pint,and get away with it, now there was serious competion and they were losing.

I moved on from not bad but unmistakenly craft keg beers to the next pub in line, which just happened to be the St Andrews Brew house, for the first proper real ale cask beer of the day. Strangely I always used to remember this venue as the Irish Guinness bar that you ventured in only between sessions of the the Norwich CAMRA beer festival as it was nearest and you could watch the queue form. Now a micro brewery pub though it brews its own beer on site,but sadly neither of the beers I had were particularly in great condition.

So again on the move and hoped for better at the Norwich CAMRA branch pub of the year the Fat Cat Brewery Tap, which really is (if I ever get to publish my clowder of Fat Cats post) one of those pubs you have to make a special visit to in Norwich, its a good 20-25mins walk out of your way to get to, and it was raining.

Maybe thats why I arrived in a less than agreeable mood, having had 2 visits to bars where I wished Id just stayed at Brewdog, surely CAMRA branch pub of the year would sort me out. Scanning the beer list...the only beer that caught my eye Mocha Moggy by Fat Cat, one of my favourite alltime beers.

Whether I got served the wrong beer (as since suggested by the brewer) I dont know, but it wasnt Mocha Moggy as far as I know it to be, it was just a plain old boring stout, and again I was left wondering why Id bothered to leave Brewdog, so I left less then impressed.

Onwards again I picked a route back to the city centre via Grain Brewery's the Cottage, again another pub like the St Andrews brewery that opened in 2015 in its current form

They had a roaring fire which was keeping things nice, warm and drying off. I didnt realise they did food as well, beyond the famous Grain brewery sausage and onion pie, but apparently its a foody venue as much as pub which may explain that lack of patrons, to be fair it felt alot less "unbusy" than the Norwich tap house did. And the beer was great and I even got to try one of the Boudicca Brewery beers, which Id been trying to track down all day.

An interesting point to make at this stage as regular followers know I use an app called Untappd to tick beer I drink,and one of its features is you can ask it to show you beer ticks from other users of the same app within various nearby distances. Since arriving in Norwich on this particular day, Id struggled to see anything other than keg beer being ticked in via this, no Woodfordes, no sneaky Adnams, not even a Doom Bar, nothing really cask related or even standard lager/guinness/cider, which isnt something even in London Ive seen before.

But after a couple of pints I finally made my way to the final pub of the day, the Plasterers Arms, where they were promising a couple of special double IPAs in a clear "we also do Craft Beer,its not just Brewdog" promotion...unfortunately only from 6pm and I arrived at 5:45pm.

Why they chose 6pm I dont know,because there was no fanfare at 6pm that these beers suddenly came on, and no-one other than myself seemed particularly interested in them being on or was even waiting for them. So I filled the gap with a reasonable bitter, and come 6pm went on the barmans recommendation to pick the not Cloudwater DIPA v3 (and since discovering I had a backup solution for Cloudwate DIPA v3) I went with his choice, unfortunately Ive assumed I got whatever had been sitting in the pipes since the beer was pulled through and setup,  and so it was slightly less than proper temperature served if Im being generous.

So I drank it as quick as an 8% beer will let you and went for my backup solution for the Cloudwater DIPA v3, which was back at Brewdog.

Yep after at least 6hours of trawling round some of Norwich's "best" pubs I ended up back at the one bar Id started with, the one bar had anyone said to me before the day started Id be back there Id have laughed at, and yet the staff were still being excellent and friendly and even apologising when they didnt ask for the right amount of money for your beer and had to come back and ask for some more, and out of all the pubs/bars I visited that day it was by far the best overall experience for beer quality and customer experience, even if was near £5 a pint. I dont mind paying £5 a pint if the customer is being treated like they are awesome, I mind paying £4 a pint and being treated like Im basically nothing.

Which led me to this conclusion not necessarily just based on this visit, but on numerous visits Ive made over the years,there are alot of pubs in Norwich competing for the same customers,lots of them are offering the "craft beer" experience but have had till now relatively little serious competion but...

There are new guys in town.
Their name is Brewdog.

Up the game or lose out.

[1] a title Sheffield now clearly claim

CAMRA AGM & Member's Weekend part 1

Fraught - causing or affected by anxiety or stress.

That was how I felt best described the way we felt recovering over a quick couple of pints in between sessions after a breathless  start to the CAMRA AGM/Members' weekend in Liverpool held this past weekend.

Others have described the mood in the conference room on Saturday as "divided", Tim Martin chairman of Wetherspoons described it jokingly as a "bear pit", and Im sure there were plenty more adjectives flying round social media that afternoon that may have given some flavour of what was happening.

This was the 4th conference Ive attended, though that still makes me a relative newcomer to these things, and I attend them on the basis its a weekend city break usually in a different beery part of the UK. Theres a members bar, there are organised trips (some good/some not so good) and a good list of local great real ale pubs to visit, plus you get to see a side of CAMRA that maybe doesnt always get covered in full in WhatsBrewing. This is where the heart and soul of CAMRA the volunteer organisation is on show, where the detail of the campaign is dissected and the passion of members for the campaign is demonstrably on show.

"Proposal to adjourn defeated. Special Resolution 1 now being discussed. #agm2016"

Anyone reading just that tweet from the official CAMRA AGM account might be forgiven for not appreciating the significance of what had just happened, or was happening, it looks a fairly procedural piece of AGM business at a glance, though admittedly it will take me far more than 140 characters to explain it properly (and I dont apologise for that, as the detail is important).

Even though its the first time Ive witnessed such a proposal being made, the sharp intakes of breath and reaction among members in the hall to it, suggests its not something thats occurred that often in the past either.

What in effect was happening was a proposal was being put, which required a near instant vote, to immediately adjourn the whole AGM & conference, including suspending all the voting for special resolutions, conference motions and elections for the national executive and conference policies committee.

Had the proposal succeeded, everyone would pretty much have then had a free weekend to explore Liverpool instead, Id describe its impact at least, as being akin to Her Majestys Opposition asking for a motion of no confidence in the government to be passed.

It was still fairly early in the morning and I hadnt had enough coffee to wake me up fully, so it wasnt initially clear to me why this proposal was being pursued as the fallout from it would be massive, "CAMRA members vote to stop own conference" seemed a remarkable thing to be even considering, what had caused this ?.

When Id read through the conference motions I hadnt seen anything Id felt would be controversial or likely to lead to extended debate,so it wasnt that, and it wasnt necessarily about the Revitalisation project  either (though there later appeared to be some fundamentel issues with this) as it wasnt a topic down to be debated. What I, and I suspect the 170,000+ other CAMRA members, had missed completely were the Special Resolutions.

Special Resolutions

"Any motion seeking to amend the Memorandum and Articles of Association is a Special Resolution.  A Special Resolution must give the precise wording of amendments, additions or deletions of or to specified Articles or Sections.  Once submitted, it will not be amended or corrected by Conference Procedures Committee for any reason".

Normally special resolutions are mainly house keeping in nature. Either corrections where mistakes have been spotted, updates to reflect the ever changing legal minefield organisations operate in, or changes to CAMRAs policies as the world changes over time.

Special resolutions generally refer to the specific articles, they arent as self explanatory as conference motions, so you not only have to go and try and read those specific documents to understand what the resolution refers to, but also what it changes, and the implication of those changes.

Additionally this year proxy voting online for special resolutions had been introduced, in an attempt to make CAMRA seem more upto date. Now proxy voting has always been allowed by post, though few have ever taken the option, and by allowing online voting this year, more than 5000 votes were cast, which seems on the face of it a good thing more votes, more members taking part.

However with only 1400 registered AGM/Members weekend attending, and certainly less than that in actual attendance, it was clear regardless of the way the votes in the hall went, the proxy votes would always outnumber those votes, so the resolutions were already fundamentally passed regardless. Although it also wasnt clearly understood whether members could be prevented from voting online and in the subsequent ballot at the AGM/Member's weekend, or that the online voting system was secure enough.

Special Resolution 3 (Revisions concerning additional methods of voting at Conference)

Article 43 - This change would pave the way for the potential use of voting methods at Conferences (as opposed to AGMs) that are additional to the traditional show of hands on motions. For example, subject to NE approval, “remote” online voting could be introduced for Conference motions.

Those issues aside the bigger problem though was the special resolutions had been poorly framed and worded and it was clear even the Chairman Colin Valentine wasnt aware how badly framed the resolutions had been made, it hadnt been intended to extend online voting for conference motions as was in Special Resolution 3 as these are the more open to debate motions, and the discussions and points made during the members weekend, do swing votes.

Conference motions (unlike special resolutions) can be and often are amended to clear up ambiguities or make better motions, motions can also be remitted where they are sent to the national executive for review. If online voting was extended to conference motions none of those options would really be open to use anymore, and in anycase the online votes would carry the result before the debate had even happened.

But as a special resolution once submitted, can not be amended, so we were stuck with the words and all that it entailed, and it appeared stuck with the results before anyone had even spoken for or against them, which is what had led to the adjournment proposal as the only way for the special resolutions to be sent back and given a proper review to fix them

Of course none of this discussion, and alot of it was very passionately,strongly & even angrily delivered, it was certainly a chastening experience for the Chairman and national executive as they largely had to sit there and take it, would have been heard by any of the members who had already voted online,they might even not be aware these issues existed, they might not care, nobody knows.

Unfortunately I think the ensuing mess of Special Resolutions only became apparent as each one was debated in turn and increasingly the numbers voting against each special resolution increased, but by which time the adjournment proposal had already been defeated, albeit by no more than a 100-120ish votes and was the only motion in the entire weekend which required tellers to count votes, which shows it was alot closer than it was merely defeated.

One might have thought that was enough drama for the whole conference, but there was more to come which Ill cover in seperate post.