No: it is NOT time to rehabilitate Watney’s Red

The beer writers Boak and Bailey have produced, as usual, a professional and informative blog on Watneys Red a keg beer which fuelled the early activity of the Campaign For Real Ale (I joined in 1975 and havent left yet) who called Watneys, ‘Grotny’s. That was perhaps too kind.

Anyway before anything else read the post:

Watney’s Red Barrel – how bad could it have been?

It has provoked social media comments to the effect that can Watneys Red really have been that bad etc. Obviously you need to have been of a certain age to have tried it and I am.

It was indeed bad. It was cold, fizzy and tasted of very little. It was not uniquely bad because after all Twitbread’s Wankard (for example) was also in the field as were various Trumans beers that were so bad I cant now recall what exactly they were called.

The problem is, and the late Richard Boston made this point very well in the Guardian in the 1970s, it was not a case of, avoid Watneys Red by popping around the corner for a good pint of cask.

This was the first era of Big Beer. In some areas your choice was Watneys Red or Watneys Red. In many more it was this national keg brand or that national keg brand.

In the north London Borough of Haringey in the mid-1970s (where I still live) the number of pubs where you could get any kind of cask beer as well as national keg was less than six. That is: one Courage (Muswell Hill) one Whitbread (Highgate) one Charrington (Wood Green) one Bass (Crouch End) one Ind Coope (Tottenham)

That was why CAMRA got active and grew. Of course far from all cask was great but if you’d tried national keg brands and actually liked beer it was at least a start to something better.

Then of course there was the Watney’s Party Seven…