A History
Arguably one of the most prestigious beer competitions in the world, the Campaign for Real Ale’s Champion Beer of Britain (CBOB) title has the potential to bring a struggling brewery back from the brink, or catapult a little known producer to dizzy new heights.
A food and drink writer, photographer, competition judge & CAMRA member. Laura’s blogs at Extreme Housewifery and is the author of '50 years of CAMRA’. She runs a creative agency for SME’s called Thirst Media.
Originally known as the Beer of the Year competition, it was first held at the second Great British Beer Festival (GBBF). This took place at the Alexandra Palace in London in the summer of 1978. The process has altered slightly over the years, but essentially CAMRA members nominate beers for inclusion in regional heats. Those beers compete head to head in a range of style categories. The winners, and the winners of the winter styles categories judged at GBBF Winter, go head to head at a blind judging at the GBBF and the style category victors as well as an overall winner is announced on Trade Day.
At the inaugural competition two supreme champions were named – Thwaites Best Mild and Fullers ESB. Both beers have enjoyed long, illustrious careers and are still supped by discerning drinkers up and down the country. They’re not the only Champion beers that have enjoyed a surprising degree of longevity. Nottingham’s Castle Rock brewery won with Harvest Pale in 2010 and a recent survey by the city’s CAMRA branch showed that it is still the most widely sold beer in Nottingham.
Fullers already had a long association with CAMRA. Their first ever national beer festival in the Covent Garden’s old flower market in 1975 was only able to go ahead because of Fuller’s intervention. The festival had had to move venue at the last minute, so the organisers hadn’t had the opportunity to apply for an event licence. The Fullers’ directors stepped in to help and were in court applying to hold the licence on the Campaign’s behalf at 10.30am when the festival was due to open at midday!
In the first seven years of the competition, Fullers won the top prize a total of four times. They enjoyed three wins with ESB and one with London Pride in 1979. This is particularly remarkable, because before CAMRA had risen to prominence and brought an eager audience back to cask conditioned ale, Fullers had drawn up a plan to convert into a keg brewery and leave cask ale behind. The brewery was at rock bottom and had to invest or die.
They had already gone some way down the road by the time CAMRA had helped cask beer to recover some of its importance, investing in conical fermenters for the enclosed fermentation of beers for kegging.
The open square fermenters they reserved for cask ale were over 100 years old. Because of their age they kept springing leaks, so the brewers occasionally used the conical fermenters to keep things moving while the open squares were being fixed, so they were unique in releasing beers from the conicals into cask occasionally. The Fullers pub landlords started asking why some batches of beer were so good compared to others and eventually Head Brewer Reg Drury realised that the conicals were producing better beers than the open squares.
Conventional wisdom said that open fermentation was the best method for ales that were destined for cask conditioning. By pure luck Reg had discovered that enclosed fermentation actually produced beer of a superior quality and consistency. He made the decision to make the change permanent and it was then that Fullers began to win awards for their beer. The open squares were kept initially for keg beers and were finally retired in 1984.
Renowned brewing director John Keeling was at Fullers for 37 years from 1981. He remembers when they won CBOB in 1989 with Chiswick Bitter, its sales doubled overnight – providing an exciting challenge to everyone within the organisation to cope with the additional demand. This win in particular provided a tangible value to the business – people wanted to stock Fullers in their pubs because of the reputational boost that came from winning CBOB. Their expansion had previously been limited because distribution was a problem for them, but winning CBOB, alongside the Guest Ale provision, laid out in the Beer Orders meant a lot of people wanted to serve Chiswick Bitter and London Pride. This notably included formidable Big Six breweries Whitbread and Bass, who had a huge nationwide network of pubs.
Fullers had been starting to brew lager, but Bass offered them Carling as a swap for London Pride. They agreed 20k barrels of London Pride would be sold in Bass pubs for 20k of Carling in Fullers. In the first year Fullers were actually able to sell only about 12k barrels of Carling to Bass’ 25k of Pride! John recalls talking to a Bass pub landlord in the nineties who preferred selling London Pride to Bass as it settled out better and was easier to control – he thought it was a really good idea that Bass had started brewing it! John was amused that they thought it was a Bass beer.
Fullers were not the only brewery who were brought back from the brink of real disaster thanks to CAMRA’s influence on the cask ale market and the uplift enjoyed by the winner of Champion Beer of Britain. Batemans of Wainfleet in Lincolnshire were also feeling the pressure from the decline in the popularity of cask ale in the late 1960s as the Big Six converted to keg beer. Batemans couldn’t afford to put in a keg line to keep up with the market, although they were able to build a makeshift keg washer and filler to try and stay ahead of the trend. However, the future did not look good for the brewery.
In March 1985 George Bateman’s sister and brother announced that they wanted to sell their shares. Prospective buyers queued up at the doors so the staff, tenants and press had to be told about what was happening.
“I still can’t believe the support that followed from so many well-wishers. One day, a local farmer knocked on my door and said he had £3,000 to invest if it would help. On another occasion, two daughters of one of our tenants asked if they could put a bottle on the bar to collect money for the Brewery. All the support we were shown by employees, tenants and well-wishers really did help us to stay strong.”
George G Bateman
CAMRA was an important component of these well-wishers. They had been backing the brewery for a long time – the first time that Bateman’s beer was served outside of Lincolnshire was in 1976 thanks to CAMRA. One of their investment pubs – the Salisbury Arms in Cambridge – put it on the bar on their opening day.
George needed to raise the funds to make an outright purchase from his family. He received a standing ovation at the 1986 CAMRA AGM in Southampton for his impassioned speech about his quest to find the funds to preserve his family business. He thanked CAMRA members for their ‘overwhelming’ support and pledged to do whatever he could to support his loyal workforce.
In August of 1986, their fortunes changed dramatically. At the Metropole in Brighton, their premium bitter, Triple XB, was named the Champion Beer of Britain – then still the CAMRA Beer of the Year. This increased demand for their beers and gave them more media exposure. They were able to raise enough money to buy out George’s brother and sister. A statement was issued on 3 February 1987 that the ‘long-standing differences between the shareholders’ had been resolved. However, the company’s future was still not quite secured. They had made significant borrowings to buy their independence which led to some pubs being sold off. George’s son Stuart moved into developing the free trade wholesale side of his business, while his daughter Jaclyn took care of expanding their beer distribution outside of Lincolnshire to meet the demand that winning CBOB had created. George Bateman always referred to CAMRA as the brewery’s ‘knight in shining armour’. The brewery Chairman, sadly passed away on 25 June 2007 and the reins passed to his children Jaclyn and Stuart.
The most successful single beer when it comes to the Champion Beer of Britain is Timothy Taylor’s Landlord. In fact the beer has won more awards than any other across all of the major competitions. In total, Landlord has won CBOB four times – in 1982, 1983, 1994 and 1999.
Head Brewer Andy Leman remembers being taken aback to be interviewed by CNN in the USA amongst all the commotion of the 1999 win. He spent the evening with the Managing Director Charles Dent and the Sales Team in a swanky London restaurant where more than a few bottles of Veuve Clicquot Champagne were consumed. The rather parsimonious Finance Director at the time was not too amused at the subsequent expenses claim!
Tim Dewey, the current Chief Executive at Timothy Taylor has fond memories of the brewery winning CBOB with a different beer, Boltmaker, in 2014. He had been offered the job of Chief Executive to start in the autumn and had just returned from holiday when his predecessor Charles Dent called. Charles told him he was at GBBF but was somewhat disappointed that Landlord hadn’t made it through to the final judging – he didn’t mention Boltmaker at all. A few hours later and Tim received a further extremely excited call from him to say that best bitter Boltmaker had won. It had always been a favourite with the brewers but had never enjoyed the same notoriety as the other beers in the range. So much so, before the win, the brewery had considered discontinuing it.
The CBOB win created a huge demand for Boltmaker that they were happily able to service – and it made Tim’s first year as Chief Executive very easy! It secured Boltmaker’s future too – in the year before the pandemic they sold significantly more Boltmaker than they had even in the year following the win – as more people tried it, it gained more and more fans. “A great beer re-born thanks to CAMRA,” Tim says.
Many of the past Champion Beer of Britain winners report a significant uplift in sales following their win which was sufficiently long lived to justify an expansion of the brewery.
Ian Bradley of Coniston Brewery has won CBOB twice, first with Bluebird Bitter in 1998 and then with No. 9 Barley Wine in 2012. Ian says that winning the awards are jointly the highlights of his career. He recalls that the first win was absolutely overwhelming. Ian went to GBBF at Olympia with his father, the owner of the Black Bull in Coniston, and they had no idea they were in with a chance of winning the important accolade. The brewery had only been in existence for three years. “The brewery was transformed from that day,” Ian says. “We had flat out production for the next ten years which included some brewery expansion, our beers are now exported all around the world.”
The story is the same with Oakham Ales, who won in 2001 with Jeffrey Hudson Bitter (JHB). They were already a reasonably well known brewery when they won, but they credit their CBOB win with being the catalyst for getting the nerve to go ahead with building a bigger brewery. As well as immediately having to increase from brewing three times a week to six, the team saw a new widening of demand for JHB and the rest of the Oakham range in areas away from their ‘East Midlands heartland.
Winning CBOB can potentially create a significant missed opportunity if breweries cannot scale up quickly enough to benefit from the increase in demand. A motion was passed at the 2000 CAMRA AGM that prevented breweries from using the award to promote contract-brewed versions of their award-winning beers, in response to smaller winners like Mordue and Coniston having done just that. So, when Kelham Island’s Pale Rider won in 2004 to keep within CAMRA rules, they chose to give the beer they had brewed under contract the hybrid name of Pale Island to prevent any confusion. This made it clear that it was their recipe but not brewed at their brewery.
Another beer that underwent a facelift and name change upon winning CBOB was Hobsons Brewery in 2007. Unlike JHB, their recipe hasn’t changed in all those years. However, ‘Hobsons Mild’ was re-branded as ‘Champion Mild’ following its win and they have brewed it every two weeks since, as demand as never tailed off. In fact, the brewery had expanded around 9 months before winning the award, so Hobsons founder Nick Davis says the win couldn’t have been better timed to help them brew their new brewing capacity.
Winning the award led to new opportunities and recognition of mild as a traditional beer style. The Slow Food movement chose Hobsons as the brewery to represent the production of Mild at bi-annual festival Terra Madre. Nick gave a talk to the international community of Slow Food members, focusing on preserving the traditions of brewing a low strength dark beer that was consumed by the working man predominantly for purposes of hydration. Of course with a low ABV comes a lower price point, as alcoholic drinks in the UK have always been taxed according to alcoholic strength – another factor which would historically make mild beers an attractive choice to manual workers.
Hobson’s Champion Mild is not the only mild that has won the supreme champion title. In 2011 the accolade went to Mighty Oak’s Oscar Wilde, a beer that had been designed by brewer John Boyce in 1999. After researching the style he realised there were no hard and fast rules but there was a tendency to use crystal and black malt which he combined with British Challenger hops. The beer won a prize at its very first outing, at the now defunct Ongar Beer Festival. This was practically the first firkin of Oscar Wilde they had sold.
John says the name was a spoof on cockney rhyming slang and he always had aspirations of being able to drop the Wilde altogether – “I’m having a pint of Oscar with my Ruby tonight!”
When they won John remembers the whole team getting up on stage dressed in purple waistcoats with the beer’s name written on them. He regrets being dragged off to the press office when all he wanted to do was drink Oscar Wilde with the team at the bar, although in reality he would have had his work cut out to avoid the CAMRA press team! Sales went up 25% across all products for Hobsons after this – as a mild the Oscar Wilde was never going to be the biggest seller in terms of volume, but it did create a sales uplift across the product range which turned out to be the catalyst for permanent growth within the company.
John Boyce was not the only winner to immediately be held captive by the CAMRA press team following their victory. Nottingham’s Castle Rock brewery won CBOB in 2010 with Harvest Pale. It had been introduced by Castle Rock under the name Trammy Dodger, originally to celebrate the launch of Nottingham’s new tram network in 2003. The golden, hoppy beer was intended as a one-off brew, but it proved so popular that they changed the name and kept on brewing it. The brewery already had to ration it, even in their own pubs, when it won Champion Beer of Britain.
Happily, this meant they were also already in the process of expanding the brewery. Bob Jones and Nik Antona took brewery owner Chris Holmes to the GBBF press office to await the press conference and he used the time to phone the main contractors working on the brewery. He told them they were opening the brewery on Monday, no matter what it took. Chris estimates that winning CBOB generated an uplift of some 30,000 barrels at the time.
Sadly, not everyone experiences a great rise in sales thanks to winning Champion Beer of Britain. Colin Bocking of Crouch Vale Brewery won with Brewer’s Gold in both 2005 and 2006. He recognises that the accolades, “Did provide us with some useful publicity and profile raising but not as much as we might have hoped – I think, even all those years ago, there were so many awards and competitions that the CBOB competition did not attract the acclaim we might have hoped for.” However, it’s fair to say that Colin’s view is very much the minority one and most winners have truly seen their business taken to the next level as the result of being named CAMRA’s Champion Beer of Britain.
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