I was recently engaged in a discussion in some blog comments that underlined how much things had changed in the beer world over the past thirty years, and how younger people understandably didn’t really appreciate what life was like back then when I started my legal drinking career.
So here are a few points of the drinking and pubgoing experience of the late 1970s that are very different from today:
- Most pubs here in the North-West just served standard mild and bitter. Apart from the odd sighting of Pedigree or Draught Bass, there was nothing that could be called a premium beer
- Beer was often sold from unmarked handumps
- Electric beer dispense was commonplace, typically using diaphragm meters, which were generally unmarked too
- Free houses were virtually unknown and there were no guest beers. It was just the regular products of the owning brewery
- Across the board, there was a lot of choice, with substantial tied estates belonging to Border, Higsons, Burtonwood, Oldham Brewery, Boddingtons, Matthew Brown, Mitchells and Yates & Jackson that have largely vanished from the face of the earth now
- But in many local areas there was a marked dearth of choice – the local Robinson’s monopoly in Hazel Grove being a case in point. Many areas had a similar dominance of Greenalls pubs
- It was considered a point worthy of note that in Macclesfield you could get beer from eight different breweries (Ansells, Bass, Boddingtons, Robinsons, Marstons, Greenalls, Tetleys and Wilsons)
- Central Manchester was, surprisingly to the outside observer, virtually devoid of pubs tied to the local independent breweries – it didn’t have a single Holts pub
- Although there was a compulsory afternoon closure (around here, generally 3-5.30), most pubs stuck fairly closely to the standard permitted hours. Weekday lunchtime closure was very rare
- Closing time was 10.30 pm Monday-Thursday, with 11 pm closing only on Friday and Saturday
- Pubs were a lot busier with drinkers, especially at lunchtimes and earlier in the week
- There was a lot more lunchtime drinking by office workers
- Middle-aged couples would just “go out for a drink” in the evening in a way they don’t tend to now
- There was much less food served in pubs, especially in the evenings. Many of today's high-profile country dining pubs did not serve evening meals at all
- On the other hand, food was much more varied and there was more of a sense of experimentation with styles and formats. It had not yet settled into today’s standardised “pub menu”. For example, a number of pubs had extensive lunchtime buffets – something you never see nowadays
- A lot of the bottom-end pubs were extremely scruffy in a way that is very rare now
- There was also a much higher proportion of badly kept or undrinkable cask beer
- There was a clear hierarchy amongst country pubs of “No coaches”, “Coaches by appointment only” and “Coaches welcome”. Does anyone (apart from CAMRA) actually organise coach trips to pubs any more?