Beer and pub myths

This post by Pete Brown and my response to it led me to think about the pervasive but often largely groundless myths that have grown up about pubs and beer over the years. So here’s a few, offered without comment (although some of these are themes that I have addressed here in the past):

• Pubs used to be male-only bastions where you would scarcely ever see women
  
• Before the breathalyser, a substantial proportion of male drivers would regularly drive home drunk
  
• Before the smoking ban, there were virtually no non-smoking areas in pubs
  
• In the early Seventies, there was very little cask beer available in the UK
  
• CAMRA brought about a dramatic increase in real ale sales
  
• In the past fifteen or twenty years there has been a revolution in the quality and availability of food in pubs
  
• “24-hour drinking” is now widespread in Britain
  
• Mainstream beers in the 1970s were much weaker than they are now

Another one, which has been disproved now, but was surprisingly prevalent maybe fifteen years ago, is that alcohol consumption had considerably declined and the British were a much more sober people than they used to be.

Are there any other misguided ideas knocking around?