The making of the Hardknott film

I have a beard. Some people think I'm quite weird¹. I drink beer, quite a lot of it, but despite all of that I also like to remain fit and healthy. My beard is kept short, I avoid wearing sandals unless it's very hot and I'm on holiday, and hope to remain in good shape by occasionally partaking in a little light exercise other than the simple act of raising around 700g with my right hand.

In one of our local pubs there are many regulars who remain fit and healthy, despite my suspicion that they drink more than the government recommendation. I believe they remain healthy due to an interest in the great outdoors; climbing, walking, caving, that sort of weird nonsense. Their irritating youthfulness may also help. Some of them may have weird beards and occasionally wear sandals, but we'll gloss over that point. CAMRA membership status is unknown, I'd actually hope some of them are members, however, they rarely use the term Real Ale and prefer to talk about cask beer instead.

It turns out that they all like Hardknott beer, which is handy because despite the pub being a managed house and having an owner who doesn't give the manager quite enough free-reign as we'd like, we have negotiated hard and offered volume discount and now have our beer on-sale reasonably regularly. The pub does not sell craft keg and I suspect it is likely to be a long time until they do, if ever.

I like the pub a lot. It ranks as one of my top 10 in the area and we spend far more time in it drinking than we should.

Planning the film

With the above as background, when we were offered a rare opportunity for a very low cost but high quality promotional film we had to think of an idea for a "script". Mark, from PiciFilms, who was to be camera man, director and editor, came to see me at the brewery to try and work up ideas for the film. We started talking about target demographics and the local beer market, tourism, extreme sports, younger drinkers and the image of Ale.

There are two main styles of attraction in The Lake Dirstict. One is the very traditional picture postcard scenery, fudge, gingerbread, sticky toffee pudding, local traditional ale, Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, lake steamer rides and gentle walks on the fells. This one is very strong and successful and I have far more affection for it than much of my writing would betray.

There is another attraction style that is much less popular and with international travel becoming an ever smaller reason for visiting The Lakes. Perhaps they are niche activities and not at all popular with the mainstream, but still, I have an affinity with people who enjoy extreme sports, partly perhaps because the very best times in my life have been when I have been high in mountains, deep in a cave, or perhaps momentarily stuck in a crevasse in an Alpine glacier, sliding down a slippery icy slope on a couple of planks or, as in the film, just larking about on a sunny day on a lump of Borrowdale volcanic rock scaring myself silly.

My beery activities have taken me further away from such a lifestyle than I am happy about. However, I know a great many people who engage in such outdoor activities and many are very physically fit beer drinkers. Many also search for much more exciting activities than the generally perceived safety of Cumbria. Alpine peaks, Himalayan foothills, trekking in the Andes, white water rafting down the Amazon or an assault on Kilimanjaro are much more likely to excite this contemporary looking demographic. Their tastes in beverages are much more likely to be Rioja than Dusky Old Ferrets Jock Strap. For that matter, because it seems to be cleaner and fresher, there is a proportion of this demographic who choose lager over ale. Their tastes are much more likely to be contemporary and international than traditionally British.

I am aiming at people who are more likely to holiday in Zermatt, Chamonix, Kathmandu or even explore Latin America, Africa or Asia. These people are far too broad minded to simply buy the traditional drink, one made with British hops and barley to the same old recipe that has been handed down from brewer to brewer. The demographic I'm thinking about know that making great beer needs a firm sight on new varieties of hops from further afield than Kent, and technology that involves more than just traditional open square fermenters. But what we were not pushing was keg beer. Indeed the bar transformation scene shows our concept for contemporary handpulls, in the main, and only has one keg font shown.

We wanted a film that would be funny, poke a little bit of fun at the traditional unhealthy British beer drinker image and suggest that drinking beer is not necessarily an exclusive pass-time of the unfit. I would hope that some of the demographic I describe, the progressive, outgoing, fit and healthy extreme sport activist, or even casual observer of such activities, might find the film more entertaining than if I just rambled on about hops and malt.

Moreover, I hoped that it would be amusing to a broader cross-section of people. It's supposed to be funny, light hearted and even to some extent self-deprecating. As I said when opening this piece, I AM a beardy weirdie, and proud to be so. The fact that in the original post, the one in which I launched the film, there are comments that seem to not get this is a little worrying. As I say, I'm objecting to the image that seems to be attached to micro-brewed beer and the insistence that this image has to stay is divisive.

At Hardknott we are very keen to promote food and beer matching. I'll be returning to my Saturday Kitchen objection and related activities. We wanted to not only include extreme sports but also food and beer matching in our film. Extreme cheese boarding might be included in the Olympics one day, you never know. Actually, it came as a bit of interesting revelation that despite the concentration required during filming, the Granite I drank really does go with cheese especially well.

The Music

During planning it became evident that music would be required. Mark had suggested that stock music could be used at a cost. We talked about genre and how it might tie into the demographic we imagined. Rightly or wrongly we chose 90s rock as a model.

I messed a little with a lesser well known song "Don't look back in anger" and found it to fit reasonably well. At this point I was not expecting my rusty musical skills to be adequate. However, what I did find was that involving real musicians was likely to be expensive and troublesome. After talking to several significantly better artists than myself it became apparent that pro-activeness was to be hindered by differences of artistic opinion.

I dug out my little recording studio and started messing around. That turned out to be a pleasure all on its own. Writing, be it words or music, are one of the few pleasures I can have by myself. All of the music on the film was produced by me with a little bit of help from my step-son to make some rhythmic bashing sounds.

Is it good music? I don't know, but I enjoyed making it.

The full track is here in case the reader is daft enough to want to listen to it.

The Filming

Filming on the day was both fun and tiring. Mark, Ann, Andrew and I met at the brewery just after 9am. We headed off to do the main "stunt" which involved me abseiling off a crag. I chose what I thought was a reasonable location combining good scenery with a sense of exposure. Unfortunately, in rash puritanical action by The British Mountaineering Council, this particular crag has been un-bolted. I have always viewed this crag as a training crag and good solid bolt anchors totally appropriate when teaching young people to climb. The BMC oppose any artificial anchors on Lake District crags even those, like this one, that have historically had them for decades. But, I suppose it's one of them thin end of the wedge things that allows for no grey areas.

I spent some time setting up traditional anchors. If I had some Rawl bolts I'd have used them in the still clearly visible holes. Still, having two lengths of rope and there being some hefty rock blocks, I made fairly safe anchors ensuring, to the disappointment of some, my continued existence.

Unfortunately the sun was casting shadow across the crag face. We had to wait until well after 12 noon (11 GMT) before the sun was high enough in the sky to work on the near vertical, north-facing cliff. Practising the abseil was useful, but walking back up the 25 metre more than a dozen times left me more fatigued than I'd have liked. Also, our late afternoon studio session was going to get knocked back.

Finally we got the main shot "in the can" and proceeded to the riverside location. Unfortunately I had forgotten about the inevitable tourists. It would have been fine but for the fact that the few people around the river turned out to think they owned it. A rather wet dog threatened to eat my cheese and knock my bottles of beer in the river. My gentle nudge with my lower leg was incorrectly interpreted and Andrew overheard the objectionable woman say "don't kick MY dog" - bless that dog, not its fault, it was having a nice time in the river but the owner was a little unaware that it should be kept under control. Aforementioned woman also dumped a used nappy by the river. The little girl who had been responsible for the contents of the nappy was quite charming. Mark heroically removed the nappy, which I feel was not his responsibility.

Back at the brewery we had mocked up a "marquee" borrowed from the pub mentioned earlier. I began to realise my hairless crown was feeling the effects of a glorious day out in the sun. Luckily it doesn't seem to show on the video.

Tiredness reduced my ability to hang on a rope and perform the final cheese board filming was less than ideal. Keen viewers will notice involvement of people both in shot and out of shot passing the cheese board etc.

However, Jeff Pickthall² got right into character and seemed to revel in his various roles. Looking particularly cool as bass player we are all wondering if he might branch out into a new career.

The final edit and release

Mark went away and cut together the film. I bit of editing of the soundtrack requested of me to give the "before" sound and halting. After a few comments from me the final version went online at Vimeo

Hardknott Beer from PiciFilms on Vimeo. or alternatively view on YouTube

The local paper picked up the story and did a nice little piece which made page 3. They are good to us, although the original version put online had a rather badly hacked download which Mark had to request they change.

All in all we are happy with the results. OK, there has ensued the usual CAMRA verses anti-CAMRA debate on my previous posts and some people in real life have accused it of being embarrassing, but generally I think it's been received with the level of amusement I'd hoped for, including some local beer drinkers.

We really did try and avoid accusations of anti-CAMRA and are simply highlighting what we believe is bad about the image that some people portray. I'd like to continue to make progressive beer much of which is either bottle conditioned or cask. Those that don't like our style because it jars with some of the traditionalists views doth protest too much, methinks.

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¹It is unclear as to the overall proportion of people who know me who also think I'm weird. It seems to be that as a person increases in age they also become significantly less concerned about their own eccentricities. Having always been a person who preferred to follow off-the-wall trends anyway, things don't look good for my future.

²Yes, I know including Jeff only increases the suspicion of anti-CAMRA activity. But he's a good friend and lets face it, the film wouldn't have been half as good without him.

This is NOT anti-CAMRA

This is NOT anti-CAMRA, it's just against the facade of traditional Real Ale as a means of selling beer. How many times have we heard "brewed using traditional recipes, English barley and English hops" and we find that the beer is anything but inspiring. It might be cheap. It might be a brand name that has been around for decades, but no one deserves to be able to sell beer that fails to inspire. Cask, keg, chill filtered and bottled or properly bottle conditioned, we love them all providing they have some flavour.

We think the brand group of Real Ale is looking tired and old. What the alternative is for the 21st century we don't know, perhaps just good beer.

Meanwhile we've been busy making some video. When I get some time I'm going to blog about the making of this.

Hardknott Beer from PiciFilms on Vimeo.

Music, incidentally, is composed by me and almost entirely performed by me. @WithoutaVision did the hitting things with sticks.

Cast is:

@HardknottAnn

@JeffPickthall

@HardknottAlfie

@HardknottSarah

@BarmanAlex soon to be @HardknottAlex

@WithoutaVision

The image of beer - brand image

I should really be doing an update on our Saturday Kitchen attack and further considerations for a general attack on the media for not covering beer. It's been an interesting week that's for sure, and when an activity starts to raise a few questions about its appropriateness then you know it's starting to have an effect. There have been various discussions on twitter and blogs about the whole subject and I'm going to take stock in good time. Watch for a further post soon.

Meanwhile, I like to drill deeper into these things; Why is beer seen as such an unworthy subject for many of the major media productions? The answer to this I'm sure is complex and too much for my tiny brain. Still, I do have some ideas, and I'd like to explore them further.

My friends over at Pumpclip Parade did bemuse me slightly when it started; I still bought into the "well, it's just a laugh......." argument put forward in defence of childish puns, irritating alliteration, and bawdy Viz style jokes on pumpclips. The main ringleader of Pumpclip Parade, Jeff Pickthall, had a direct attack at me because of my amusement at Wychwood branding a short time after I started writing on this blog.

Despite that on-line poke at my good character, I have remained good friends with Jeff, and he has slowly whittled away at what has turned out to be a nerdy bias towards certain things¹, like for instance the best beer can only ever be served from a cask. Or for that matter, that micro-brewed beer is inherently better than that made in a bigger brewery.

What I am very interested in is how beer can be given better stature across a broader cross section of demographics and there are a lot of things that let beer down in that respect. Branding is just one of them. The branding and image of "Real Ale" in particular is suffering with alarming contemptibility. For this reason we have avoided using "Ale" as a descriptor for our beer and will shortly be engaging in some publicity that more overtly promotes our cask beer as anything but old fashioned and stuffy "Ale"

I'm sure this will cause some shouting about how we are anti CAMRA, which is not true. What we are is pro-beer. We want all beer to succeed, and for it to do so we have to recognise that there might be some things that don't advertise beer that well.

I'll leave you with something that did amuse me, but at the same time worries me. A pumpclip by the well respected Mordue brewery. "A'l Wheat Pet" - I did laugh, out loud too. But on reflection I thought it also localised silliness, which if contained within the geeky pubs I love over in the North East might do no harm. I do think this sort of thing does have a continual and indelible subliminal impact on quality food and drink writers, newspaper editors or broadcast producers alike.

This pumpclip stirred something in my brain. It started to irritate me, despite the NE accent and dialect being my favourite regional vocal sound. I tweeted the image for the attention of @Pumpclip parade as I thought, despite Mordue's good branding image, it was just on the wrong side of the line for the overall good of beer. I got a couple of replies suggesting that it was generally clever and amusing, suggesting perhaps I overreacted. An interesting debate to have, where does the line exist? After all, I used to like Goblins, especially if they mocked lager drinkers, but not now, partly because I've found that given the right lager, I drink it.

In summary, the wider world thinks beer is either mass produced lager for drunken hooligans or "Real Ale" of invariably poor quality, brewed by good people with the right intentions, but with little flair or imagination, doing things on a shoe string, in sheds, for old fashioned, penny pinching, poor joke loving, deliberately fashion snubbing, anti-commerce ageing hippies². Perhaps it is no wonder beer doesn't appear on the TV.

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¹He has failed to convince me that ketchup is a good accompaniment for double fried chips any more than anyone could convince me that shandy is a worthy beer cocktail, but there you go.

²and I realised, I probably fit into some of those descriptions too.

Beer Branding

My previous post expressed my frustration about the lack of concern amongst many on-sale beer emporiums failing completely to have any concern about putting the correct beer brand in the correct branded glass. Some readers might think I've gone a little over the top on this one, and clearly, for most drinkers, it is really something that is of little concern to them. Drinking a pint of quality real ale, for instance, out of a major lager brand glass is no big deal, the beer tastes no different just because the glass claims to be for a different beer.

I find it curious that in the beer enthusiasts world there is a faction that harbors an objection to any form of proactive brand promotion. I'm getting really quite interested in the reasons for this objection. To me it is very simple; a product sells well because people want to buy it. They will not want to buy it if they are not aware of the brand.

I'll start with an analysis of my survey. From a beer drinkers perspective it shows, that really, glassware doesn't matter much; the majority (68.2%) either don't notice, notice but don't care or only get a little irritated by incorrect glassware. From my own experience of people in pubs this is probably about right. I'd even go as far as to say that some drinkers would actually get irritated if service was slowed up due to bar staff spending a few moments looking for the correct glass.

I can turn all of this on it's head however. Very few respondents, one actually, reported that they never notice beer being put into the wrong branded glass. So, 68 of you do notice, even if you don't care. That is 98.6% of the people who responded at least notice the branding on the glass that they get their beer in. From the perspective of someone, me that is, who wants his beer branding to be noticed this is a very, very important fact. Branding on the glass is a key and important part of brand awareness; drinkers notice it.

When we launched Hardknott as a stand alone brewery, as opposed to one that was attached to a pub, we knew we would have to be much more proactive with our branding, marketing and sales. We would no longer have a guaranteed outlet and we would need to sell a lot more beer to be able to make a living at the job. We engaged a design company¹ to help us out.

One of the key briefs to our designers was to be a little like BrewDog, without it being obvious that there was any copying going on. Some say that there was a failure in that last part, but then I'm not sure I care and neither do I think that BrewDog do, especially as we have a good relationship with that brewery.

Moreover, there is even more reason why copying ideas is not only acceptable but even the right thing to do. If it works then why change something if you don't have to? BrewDog after all have already copied what Stone have done. Using similar graphics, fonts, prose or any other form style copying, be it deliberate, or often subliminal, is nothing new at all, either in the beer world or for branding in general.

Take the curvacious shape of a Coca Cola bottle, or glass; it's representative of the curves of a sexy lady, so I'm told. Think of the shape of a Weissbier glass, spooky eh? You can find that curvaceous shape all over the place if you look, sexiness sells, as does controversy......

....I have had a go at BrewDog myself over the naming of Sink!. I think a few of us middle aged beer geeks were a little outraged about this. But perhaps this is just Punk marketing, shock tactics. Some commentators would like to say that it won't work, BrewDog are not going to continue to grow with this approach. Perhaps there is a limit, but currently they are brewing 50 barrels a time, 11 times a week and are turning over approximately £4M a year. That's a tripling of turnover in 12 months. They are a £4M a year business, I almost feel I need to say no more, but of course I will.

So you don't care? What you want to do is sit in a nice pub with a nice pint of real ale, no fuss, no hype, no branding and nothing to clutter up and confuse your enjoyment of a good pint. I'm with you all the way. Good beer, that's all we want. Some of us would like to see more real ale available. Some would like to see a more diverse beer styles, strengths and some way-out innovation, but that's just my personal view. Whatever our choice of beer we don't want it all cluttered with this silly commercialism that takes over the world.

CAMRA's main aim is to maintain and perhaps grow the availability of real ale. The Cask Report would seem to suggest that indeed the real ale market is quite healthy. The very same report also suggests that more could be done to grow the cask market and presumably CAMRA and real ale enthusiasts would be pleased if this happened.

If you are reading this blog then the chances are that you do not need to be told that cask beer, and more generally craft beer, is a fantastic drink; I would be preaching to the converted. Despite the fact that much of the beer that I and presumably you, the reader, drink is a far superior, and often better value for money beverage than mass produced brands, the big brands continue to be the best sellers.

WHY?

Take Carling², which I estimate to have a market value of over £1 billion³. Why has it been Britain's number one lager for over 30 years⁴? Branding and marketing, that's why.

Branding is crucial to growing and maintaining a product market. Branding, marketing and advertising, which are different but related activities, and to be honest I get a little confused about where one leads into another, are all important. Of course, that tacky homemade cardboard pump clip might well send a message to you that the beer is handcrafted in a shed by someone who has more time for caring for the beer than for branding. It might well be that you don't care that you got that beer in a Carling glass, or that the beer mats on the table are for a brand that the pub doesn't even have on sale at the moment. Why should you care? Perhaps you shouldn't. But the reason that your hand crafted beer is still made in a shed and the brewer is living from hand to mouth and probably unlikely to gather together enough money to buy an annuity⁵ when he retires is because he didn't invest in branding and so grow his business.

The reason Carling is successful is because you got served your micro-brewed ale in a Carling glass.

PumpClipParade concerns itself with poor beer branding. Perhaps it is overly concerned about branding that is objectionable to the instigator of that site, after all, there are people who like that sort of silly joke. But to be fair, the proportion of the population that will buy a product because it comes with a silly joke, badly designed graphics, or even in some cases grossly offensive sexism is rather small.

So, you may not care about the branding on the glass you drink out of, but you do notice, don't you? You might not care that the beer mats and bar towels in the pub are provided by and carry the branding of a major corporation, but you do notice, don't you? You might not care that the pump clip looks bloody awful, in fact you notice and you like the fact that the unprofessional style makes it obvious that it's made by an amateur, don't you?

All those people who don't drink real ale, but you think should, also notice too.

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¹They are, like us, doing well enough for their website to be a low priority. I expect that as our increased brewing capacity will soon necessitate our web presence to be improved.

²Yes, take it, take it a long way away as far as I'm concerned. But it is not going anywhere, really, not without strong brands that compete with it.

³That's a reasonable estimate of the value to the owner of the brand, Molson Coors. Based on 5 million barrels per years and a brewery gate price of £200 per barrel. If all that volume was sold through pubs it would be nearer £4 billion as total contribution to the UK economy. Moreover the contribution to reducing the deficit is over £500 million per year. I suspect Molson Coors put a shed load of £millions into branding too.

⁴At least, that's what I believe. Heard it somewhere, can't think where.

⁵I hope to be able to live a reasonable life when I retire. For this reason I am greatly concerned that my brewery is successful. If that means I have to copy stuff other people have done then I think I may well do so. To have a reasonably comfortable retirement I may well not need a £1 billion business. I may not even need a £4 million business. However, I will probably need to be a lot closer to that last figure than I am now, and to do that I'll have to work on branding.