TMT Day 2 - The Eagle Ale House

My first foray into the world of pubs and publicans.

Top bunk or bottom bunk? It’s a cursed choice, really. The top bunk will make doing anything inconvenient. The bottom bunk will make everything the top bunk person does annoying - especially at 1 a.m. just before you get into that R.E.M. cycle.

All this to say - I might officially be too old for hostels.

It was a relatively early start to the morning. Sometime around 4 am, I found myself lying in my bottom bunk, just praying for any amount of sleep or the sweet relief of death, whichever came first. But no, just another 3 hours of sleepless purgatory.

But no matter, today was an exciting day! It was my first real foray into the depths of the pub world. So I grabbed some coffee and made my way through London to the Eagle Ale House in Battersea.

En route, I found Terry's Cafe, a nice little spot for a very English Breakfast - fried egg, bacon, sausage, black pudding, mushrooms, and grilled tomatoes? Say less. It was all reasonably priced, too! So if you find yourself in that part of London, give Terry’s a visit.

Anyway, just a few days ago, I was put in contact with Dave Law, the publican of the Eagle Ale House. Dave has been running the pub since the 90s and has been an avid campaigner against the “pub tie” for many years.

Dave was kind enough to give me a primer on “tied houses” while we tried some cask ale he had on tap.

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Last email, I briefly touched on “tied houses”, where some pubs are “tied” to a brewery and can only sell their beer.

The tied model came about in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It was originally mutually beneficial to the publican and the brewery - the publican got some initial help and financial resources needed to start the pub, while the brewery got a steady source of demand for their beer. By the early 1800s, 8 in 10 pubs were tied to a brewery.

But my conversation with Dave mostly picks up in the late 1980s. At this point, there was huge consolidation amongst the breweries and, subsequently, the pubs. This led to an investigation by the UK's Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Their findings showed that six major national brewers - Bass, Grand Met, Courage, Whitbread, and Scottish & Newcastle - owned ~45% of the pubs in the UK. Between these six and smaller regional breweries, about 90% of pubs were tied or restricted on the beer they could offer.

The result of that commission was the 1989 Beer Orders, which prohibited breweries from owning more than 2,000 pubs. Sounds good, right? Well, when the breweries were forced to sell off their pubs, pub corporations ("pubcos") who weren't capped on the number of pubs they could own, seized the opportunity to buy up more pubs. As of 2001, two pubcos in particular, Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns, owned over 8,000 pubs. Not surprisingly, the pubcos kept the beer tie and even formed relationships with the major breweries.

But what's it like running a tied pub? More on that later.

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When I started down this rabbit hole of pubs, on the surface, the pub tie seemed so uniquely British. And it is. But once you really get into it, some of the problems are so eerily similar to all the ones we've felt in the U.S. over the same time period - massive consolidation, monopolistic industries, nefarious profit-seeking, poor or non-existent regulation, etc.

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In other news, the jet lag is hitting pretty hard - the walking, the talking, the research, the editing, let alone all the other bits and bobs that come with travel, is proving exhausting. I quite literally fell asleep at my computer while trying to put something together last night, hence why this edition is coming to you a bit tardy.

-Skylar