sg! The Phoenix is a Mitchells and Butler one of the largest outfits in the UK. O’Neill’s is, or was, one of their brands, they are a division of what was Bass which then became Six Continents and fragmented into smaller things — like Mitchells and Butler.

So is The Commercial in Herne Hill, the Gipsy Moth in Greenwich and a lot of other other places — http://www.mbplc.com/ . You get to know them by their feel and product range.

Yawn

no no and thrice no!

The problem here is the treatment of small businesses by greedy landlords.

Mark is being stitched up by people who claim to support him; and if it weren’t for the pubco’s contempt for your desires as a customer, he would be selling these beers to you now. you know how innnovative and customer led Mark is, why would he do otherwise.

Mark told me the other night that his wine sales are out of tie; maybe we should all pitch up and drink glass after glass of his champagne!

Cheersh!

Drew M

PS mark if you need someone to celebrate with later this week — or to vent spleen at — gis a ring.

that’s very interesting.

So I guess the Phoenix is with a different PubCo to most in Camberwell, given it can sell Frulli??

Maybe we should hope for the day that we get either a Slug and Lettuce or AllBarOne in Camberwell — at least they have a good range of fruit beers.

I’ve had word that my long in ARBITRATION rent review (due 25 September 2005) should have a conclusion within a week.

So I will know in a short time whether I can continue to do business in Camberwell if the arbitrator finds in my favour, or whether I find myself suddenly out of business and against the wall with a back rent bill I can’t pay.

Ho Hum hey for the touchy feely noughties.

The short answer is:

WE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO. IF WE DID SELL THESE BEERS WE WOULD BE BREAKING THE TERMS OF OUR LEASES AND WOULD HAVE THE LOCKS CHANGED AND BE THROWN OUT OF OUR BUSINESSES WITH NO MEANS OF RECOMPENSE THROUGH THE COURTS.

Off the top of my head there’s only one bar in Camberwell that could legally sell this, or any other fine beers like it, and that is Funky Munky.

All the other pubs in Camberwell are TIED leases or in the case of the Grove, owned and run by one company that does not make fruit beers, and all are bound by the terms of their lease to sell beers from a ‘portfolio’ of beers that are decided by the Freeholder.

All these pubs are owned by PubCo’s (Punch, Enterprise, S&NPE et al) and leased to people who then run a business of some description that sells beer in that property and try to make a living by it.

I’ve been asking Scottish & Newcastle Pub Enterprises for organic and wheat beers for a decade. Nothing until Scottish & Newcastle Plc decided to make Kronenbourg Blanc available in the UK. Pathetic isn’t it. When S&NPE bought the Sun and Doves in 1998 I had a verbal agreement with UNique, the then Freeholder, to sell organic and fruit beers — which could only be bought out of tie — because there was a clear customer demand for them. We stocked Leffe, Hoegarden, a weiss beer and a couple of fruit beers. We sold about 24 — 36 bottles a week. S&N didn’t like this when they took over and warned me once not to sell them because I was breaking the terms of my lease. I didn’t rellay take them seriously because the previous freeholders had said stuff like that while allowing me to sell out of tie beer anyway, and it was such a small volume a week that I thought it could hardly matter. Well I ended up in High Court in front of a judge with S&N trying to revoke my lease and throw me out. I pleaded guilty, diclosed accounts and had to pay compensation and legal fees of £10,000 to S&NPE. This was over about £3,000 worth of beer that I’d bought out of tie over a two year period.

If you go to these PubCo’s websites there’s usually a section on the ‘unparalleled’, or some other clap trap, range of beers they make you buy when you sign their lease. If you look at these ranges of beers and compare one company’s against another you’ll notice they all do 2 premium lagers, 2 drinking lagers, 1 stout, one nitro bitter, they nearly all do Guinness because even though non of theses Co’s own it they need to sell it because it’s Guinness. IT’s a long story really. Too long to explain etc etc etc

The PubCo’s also all talk about the business advice, product support, training courses, accounting packages and expert licensing knowledge you can tap into if you’re one of their tenants.

It’s all lies bollocks and nonesense. They are cheats and charlatans the lot of them and collectively they should be buried without recognition.

I cycled all round Burgess Park early evening. I passed St Mark’s on Coburg Street — the schoolhouse or whatever has been turned into flats. I couldn’t see the sign for St Mark’s Little Army any more. I thought, that’s no good.

It tells the tale of the 4,000 schoolchildren 1914–18 of whom several hundred never came back. I thought, hm, that space is going to be used for ads for mobile phone networks and such.

But all it was was, the sun was shining directly from the west on the carved inscription, shedding no shadows on the wording.

One must never jump, I thought, to conclusions.

I had Pieterman’s Frambozen (raspberry) beer in Blackheath on Friday night, I think. Why does no-one offer it here?