Black gold
Hello,
Right, time to finally get into my life as a Guinness mob boss. Or well, actually that was total hubris but for a short period of time I had the only Guinness surplus in South East London (just about).
That’s gone now and I’m in the same boat as everyone else, which is desperately trying to snag any keg I can. Well, not any keg actually, which more on that later.
The first thing is: the Guinness shortage is real. How a company as massive as Diageo has fucked up this badly is a story that someone with more time than me could have a lot of fun investigating, since there’s more rumour than truth going round about the whole business but the reality is that you can’t get the amount of Guinness you order and that it particularly affects draught product, has been going on since November and will likely continue up to summertime.
The story, as everyone’s telling it, is that an entire 500,000 gallon vat of Guinness was brewed, kegged and then only after the kegging was it realised to be somehow contaminated. That’s a bit of an alarmist word for something that’s probably actually just an imbalance of hops and barley (if it’s true at all) that wouldn’t allow the product to be called Guinness or something. The tales flying round range from dirty water being used to there being chemicals in the vat from cleaning and the truth isn’t actually out there, so at least Diageo’s PR department is keeping it tight through this whole business.
If that did happen and it’s definitely a good explanation for why you can’t get a keg of Guinness for love or money then it’s a spectacular fuck up. If they’d realised before they’d kegged it then there’d be a problem still but less of one, since there’s only one way to get beer out of a keg and it’s pouring it. Even if you do that through some sort of high speed flusher, that means it’s someone’s job to throw Guinness down the drain. RIP Dublin waterworks.
Any company, even one as big as Diageo, has a limited supply of kegs. They’ll be managed so that there’s enough in the factory to keg up what’s being made and the rest will be going out and being returned on the dray lorries.
Obviously there’ll be some surplus to that but probably not an entire vat full. So then even if you’ve got the Guinness, you’ve not got the kegs to put it in which, if all this happened as it’s alleged to have happened, would be where it all really trips up.
Now pubs that sell 20 kegs of Guinness a week are getting 10, at absolute best, on their deliveries. Some kegs are making it to warehouses where you can get your mitts on them if you’re desperate but they’ll cost you. My brief surplus really was a power moment where other managers were having to come and ask me if they could drag some out of my cellar.
It’s been a massive boon for Murphy’s, which I’ve now got a tap for - although technical issues with fitting it (no nozzle for ages, cellar float was buggered when I finally got one) did mean it took depleting the stockpile before I could pour the stuff.
A new development in the Guinness crisis is that a lot of defective kegs are showing up. If the story being told’s correct then that’d sort of figure, that they might be digging out every keg they possibly could rather than sticking to the known-to-be-good stock. Or maybe this is a fresh nightmare and a separate screw-up.
Either way, of my limited number of kegs of Guinness I’ve now got to send one back because the spike is defective. The spike’s how the beer gets out of a keg and also literally a steel spike which can, in some horrendous scenarios, ping the fuck out of the keg and bounce around your cellar for a bit while you’re praying it doesn’t get you. That’s extremely unlikely, of course but still why you don’t lean over the barrel while you’re changing it.
More commonly a defective spike just means the beer is shit and comes out wrong or not at all. When I got a bustoed Guinness keg it was clear it weren’t right because it was pouring like flat Coke.
In some ways it’s just an annoyance. And a bigger one that it broke my keg coupler by failing to detach properly, so I couldn’t even just hook up the next keg. 24 hours without Guinness is a luxury amount for a lot of pub managers now, though, so the wait for the engineer wasn’t all bad.
What he said though was that this was one of a lot he’d been called out to recently. I’m not the only pub manager I know of with one in the last week. This is, it’s gotta be said, getting a bit silly now.
First you can’t get the damn Guinness, then you can’t serve it. I dunno when they’re going to sort this whole business out but it’s a royal pain in the arse until they do. I get that it’s hard to course-correct when you’ve gone this far awry but the dispense pumps might need to start playing the Benny Hill them when they’re poured if it takes another turn.
A frequently asked question I get is why the hell my offbeat pub in a corner of deepest South East London is full of Rangers fans. The short answer is that a previous landlady here’s nephew is part of the fan club but that doesn’t actually explain the connection, of course. The longer answer is I asked them last night.
Apparently there’s always been quite a lot of Rangers fans around this bit, some of it possibly for sectarian reasons. The fan groups would recruit other fans because they were fun to be part of, until it wasn’t important what your connection to the football team was, just the club you were part of. Then about six years ago some of the other fan clubs shut down and my lot started the Dartford Rangers Supporters Club. They were meeting up in a pub in Dartford but it shut down, so the nephew suggested they come up here and now they have better attendance.
They’re always perfectly lovely in my pub and bring in a hefty chunk of income. I guess it’s no different than my sci-fi society that comes in, even if they’re a lot louder. Ultimately, people come to the pub to watch stuff rather than doing it at home where it’s cheaper because they want the sense of community.
Speaking of community, I found out what the football team who come in on Thursday nights after their games is called and it’s an absolute banger of a name: Inter-Quarry Erith. The quarry may be gone under a pretty dismal looking housing development (and in a pretty dismal bit of Erith, just down the hill from North Heath, nestled behind the massive warehouses for the dock) but that’s an excellent team name if I ever heard one. They’ve also got amazing kit, better than most pro teams, all black and turquoise patterning.
The latest real ale news at the Oak is I’ve got Mighty Oak Aphrodite and Woodeforde’s Wherry tapped and ready to go when Oscar Wilde and Old Oaky finish, which will be today sometime. Banging through three firkins in basically a week is a heck of an achievement in a pub doing the sort of numbers mine is.
That reminds me, I’ve got some guest entries coming up - one from Michael, the landlord of another pub that needs pulling up from its knees and one from Mandy, who’s the cleaner at my pub and has known the place for a long time.
Anyway, time to go and spend my Friday night as door staff, a knock-on from last week’s stupidity. The fun we have.
Hazel