Give people Knowledge and let them find their Passion
It’s Six Nations time again and the pubs are full of keen enthusiastic rugby fans cheering their teams over the touch line. It’s a great spectacle when the pubs are full of good natured banter and brimming glasses of ale. What strikes me is how knowledgeable these fans are about their chosen game, and how passionate they get once the ball is in play. It makes me realise that if we want passionate people running our pubs we need to give them the knowledge.
Is quality really a problem?
Recently there has been a lot of noise on the internet about the poor standard of cask beer in trade, some brewers have even gone to the extent of deciding that the risks are too high and have retreated from the cask beer market, this coupled with distinguished beer writers beginning to question their choice of beer is a sorry state of affairs. I don’t think it needs to be like this if we just become more pragmatic and tackle the issues head on.
Getting Crafty
A short time ago I was contacted by some small craft brewers who realised that the way their beers were dispensed in trade had a huge effect on the value of their brands and wanted to do something about it. We designed a cask beer workshop and delivered this to a number of their customers in their pubs. These customers were not part of a brewery and consequently had never had the opportunity to undergo any formal beer training. The feedback we got was fantastic and we even went on to organise cellar audits and beer and food matching events in some of the pubs.
The craft brewers were really pleased as well as they were able to offer their customers a complete package that had a value bigger than the sum of the parts, their brand equity improved and…. nobody talked about the price of the beer.
This forward-looking approach to customer service has been adopted by leading industry suppliers like Proton Chemicals Ltd and raises the value of their products far above the intrinsic value on the balance sheet.
Working with a new model
In my opinion, this situation has arisen since the industry moved away from the vertical integrated brewery model, a situation brought about by government regulation. In the old days the brewer would control the route to market and was the custodian of quality from grain to glass. But we are where we are, so we need to find ways to raise the bar.
We started with the glorious game, and all those knowledgeable passionate fans supping great ale. If we give our publicans and bar staff the knowledge, we will have passionate people serving great ale. Go on, give it a try.