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CAMRA at 40 by Willard Clarke, 04/11 It won't go down well with the health lobby, but I offer a new slogan for your delectation: "Cask beer is good for you". You could draw no other conclusion if you'd attended the CAMRA Pioneers get-together in Nottingham on 16 March to celebrate 40 years of the Campaign for Real Ale. The cut-off year was 1980: only those active in the 1970s were invited, along with such mere striplings as the current national chairman Colin Valentine and chief executive Mike Benner. A group of us who travelled up from London dutifully brandished our Senior Railcards to the ticket inspector who showed the due deference accorded to the halt and the lame. We gathered in the Canalhouse pub, run by Castle Rock, a brewery founded by Chris Holmes, CAMRA chairman in the mid-1970s. From one small pub in Newark back in the early days of the campaign, he now has a brewery and pub chain in the East Midlands that proves that the demand for cask ale is unabated. During a long afternoon last week, we supped a gallon or three of his Harvest Pale, the current Champion Beer of Britain. The large upstairs room in the pub was packed to the proverbial rafters. People had made long journeys, even prodigious journeys, to be there. One of the famous four founding fathers, Michael Hardman, had used his well-honed PR skills to get all four together in the room - no easy task when you consider that two of them, Graham Lees and Bill Mellor, now practise their journalists' skills in Hong Kong and Sydney respectively. But, along with Jim Makin, all four were there, raising glasses to the assembled throng and reminiscing about the dog days of the early 1970s when they took on the might of the Big Six national brewers and their abysmal keg beers: Watneys Red, Worthington E, Double Diamond and Whitbread Tankard. Right: (from left to right) Bill Mellor, Michael Hardman, Graham Lees and Jim Makin, with in centre in kilt the current national chairman of CAMRA, Colin Valentine The landscape has changed over the years. The astonishing and heart-lifting aspect of CAMRA's relentless devotion to cask is that there are now four times as many breweries than there were in 1971 and choice for consumers has never been greater. We were drinking Harvest Pale last week but golden ales as a style didn't exist back then. Today it's so popular that it has its own category in the annual Champion Beer of Britain awards. We can also enjoy proper porters and stouts from the 18th century and Burton-style IPAs and pale ale from the 19th. Encouraged by CAMRA, craft brewers have become great innovators, introducing such stunning new styles as oak-aged beers and even beers made with champagne yeast. At the gathering we heard from John Roberts, who has just stood down as managing director of Fuller's Beer Company: he hasn't retired, he just needs a break, as working in brewing is an exhausting business these days. He reminded those present of the way in which cask beer was disappearing under the onslaught of keg in the 1970s and how even Fuller's were contemplating serving the likes of London Pride and ESB with gas pressure. CAMRA kept Fuller's on the path of righteousness and did a great deal to halt the wave of takeovers and mergers that was destroying drinkers' choice. Colin Valentine warned that CAMRA's job is never done. The dreadful cull of community pubs has to be stopped and politicians must tackle the grotesque unfairness of escalating rates of duty and cut-price booze in supermarkets. In short, the price of beer drinkers' liberty is eternal vigilance. But it was essentially a day for renewing old friendships and reliving great victories. There's something quintessentially British about CAMRA - a dogged determination to stand up for the ordinary man and woman in the pub and to save the type of beer that, largely unheralded and under-promoted, gives them quiet pleasure. To the few people who question the impact the campaign has made over the past 40 years, I would pose a few questions. Without CAMRA, who could have stopped the takeovers and mergers that were causing mayhem in the brewing industry? Who else could have restored drinkers' choice? The number of beer brands dropped by half in the 1970s and the campaign has had to rebuild choice by creating a market place where craft brewers can now successfully sell their beers. Possibly, even without CAMRA's efforts, those awful keg beers of the 70s may have disappeared. But in their place we would all be drinking what the late beer writer Michael Jackson brilliantly dubbed Ersatzenbrau - fake, fizzy global lager. So let's raise a collective glass to real, live beer. We know it's made from barley malt, hops, yeast and water but we must never forget good old vitamin B that keeps the likes of the CAMRA Pioneers alive and kicking. Michael Hardman tells me he'll organise another reunion in three years' time. I'm already in training, ingesting vitamin B in liquid form.

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