Once Great Ale Brands

Courage Best Bitter

I grew up with Courage Best Bitter (CBB) in the villages and towns of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, where every other pub was a Courage pub so it was quite ubiquitous. The good thing about CBB is that for a young man, the flavour was never that challenging and far more accessible than the other locally brewed beer, Morland Original. The latter was a proper bitter beer, the sort the younger palate struggles with, whereas CBB, well that was easy. Having said that, CBB was not a great beer, but it was a great brand.

As I grew to enjoy real ale more and more I quickly realised that the insipid and sometimes wishy washy CBB was an average beer with limited flavour. It was also inconsistent as the cellar practices of some Courage tenants left a bit to be desired and the beer not robust enough to take any malpractices. However what made CBB a great brand was that is was so easy to drink making it accessible to most; its critical mass where every other pub stocked it and finally the marketing investment to encourage drinking it.

The real demise of CBB came as a result of its various ownerships over the years (including Imperial Tobacco, Fosters Brewing, S & N and latterly Wells & Youngs); the growth of standard lager in the 1990's with its huge marketing investment and finally the demise of a tied estate where sales of pubs and permitted guest beers eroded sales as a result of the 1988 Monopolies and Mergers Act.

Marketing for Courage tended to feature around its London, Thames Valley and West Country heartlands and who can forget "Take Courage"strap line that ran for years or the Cockerel logo. The Courage brand also featured heavily as a sponsor of sport including rugby union and Reading FC. However, the trends in the 1990's saw a rapid growth in standard lagers, where the likes of Carlsberg and Fosters attracted all the new drinkers to the market. Slowly the CBB drinkers began to die out and the beer found it hard to attract new drinkers. Sadly for CBB, its not part of the recent interest in craft beers and has been over taken by the equally bland Doom Bar as the ubiquitous beer for the South of England.

Current owners Charles Wells Brewing have done a good job to arrest the decline but the future for CBB looks bleak, its not interesting, it has limited marketing support and no real tied pub estate. How much longer will we see this beer, I suspect sadly it will be a very minor brand in 10 years time, appealing to the Reading and Bristol areas and may not even be brewed at all.

Wadworth 6X
Unlike CBB, 6X is a great beer and was also a brilliant brand, so just what has gone wrong here. It was once revered by many in the 1970's, quickly becoming a very fashionable beer and attracted many younger drinkers to the sector.

The beer is actually a fine beer. A nice fruitiness matched with a nutty malt flavour, it does not lack for taste. Perhaps that malt driven flavour has fallen out of favour a little where the search for hop bitterness by the craft beer fraternity has taken preference, but that still does not explain the fall from grace for such a great beer.

In my view I think you have to look closer to home with some regrettable decision making by Wadworth . This included selling the marketing rights to the brand to Whitbread in the 1990's where a sudden growth was then followed by a loss of love for it as this multi-national company moved onto other objectives. 6x reached a peak but from then on it was on the decline and received no focus. Wadworth took the ownership back and spent big marketing bucks to try and arrest the slump with an advertising campaign around sex. It was high risk and an attempt to appeal to the younger market. Sadly it failed and at the same time turned off many existing drinkers.

Wadworth then decided to focus more on their pub estate and then sold off much of their distribution, making sales into the freetrade harder. Beer sales continued to decline and Wadworth have recently undergone redundancies.

Today, 6X is still a great beer, it has the support of a pub estate which helps, but receives only limited marketing spend. It has been overtaken by the likes of St Austell Tribute in sales and its difficult to see things changing much. The future of the beer is entwined with the future of Wadworth and their pubs. They might one day decide to get out of brewing? I hope not as this is a classic beer and one which all beer lovers want to see survive and thrive.