List opportunity

Specialist beers are thriving on the supermarket shelves, but why do restaurants still insist on offering such a paltry selection? Fiona Sims stirs it up.

Remember the story about six City boys who ran up a staggering £44,007 bill at Pétrus last June? Most people do - especially the fact that this sum referred to the drinks bill only (owner Gordon Ramsay comped the £60-a-head meal). Just to refresh your memory, the bill was as follows: three bottles of Château Pétrus (a 1945 at £11,600, a 1946 at £9,400 and a 1947 at £12,300) followed by a 1900 Château d'Yquem at £9,200 and a bottle of 1982 Montrachet.

What most people have probably forgotten is that a couple of the hedonists kicked off the meal with a bottle of Kronenbourg each - a fact that didn't escape the attention of famous beer writer Michael Jackson. "I was appalled," he splutters, "Kronenbourg - that's like the beer equivalent of Blue Nun!" Jackson gets a tad irritated if he goes to a restaurant that has "gastronomic pretensions" and all they can offer him is Budweiser or Beck's. "I say to them, ‘Well, you wouldn't offer Piat d'Or now, would you?'"

Quality product

So what does Pétrus have to say for itself? "It isn't anything I've really thought about before," ponders the restaurant's new sommelier, Alan Holmes. "But we are offering a quality product here, so we could look at putting on some more interesting beers in the future."

Which brings us neatly to the point: why don't restaurants in the UK, especially at the top end, offer a better choice of beer? How often have you visited a restaurant that sets great store by its wine list, or its passionate line-up of single malts, only to offer a paltry selection of bland beer?

OK, so beer sales are having a hard time at the moment as drinkers shift towards wine and spirits. Beer consumption fell by 3.7% last year (wine sales rose by 8.5%) and it's been falling steadily since 1971. However, beer is still the nation's favourite alcoholic drink - some 29 million pints are consumed every day, which is six times as much as wine and way ahead of spirits. But before you get too excited, get this: "Eight out of 10 pints of beer brewed in Britain today come from three global giants - Interbrew [which owns Stella Artois and includes Bass and Whitbread], Scottish Courage [which owns Kronenbourg] and Carlsberg-Tetley," says Good Beer Guide editor Roger Protz. "In the past 10 years over 40 breweries have closed."

Supermarkets have been doing their bit to rekindle enthusiasm with an ever-increasing line-up of interesting beers on their shelves. And attendances at events such as the Great British Beer Festival (at Olympia in August) are more than healthy. In fact, you could say that there's a renaissance going on - one, predictably, that the hospitality industry is rather slow to pick up on.

Gerard Basset spotted the trend a while back. The wine-savvy director of boutique hotel chain Hotel du Vin decided to offer a line-up of "interesting" beers when he opened the first Hotel du Vin, in Winchester.

Now you could argue that, as the hotel's name suggests, wine is the name of the game here, so why bother with beer? "We have 70 malt whiskies and 30 different Tequilas and some great Armagnacs, so I thought we should offer a decent selection of beer, too," says Basset. He stocked up on specialist Belgian and Czech beers in addition to a couple of the big brands, but was disheartened when Beck's accounted for the majority of beer sales.

"I did try and suggest to customers that perhaps they might like to try a lambic instead, but they just wanted to drink Beck's. I think people tend to see beer as a refreshing drink first and foremost. Admittedly, we should have done more to sell the other beers, and I feel a little guilty about that. But you need to have your staff behind you, and I guess that's down to training. I put a lot of effort into wine and spirit training, but not beer. I'm lazy about beer. And I should - I will - do something about it," promises Basset.

Paul Henderson did something about it. The hop (and grape) loving proprietor of Gidleigh Park in Chagford, Devon, is pretty much still alone in this tier of the industry for his championing of beer.

He came across a copy of Jackson's Beer Companion when it was first published, in 1993. "It stimulated me - first, to learn more about beer, and second, to offer something better than the ubiquitous Heinekens and Carlsbergs that you find in most restaurants," he declares at the top of the hotel's seven-strong beer list.

Henderson used to list twice the number of beers currently on offer, including beers such as Chimay and Anchor Steam. "It was difficult to get stock here in Devon," he explains, often picking up the supplies in London himself. "And the customer response wasn't quite what we expected," he admits. "We thought they might want to drink beer with food - but they tend to drink beer more after a walk in the woods."

Still, Henderson's line-up includes a Sch"fferhofer wheat bear (£3.25 for 50cl), Morland's Old Speckled Hen (£3.50 for 50cl), Fuller's 1845 (£3.50 for 50cl) and the Hop Back Brewery's Summer Lightning (£3.50 for 50cl), which all sell well, he reports. Not bad for a remote Dartmoor hotel.

So what's everybody else's excuse? "The bottom line is that restaurants make a lot more money selling wine than beer - which is such a British view of things," says Jackson. "Instead, they should be thinking, ‘How can I make it more interesting for my customer?' - which is the American way of doing things. I've become an American in that sense," he declares.

"They're not thinking, ‘Well, I can't make as much money out of beer,' they're thinking that the punter might like the beers they offer and come back. They're thinking, ‘Let's go out and build our business.'"

Jackson speaks from experience. In addition to his various books, TV shows and radio programmes, he travels the world eulogising beer to audiences of up to 300. The Japanese love him, and he's a familiar face on the USA's West Coast. "In Portland or Seattle it would be considered a crime if you didn't offer a large selection of interesting beers in your restaurant," he says.

But isn't there a strong microbrewery culture in that part of the world? "OK, so there is," he concedes. "Then let's look at New York. Take Caf‚ Centro in Manhattan, for example. It's not a beer specialist but it offers a reasonable selection, and it's not uncommon for staff there to suggest food matches with the beers."

Jackson has just come back from a whisky-judging session in Paris (he is an authority on whisky, too), where the French finalists had to talk for five minutes about a whisky they were told about only moments before. "It was pretty impressive, I tell you. Imagine people being able to talk about beer like that here," he says. "Most people only know about one type of beer in this country - and it's a distant relation of Pilsner. Or they know about cask-conditioned ale. But what about the other 50 styles of beer out there?"

Jackson is not suggesting that restaurants attempt to list even half this amount, but, "Half-a-dozen would be a good start. If you ask for a wheat beer in most places, staff look at you blankly. Or they'll tell you they can't sell it. But I tell them to walk around their local Sainsbury's and look at all those different styles of beer that there is supposedly no demand for."

Things are changing, albeit slowly. The explosion in Belgian-themed eateries that focus heavily on a diverse range of specialist (Belgian) beers has opened up a whole new world of beer to a wider audience; the rise and rise of brew pubs and their touchy-feely approach to beer is reaching out to a new generation of beer drinkers; even the big brands, such as Interbrew's Stella Artois, are playing their part - it launched a larger-format bottle earlier this year aimed at the restaurant table. Even Carlsberg is keen to get in on the action, with a new campaign in Denmark to get beer back on the table with a range of limited-edition beers sold in 30 of "the best restaurants in Denmark". It was so successful, says Carlsberg, that the beers will be rolled out nationally.

Convinced? Then turn the page for ideas, where Adrian Tierney-Jones suggests a line-up of specialist beers for your list.