There's a bit of talk in the beery blogosphere about Watney's Red Barrel as the shorthand for bad beer that inspired CAMRA's formation and of the value of bad beer as a comparison or base line for tasting, asking the questions 'have you ever tasted Red Barrel' and 'what's the world's best bad beer?'. I'm not old enough to answer the former, but to chip in with the answers on Boak and Bailey's post, I suspect it was thin, fizzy and tasted like someone had had beer described to them without actually tasting it.  However, I am old enough to remember its ubiquity. A neighbour when I was a kid in the 70s had a Watneys Red barrel pump stand that lit up on his sideboard, which always intrigued me. Memory now seems to tell me that on our trips to pubs and clubs as a child (orange jubbly and crisps in the back room of course), the barrel was pretty much on every bar. In modern sales speak it would probably represent something like a 'consistent drinking experience' in the same way as Coke and with the same large scale production and lowest common denominator flavours. I don't doubt that there are beers that are still made like that, even under the guise of craft or cask brewing - a bottle of Banks' bitter that I got from the Co-op recently was reminiscent - over carbonated, thin and tasteless, yet still nominally a 'traditional' bitter.

As a Yorkshireman I do have to defend John Smith's bitter. The awful Extra Smooth is just swill, a cheap cynical unit shifter for supermarkets in the same way as Boddingtons Bitter and Stella Artois are now. Smooth, which is slightly less unpalatable, has supplanted standard keg John Smith's Bitter in many bars, but in the right place, with a good cellar manager, cask John Smiths can still be very good. A friend reported that it was the best choice in the owner's enclosure at York Racecourse recently, and it's been suggested by several people that it's a lot better since production was returned to Tadcaster. After a formative early drinking career on John's and Trophy it wouldn't be my first choice but if it's on handpull in a good pub it's worth a try.

The question that I've been mulling for a while is 'how big is too big?' There's no doubt that there is the difference between the corporate, where old brands get diluted for mass market recognition and lose much of their quality, and, for want of a better phrase, the brewer who has got a contract with the largest convenience store chain in the country - Freeminer's beers are drinkable and have good ethical provenance, and as they're designed for a mass market, the pressure must be there to make them broadly acceptable, but I also suspect that scale is a contributing factor and once you get over a certain size, it's difficult to make beers distinctive. Similarly when you're a contract brewer who makes a lot of iconic brands, following the recipe doesn't always make the beer the same - Tetley's bitter has definitely lost the qualities that it had when made in Leeds, even if it's still made in traditional squares.

My choice of a good 'bad beer' is Webster's Green Label. My old local, the New Inn in Yeadon, used to carry it as an alternative to John Smiths keg and to cask guests that were often too strong for session drinking. There was partially the novelty of a beer whose relations epitomised everything that was bad about corporate beer, not to mention the novelty of drinking something that seemed to have risen from ancient history. It was decently drinkable. It's described as a light mild at 3.2%, and was from memory a bit caramelly and a bit yeasty, and by all accounts is actually better on a pump than on a handpull. It's a matter of taste: even five years ago we wouldn't have had much of a choice in many pubs, so sometimes yes, it's good to try something that you wouldn't usually consider to form a baseline.