The Shocking State Of John Smith's

Brewed_Force said:

I recently had the misfortune recently to try draft Heineken, I didn't finish the pint......it was awful even by Carling standards, don't understand how it's such a big brand.

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The power of advertising and a good example of just how many gullible folk are around.

I think back to when I started my drinking career and I don't remember seeing anything other than tetleys, john smiths, boddingtons, worthingtons, newcastle brown and guiness. Occasionally 6x (expensive, considered a treat) and ushers (terrible) because they were local I guess. Newcastle brown and guiness also seemed very expensive to me. I don't think I was that bothered? Used to look at the money in my pocket, work out how to maximise the number of pints I could have and then stick on that. Lots of the pubs local to me would serve 'whacky' from a jerry can under the bar. Local cider without any duty paid on it, usually about 1/3rd of the price of the cheapest pint, often claimed to be as strong as 9%, used to joke about how pints 1-3 were great, but 4 was pushing it, 5 was prime losing your trousers, arrested for peeing on the cash point, defacing the floral display on the turnpike and so on territory. John smiths was quite cheap so I drank quite a lot of it, didn't drink lager.

Clint said:

It is ****. It's all about cheap. I wonder how people can drink the stuff. They must have either dreadful taste or don't know anything else.

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I agree but there was a time I thought kronenberg 1664 and groslch etc were good beers. It’s because at the time I didn’t know any better , probably why wetherspoons has been so successful. We homebrewers have taken the time to learn and appreciate what the ingredients do and how good a properly brewed beer can be made at home or bought from a decent craft brewer. I’m sure your beers, like mine are vastly superior to these uber commercial beers because profit and margin are not the driving factors, taste and satisfaction are.. I don’t think I could ever try a John Smith’s or anything similar again, gastly vile stuff.

terrym said:

Like sucking on a lemon, only surpassed by Stones bitter before that too became a nothing beer.

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LOL, it was rather, but there are pretty tough guys around here. Not me, obviously, but I got used to the taste, nonetheless.

I went drinking in Durham with a Uni mate about 15 years ago and he said "I'll get you a pint of John Smith's, it's a really nice pint in here". I remember saying "I'll pass thanks".
Luckily I'd misheard him and it was a SAM Smith's pub (Swan and Signets) and sure enough the bitter was spot on. How can two breweries about 500yds apart produce beer so different?

HoppyTommy said:

I went drinking in Durham with a Uni mate about 15 years ago and he said "I'll get you a pint of John Smith's, it's a really nice pint in here". I remember saying "I'll pass thanks".
Luckily I'd misheard him and it was a SAM Smith's pub (Swan and Signets) and sure enough the bitter was spot on. How can two breweries about 500yds apart produce beer so different?

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how can two brothers....

I wonder if **** beer will go the way of **** wine. 30 years ago you could buy really awful wine, now it's virtually impossible and for good reason - there were so many people producing good wine that it's a buyers market so they just stopped buying the poor stuff. 20 years ago I was growing grapes in the south of France for wine production. Throughout the south vineyards that were planted on the plains to produce plentiful but poor quality wine were being dug up or abandoned all over the place because they could no longer sell it. It was a combination of two things. Firstly 50 years ago the average working man in France drank 2 L of wine a day. This would be very poor quality at about 11°. With the decrease in manual labour, particularly as agriculture became more and more mechanised, so the demand for such wine decreased. Secondly as the New World and eastern European growers came onto the scene suddenly the French had some serious competition (when I moved to France in 1992 about 80% of the wine on Sainsbury's shelves were French - now maybe 5%). The result of this was that buyers could buy good wine cheaper from them than from the traditional French producers and also the wine drinking public discovered that you didn't have to buy French to get good wine. This in turn caused the French to up their game and stop producing poor quality wines for the simple reason that they could no longer sell it.

With so many good beers available today and with the buying public becoming more and more discerning I think and hope that the market for **** poor beer will go the same way - it certainly deserves to. I noted with interest that SAB Miller bough the Meantime Brewery in 2016. I'm sure they saw the writing on the wall as to the future of beer.

Supply and demand. I think it is down to people drinking less overall. Without a younger generation feeling flush enough to drink copious amounts of cheap, but subjectively poor quality alcohol the model for high volume low margin doesn't remain as profitable. You've still got money being spent on booze, but by older people and people who drink less often, generally people who prefer a higher quality product. What remains to be seen is if the macro brewers buying up smaller breweries will push to turn them into the low quality brands of the future, how customers define quality and ascribe value to a brand and react to any changes and if I'll see smooth flow neck oil in a widget can!

John Smith's is beyond ****, as the guy said in the review water would be a better drink. It's strange, but i know 2 guy's that drink only widget can's of Smith's, and love it, and if you give em a pint of a decent craft beer they say it's **** (weird) I dont agree that Boddington's was a bitter drink, far from it. When it was proper Boddy's brewed at the strangeway's brewery it was magnificent like cream. Best pint of it i ever had was at the Grey Horse near houldsworth square reddish, bet the pub's not even there anymore.

A couple of years ago, I quit brewing to retire to the land of eurofizz (Fuerteventura, Islas Canarias). You guys don't know you're born - I have to do a 45km round trip just to get cans of JS . The improvement over eurofizz makes the journey worthwhile (but it's still just JS). I should start brewing again...

terrym said:

Like sucking on a lemon, only surpassed by Stones bitter before that too became a nothing beer.

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The clue was in the name, Boddingtons B-I-T-T-E-R. I actually preferred it to the other options, Robbies, Pedigree, Tetleys, even in its late 80s more quaffable form. Would have loved to have tried it in the 70s. Edit: probably did, a shandy or just a sip of my dad's pint though.

https://boakandbailey.com/2014/05/boddies-buried/

Sadfield said:

The clue was in the name, Boddingtons B-I-T-T-E-R. I actually preferred it to the other options, Robbies, Pedigree, Tetleys, even in its late 80s more quaffable form. Would have loved to have tried it in the 70s. Edit: probably did, a shandy or just a sip of my dad's pint though.

https://boakandbailey.com/2014/05/boddies-buried/

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Age does not appear to have dulled my memory from the late 60s/early 70s, which is gratifying at my time of life
From the article
"It was a very dry beer, yet intensely bitter throughout"
"a bitterness that clawed at the back of the throat"
"exceptionally bitter"
It then looks to have been dumbed down to mimic other beers, i.e. became blander and 'smoother!', with lower hopping rates etc but the final assassination was when creamflow became popular and it went into tins. Arggh.

Brewed_Force said:

I recently had the misfortune recently to try draft Heineken, I didn't finish the pint......it was awful even by Carling standards, don't understand how it's such a big brand.

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One very simple answer - the power of marketing.

Sadfield said:

The clue was in the name, Boddingtons B-I-T-T-E-R. I actually preferred it to the other options, Robbies, Pedigree, Tetleys, even in its late 80s more quaffable form. Would have loved to have tried it in the 70s. Edit: probably did, a shandy or just a sip of my dad's pint though.

https://boakandbailey.com/2014/05/boddies-buried/

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I would have started drinking Boddies in the late 1970's, but mainly it would have been 1980's in Glossop. It was very noticeably more bitter than the others you mention and not as strong as Pedigree - I always got more drunk when I went to the pub with Pedigree on a Saturday night.

There was something of a cult following for Boddingtons at the time, probably because once accustomed to the taste, anything else tasted quite sweet.