The end of a heresy

I find christian heresies fascinating and can happily spend time clicking through wikipedia reading about them. Those early christians really knew how to have major spats over obscure points. More modern times have brought such delights as sedevacantism, the gloriously bonkers belief of some traditionalists that the pope is in fact not a catholic. I am unaware of their views on whether bears shit in woods. 

But when a heresiarch founded a protestant beer sect called the Campaign for Really Good Beer (CAMRGB) in opposition to our mother church I was not filled with pleasure that I get from say, reading about nestorianism. I must confess that in my arrogance I had come dangerously close to advocating for something similar to the CAMRGB in the early days of beer blogging. Back then whinging about CAMRA was something we all enjoyed...until I realised some of the people were not whinging about the home team but were in fact the opposition. I repented my sins then, and despite my occasional confusion over theological matters and distaste for modernism, my faith has not been shaken.

The CAMRGB was explicitly named with the aim of annoying CAMRA, which seemed a bit of a dick move. It never looked like an actual organisation to me, though Boak and Bailey included it in one of their books as they thought it was. The CAMRGB blog was just one bloke reviewing beers as far as I could tell, though it also offered free membership. I never took up the offer, so can't say what you got out of it but it can't have been much. There were some CAMRGB t-shirts, and I suspect I even saw the antipope wearing one once...at CAMRA's Great British Beer Festival. I recall then craft crusader Matthew Curtis wore a CAMRGB t-shirt there: 

"I had hoped that by wearing that t-shirt I might have found myself having some interesting conversations with CAMRA members but none of them seemed to either notice or care."

And I see there were some CAMRGB "twissups", pub crawls arranged over twitter. 

But crafties have never really got grassroots organisation going. Craft beer has always looked like a petty bourgeois movement to me, i.e. a movement of small business owners. Craft beer fans did at times provide unpaid labour for craft breweries' beer festivals, and I think there are one or two non-CAMRA beer festivals organised by craft beer fans. But I not really sure what crafties could campaign for. When craft beer was new and exciting sales and availability rose rapidly so it didn't really need campaigners. In fact, crafties would at times get upset when craft beers appeared in supermarkets. Some of the upset may have come from the same source as that of indie music fans when a band signs to a major label, but part of it was definitely concern that cheaper supermarket craft beer would mean margins would fall for their brewery owner mates. See, told you it was a petty bourgeois movement!

Having something to be against can be just as important as being for something, which was certainly part of the CAMRGB's reason for existence. But the appeal of campaigning against the Campaign for Real Ale must be limited. 

CAMRA went thought a slow and tedious process to placate the heathens craft keg fans, and craft beer now seems spent as a revolutionary force. Craft beer is widely available in supermarkets, but a lot of it is made by multinationals that bought out some of the darlings of the craft beer world. Not so much to get excited about, or campaign for, there.

Doing a bit of heresy snooping I saw the CAMRGB has vanished from the internet. I don't know when it went but but it looks like it fizzled out years ago. Matthew Curtis now writes regularly for CAMRA.