This week’s exclusive Diary includes BrewDog nabbing ex-M&B marketing specialist for a new ops role, Tim Martin musing over two decades of JDW PLC, some ice-cool Heineken product placement, and Luminar dazzling Crawley.
Brew-starter at BrewDog
Diary appreciates that he’s given quite a few column inches to those publicity shy folk at BrewDog recently, but he couldn’t resist a few lines on the latest news that arrived in his inbox today. BrewDog has appointed Caroline Morris, formerly senior marketing manager for Mitchells & Butlers’ Castle brand, in a new role of operations director for its growing bar division. James Watt, BrewDog co-founder, said: "Caroline comes with a wealth of experience and she’s exactly the kind of person we need at this moment in time. We’ve got a lot of new bars opening and we need someone like her to ensure we are not just tags on a map, but awesome, interesting spaces where people come to learn and love great beer." BrewDog has opened two bars this month - in London’s Shoreditch and Bristol - and a site in Birmingham is now expected to begin trading in December. With many more on the cards, Diary reckons Caroline’s in for a busy year in 2013.
Fight le tax
Like the entire industry, Diary has his fingers crossed that tomorrow’s Parliamentary debate on the beer duty escalator adds pressure on the Government to abandon the ludicrous policy. But if you think the 2%-above-inflation hike is steep, spare a thought for our counterparts across the Channel. According to today’s Guardian, French president Francois Hollande is pushing through plans to whack up beer taxes by an astounding 160% to raise Euro480m to fund social help programmes. Jacqueline Lariven, spokeswoman for the trade body Brasseurs de France, said the cost to consumers will increase c20% in bars and supermarkets. The British Beer & Pub Association noted that it’s a hefty increase - but pointed out that it still leaves French beer duty at around one quarter of the rate here in the UK. "A 10p increase is what the UK brewing industry has received in the last two years alone – around half the damaging tax hike we’ve had since the beer duty escalator began in 2008." Zut alors! Meanwhile, The Sun has backed the anti-beer duty escalator campaign, labelling the tax "punitive" - let’s hope it has an impact.
Pizza the action
Diary reported in the summer that wood-fired pizzas, rather than flatbreads, had been given pride of place at Jamie Oliver’s new British influenced Union Jacks site in Covent Garden. There are more bad omens for the flatbread now, with news that Mitchells & Butlers has also been replacing them with their Italian counterpart across its upmarket Premium Country Dining estate. Diary believes flatbread’s time will come, but perhaps not yet.
Twenty not out for JDW
JD Wetherspoon chairman Tim Martin was in nostalgic mood on Tuesday when he opened the London Stock Exchange to mark 20 years since the company floated. He told Diary: "When we first went to the stock exchange some investors were a bit worried that we were a bit young. After about 10 years I became a veteran - and now I’m old! Not many have been around for 20 years." The JDW founder, who was joined by company directors and long-time employees, revealed that a few thousand members of staff have been at JDW for a decade and "probably a dozen" were employed at the firm back in 1992. "We’ve got someone who’s been in the same pub since 1991," Martin said. Here’s to another 20 years.
Ten green bottles
Diary was honoured to be among a number of reality TV stars and retired sportspeople at a special preview of the new James bond movie Skyfall last Wednesday, a full two days before its general release. The audience – all guests of the film franchise’s latest product placement ‘advertisers’ Heineken – took their seats with limited edition bottles of the Dutch brew and watched in great excitement as the action unfolded. It wasn’t long before the first of many green bottles made an appearance. A cheer went up in the cinema as a post-coital Bond was seen enjoying a Heineken while his sexually sated conquest dozed beside him. Diary spotted a few more Heinekens in a gratuitous back-bar fridge shot. But the most blatant scene of all was left until much later in the storyline. Without giving too much storyline away, the MI6 building is blown up and the secret service moves en masse to a Churchillian bunker below London. Cut to dust-covered actor Rory Kinnear (son of Roy Kinnear, don’t you know), playing British spy Bill Tanner, swigging from a cold bottle of Heineken as he surveys a map of London and plans the agency’s counter-terrorism strategy.
Luminar lights up Crawley
It’s not often that Diary has a night out in his home town of Crawley, but, like buses, he has dared to venture into the West Sussex suburb twice in the past few weeks. The first was a leaving do (Diary won’t bore you with the details) and the second was a trip to the opening of Luminar’s new investment at the town’s former Liquid & Envy. Luminar has spent £1m changing the venue to a more upmarket outlet called Moka, and Diary can report that it’s some spectacle inside. There’s a striking red and black colour scheme throughout, with the main room boasting a spectacular lighting rig above the dance floor, with a smaller R&B room upstairs. It’s the fourth project that Luminar has so far carried out as it looks to refresh the "low-hanging fruit" in the business first. Kings in Eastbourne is believed to be next.
Hat’s entertainment
Diary isn’t much of a festival goer in truth, but he was tempted along to the Relentless Energy Drink Freeze Festival at Battersea Power Station last weekend with the promise of music, food, drink and extreme rad snowboarding to the max. Saturday’s headline act was Public Enemy, the hard core hip hop band behind such late 80s classics as Yo! Bum Rush the Show, It takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet. Diary got to south west London early for this gig, and was amused to see the hard men of American militant political rap huddled together shivering in the merchandise tent, stocking up on fur lined jackets and woolly hats to ward off the chilly excesses of the British autumn. "No sh*t why they call this the Freeze Festival, mutha****er," Diary imagined Flava Flav saying to Chuck D as they donned their new bobble hats and went off in search of their heated VIP trailer, and some energy drinks, no doubt.
