Red with barrels
HE CALLS IT “the longest pub crawl in history” — that’s the label on beer writer Roger Protz’s 30-year career searching for the perfect pint in the perfect pub. He has now written up his quest in a book, imaginatively entitled A Life on the Hop: Memoirs from a Career in Beer.
Roger Protz says he traces it to when he worked in the “astonishingly boozy world of national newspapers in Fleet Street, where so much alcohol was consumed that it was a miracle the papers ever appeared”.
He was a sub on the London Evening Standard before going to work for the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) as editor of its tabloid paper, What’s Brewing, and the Good Beer Guide.
Roger Protz had also been very active in the NUJ, and in left-wing politics. He’s been in the union for 51 years and was on its national executive in the 1970s, and from 1968–74 was the founding editor of a very different tabloid, Socialist Worker. Indeed his politics were so gloriously left-wing, he says, that he was expelled from the Labour Party twice.
But there’s nothing schizophrenic about his combination of specialities. “Fleet Street turned me into a beer lover,” he says, “for obvious reasons, and a lefty, just as obviously really. Working for the Standard was exciting and I loved it, but the right-wing politics were simply obnoxious.”
Roger Protz has written 18 books about beer and pubs, including four editions of The Complete Guide to World Beer, and has edited 18 editions of the Good Beer Guide. He has twice been Glenfiddich Drink Writer of the Year and has won more gold and silver tankards and the like from guilds of beer writers than you could order in a round.
A Life on the Hop, £12.00, is available at www.camra.org.uk. Roger Protz’s website is www.beer-pages.com.