OK, so it’s taken as read these days that all the good pubs have handpumps on the bar, but any member of the Campaign For Real Ale will tell you that you had a fight on your hands to find anything but the gassy carbon-dioxide enhanced stuff until the 80s.
Northern Britain led the way on this, with all but the dodgiest bars offering a good selection of cloudy beers (that’s how it should be you know) the head of which still laced the sides of the glass an hour after drinking. It was indeed an eye opener when in 1981, as a naive eighteen year old, I took my first trip to London and found handpumps were as rare as rocking horse waste. To make matters worse, I made the mistake of asking for a bag of crisps with a pint. I learned the hard way that Southerners don’t like taking solids with meals !
Some of us even attempted brewing our own and the GlamGuru’s own Exhibition Bitter, (3 pints and you make an exhibition of yourself) was always popular at parties. Many people threw it up to the sound of Duran Duran and Toni Basil. (And if the girl with the Rah-Rah skirt at the party in April 1982 is reading, please accept my apologies and I hope you got the stains off OK).
Of course, the essential fashion accessory of the 80s Yorkshire teenager who knew that beer wasn’t just for breakfast, was a coat full of protest badges. Those of us who were running out of space for more badges welcomed the dual purpose ones that covered two campaigns, as the picture below from the GlamGuru’s own collection shows.
GlamGuru (Strictly a glass of two of wine only these days !)