Oswestry Pub Has Won Another Camra Award!

Transcript

00:00Okay, hi everyone, my name's Grace Goodlad, this is my husband Duncan Borerman, we're the landlord

00:04and landlady of the Bailey Head in Oswestry. We've won, well most years we've won the local

00:09market towns pub of the year from Camera and we've won Shrewsbury and West Shropshire Camera a few

00:14times and Society of Independent Brewers six out of seven years we've been finalists for best rural

00:19craft beer bowl, we've won that once and this year we've gone on with Camera to win Shropshire

00:28and then to win the whole West Midlands region which is Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire,

00:32Staffordshire, Warwickshire, West Midlands Met which puts us in the 17 that go forward to be

00:41national pub of the year and at the end of September we find out whether we're in the

00:46final four for that. The awards just happen you know we don't, Camera don't say can you apply for

00:52awards, they come to you so it's really, it's a lot of hours, it's a lot of planning but the hours

01:00and the planning about getting it right, they're not about winning the awards, the awards

01:05are a great thing to get, a great confirmation but it's not the aim, the aim is to give the best beer,

01:12the best atmosphere which they also judge you on, to be inclusive, to have staff who understand what

01:18they're doing, to have good cleanliness, all those other things are part of the awards, it's not just

01:24about what the beer is, so it's about ticking all those boxes and really if you're doing your job

01:29right that's what we've got to do anyway. Our ceiling at the moment has got about three and a

01:33half thousand pump clips on it and every one of those is a unique different beer we've had on

01:38since we were here, obviously some of them have repeated so some of these beers have been on once,

01:42twice, two, four or five times, others only once but whenever we have a new beer and that's about

01:48eight or nine times a week the clip goes up on the ceiling for everyone to see. Yeah technically

01:52there aren't any repeats on the ceiling, occasionally we find an accidental one but there are online

01:56spreadsheets everyone can see of all the beers we've had every year in the grand totals, so you

02:00know the numbers are confirmed, you know the the judges have you know it's proved but yeah that's

02:07there's hopefully one each for every draft beer we've had except for the odd one that wouldn't

02:11stick on the ceiling. So when we bought the Bailey Head in March 2016 we'd been running a volunteer

02:17run social club in South East London for a few years and we got some experience from that and we

02:22kind of bought the pub on the site unseen because we were buying on a budget and we walked in

02:29thinking we knew how to run a pub and we had quite a steep learning curve in the first year or so.

02:35However we did have the experience that we built up of working with brewers and working with

02:39breweries to get the beer quality right and we've learned other stuff as we've gone and

02:44it's just been a massive learning curve and very hard work. In the club we'd been national

02:51finalists but that was part-time, we had normal jobs you know, Grace worked as a press officer

02:57and I worked for, I was head of leadership for London council you know and so we'd come from

03:03that sort of work and before that Grace was an accountant and I'd worked as a tv sound engineer

03:07so we'd done other things, this was our first real experience and of course while we learned

03:13stuff down south when you came up here it's all different brewers so even though we've made all

03:18those contacts and it helped us to get into the web, into the network and got us some introductions

03:24there was still a rapid learning curve which we've had to repeat a bit because of Covid and things

03:29where the whole scene has changed you know lots of people we've used over the years have gone you

03:34know. Yeah we're feeling that, lots of our old brewery friends because of the cost of fuel,

03:39because of what Covid did, we're seeing lots of our old brewery friends disappear which is sad, really sad.