CAMRA Obscura: Membership Weekend 2026
Anyone wanting my introduction to the concept of a Campaign for Real Ale Annual Event, please start here ( https://www.londonbiermeister.co.uk/blog/previously-on-camra-membership-weekend)
Reflecting now on my visit to St Albans for the CAMRA Members Weekend on 18 April 2026.
Headline: I enjoyed it and found it really interesting. See the video below for evidence of me enjoying myself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4MA4gB8-Es&feature=youtu.be
Many thanks initially to the St Albans organising committee. It is a beautiful city that you have there. Organising the weekend on a third Saturday in the month when the street market was in full swing was a very good call indeed. The great weather was a massive plus. And the volunteers behind the desks and behind the bar were all really friendly in a classic CAMRA sort of way. (“The bar staff will know what to do with these tokens, my friend… but I'm afraid you will still have to do the difficult bit of deciding which beer you would like to drink”)
I arrived late morning, registered, decided on reflection to skip the formal AGM and instead have a stroll around before the Conference in the afternoon. I then returned to the Alban Centre at around 1230 and eventually spotted the way through to the beer garden.
I had promised myself that today was not the day for a big sesh. Maybe just a few halves of good local stuff before the Conference… so
- Golden English Ale, 3 Brewers of St Albans
- Mansion Mild, Tring
- Stronghart Festive Ale (7%), McMullen’s (Hertford)
- Fuzz Hazy Pale, Baron (Buntingford)
All really nice in their different ways. Mild is now on my list of styles of beer to try at CAMRA events, as heaven knows it is hard to find otherwise. Fuzz was one of the couple of keg offerings - and it had in fact taken joint second place in the keg category of the local Champion Beer competition. Like my previous experiences of Baron, it was excellent. I will revert later to the perennial question of the place of craft beer at a CAMRA event.
Then the bar called time and we were ushered into the hall. I think there were about 350 people there, with an extra 100 online. Not bad. Or 0.3% of the membership, depending on how you want to look at it (remembering Martyn Cornell’s jibe at “the tiny minority of CAMRA members who show up”). CAMRA is proud of its 140,000 members - a slight dip on the peak of 190,000 but still impressive - but the role of “Direct Debit inertia” is a fair challenge.
I saw the usual ratio of men to women - quite a few women (and strongly represented among the active volunteers) but lots of room for growth. I saw about three people under 50, and three non-white people (one Caribbean origin, one south Asian, one east Asian). So the usual demographic comments, which I will just leave there.
Actually, I think one of the people under 50 was in the chair - Ash Corbett-Collins. Shout out to Ash. I thought he chaired really well, judging when to let the cantankerous (but passionate and in their own terms well meaning) old gits to have a say and when to move things on. One of the naughty corners in the audience - who did things like voting against the Order Paper - was seated just behind me. The penny eventually dropped for me that the “Colin” who formed part of this group was in fact former Chair Colin Valentine, he of the “craft beer Bloggerati” speech.
Some of the conference was frustrating because it was so indisciplined. We had a couple of debates which were a) a bit irrelevant to the existential issues at hand and b) rambling. The debate on whether individual member motions should have greater priority than National Exec motions. The pointless debate on whether the Pub of the Year should be referred to as Pub of the Year for the year ahead or the year that had just happened. I was brought in mind of the motion proposed by Merseyside Branch in 1978 which suggested that “democracy… has miserably failed, by its generation of mass apathy, to advance the Real Ale cause” and went on to propose replacing all the CAMRA Committee structures with a dictator. (The motion was rejected).
I don’t put the debate on bilingual Welsh language publicity materials in the same category. Everybody supported this idea in principle. The problem was the lack of clarity about exactly what this motion would achieve and how. It passed, but will that change anything?
Then we had the proposal that the National Exec should present proposals to re-establish the Great British Beer Festival asap. Roger Protz - the David Attenborough of CAMRA - hobbled to the lectern to issue his appeal. The passion burned in his voice about the vital historic significance of GBBF - how it was the inspiration behind the Great American Beer Festival and others, and how it was fundamental to the very soul of CAMRA. Obviously, given the cost challenges it should be scaled back only to feature British Real Ale (right…) It fell to the National Exec to issue the riposte. Another loss of the scale of Birmingham 2025 and CAMRA was bust. Literally. We could not take the risk. Various people - many of them previous GBBF organisers - pitched in to say “come on, surely, of course learn lessons but we always made it work in the past”. The opponents dug in. They hated to disagree with Roger, but the world had changed and the GBBF model no longer worked. The motion was voted down. It was a good and important motion, debated passionately but in a good spirit. National Exec will now come back next year with the lessons learned report, and the debate will doubtless resume.
Then there was an item which had not featured on my timetable. That morning’s AGM had changed the CAMRA rules so that a member who had been expelled for disciplinary reasons no longer had the right to appear at Conference to appeal personally, but instead make a written submission. But, in the meantime, we had an expelled member who wanted to appeal and who had showed up to do so in person. Their appeal was rejected.
I won’t say much about this. All the parties involved have the right to confidentiality. But it is important to say something given the reaction the following morning during National Exec Q&A. In essence, this was a member who had acted inappropriately towards female bar staff on multiple occasions. Female members took to the podium to voice their feelings of catharsis. They had all experienced scenarios of “oh, don’t mind him, it’s just his way” / “well if it was so bad, why didn’t you complain at the time” / etc. There was a powerful message on the Sunday morning of “go back to your branches and tell them CAMRA has changed - this shows we don’t have to put up with this crap any more”. Quite electrifying, actually.
I needed a beer after the tension of the disciplinary hearing, so headed back into the beer garden to use my final tokens on a stout from the XT Brewery of Long Crendon. Then back to the station and back to London. There are many lovely pubs in St Albans that I would have enjoyed crawling round, but I have some strenuous drinking coming up so I decided to restrain myself.
Reflections
I was reflecting afterwards on whether this had changed my view of CAMRA.
I will maintain my membership. I believe in the mission of promoting good British beer. I buy the risk of good beer being squeezed out by an oligopoly of big producers. I believe in the power of a campaigning consumer organisation that will hold the industry to account.
I am inclined to be indulgent of CAMRA’s quirks, up to a point. It is a volunteer organisation, and such organisations have their own little ways. I came away with confidence in the ability of Ash and the National Exec to herd this particular long haired group of cats.
One of the criticisms of CAMRA has always been that its world is not congenial for women. The disciplinary action taken over the weekend shows the will of membership to address that. One case does not make a culture change, but it’s a start.
But I am frustrated at a couple of things.
Boak and Bailey’s account of the 2018 Conference which accepted Revitalisation included a sharp comment - “the membership wants change, but it also wants it to be slow, and perhaps difficult”. This plays in particular into the relationship with craft beer. There were non-cask beers in the bar on Saturday. Three of them. For me there are echoes of the immigration debate which I really don’t like - cask ale is the “indigenous” beer and other beers are tolerated if they know their place and there aren’t too many of them. Patronising phrases like “perfectly drinkable” still come up, as well as disparaging references to craft being a phenomenon of London hipster bars. Someone raised a point of order on Sunday morning because Ash had used the words “craft beer” in response to a question which used those words - so he had to deny in response that CAMRA had gone soft...
Obviously CAMRA is a private membership organisation and we members are allowed to set whatever policy we want - and if I'm in a minority then so be it - but it is such a massive wasted opportunity. CAMRA was set up to promote great British beer. It is the mass consumer organisation for great British beer. Cask was (or should have been?) a means to an end as opposed to the end itself. How is the best of British craft not great British beer? With challenges all around, how is it not an ally to be cherished and championed as opposed to one more problem to be solved?
Similarly, can CAMRA get away from its obsession with the inherent badness of large breweries? Even if you hate them privately and disagree with me that they sometimes do good things, they ain’t going anywhere and you need to work with them.
This would matter less if the financial position were rosier. But it’s dire, and desperately wishing that it wasn’t - or that doing the same stuff will pull us through - is no answer. At times like this, the risk of just doing the same thing is always more acute than the risk of change. Take membership. Everyone is saying the right stuff about recruiting new members and getting them more involved. Can the branches actually do it? My own branch hasn’t exactly beaten a path to my door - and I don’t say that because I am special, but because I am a member who should therefore have been targeted in some way…
Rant over. Til next time. Feel free to say if you think I am talking rubbish.