EMMA DUNN meets a group with excellent taste in beer MEMBERS of the Swindon and North Wiltshire branch of the Campaign for Real Ale love nothing more than a proper pint.

CAMRA has been campaigning for real ale, pubs, and drinkers’ rights since 1971.

It has a large national membership of more than 155,000 and growing, dozens of which belong to the Swindon and North Wiltshire branch.

Hans Hoffbauer, who is chairman of the Swindon and North Wiltshire branch, said: “Real ale compared to lager is still in a minority, but it’s enjoying a steady growth, which is a good thing.

“Maybe people are going more for quality nowadays, rather than following advertising trends.”

The group meet once a month at pubs across the area, with the next meeting being on January 13 at The Merlin in Drove Road.

The next will be at The White Hart in Wroughton on February 10.

The branch also organises an annual beer festival, the 27th of which took place in October at the Steam Museum.

Hans came to England in 1969 with the Englishwoman who was to be his first wife, having met her when the two were at college in Frankfurt.

They would remain together until the early 1980s. The couple lived first in her home town of Stoke-on-Trent, which is close to the major brewing town of Burton-upon-Trent.

He acquired a love of British beer there, although the British variety wasn’t the first he had tried.

“I was 15 when my brother was born and my mother had complications. My step-uncle took me out to a pub in Leipzig where there were Czech beers. I was drunk and sick. That was off-putting for a while, but when I was a student in Frankfurt they all drank. That was German beer,” he said.

“The first time I had English beer I thought it was not very nice. It was too warm. But the fact that it was not gassy appealed to me – I thought it was a good thing not to feel I had to burp all the time.”

That rather inauspicious first experience quickly matured into a love of real ale that is still with Hans more than 40 years later.

A new job with Motorola in the mid-1990s brought him to Swindon and in 2003 he began working in IT for Swindon Council, retiring six years later.

His involvement with CAMRA began after the move to Swindon. Hans had had friends who were involved but had never got around to joining.

 

  • Single adult membership of the Swindon and North Wiltshire branch of CAMRA is £23 a year, or joint membership for couples is £28. For more information visit www.swindoncamra.org.uk or call branch secretary Richard James on 01793 618921.