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Whitbread Trophy 'shakespeare' 'a'
A pint of Whitbread Trophy makes the actor Brian Glover wax lyrical about its Shakespearean properties.
Overview
“Only a genius could find words to describe how Trophy’s tight, creamy head rises to accommodate that characterful body”, opines Brian Glover before downing a pint of the aforementioned beer. The references to Shakespeare are clearly intended to suggest that Whitbread Trophy has been gushing forth from Olde English wellsprings for centuries, and that it was undoubtedly the Bard’s choice of keg bitter, despite not being introduced under that name until around four centuries after his birth.
Along with Watney’s Red Barrel, Whitbread Trophy was one of the big names in British beer in the 1970s. It was a curious experiment in branding, a blanket name for a whole series of keg bitters made by small local breweries that had been bought up by Whitbread after the war, the “Trophy” label facilitating national advertising and intending to suggest an overall badge of quality. But since this wasn’t often matched in the glass, Whitbread Trophy became a regular target of activists in the Campaign for Real Ale, who used it as shorthand for everything that they abhorred about the industry.
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