Roger Protz: A Life Through Beer
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 976 Ratings
🗓️ 15 August 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From being tucked under the pub bar stool as a baby to getting into Fleet Street pubs underage, Roger Protz's passion for beer began early. He's spent 40 years on a mission to celebrate and protect brewing traditions - writing about brewing and beers including over 20 editions of the Good Beer Guide. Arguably what he was writing about then is what many hold important today - in both food and drink. His passion and excitement about innovation and new flavours hasn't waned. He took Sheila to one of his favourite local pubs to try some new local ales before sharing more about his life and career.
His writing saw him forge a path to parts of the world where few were travelling - including hunting out beers and brewers in Czechoslovakia before the fall of the Iron Curtain, his eyes were opened to Belgian beers and tastings through France, and across to the USA, all of which he shared with his readers.
Roger has also worked for the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) since the 70s helping bring real ale back from the brink of extinction as a threatened minority drink to a thriving British craft industry. His work has also seen him fighting to help save pubs - to put it simply, 'no pub, no ale'. But his opinions haven't been without controversy and while he celebrates the rise of the microbrewers, CAMRA is now asking its members on whether it should remodel itself and embrace all beers and beer drinkers.
Presented by Sheila Dillon. Produced in Bristol by Anne-Marie Bullock.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program. |
| 0:05.0 | Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. |
| 0:10.0 | We hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:12.0 | This is a really delicious. |
| 0:14.0 | Yes. |
| 0:15.0 | Wow. |
| 0:16.0 | Mmm. |
| 0:17.0 | Is that an order flower? |
| 0:20.0 | It's something very floral on the nose of the bear, isn't it? |
| 0:24.0 | A nice biscuity character as well. |
| 0:30.0 | That would turn it into a beer drinker, wouldn't it? |
| 0:33.0 | Almost everything I know and enjoy about beer I learned like so many other people from Roger Pross. |
| 0:40.0 | He's been writing about beer, challenging us, pushing its pleasures, and the importance of the real thing made slowly and properly for 40 years. |
| 0:49.0 | Since his mid-30s when he got a writing job at Camera the Campaign for Real Ale. |
| 0:54.7 | He's travelled the world bringing back news of what's great, and at home he's put his life into |
| 1:00.0 | saving Real Ale from the mega-brewers and their accountants, pushing cheap, pasteurized beer |
| 1:06.2 | like fiz. Proper living beer was on the road to extinction in the about real L. He was a bit of a trailblazer actually because when he started writing |
| 1:27.8 | about Real L he wrote books railing against the kind of commodification and the blending out of our food and drink culture more generally. |
| 1:36.0 | He talked about British brewed commercial lager in the same breath as instant coffee and that really horrible cheap white bread that we used to buy and said this is not good enough we want flavor we want kind of proper food. |
| 1:50.0 | It sounded back then to me like kind of hanging on to something that had passed its |
| 1:54.7 | sell-by date but now it starts to look like he was saying what most of us in food and |
| 1:58.6 | drink is saying about 30 years before we start saying it. I think it's his writing and his work |
... |
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