Have you ever wondered how pubs are selected for the Good Beer Guide?

It's fairly straight forward really, a Good Beer Guide entry must serve real ale in consistently good condition. The entries in the guide are those pubs that we would recommend to anyone, locals and visitors alike with confidence that they will get a good pint of real ale no matter what time of the week they visit. The pub does not have to have a myriad of hand pumps, in fact sometimes this can compromise quality due to lack of throughput.

The National Beer Scoring System (NBSS) is a system used by CAMRA for judging beer quality in pubs. All CAMRA members can score their beers which will help CAMRA branches in selecting pubs for the Good Beer Guide. NBSS is an easy-to-use system that has been designed to enable all CAMRA members from any part of the world to report beer quality on any pub in the UK. CAMRA branches use these scores to help them determine which pubs from their area to include in The Good Beer Guide.

• Beer scoring is the easiest way to get involved with the Campaign – and you can do it while you’re at the pub

• Every time you score a beer on our website, you’re helping us to select pubs for CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide

• Now it’s even easier to score your beers and keep up to date with what beers you’ve logged

• Only CAMRA members can score beers

The NBSS scores are then used to whittle down the number of pubs in our region from over 200 to a shortlist of approximately 60 and these are then put to the members of Telford and East Shropshire (including the Bridgnorth Sub-Branch) to select each pub they think to be worthy of inclusion.

In line with the Good Beer Selection process, the Short List of pubs is drawn up by eliminating GBG nominations that do not meet the selection requirements of:

1. No change in Ownership or licensee;

2. Still serving real ale; and

3. Not breaking any national policy items.

Pubs where there has been a change of licensee are considered for inclusion on the Short List by deleting the Beer Quality Scores for previous licensees. Any pub with a change of licensee after 1st August is not included.

Entries into the GBG do not have to be just pubs: hotels and clubs can be entered so long as they allow card carrying members in without charge.

At our February meeting we vote to select our top two-dozen entries plus three reserves. Volunteers are then despatched to the chosen pubs to complete a full survey. The survey details are then loaded onto an on-line database for publication in the next guide. The Guide is released in mid-September.

At the February meeting we also vote for our Telford Branch Pub of the Year (POTY), Bridgnorth Sub-Branch Pub of the Year, Branch Club of the Year (COTY) and Branch Brewery of the Year. There are several strong campaigning and promotional reasons for doing so:

• pubs & clubs need all the publicity that they can get and award announcements stimulate interest not only in the winning pub/club but also in pubs generally;

• the media love competitions and with the right press release and timing, can gain good publicity for the pub/club and the campaign;

• it rewards excellence and, hopefully, inspires other pubs & clubs to achieve similar high standards;

• it makes clear what we in CAMRA consider makes a great pub/club;

• in most cases, the branch POTY & COTY will feed into the national POTY & COTY awards.