GNER memories: guest ales
by JFC AdminUp until 2003 GNER offered a guest ale as part of their on board menu. The guest ale was always priced at £2.50 a bottle which was the most expensive beer on board at the time. The pricing was convenient as you (still) can buy buffet vouchers at GNER ticket offices which cost £7.50 for a £10 voucher and £4 for a £5 voucher effectively meaning you could buy 4 for the price of 3. It became an even better deal once I qualified for their loyalty scheme GNER Excel (later replaced by GNERtime) which gives you two drinks for the price of one - combined with a buffet voucher you could then effectively get 8 beers for the price of 3. However, the 2 for 1 deal was good enough on its own so most of the time I didn’t bother with buffet vouchers anymore.
The official reason the guest ale was stopped was due to lack of demand (they were cutting down the size of their menu due to less storage space on their refurbished Mallard trains) but it was never well publicised on board, I only discovered it one day because they had ran out of McEwans Export and the person on the buffet suggested it as an alternative. Most trains only stocked four bottles and it was usually well hidden in the fridge. I do believe if it was promoted better then more people would have tried it.
The guest ale idea was inherited from British Rail but GNER was one of the last to retain it, most other train companies had scrapped it a long time ago. I remember travelling on the East Coast mainline around 1994 before privatisation and they had a poster up promoting their guest ale as Newcastle Brown Ale, as I never started using this route frequently until 1999 I don’t know much about the variety of guest ales back in the British Rail era.
The approach GNER took with the guest ales was to select beers from breweries based along the GNER route, they seemed to avoid well known mass produced beers like Newcastle Brown and offer lesser known beers from smaller breweries. Some beers I discovered thanks to GNER include Riggwelter from the Black Sheep Brewery, Yorkshire Terrier from the York Brewery, Fraoch (sp?) Heather Ale from the Scottish Highlands and of course not forgetting Nimmo’s XXXX (I think this was from Cameron’s, I’ll check and update this entry) and Angel Ale from the Federation Brewery. Originally the guest ale was rotated on a regular basis so there was often a new beer every month, however towards the end they started alternating between Nimmo’s XXXX and Angel Ale every few months.
As most trains only stocked four bottles it could cause problems when travelling with others who also liked the guest ale or on the rare occasion when someone else on the train managed to buy them before me. So one time when I was travelling with someone else I sent an email to GNER asking if they could stock more on board this particular service. I never seriously expected a reply to this request but they did put extra stock on board (more than I requested) and even sent me a follow up email to check that everything had worked out OK. This is just one example of GNER customer services going out of their way to satisfy the customer. From then on, if I needed more guest ale on board the train I just had to send GNER an email and they’d arrange extra stock on the train. Most people reserve seats, I reserved beer.