Eddie Barnes: Battle of the Booze

The Tories have announced their plans for a booze crackdown here in Manchester today. They aim to substantially increase the price of lager, cider and alco-pops through a new tax.

As tax is reserved, the plans will apply in Scotland where, as has been well publicised, the SNP administration is planning to introduce its own minimum pricing policy. This would mean that cheap high-strength drinks - lager, cider, and alcopops for example - would have a price floor under which they could not be sold.

But if the Tory plan might end up increasing the price of those drinks above that floor anyway, making the minimum pricing scheme superfluous, on all but cut-price spirits.

Which makes me wonder whether the entire SNP alcohol strategy should now be re-named as the "Glen's Vodka price increase (Scotland) Act" and have done with it.

David Maddox: Robert Brown can rest easy

Assiduous readers of The Scotsman may recall a piece I wrote earlier this month about a motion put down by Lib Dem justice spokesman Robert Brown condemning the creation of the world's strongest beer in Scotland.

The small Aberdeenshire outfit BrewDog are selling something called Tokyo which is 18.2 per cent strength.

In the spirit of investigative journalism several of us thought we would try this monstrous beer out to see what all the fuss was about. A bottle was purchased for £8 by an associate from one of the political parties and three of us media hacks tried it out last night after work.

The unanimous conclusion was that the drink was vile, which is a pity because many of BrewDog's beers are very good. Its odour offered a hint of ginger beer but it had an overwhelmingly thick malty taste which made it hard and unpleasant to drink. In fact the three of us, not exactly unused to hard booze, struggled to finish one bottle between us.

So Mr Brown may be worried about the selling of such a product, but experience would suggest that if anybody is foolhardy enough to spend £8 on it they will not do it again once they have tasted it.

However, it should be noted that the adverse publicity (of which this blog is guilty of continuing), caused largely by outraged politicians has apparently done wonders for sales of Tokyo, far exceeding the effect normally expected from the advertising budget of a small Scottish company. The bottle we tried was apparently the last one in the shop because of the high demand.