Toper Talk: Beware of the ticker?

Tickers. Scoopers. For some they are the epitome of CAMRA man. Yet whilst some branches love them (think ticker-tastic fests like Nottingham or Tamworth) others are openly hostile. Meanwhile, ticker/scooper attitudes towards CAMRA veer from dewy-eyed adulation, through grudging acceptance for economic reasons to rabid criticism. Earlier this year the Telford and East Shropshire CAMRA magazine stirred up Scoopgen users with an article that portrayed tickers as "a heinous band of tramps and vagabonds". Are they that bad? Are they an easy target? What makes them tick? Let's find out...

It was that article in a local CAMRA newsletter (and reproduced on Scoopgen) that started me thinking about tickers. With tongue slightly in cheek, 'Brockton' bemoaned tickers for being ill-mannered bottlers of beer rather than 'real imbibers'. These 'tramps and vagabonds' were described as being "clad in 70s anoraks", having a "graveyard of decaying yellow teeth", being prone to "incomprehensible mumbling" and giving off "an odour akin to a Dickensian chiropodist's waiting room". Nice.

Comments about the article on Scoopgen were unsurprisingly critical; "another example of generalisation tarring everyone with the same brush" said one; others wondered why the likes of 'Brockton' even bothered to join CAMRA. Super scooper Gazza's response to the article was that "some of this thing is slightly close to the truth but it's still quite sad... that some CAMRA people think it's okay to slag off a section of the real ale drinking public who know (generally) more about beer and breweries than 99% of CAMRA members, drink more cask ale than most CAMRA members and do the most to support micro brewers".

To be fair, I've also been critical of some tickers. Because I find people who yak on about beer all day to be deeply boring. Because some of them impose their ill-formed opinions around the bar whether you're interested or not. Becasue if the festival list suggested that Groyne's Olde Scrotum would be on and it's not, they start throwing their bottles out the trolly, metaphorically speaking. But there's a wider issue that I struggle with.

It's the numbers game. I used to be an active member of ratebeer.com, adding reviews of beers to the site and going out of my way on many occasions to sample new brews. But that was driven by a desire to try beers of differing styles - the number of rates was a consequence of the journey, not the reason for it. I stopped rating every beer I tried in 2005 (about 18 months after I started) and stopped counting altogether soon after. Even when I was rating, I'd tend to drink a pint of a favourite beer than two halves of unknown brew.

Maybe I'm a scooper who doesn't write stuff down. After all, Scoopgen defines the hobby as "the term given to sampling as many different real ales as possible, within the scooper's own personal rules". And those rules are arbitrary; as Gazza says, liable to change "at any time to suit whims and experiences". This is all starting to sound un-nervingly like Werner Muensterberger; he recognised in his book 'Collecting: An Unruly Passion', that although "the inner pressure for more and more acquisitions... exists in all collectors, neither personal style nor circumstance are ever identical".

There's clearly a collecting bug amongst tickers. 'Beige' Phil Booton writes of the "simple delight at adding a new name to the collection". Gazza has called scooping "trainspotting beer instead of trains". But is there more to ticking than the numbers game? Well, Gazza himself makes the point eloquently in his essays on scooping; he may have been seeing the country and having a good laugh, but he was driven by wanting to try the next beer; "..it didn't matter if I'd found a superb beer in a pub, I'd always want to try another just in case it was better".

That's a key point for me. If I love the beer I'm drinking, I don't feel the need to forsake it for the 'other' beer; that's why I'm a Reluctant Scooper. But are most tickers really tasting the next beer along to see if it's a better beer... or just to ink another name in their battered notebook? Gazza may have been driven by the pursuit of quality, but most of the tickers I see seem driven by quantity - with hitlists determined solely by availability. They seem to have what he calls the 'collecting gene or mentality' - and I think that's what I'm missing.

Sure, I had a collecting streak as a kid - stamps, chocolate bar wrappers, Panini football stickers) but... I want to say that it all stopped when I grew up. Perhaps that's where the anti-ticker criticism stems from, that any form of obsessive collecting is seen as immature. Certainly, pyschoanalysts and philosophers have seen collecting as a method of filling some kind of void. Muensterberger saw the experience as "an enriching respite from the sometimes frustrating demands of everyday life" and that the dedicated collector may be acting in response to "the trauma of aloneness". Baudrillard found that it was "... men in their forties who seem most prone to the passion... (it) may be seen as a powerful mechanism of compensation during critical phases in a person's sexual development". So, is ticking is something carried out by frustrated middle aged men as some kind of compensatory activity?

I think there's more to it than that. The psychology of collecting may offer some clues. The concept of an 'acquisitive instinct' has been questioned as studies have shown a sociocultural diversity in people's relationships with material goods. Similarly, individual-centred frameworks ignore explicit social features of possessions. Perhaps a social constructionist perspective can help - whereby the collection is a symbol of identity whose meaning is socially constructed. Ticking that rare brewery on your way to ten thousand beers only functions as a symbol of greatness to a reference group that shares the same belief.

As much as the critics of tickers like to make out that they are just a bunch poorly-clothed social inadequates, possibly bordering on Aspergers Syndrome, the truth of the matter is that there's a sense of society and community amongst tickers. Unlike true Asperger's sufferers, groups of tickers display a true sense of shared enjoyment and achievement. Indeed, I'd go so far to say that it's the social aspect that feeds the hobby - if tickers couldn't give and receive gen, swap bottles, share pork pies and meet a friendly face in a far-flung pub then I don't think they'd do it. After all, what's the point of ticking if no one knows nor cares about it?

Yes, tickers can be annoying, tiring, boring, boorish, under-informed, over-opinionated. But that's people for you. Like the guy sat behind me at Silverstone barking on about relative exhaust diameters when all I want to hear is the roar of a Mosler; the art snob deconstructing Rothko when I'm trying to lose myself in its murk, the convention fan who says I simply must read x's new novella coz 'he's, like, awesome!!!' (lather, rinse, repeat).

I'd rather drink with a mild-mannered ticker than a lairy lager boy. So, tick 'em if you need 'em, guys (and gals). Just don't go drinking all of that Groyne's Olde Scrotum - it's one of my favourites.

This column was brought to you under the inebriating power of Brunswick Black Sabbath, foresaking three new scoops just so I could have lashings of the stuff.

Dim and distant psychology recollections courtesy of a polytechnic tutor who's name escapes me. But I do remember that she used to drink cider and black.

And the photo is one of the numerous caricatures hanging in the cellar bar of the Flowerpot, Derby - click through to see a larger version or go see for yourself at the pub. I might even buy you a pint if I'm there...