The last Boddingtons television advertising campaign in 2005 was criticised for capitalising on the beer's Manchester heritage with a Happy Mondays soundtrack, even though production had moved out of the city.

This number grew rapidly over the next three years to 79, the height of Boddington’s popularity, with 31 per cent of their tied house estate represented.

Mind you, similar competition, along with the malt-extract Lass O’Gowrie beers which I found very poor. Whitbread's superior capitalisation and distribution network allowed it to take the Boddingtons brand nationwide. A period when the number of Boddingtons’ pubs in the GBG varied between 27 and 35 ending the period 2 higher than at the beginning. Its taste, or perceived lack of it, has been criticised by some, with Andrew Jefford describing it as a "blandly foamy nitrokeg travesty of the original [cask conditioned version]". and there seems to have been an element of "we're alright, people will always drink ale" (typified by the Oldham deal in 82) until it went a bit wrong financially in 1982-4 after which the tone was more "well maybe we do need to jump on board the lager bandwagon", leading to the Higson acquisition in 1985.

Having looked at the existing Boddington’s brewing records, I’d say that the major factor in Boddington’s would be 1) they probably stopped priming in the F. Boddingtons has a distinctive straw-golden coloured body with a creamy white head, which in its modern form is achieved by the addition of nitrogen in an attempt to replicate the traditional head from serving the cask beer through a sparkler. Admit it, this beer id s victim of big brewery acquisition, and brewing by accountants an marketers. There was another small boozer somewhere behind Victoria station that sold Boddies Mild and Bitter from the counter-mounted electric meters. I am pretty sure that that was in 1982 (probably the summer), and on my previous visit Boddington’s had been its old self.I didn't really notice a change until around 1980 when it was available in the Kings Arms in Lancaster and was quite a bit blander. The company's independence was maintained after Whitbread acted as a white knight by raising its stake in the company from 13 to 23 per cent, and the family and many small shareholders refused to sell their stakes. Strangeways Brewery was founded in 1778 by two-grain merchants, Thomas Caister and Thomas Fry, [3] just north of what is now Manchester city centre. But according to a Times article referenced in the Boddies’ Wiki article, they had 272 pubs _after_ the Oldham acquisition in 1982.

Ends rather neutral and watery, with plaster-like effects overruling any malts and hops that went in here.That feels like a time of financial pressure that would lead to the beancounters changing the recipe. At that time one in eight barrels of Boddingtons was exported to some 40 countries worldwide, including China, the United States, Taiwan and the West Indies.