“I was saying eighteen or twenty years that we were due a ‘big bang’ – there were too many breweries, too much competition – but I’ve changed my mind. It’s not going to happen. The breweries just keep coming. What we’ll see instead is a growing schism between those who make beer which appeals to people because it’s well made, drinkable and well-marketed; and also-rans. We’ll also see businesses scaling back, running on very small plants in the back of tied pubs. More brewpubs, and fewer big regional brewers.”
Don Burgess, Freeminer Brewery, on the phone this afternoon.
4 replies on “The Breweries Keep Coming”
Well, by his own admission, Don was wrong 20 years ago…
Looking at Quaffale there does seem to be an increasing number of brewpubs. Maybe a case of “Watch this space…”
Sounds like a good situation to me.
I think microbreweries of a certain size are generally unsustainable. Not big enough to have significant economies of scale, your own bottling/canning plant, sustain a supermarket contract and maintain a national presence, but too big to be able to just depend on income from a handful of pubs.
I think we will reach the point in the next few years when a lot of the newer breweries will have to decide whether to stick or twist. I hope enough twist to provide some better competition at the national/regional scale than we currently have.