Brew Britannia 10 years on: progress in a pint glass?

It’s been 10 years since our book Brew Britannia was published, and 7 since the follow-up 20th Century Pub. What did we get right? What did we get wrong? And where is British beer today?

As one review of Brew Britannia suggested, it was a story half told, because we hadn’t reached the end. We were obliged to reflect the contemporary scene as best we could, and take some guesses about where it might go next. This is what we wrote:

Though ‘big beer’ seems to be struggling, there is plenty of energy and excitement on the latter side of the fence, and new breweries continue to open while better-established ones keep growing. Now that ‘alternative’ category is in the process of subdividing yet again, this time into two broad camps: ‘real ale’ and ‘craft beer’… For all its increasing diversity and apparent health, there are anxieties in the world of ‘alternative beer’. Several people we spoke to in the industry say they are braced for a shake-out: there are too many breweries, they say, and many are brewing downright bad beer, which they are selling too cheaply… Another concern is that, in a market where the buzz is around the latest and weirdest beer, there might be nothing new left to discover…

This long post is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps and hold ourselves to account: what did we get right, what did we get wrong, and what took us totally by surprise?

More importantly, it’s about gaining some perspective. It’s easy to mistake the fact that we personally have become older and more jaded to mean that there has been a decline in the quality and vibrancy of the beer scene.

Maybe there has, maybe there hasn’t – but there must be some objective facts we can use to test our gut feelings.

We know other people have different perspectives, though, so we’ve also asked as many people as possible for their thoughts.

Our criteria for a healthy beer culture from 2013

A decade or so ago, beer felt exciting. It was at the centre of the conversation with a significant buzz about it. The very existence of Brew Britannia is proof of that. We wouldn’t have got an offer from a publisher for that book in 2004 but in 2012 Aurum (Quarto) thought there might be a market.

There were new breweries and bars opening all the time, along with constant ‘product innovations’ – for better or for worse.

While we were writing the book we lived in Penzance in Cornwall. While cities like London, Leeds and Manchester were clearly where the action was, we could still feel the ripples even in a small town out towards Land’s End.

In a blog post titled ‘Signs of a healthy beer culture?’ we jotted down thoughts about indicators:

1. There is a drinking establishment within walking distance of where you live where you like to spend time, and which serves decent beer.
2. If you are skint, there is an acceptable drinking establishment within walking distance which sells decent beer at ‘bargain’ prices.
3. If you fancy something special, there is a pub or bar within reach on public transport (WRPT) which sells imports and ‘craft beer’.
4. The nearest town/city centre has a range of pubs serving different demographics, and offering between them a range of locally-produced beers alongside national brands.
5. There is a well-established family/regional brewery.
6. There are several breweries founded since 1975.
7. There is at least one brewery founded since 2005.
8. There is a regional speciality — a beer people ‘must drink’ when they visit.
9. There is an independent off licence (‘bottle shop’) WRPT.
10. There is a shop selling home brewing supplies WRPT.
11. There is at least one beer festival in the region.

Now, with hindsight, we can see that we had our finger on the scale to help get West Cornwall over the line. We did have all of the above – and things continued to develop in the years that followed. We were writing before Verdant came along, for example.

There’s a point, of course, about how evenly distributed the ‘scene’ is in practice.

We now live in Bristol, a city which is increasingly talked about as a ‘beer city’. It has a remarkable number of decent pubs and bars, plus enough taprooms for a crawl.

But what about, say, Taunton, or Totnes, or Tamworth? Has the progress continued, and continued to spread? Or is there, as perhaps our gut feeling tells us, a sense that it has stalled, or even wound back in places?

Let’s go through the criteria above, one by one.

Is there a good pub or bar where you live?

“There is a drinking establishment within walking distance of where you live where you like to spend time, and which serves decent beer.”

When we came up with this criterion back in 2013 we deliberately kept the bar low. Perhaps we were thinking of a conversation we had with Michael Hardman, one of the founders of the Campaign for Real Ale, who said:

You hear people say now, oh, free houses only ever have the same old suspects – London Pride, Adnams – but it would have been really great to find that in 1971.

In London, we had The Nag’s Head. In Penzance, there were a few contenders, including The Dock Inn and The Yacht Inn. Then for the first few years in Bristol, where we moved in 2017, we had The Draper’s Arms literally around the corner.

Now, in 2024… Well, it depends on how you define walking distance. Our neighbourhood currently has no pubs at all. The city centre might be buzzing, and there might be craft beer taprooms on the surrounding industrial estates, but we cannot simply ‘pop out’ for a pint on a rainy Wednesday.

We haven’t moved somewhere especially weird or remote. This is a symptom of the ongoing tendency for backstreet and neighbourhood pubs to close because:

• they couldn’t make money and/or
• property developers have other plans for the sites

What about our old stamping grounds in Cornwall, though? We asked Darren Norbury who lives in Ludgvan and has edited news website Beer Today for the past 20 years:

From my personal perspective, the closure of the award-winning brewpub The Star Inn, at Crowlas, has had the biggest impact on me, down here in Cornwall.. Elsewhere, there’s a noticeable high turnover of tenants in the big pubco venues, even more than usual, while St Austell Brewery – the biggest of the independent pub owners down here – is noticeably premiumising, selling nine of its long-time sites to Red Oak Taverns in 2023…

The Star aside, the long-standing popular freehouses seem to be strong, generally, such as those on the well-trodden Falmouth crawl. Even towns previously known as decent pub deserts in the past, such as St Ives, now have the likes of the Pilchard Press Alehouse micropub and locally owned Beer and Bird and, for a ‘proper job’ Belgian experience, Bier Huis Grand Café.. Also on the rise are excellent taprooms, such as the beautifully appointed St Ives Brewery, in Hayle, and newly-opened Mason’s, in Threemilestone, run by former Driftwood Spars head brewer, Mike Mason.

Three places worth drinking in St Ives does indeed represent a significant change, and suggests that change is not confined to big cities, or to the South East of England.

So, a mixed picture all round.

Can you afford to drink beer in a pub or bar?

“If you are skint, there is an acceptable drinking establishment within walking distance which sells decent beer at ‘bargain’ prices.”

In 2013 we were anxious about beer becoming the preserve of the wealthy, and pubs pricing out drinkers altogether. And we had Wetherspoon pubs in mind, of course. In cultural terms, they have their pluses and their minuses, but there’s no denying that they sell beer at a much lower price compared to the rest of the market.

Affordability feels like one area where, a decade on, the needle has moved in the wrong direction. Between Brexit, COVID-19 and war in Ukraine, the UK has been dealing with a prolonged cost-of-living crisis.

While Wetherspoon pubs continue to open, the growth of the chain has slowed. (More on that later.) And the trend in pub closures (see above) tends to affect those in poorer, more price-conscious neighbourhoods.

But wait, let’s look at some hard facts.

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) the average price of a pint of beer in April 2014 was £3.36. In April 2024 it had reached £4.75, with a notable lurch upwards from January 2022. A 41% increase sounds pretty hefty, doesn’t it?

Figures from the same source show that in the same period (give or take) total weekly earnings increased by around 45%. So what’s the problem?

Of course it’s not as simple as getting your pay packet and heading to the pub to spend it. House prices have increased by around 55%, for example. And there’s a significant difference in average earnings between the South East of England and, say, Bradford, or Birkenhead, in the North.

But, still, data from the NHS shows that alcohol has, overall, become more affordable in the past decade.

You might be thinking, hold on, this doesn’t match my experience at all. Here’s what we think is going on:

1. If you’re not fussy, booze has become more affordable.
2. If you are fussy, decent beer has become more expensive.

As we wrote in 2014:

The last fifty years have seen the monolith that was beer split in two. On one side are the mass-produced monopoly beers (to borrow a real ale Campaign slogan), and on the other, what Michael Jackson sometimes used to call “beers of character”.

Can you get to a craft beer bar?

“If you fancy something special, there is a pub or bar within reach on public transport (WRPT) which sells imports and ‘craft beer’.”

When we came up with this criterion in 2013 we definitely worded it with small towns in mind. Of course you can’t expect everywhere to have its own branch of The Rake – but it’s not unreasonable to expect to find one at the end of a bus or train route. That is, in cities and bigger towns.

Visiting Bristol in the Christmas of 2013, as we were putting the finishing touches to Brew Britannia, we were astonished to find multiple new craft beer outlets on a single short thoroughfare – King Street. This experience informed the prologue for the book.

It wasn’t just cities, though, and craft beer bars began to open in surprising places.

For example, Newton Abbot, a small town in Devon with a population of around 26,000, gained The Teign Cellars, which opened in 2013. Truro in Cornwall (population c.21,000) had Sonder, which opened in 2016.

Meanwhile, existing operators like North Bar and BrewDog began expanding into places like Harrogate (population c.75,000) and Inverurie (population c.15,000).

By 2020 if it wasn’t quite the case that everywhere had a craft beer bar you could at least say that the journeys to get to them had become shorter, with fewer changes.

The urge behind them sometimes felt like wishful thinking, though. When we visited The Teign Cellars we always found it rather quiet, while Sonder looked like a BrewDog bar but didn’t quite have the beer range to back it up.

Then along came the pandemic, putting many of these smaller, more local craft beer venues under extreme pressure.

Katie Mather and her husband Tom opened Corto in Clitheroe, Lancashire, in 2019. In an email she said:

I was amazed by the disconnect between the full support we received from our locals and regular customers, and the difficulties we faced in almost every aspect of our operation. The reason we closed down is simple – we couldn’t afford to stay open, and we will be paying off debts accrued from the business for a long while to come. Energy prices were the deciding factor. They shut our door for good. But there were also rising costs throughout the industry, from the cost of food and basic products like cleaning sprays and toilet roll, to the cost of CO2 gas and the beer itself.

Everyone in our supply chain was suffering from rising costs of raw materials and energy, and we had to pass that cost onto our customers, and sink some of it ourselves to keep people coming through the door. The combination of people’s earnings not reaching as far as they once did due to their own steeply increasing mortgage-food-energy bills, and our own costs rising, meant fewer customers buying fewer drinks, and there was no support available for small, independent businesses to lean on during these difficult times…

As much as we would have loved to have kept our lovely, friendly, welcoming, special bar open for the wonderful people we came to know as friends, the stress of getting further away from solvent took its toll and that was that. Nine months later I’m just about well again.

Corto closed in 2023, as did The Teign Cellars, while Sonder shut earlier, in 2019. Hand Bar in Falmouth, Cornwall, closed at the start of 2020 – before the pandemic. We could probably go on.

Christian Townsley is one of the founders of North Bar in Leeds, generally recognised as the first of what we now recognise as craft beer bars in the UK.

We interviewed him and his business partner, John Gyngell, back in 2013 for Brew Britannia.

Catching up by email in 2024, Townsley said::

Covid struck and had a massive impact. At North Brewing, the ultimate and devastating effect was administration, and we’re seeing more breweries go through that. Covid loan repayments with rising interest rates, an unsupportive high street bank and many other pressures; cost of living crisis, increased prices of energy, labour, grain and transport as well as Brexit, rendered our cashflow unmanageable without significant investment to give us a little time to grow the business. Many will be in a similar position.

It’s not all bad news, of course. For example, Vessel, a craft beer that opened in a suburb of Plymouth, has been, perhaps, a surprising survivor.

And something interesting is happening: craft beer bars, as a category, are merging with micropubs.

Is The Barking Cat Alehouse in Poole, Dorset, a micropub, or a craft beer bar? What about The Cockleshell in Saltash, Cornwall? Both have bottled beer and keg beer alongside a range of cask ales.

Handled badly, this could feel like compromising the offer but, in practice, it’s more like spreading your bets.

Is there real choice and variety?

“The nearest town/city centre has a range of pubs serving different demographics, and offering between them a range of locally-produced beers alongside national brands.”

When we came up with this we were trying to capture the importance of variety. A beer culture that only has one type of venue doesn’t feel healthy, even if they happen to be the type of venue you prefer.

And, in fact, most of us want different things at different times, or even different things throughout a single pub crawl.

Looking at Bristol, things feel healthier than ever on this front. In 2014 there were mostly traditional pubs and a few new craft beer bars. Now there are also:

• micropubs
• taprooms
• lager specialists
• a couple of Belgian beer bars

We can easily find beers from Bristol breweries like Good Chemistry and Lost & Grounded, as well as from nearby breweries like Butcombe and Cheddar. 

We’ve found this experience replicated in places like Manchester and Sheffield, too.

When we wrote Brew Britannia we took note of Birmingham as somewhere that seemed to be lagging behind in the beer boom. A year later, in our follow-up essay ‘The Good, the Bad and the Murky’, we said:

With the arrival of the much-lauded Cloudwater among others, 2014-16 appears to be Manchester’s moment. Perhaps Birmingham will be next? Depending on which list you consult, Britain’s second biggest city has only five or six active breweries, none of them of the post-BrewDog school, which suggests there might still be at least some territory waiting to be seized.

And a few years after that, we were still only able to count 13 breweries operating in Birmingham.

We asked Dan Brown, one of the organisers of the Birmingham Beer Bash craft beer festival which ran from 2013 to 2016, whether he felt Birmingham had finally caught up. He replied:

From my perspective, things have definitely improved [in Birmingham] in the last ten years. We now have some lovely craft breweries, e.g. Burning Soul, Glasshouse, Leviathan, Halton Turner, and Attic (plus others)… We still have our amazing beer shops in South Birmingham and a few emerging retailers in other areas…

I also think we now have a much stronger bar and pub scene, albeit with a few ups and downs along the way. Places like the Colmore, Kilder, The Wolf, 1000 Trades, Cork and Cage, The Wildcat Tap, Cask and Craft, and Hop and Scotch have all appeared in the last ten years; and distinct ‘scenes’ have formed in areas such as Kings Heath, Stirchley, Jewellery Quarter and Digbeth…

The old cask spots (such as The Wellington) are mostly still powering on, plus craft pioneers Cherry Reds, and the ‘early adopters’ which were among the first to serve craft beer – The Victoria, The Post Office Vaults, Tilt, The Craven Arms…

There have been some casualties… But the scene undoubtedly has more depth now, with better beer ranges at a much wider set of locations… Does our scene feel as strong as other cities? I’m probably not cosmopolitan enough to say, but I do think it might take longer to tick off all the hotspots in Bristol compared to Brum. I asked a friend what he thought we were missing and he said an elite lager brewery – he’s not wrong.

Balance will always be difficult to maintain. It’s a wobbly see-saw with lots of variables.

But, on the whole, it feels as if beer culture is healthier in terms of variety than it’s been in years.

Is your local big-tower brewery still going strong?

“There is a well-established family/regional brewery” was a criterion we identified in our original healthy beer culture post back in 2013, having in mind the need to balance innovation and tradition.

Since then, we’ve fretted about this subject on more than one occasion:

In his 1973 book The Beer Drinker’s Companion Frank Baillie listed 88 ‘Regional (Independent) Brewers’, from Adnams to Young & Co. We’ve just reviewed that list (only quickly, mind) and realised that, in the last 40+ years, something like another 47 of that number has been lost.

In recent years we’ve seen:

• Charles Wells exit brewing (brands now owned by Carslberg Marston’s)
• Fuller’s sell to Asahi (still brewing)
• Adnams call in advisers after a period of serious losses (still brewing)

The reputations of the remaining family brewers seem fragile. We often forget that, say, Wadworth and Arkell’s even exist until we see their beers on a bar counter. And we very rarely hear anyone enthusing about them.

On the flipside, Harvey’s and Batham’s are two examples of breweries which seem to have won the hearts of modern beer geeks and entered the pantheon of cult beers.

There are also newer breweries which have been around long enough that they’re starting to feel like the Victorian family breweries of old. Butcombe, for example, was founded in 1978, but feels as if it’s existed forever. It has an ever-growing tied estate in and around Bristol and tends to brew (very good) traditional styles.

Thornbridge is another brewery that might be going the same way – and, indeed, when we interviewed co-founder Simon Webster back in 2013, he said they wanted to create a multi-generational business.

“We still very much see ourselves that way and often talk of it,” he told us by email. “My son was 5 years old then and now he is doing GCSEs at school with the aim that he wants to join the business in a few years.”

Have new breweries continued to open – and are they any good?

Our list of healthy culture signifiers was locked in time and included “There are several breweries founded since 1975” and “There is at least one brewery founded since 2005”.

The point was, really, that a healthy scene is not stagnant, and is multi-generational.

What we didn’t foresee was the absolute explosion in brewery numbers in the past decade.

Though new breweries were appearing, and it was clear a boom was underway, everyone expected an imminent crash.

Instead, the graph looks like this:

As we were writing Brew Britannia the number was hovering around 1,000 and then doubled in the decade that followed.

What that meant, in practice, was that new breweries began to far outnumber those founded in the microbrewery boom of the 1970s and 1980s.

We’re going to keep reaching for Bristol as an example because, well, it’s right there in front of us. Its current line-up of breweries looks something like this:

Brewery	Year founded
Butcombe	1978
Bath Ales (St Austell)	1995
Zero Degrees	2004
Bristol Beer Factory	2004
Arbor Ales	2007
Moor	2007
Ashley Down	2011
Wiper & True	2012
New Bristol Brewery	2013
Left Handed Giant	2015
Good Chemistry	2015
Lost & Grounded	2016
Tapestry	2016
Fierce & Noble	2017
Basement Beer	2019
Little Martha	2021
On Point	2022

Now we look at it, though, this does seem fairly healthy. Breweries open, they give it a go, they disappear – and the strongest survive.

For 40+ years in the case of Butcombe, 20 years in the case of Bristol Beer Factory, and more than a decade in the case of Wiper & True. All three of whom seem to be expanding rapidly today.

Variety versus homogeneity

In 2013 we suggested that a healthy beer culture included “a regional speciality — a beer people ‘must drink’ when they visit”.

From our perspective in Penzance, of course, we were thinking of Blue Anchor Spingo, but also of the milds of the Midlands.

Agonising over the increasing homogeneity of British beer is an ancient pastime connected with industrialisation, consolidation and, eventually, the birth of the ‘national brand’.

Resistance to the imposition of Watney’s Red Barrel across Britain was one of the triggers for the founding of the Campaign for Real Ale back in 1971.

Everything is lager these days. Everything is golden ale. Everything is nitrokeg. Everything is twiggy brown cask ale. Trends come and go, and certain styles will dominate, but is there still room for local character?

In the 2010s it was the rise of international craft beer style that had people worried. All the bars and taprooms began to look the same, and all the breweries were trying to make the perfect IPA, inspired by a handful of American originals. We called this ‘Craftonia’.

The thing is, from where we were sitting, this movement did seem to lead to the wider availability of a wider range of beer styles. Not only IPAs and sour beers but also, say, German-style Weizen, or Vienna lager and even dark mild.

Justin Hawke, who runs Moor Beer in Bristol, argues that the past decade was one in which experimentation ran wild, but that we’re now returning to a more sensible level of variety:

I’m very pleased to see the direction moving away from… novel products, which can only be tasted in very small measures, back to what beer has always been – a social beverage traditionally made from 4 ingredients (a malted grain, a bittering agent, water and yeast), of modest alcohol level, designed be drunk in large measures, preferably in the physical company of others – typically a pub!

We hear this every week from trade customers and consumers now, where it’s gotten back to being about consistently high quality, reliable, trusted beers with great flavour, balance and drinkability, both ales (cask and keg) and lagers.

It’s great that there was a decade of innovation and experimentation but it can be safely said that most of those were long term failures, or novelty beverages that will only remain on the periphery of peoples’ drinking repertoires. At the end of the day, people mostly want a great Bitter, Lager, Stout or IPA (hoppy beer) now. We’re lucky that many are more widely available than before.

I’m happy that the 21st century beer culture moved out of its teenage rebellion stage, which was necessary, and is settling down to become a much more considered adult, but one that still appreciates the fun and playfulness of youth.

By way of a counterpoint, Christian Townsley of North Bar says:

Since the pandemic, it seems ‘big beer’ has woken up and is fighting back against the market share that craft was gaining…

How do the smaller breweries challenge? Ultimately, by offering more competitively priced products. That sounds great for the consumer, but I believe it’s strangling the innovation from the sector as small breweries have to work incredibly hard for margin and so cheaper core beers have become a focus and brewers are looking for ways of reducing their cost of production and their access to the market…

[The] net effect is beer that’s cheaper to produce but less flavoursome overall… [An] easy win for a hospitality operator is to seek margin in volume products such as house lager or pale ale.

As for the local specialty thing… Well, that never really happened. Probably because, if we’re honest, that boat had already sailed way more than a decade ago, probably before World War II.

Perhaps we hoped that by stating this as a sign of a healthy beer culture we’d prompt some brewers to dig into local brewing records and produce Cornish swanky, or West Country vatted ale.

At least the dry Mancunian pale ale derived from Boddington’s is ‘a thing’ in 2024, with multiple takes available from various breweries. That feels like a victory of sorts.

One thing we do miss is American beer. In the early days of this blog we’d schlep for miles to get to bars with Goose Island IPA and Anchor Liberty in the fridge.

Nowadays, who would bother importing beers like that when local breweries are making similar beers that can be sold cheaper, and fresher?

Where do you buy your bottles and cans?

“There is an independent off licence (‘bottle shop’) within reach on public transport.”

Just as in every other area of UK craft beer, the 2010s saw a boom in the number of specialist beer shops.

Bristol, for example, gained several bottle shops including Alpha, Bottles & Books and Beer Necessities.

Even more interestingly, perhaps, Pats News & Booze, one of our local corner shops, started selling craft beer in 2019 and now has fridges full of colourful cans of enticing fruit sours and pastry stouts.

Exciting as this seemed to consumers, it meant many found themselves instantly facing stiff competition, as Phil Hardy, founder of Otter’s Tears in Burslem, Staffordshire, explained in an email:

Opening in 2015… was more of a challenge than I expected. There was nothing like it in the area at the time but before the six months’ planning, licensing and preparation was over, I was already the third new specialist beer venue within five miles… that continued to grow and, despite what folks may think, pricey special beer was and perhaps still is niche, and there’s only so much pie to go around. People would be all over social media, full of praise of my having the best range in the area, but be still shopping elsewhere.

Bottle shops arguably have it tougher than pubs being forced to compete more directly with supermarkets. A few years ago, we heard the owner of a bottle shop in Bristol sigh deeply when a customer told him how much Tesco was charging for bottles of Duvel: “I don’t know why I bother…”

Phil Hardy expanded on the challenge of competing with supermarkets in his email:

I used to have a massive bee in my bonnet about supermarkets and how they were killing independent shops, but of course supermarkets are fickle and now we see plenty of once supermarket-supporting brands being dropped and left seemingly in the lurch, replaced by Brewdog and Co. I now buy my personal drinking supplies of St Bernardus from Tesco, though, as it costs pennies more than I pay wholesale. If you can’t beat em, join em.

Another challenge is that during the pandemic many breweries worked out how to sell their beer directly to customers by mail order, cutting shops out of the equation. And they haven’t stopped. Phil Hardy again:

Direct online sales have changed the marketplace massively…  and although it’s true not everyone wants a full case of beer from a single brewery, folks want the cheapest option in the main. I do recall more than once, customers coming into the shop with a case from Brewery X collected from the local courier depot tucked under one arm, popping in to buy a single can [from me]… Then of course you have the eight million ‘unique’ online beer subscription and/or discounters in recent times.

As it happens, at the moment we emailed Phil in June 2024, he was in the process of winding up Otter’s Tears for good. He closed the bricks-and-mortar shop in 2021 and went online as what he describes as “an expensive hobby”.

At the same time, many of the shops founded in the heat of the craft beer boom are still with us, perhaps to the surprise of their owners. Hops + Craft, for example, opened in Exeter in 2015, and is still trading.

As with craft beer bars versus micropubs, there’s also blurring and blending underway, in bottle shops’ favour.

Most of the Bristol bottle shops listed above also have tables at which you can drink while you watch others walk in, load up tote bags with cans, and wander out again.

Is homebrewing still a thing and does it matter?

When we specified “There is a shop selling home brewing supplies…” as one of our healthy beer culture criteria we were home brewers ourselves.

That was partly because if we wanted to drink exotic or historic styles making them ourselves was a relatively easy option.

Nowadays, though, we’re out of touch with the scene. Is there still a pipeline from home brewing into the founding of craft breweries? We emailed Andy Parker, founder of Elusive Brewing and author of CAMRA’s Essential Home Brewing, for his view:

Home brewing absolutely boomed during lockdown and whilst it’s fair to say some of that interest has waned, I think overall the hobby is in a good place. There are more competitions, clubs and suppliers than ever before and club membership numbers are strong.

What has definitely happened though is a move away from specific social apps and ways of engaging in favour of others. The home brewing Facebook community is very strong but I see next to nothing on X (Twitter) these days.

Clubs who hold (or held) physical meetups have benefitted from the Zoom era and are able to engage with more members with better frequency. Some have fully reverted to physical meetings, especially those with city locations – mostly London and Manchester which are seemingly the two home-brewing strongholds. Whereas others have kept things online, recognising that life post-pandemic is pretty different.

If we wanted to take up home brewing again, starting this weekend, how hard would it be?

Our local branch of budget home and hardware store The Range has a selection of basic brewing kit and ingredients, for starters.

There’s a home brewing supply shop on Gloucester Road, founded in 1983, although that seems to be turning into a micropub.

And there’s another specialist out in Cheddar which, if we had a car, we could get to fairly easily.

Let’s be honest, though – we’d probably end up ordering kit online. Which feels to us pretty similar to the state of play in 2014.

What’s happened to beer festivals?

“There is at least one beer festival in the region.”

2024 is an interesting year to be asking about beer festivals because several formerly regular fixtures in the calendar are missing.

There will be no CAMRA Great British Beer Festival this August with the organisation citing “complications with venue hire”. That comes not long after the two-year gap during the pandemic.

The first Independent Manchester Beer Convention took place in 2012 and ran for more than a decade, with the expected pause in 2020-21. But this year, it isn’t happening. The team behind IMBC, AKA IndyManBeerCon, didn’t give a reason but the cost of living crisis and inflation seem to be the likely culprits.

These feel like significant signals, but are they? Festivals are expensive and difficult to run and it should perhaps be no surprise when those organising them decide they’ve done their bit. When the Birmingham Beer Bash wound up after 2016 it was sad news but didn’t presage a total collapse of the ‘scene’.

The news about GBFF might be more significant in what it says about CAMRA. For a long time, and certainly when we wrote Brew Britannia, the story was that membership was constantly climbing. When it reached 150,000 in 2013 it was big news. It has since dipped again. If not an organisation in trouble, exactly, it no longer feels quite the powerhouse it once was.

But back to that original point: is there at least one beer festival in your region? From where we’re sitting, there seem to be more than ever. In Bristol this year we’ve had, or have upcoming:

• the Bristol Craft Beer Festival (June)
• the Bristol Craft Brew Festival (August)
• the CAMRA Bristol beer and cider festival (November)

The organiser of the first festival listed above, Craft Brew Festival™, is also running festivals in Liverpool, Birmingham, Swansea, Sheffield and Manchester. (Disclosure: weirdly, the person behind it also happens to be married to one of Ray’s day-job colleagues.)

And the second festival is organised by We Are Beer Limited, with events also planned for London and Manchester.

So, these big cities are well served, but what about, say (sticks pin in map) Chippenham? That had a CAMRA festival in April.

Or (sticks pin again) Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex? The Adur district, in which Shoreham sits, has Yapton Beerex, and there are a bunch of smaller pub-specific beer festivals in Shoreham itself.

Beer festivals haven’t gone anywhere, then, even if their organisation might now rest in the hands of new national promoters, and local CAMRA branches.

Micropub numbers

In both Brew Britannia and 20th Century Pub we identified some interesting numbers to keep an eye on.

Micropubs, for example, seemed very much on the march in 2017. At that point around 300 had opened in a little over a decade. The founder of the movement, Martyn Hillier, was convinced there would be thousands if that rate of growth was maintained.

It’s hard to find an exact number but one source suggests there are now around 900 across the UK.

And we know that Bristol alone has five, arguably six if you count Bruhaha, which feels more like a craft beer bar.

Even Pewsey in Wiltshire, population 4,000, has one.

If not a revolution, it certainly feels as if boozers in old shops have become a fixed part of the landscape. And they’re often the best pubs in town.

Beer in supermarkets

Supermarkets are another indicator of the place beer has in people’s hearts.

For years, beer geeks have argued over this. On the one hand, good beer in the supermarket is a sign of mainstream acceptance. On the other hand, it puts independent specialists under pressure on prices.

Either way, a visit to a supermarket in 2024 reveals a few major changes in the past decade. First, the selection of ‘premium bottled ales’ (PBAs) is likely to be smaller.

Secondly, the range of craft beer in cans is likely to be much, much bigger. Our local Sainsbury’s has a wall of them from breweries like BrewDog, Northern Monk and Tiny Rebel. 

And thirdly, there’s likely to be a far wider range of non-alcoholic beers, in a wider range of styles.

Craft beer superstars

Now, here’s a funny one: remember the United Craft Brewers? Between the publication of Brew Britannia in 2014 and the writing of ‘The good, the bad and the murky’ in 2015, a bloc of commercially successful craft brewers was formed. It included:

• Beavertown
• BrewDog
• Camden Town
• Magic Rock

As we wrote at that time:

Regardless of its success, the confidence of the founders of UCB in founding an entirely new organisation is perhaps a sign that Britain has an emerging class of young brewers who are the most likely to follow the path set by Sierra Nevada in the US, which is now so big that it operates across multiple sites in the US and has a vast fleet of trucks to service them.

What actually happened in the years that followed was that Camden was bought by AB-InBev, Beavertown was acquired by Heineken, and Magic Rock was bought by Lion. (Which later released it again.)

As for BrewDog, it never quite sold up, though a 22% chunk of the business was sold to a San Francisco-based private equity firm in 2017.

More to the point, the various controversies around the brewery that we began to record in Brew Britannia continued to pile up, and intensify in toxicity.

The list now includes accusations of bullying and sexual harassment, as reported in a BBC podcast and documentary, and arguable negligence in the management of one of its flagship bars.

Putting all that aside, certain breweries that were big players in the craft beer scene of the 2000s and 2010s are definitely no longer cool.

We’d go as far as to say that Beavertown Neck Oil, Camden Hells and BrewDog Punk IPA have a similar status to, say, Greene King IPA in 2014. “Have they got anything good on?” “Nah, just the usual big brewery stuff…”

No bar that wants to signal serious credibility to beer geeks will have these beers on sale. But plenty of ordinary pubs that want to broaden their offer will. At a system level, this is what people wanted: for non-specialist pubs to have, when you really boil it down, some properly hoppy beers.

“The likes of North Brewing simply can’t compete on pricing,” says Christian Townsley, co-founder of North, “hence the dominance of brands such as Beavertown, Camden, SALT…”

The Wetherspoon situation

We mentioned Wetherspoon’s in passing in Brew Britannia, in the context of the mainstreaming of real ale. We dedicated an entire chapter to the chain in 20th Century Pub, based in part on an interview with Wetherspoon boss Tim Martin.

Then, we observed its continuing, apparently unstoppable expansion. Since then there has actually been a small retraction in the overall number of pubs, down from 955 in 2015 to 814 in March 2024.

Tim Martin talks about a “slow three-year slog” to recover from the effects of the pandemic and still has an ambition to build the chain to 1,000 pubs.

From our observations of a couple that have closed that we knew, our conclusion is that if a Wetherspoon pub is not pretty consistently rammed with customers then it will get rationalised out of the estate, no doubt reflecting the very narrow margins within which Wetherspoon operates.

We observed on our last visit to a Wetherspoon pub, on a busy Saturday afternoon, that the range and price of ale was still impressive.

Thornbridge Jaipur was on, for example, at less than £3 a pint. However, the building was looking fairly shabby and there clearly weren’t enough staff to keep the drinks coming, or clear and clean the tables.

Those Wetherspoon exclusive American craft beers that got people so excited back in 2014 have disappeared, too, along most of the more interesting bottled beers from the EU.

We’ve posted before about the position of Wetherspoon pubs and their effect on others nearby. Does a Wetherspoon pub steal business and depress the local market overall? Or do they liven up areas which already lack pubs, or decent pubs?

We can name several places where we would rate the Wetherspoon as one of the better drinking options in town, or in a particular suburb. And that’s without us being particularly price sensitive.

It’s hard to argue that the dominance of a single pub chain speaks to a healthy beer or pub culture. It feels more like a symptom of an underlying sickness – whatever you think of the pubs themselves.

The health of the cask ale market

Like many others, we worry about cask ale.

On the surface, all seems well. If anything, it feels easier to find reliably good pints of cask ale than ever, and it’s been a long time since we were served a glass of vinegar. 

But cask does seem increasingly to be concentrated in specialist pubs, as a premium product for enthusiasts, rather than an everyday drink. And even some of those cask specialists have reduced their offer with fewer pumps in action.

Behind the scenes, we also hear stories of decreasing volume, and of breweries increasingly shipping pins (4.5 gallons) instead of firkins (9 gallons).

John Keeling, former head brewer at Fuller’s, recently wrote a piece for the Brewer’s Journal with the dramatic headline “Cask beer is dead – enjoy the wake”:

In my travels up and down the country I can confirm that most family brewers who are the backbone of cask beer are indeed reporting a decline in sales. I don’t think this is a good thing… Indeed, cask beer sales are now less than 9% of all draught beer sales and around 4% of total beer sales… I have said repeatedly that cask in the future will be brewed by specialist brewers for specialist pubs to be consumed by beer drinking specialists… We are probably there now. Is this a bad thing? Well I’m ok but there won’t be any more new drinkers of cask.

But there may be reasons for optimism yet. Jules Gray runs Hop Hideout, an independent craft beer shop in Sheffield – a notably cask-loving city. She says: “British cask ale is being loved once again – though I never fell out of love with it and always saw it as craft beer… Now you have the likes of Kernel, Deya and Verdant doing cask.”

In recent years, we’ve been particularly impressed by the cask output of London brewery Five Points, whose best bitter and porter seem to get better every time we taste them.

Yes, but how does our beer culture feel in 2024?

Let’s step back and ask the question again: do you think our beer culture is in a better place in 2024 than in 2014?

We asked a bunch of people this question by email and got some fascinating, thoughtful replies.

Justin Hawke, owner of Moor Beer in Bristol, said:

I believe that British beer culture is in a better place now than in 2014. I put this down to a much wider availability of decent beer in most hospitality and retail settings, a better appreciation by the general public of beer styles, and battle lines softening between die hard cask versus keg drinkers. In short, it’s more about better tasting beer in more places in various styles.

But from his perspective, there are problems:

While the overall direction of travel is good, many things have gotten worse and needed addressing. During the last decade the interest around beer morphed from being about the liquid itself, and the setting in which it was drunk, to a lifestyle trend encompassing a lot of virtue signalling and pleas for attention. It wasn’t about the liquid anymore, it was about how people were seen interacting with it and how they wanted to use it as a platform to push agendas. You can see this very clearly on platforms such as Instagram and Untappd, where it was more important to visualise and communicate the experience, alongside a personal message…

That in turn led to old school visual cues being turned radically on their heads. For instance, instead of “That’s an amazing pint because it’s gin bright” (which I never agreed with) the way to garner cool-points became increasingly “Wow, look how murky that is, and it’s blue!” Artificial ingredients and methods had become the trend, leading much of the category to become alcopops more so than what anyone should rightly describe as beer.  When the person who brought hazy beer to the UK is telling you that I consider most ‘hazy’ beer produced these days (I specifically say produced rather than brewed) is there to shock more than consume, you know the pendulum has swung too far.

Last month, we also interviewed Brett Ellis, who we last spoke to not long after he had founded the Wild Beer Co with Andrew Cooper in 2012.

Wild Beer had its ups and downs, including controversy over a round of crowdfunding for a brewery that never got built, before going into administration in 2022. It was acquired by Curious Brewery in 2023, which was in turn acquired by St Peter’s. Ellis was made redundant in December last year.

It’s clear the Wild Beer Co experience was bruising for him, and remains a sensitive topic.

As a reflective character who prides himself on being a “positive person” he is still able to identify ways things have improved in the past decade.

His perspective is interesting because it reveals some of the less glamorous work that’s been going on to build the infrastructure necessary for craft beer to thrive:

When we started.. the infrastructure for an independent brewery to sell kegged beer just wasn’t there… To keg beer, you had to buy small bottles of CO2… You had to either spend close to £100,000 on keg-filling equipment or, like, MacGyver your way, taking apart a keg coupler and turning it into a keg filler. You had to make a lot of your own equipment and pubs didn’t understand how to clean their own lines, let alone change the coupler… Those companies that sell CO2, they didn’t sell them in the one-ton volumes that they would sell them to us later on for industrial use. It was for hospitality… Flash forward to today, you can set up a brewery and easily buy from an industrial sales rep who understands food production and not just hospitality…

Fruit suppliers were like, “Well, you want to buy 20 kilos of puree? We only usually sell hundreds of kilos to Yeo Valley or someone else. We don’t sell to breweries yet.”

So every part of the beer industry today wasn’t there before. All of that had to get built out and realised… I think there’s a really cool conversation there about what exists now, what jobs have been created now… like account manager or business for small breweries, CO2, or innovation around packaging equipment for breweries.

David Jesudason, author of Desi Pubs has recently invested a lot of time and energy into investigating workers’ rights in hospitality, and at BrewDog in particular. It’s no surprise then, perhaps, that his response to the question of whether we’re in a better or worse place focuses there:

Since 2014, the way frontline hospitality workers have been treated has got substantially worse. Wages in real terms have decreased, as have standards of living, while the costs to just simply survive have increased hugely every year…

At large pub companies and breweries, such as BrewDog, adopting a growth-based model has seen wages in real terms decrease while staff have to deal with increased demand and more abuse from customers. The owner of a large craft brewery in Bristol – who does pay and treats his staff very well – said that his employees were left traumatised by the way drunken people acted when Covid restrictions were eased: “It was as if the world had forgotten how to behave.” He instigated measures to ease anxiety and mental health concerns, but other companies aren’t sympathetic and adopt an unspoken ‘profits before people’ philosophy…

Jules Gray of Hop Hideout in Sheffield immediately focused on the meaning of ‘culture’ in our question – who is included in that culture, and who is not?

The exuberance of the craft beer scene accepted me to a degree in my childless state in my thirties, but hasn’t seemed to grow along with me. Now, with a small child, I’m a bore, and a chore.

So many beer places don’t have baby changing (or disabled) facilities, and it’s a challenge to even manage to get through the door with a pram. I’ve certainly noticed that in these past couple of years. Lots of places that would take my money before I had a child now don’t welcome me.

There’s a repetitive generally negative kids-in-pubs topic which goes around regularly on social media which I find so disheartening.

So I’m in a strange limbo. Places that used to be my community and happy place are now tinged with sadness and challenges…

Beer culture does have a community problem, and it’s been very difficult to have constructive nuanced conversations around this. It is a very white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, childless, dominated space still. And that’s who is marketed to. There’s tiny pockets of diversity happening, yet the support for those driving it forward positively isn’t always there, or not enough, and they’re also expected to do all the lifting and shifting in the change.

Katie Mather, who we quoted earlier talking about her experience running a bar in Clitheroe, wonders whether it is possible to disentangle the objective truth from one’s own personal change over the course of a decade:

In many ways it’s better [in 2024 than in 2014] – there is more choice, there is more awareness of business practices, how staff are treated, how women and minorities are treated within the scene itself. But awareness isn’t necessarily positive action, and there’s still a long way to go if we’re looking to enjoy a beer culture that’s as welcoming and accepting and accessible as we all say we would like.

There’s also the disconnect between industry and drinkers when it comes to pricing and availability. In industry we know that times are extremely difficult. There are many beer drinkers out there who still believe the rising price of a pint is down to the simple fact that drinkers are being shafted by brewers and pubs who are out to make unbelievable profits. If only that was the case! We wouldn’t have so many pubs and breweries shutting down if it was!

Maybe beer culture was a simpler place in 2014, back then I was merely a drinker and didn’t even have a blog then, I don’t think. If I remember it being simpler and more pleasant, that’s perhaps only because I had the privilege of blissful ignorance. In 2024, at least we have the knowledge to understand what needs to change, and many hardworking people have put in a lot of effort to get things moving in the right direction.

Andy Parker of Elusive Brewing, who we quoted above talking about homebrewing, gave a careful response to the question:

I’ve thought long and hard about this but overall I’d say better. When I think back to 2014 there was a lot of buzz around the burgeoning ‘craft’ scene and some exciting new brewery openings but that was very much within what felt like a smaller bubble of consumers. I felt like there was still knowledge and respect of our heritage whereas the modern consumer is perhaps less aware of it.

Beer has reached a lot more markets since then and there’s more access to good beer across retail and hospitality (thinking beyond [off licences] and pubs). I do feel we’ve seen an erosion of our culture and history in other places, and some big name fallouts and closures following acquisitions in both the traditional and more ‘craft’ ends of the market. But how does that impact our overall culture?

It’s fair to say our culture is different to 2014 and probably better in some areas, and the same or worse in others.

Finally, seeking an outside perspective, we asked John ‘The Beer Nut’ Duffy for his views. He lives in Dublin but makes it to the UK fairly frequently. He wrote:

Maybe I’m a bit too outside for this, but I don’t see much difference in the industry between 2014 and now. The big-name micros then are now industrial-sized operations with massive distribution, but the overall shape of the beer market is the same: you still get cask from family and small brewers and a craft keg segment largely made of IPAs.

The arrival of craft keg was a massive transformation, and one for the better, I think, but that was already done and bedded in by 2014. Nothing as transformative has happened since, unless I’ve missed something really obvious. But the kinds of bars I seek out when in Britain in 2024 are the same as the ones I sought in 2014.

Regarding the culture generally, I think it’s much much improved, with the diversity of voices you get, and the lack of tolerance for bad behaviour. It’s far from perfect, but at least its problems are being recognised.

Off the fence

Having thought about this long and hard for most of the past year, showing our working in one Substack newsletter or blog post after another, we think we have an answer: our beer culture is healthier and better in 2024 than in 2014.

Only a little, though.

And only as long as you have sufficient brass in your pocket.

Sure, things felt more exciting in 2014, but that’s because:

• the baseline for quality was especially low
• change was happening fast
• we were a decade younger
• we were less jaded
• beer blogging was fresh and fun

We’ve often talked about the journey beer geeks go on from wide-eyed enthusiasm to being set in their ways and rather grumpy. That’s something real.

If you are just getting interested in beer now, it is easier than ever to explore a range of styles, from a range of producers, in a range of venues.

At the start of this post, we mentioned the divides between craft beer and cask ale, and between macro and micro, that defined the debate in 2014.

What has actually happened is that some trends have got absorbed fully into the mainstream, like IPA. We frequently hear people ask for “an IPA” in pubs, just as they might ask for lager, red wine, or a pint of bitter.

And other trends, though still niche, have gained perhaps more traction than anyone ever imagined, like sour beer and hazy beer.

Sitting in The Kings Head in Bristol on Saturday afternoon it’s interesting to see just how many passing-trade, non-beer-geek customers try sour beer, drawn in by the enticing descriptions of fruit flavours – and then stick with it.

Big national and international brewers also now include a range of ‘craft beer’ products in their ranges in the same way they were obliged to meet the new demand for lager in the late 20th century. These aren’t beers that excite us but they’re certainly a step up from beers like Worthington Creamflow.

One thing that feels really different to us, personally, is the wide availability of decent homegrown lagers.

In the early days of this blog, we’d go to Germany and have our minds blown by subtle, satisfying beers.

Then we’d come home and have to go to very specific pubs if we wanted to drink anything other than bog standard brands.

Now, breweries like Donzoko, Lost & Grounded and Utopian specialise in lager, and often make beers that give us the same feeling we get in Franconia.

If you’d told us in 2014 that we’d one day have a local taproom, and that that taproom would serve very decent Kellerbier and Helles as standard, we’d have thought you were having us on.

This post has taken several months to write. As ever, we’re incredibly grateful to our supporters on Patreon who give us the encouragement we need to spend our spare time on projects like this. You can still buy Brew Britannia in, as they say, most good bookshops. And we have copies of 20th Century Pub if you want one.