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breweries opinion

How Does It Feel To Sell?

Maybe in 20 years time we’ll be able to sit down with Camden Town Brewery’s Jasper Cuppaidge and get him to tell us how it felt to sell to AB-InBev.

By then, we’ll also know whether the deal worked out as per the utopian vision of the public statements

We’ll be getting more capital to expand programmes like barrel-aging. You only have to look at Goose Island barrel-aging programme and you’ll see more innovation, more brands and even better beer.

…or as per the bell-tolling of the doubters, such as Keith Flett:

My guess would be that aside from accountants looking for the usual synergies they’ll leave Camden Town alone for the time being until someone not involved in the current deal appears at AB-InBev and wonders why the acquisition was made and what should be done with it.

But, for the moment, we have to look at the experience of other brewers, and entrepreneurs in other sectors, to get an idea of what might be going on behind the handshakes and the cheery press releases.

1. More Mixed Feelings

In 1988 David Bruce sold his chain of Firkin brewpubs for £8m. (That’s about £20m in today’s money.) It had always been his goal to be a millionaire by 40 which, even after paying off various bills, he more than achieved. But the cash in his pockets and the free time he’d acquired didn’t stop him fretting about what Allied-Domecq were doing to his brand. Appalled by their reckless over-stretching of the gimmick, and by its rapid plunge down-market, he even considered buying it back. He has never said ‘Selling up was the worse decision of my life’ or anything like that but, clearly, it came with some pain, and wealth certainly didn’t cure him of the itch to start and run businesses. As of 2015, has still failed to retire, despite repeated declarations of his intention to do so.

Categories
breweries london News opinion

Shades of Grey

Most people aren’t stupid and don’t think in cartoonishly simple ways.

It’s quite human to feel a little sad when a hip independent brewery like Camden Town is taken over by a multi-national, as was announced today.

Furthermore, when a brewery has built its brand on the proposition that people who buy its beer are ‘fans’ and ‘friends’, those drinkers are surely entitled to feel aggrieved when that relationship — something they have valued, for right or wrong — seems to be changing.

It is even reasonable and rational to say, ‘A fundamental quality of the product has changed so I won’t be buying it.’ That needn’t be petulant or mean-spirited — they’ll almost certainly understand why the decision has been made, probably empathise with the owners and shareholders, and wish no-one ill.

They get it, OK?

But, still, its not what they signed up for. (Literally in the case of crowd-funding investors.)

Many other consumers, however, will find their emotions at odds with their pragmatism: yes, it’s another step towards the grimness of monopoly, but, still, won’t it be nice to buy their favourite beer for a few pennies less, in more outlets?

Even the most highly sentimental boycotters might weaken when they’re faced with a can of what has become their ‘ex’ on a train, or in a provincial hotel bar.

This specific case is an interesting one, by the way: everyone kind of knew it was coming and, anyway, it’s not as if Camden ever made a big fuss about being purist about the Great Ideals of Craft Beer.

Main image adapted from ‘Brewery Tour @ Camden Brewery’ Dafydd Vaughan from Flickr, under a Creative Commons Licence.

Categories
Blogging and writing Generalisations about beer culture opinion

What Is ‘Drinkability’?

That’s a thought-provoking and funny response to (we assume) this blog post by John Keeling of Fuller’s for Craft Beer London, in which he says:

[Beer] from kegs, cans and bottles has got a lot better over the last few years, they just don’t have that ultimate drinkability. That is cask ale’s trump card: if you’re having a few, there’s no doubt that cask ale is your best option. It’s better for flavour; a 3½ percent ale won’t work on keg but it can be superb on cask. For an occasion when you’re going to have four or five pints, cask is best.

‘Drinkability’ is one of those words that some people dislike, along with ‘refreshing’, ‘smooth’ and ‘creamy’, for reasons summed up in a post by American writer Bryan Roth last year:

Every beer, by virtue of being liquid, is smooth. But to declare a beer’s sensory characteristics simply as ‘smooth’ is no better than relying on its disgraceful cousin, ‘drinkability,’ which is essentially describing a beer as drinkable because it doesn’t kill you when you consume it… ‘Smooth’ is nothing more than word vomit, digested in the chasms of the brain, spewed from our mouths and flushed down our collective consciousness, only to reappear all around us, as if some form of contagious disease so easily passed from one person to the next.

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Environmental stuff opinion pubs

Climate Change and British Beer

The Guardian today features a story about the Cantillon brewery in Brussels which, owner Jean Van Roy says, is suffering as a result of climate change:

“Ideally it must cool at between minus 3C and 8C. But climate change has been notable in the last 20 years. My grandfather 50 years ago brewed from mid-October until May – but I’ve never done that in my life, and I am in my 15th season.”

This reminded us of an exchange we had with a senior figure at one of the larger British breweries last year who said that climate change was among their biggest long-term worries.

In particular, they suggested, cask ale still relies to a great extent on naturally cool pub cellars. (And, as a result, warm summers can already be a problem for cask ale quality.) If those summers last longer, and get hotter, traditional British beer will struggle. Cellar refrigeration is already common but might become absolutely necessary, even in pubs that haven’t needed it in the past.

That’s on top of concerns over how it might affect hop farming and malting barley; a nagging sense of guilt over the amount of water used in brewing; and about the amount of energy used to ship it, and its ingredients, very often under refrigeration.

We’d be interested to hear from others involved in brewing and the pub trade: is climate change on your ‘risk register’?

Categories
opinion real ale

Why Brew Gose Instead of Mild?

https://twitter.com/PrettyBeer/status/649392005559242752

There’s a simple answer to this question: because no-one in Britain actually likes mild.

Of course that’s not quite true — a few people are obsessive about it, and quite a few others like the occasional pint for a change. In the Midlands through to the North West, it seems there are even some regular mild drinkers left.

In general, though, it’s a style that the Campaign for Real Ale has been trying to get people excited about for 40 years with little success. First wave CAMRA members prefered cult bitters; in more recent years, they’ve turned their attention to hoppy golden ales.

And many (most?) post-2005 craft beer enthusiasts think like Tony Naylor — what’s the point of it?

[Mild] as it developed in the 20th century, was a low-strength (around 3%), very-lightly hopped beer, that became a staple thirst-quencher for miners, factory workers and anyone keen to sink eight pints and still get up for their shift the next morning… Flavours… were deliberately dialled-down to an innocuous level. Even its most misty-eyed fans admit that this was a beer designed to be undemanding, easy drinking.

They’ve got a point, too: if ‘connoisseurs’ rejected Foster’s lager and Watney’s Red because they were weak, sweet, bland and fizzy, then mild’s only point of superiority is that it isn’t usually highly-carbonated. Not much of a sales pitch.

“But no-one likes Gose either!” That might well be true but, if they dislike Gose, it’s because it tastes weird, which is preferable in marketing terms to tasting bland. And, as it’s usually bottled or kegged, not that many people have to like it for it to be worth brewing or stocking. Cask mild, on the other hand, needs a few people to drink several pints a night if it’s to be any good at all.

Nor does it help that lots of milds are, regrettably, bloody awful. We do like mild (mostly, it must be said, for sentimental reasons) but even we struggle with pints of sweet bland bitter dyed black with caramel or, worse, mislabelled, watery stouts that taste like the rinsings from a dirty coffee percolator.

We’d love to see more mild around — we can go months without a taste of the stuff — but let’s not kid ourselves that, if only, say, Magic Rock would make one, it could be cool again.