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News, nuggets and longreads 11 May 2019: Mild, Mergers, Manchester

Header: a London pub with date.

Here’s everything around beer and pubs that seemed to us worth bookmarking in the past week, from boozelessness to buyouts.

The week’s big news is that two American breweries we’ve actually heard of, and whose beers we have actually managed to taste, are merging. That is, Boston Beer and Dogfish Head. We’ve been wondering for some time if we might see more craft-on-craft acquisitions and mergers; it’ll be interesting to see if this is the start of a wave. In the meantime, we went straight to Jeff Alworth at Beervana for commentary, as should you.

If you enjoy industry drama then do have a look at this Twitter conversation around BrewDog’s new alcohol-free Punk IPA variant initiated by a marketing agency formerly retained by the Scottish brewery:

The Mild Guy by Lily Waite/Pellicle.

For the brand new publication Pellicle Lily Waite has written about a London brewery finding space in a crowded market by focusing on an unfashionable style. Boxcar is based in Bethnal Green and run by Sam Dickison:

Whilst not necessarily the polar opposite of the New England-style beers that put Boxcar on the proverbial map, dark mild is a departure from those juicy, hazy, hoppy beers. It is, however, very much in keeping with Boxcar’s ethos.

“We’ve gone in the hoppy directions because I love those beers, but equally, I love dark mild, so I said ‘let’s do a dark mild”, he says, with a typical quiet smile.

(This kind of thing signals something interesting: mild has become a quirky minority style – a novelty, rather than an everyday beer, like Berliner Weisse or Gose.)

Detail from a 1943 advert for Lifesavers depicting fruit on a tree.

At a time when silly one-off beers with silly stuff in them has become one of the go-to moans in beer commentary, it’s refreshing to read a post which, though it starts that way, ends up talking positively about the benefits of getting to know a standard beer really well, from Joan Villar-i-Martí at Birraire:

I enjoy seeing the constant quality of Montseny IPA Aniversari, even when bought in the supermarket; my senses soared the first time I drank Espiga’s Mosaic Hops Collection in a can, a format that enhances a recipe that was already a solid. After analysing it during a guided tasting, I felt the urge to buy a whole box of Sansa, La Pirata’s Amber Ale, so tasty and smooth that it promptly disappeared.

(Flagship February feels so long ago.)

Intoxicate Lubricate Connect

For the Guardian Tony Naylor has written about why boozeless pubs don’t work:

Beyond loving the taste of beer, I also love the effects of alcohol, and for what it can do to a pub. I cherish that three-pint window where real life melts away. I love the warmth, the laughter, the life, the random, nonsensical conversations and soft-edged, jovial chaos of full pubs at peak hours. I like the din. I like the revelry. I like a bit of noise and chaos, frankly. And I like the sense of drinkers of often very different backgrounds rubbing along in mutual intoxicated tolerance. In an increasingly atomised society, there is value in that.

A map of the world.

A fascinating piece in the Economist puts AB-InBev into context as one strand in a global business that also operates 3G networks and owns the struggling Kraft Heinz conglomerate. With few costs left to be cut, and few businesses left to acquire, where do they go next? Perhaps towards acquiring Coca-Cola (we’ve heard this in the form of a rumour before) or Diageo, the article speculates. We can certainly imagine ABI fancying Guinness in its portfolio. (Article paywalled; registration required to read five articles per month for free.)

A vintage image a flat-roofed pub.
The Old Garratt c.1970 via Manchester’s Estate Pubs.

It’s always exciting when one of our favourite blogs, Manchester Estate Pubs, posts something new. This week Steve Marland shares photographs of and notes on The Old Garratt:

Time changes everything the Cream of Manchester is now a somewhat sour subject, the Old Garratt has dropped the old in favour of Ye Olden Days, a look which it clearly lacked. Modernity is now dragged up as a cut price stage set coaching house caprice, replete with lamps, black and gold lining, columns and pediments. The pub that thinks it’s a pack of John Player Specials.

And finally, a great photo of a pub we visited during research for 20th Century Pub, in the base of a tower block in north London:

https://twitter.com/visuals0und/status/1126951660914393089

For more of the same, but different, check out Alan’s blog on Thursdays and Stan Hieronymus on Monday.

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News

News, nuggets and longreads 4 May 2019: ramen, gin, kveik

A frothy glass of beer.

Here’s all the beer-related gubbins that caught our eye and seemed bookmarkworthy in the past week, from ramen amateurs to the perceived sophistication of gin.

First, though, some bits of news on the health and trajectory of specific breweries, which we expect to be including in these round-ups quite a bit in the coming months.

Northern Monk, which was one of the breweries we’d heard might be on the verge of takeover, has announced that Active Partners has taken a less than 25% stake in the company. (We’re beginning to learn the code: that probably means something like a 24.5% stake.) In their announcement, they acknowledge having batted away offers from larger breweries.

Meanwhile, in London, Redchurch seems to be undergoing some turmoil. It has apparently filed notice of intention to appoint an administrator with the civil courts, and changed ownership. (Is it us, or is the launch of crowdfunding increasingly reliable as an indicator that a brewery is either going to fold, or get sold?)

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News

News, nuggets and longreads 27 April 2019: numbers, mild, cult beer frenzy

Here’s everything that struck as as noteworthy in writing about beer and pubs in the past week, from brewery numbers to the possible decline of lager.

Like many other commentators, we’ve taken the total number of UK breweries, and the amount by which it increases each year, as an at least partially useful indicator of the vigour of the craft beer boom. According to a new report from accountancy firm UHY, that growth might finally have begun to slow:

The craft beer boom in the UK has slowed sharply in the last year with the total number of breweries increasing by just 8 versus the 390 added in prior twelve months, our research shows… The total number of UK breweries reached to 2,274 at the end of 2018, up from 1,352 five years ago… The craft beer market has become difficult for new entrants as multinational brewers continue to buy and invest the more successful “craft” breweries. The huge levels of investment that the multinationals then deploy through their “craft” subsidiaries throw up barriers of entry against other entrants. The multinationals have been attracted by the high growth rates in the craft beer market and the premium pricing they can achieve.

(This story got a bit mangled in the retelling by some news outlets which, tending to prefer stories of either total triumph or dreadful doom, reported that only eight new breweries had opened in the past year.)

Related news: the total number of pubs continues to decline at a rate equivalent to 76 closures per month, but the rate of closures is quite clearly slowing.

Another nugget of news, unfortunately from behind a paywall: financial news service MergerMarket reports that both Truman’s and Five Points are actively courting investors or partners. There’s nothing we can link to at this stage but, well, keep your eyes peeled for further news.

Weyerbacher logo.

For BrewBound Justin Kendall offers comment on the struggles of yet another early-wave American craft brewery, Weyerbacher:

Most of Weyerbacher’s financial issues stem from a 2014 expansion project that cost $2 million and included the addition of a 40-barrel brewhouse. Over the years, however, the company dealt with increased competition — particularly in the pumpkin beer category — as it struggled to grow sales and pay down debt.

“We were expecting to see double-digit growth for a number of years … and with the market saturation that happened in pumpkin and all of those other things, that just didn’t pan out,” [Josh Lampe] said.

The market saturation that happened in pumpkin! What a time to be alive.

Illustration: beer bottles.

For Drinks Retailing News Anthony Gladman has produced a fascinating piece on the struggle of independent bottle shops to attain supplies of the most sought after beers:

“Anything DIPA or hazy goes really fast,” says Dan Sandy, manager of east London craft beer store Kill The Cat. Beers from Cloudwater, Verdant and Deya are subject to fierce competition because they will draw in customers and drive sales of other beers once people are through the shop door.

“Everyone wants Deya cans but it’s not making very many,” says Jen Ferguson, co-owner of Hop Burns & Black, a craft beer retailer in south east London. “The number of Deya cans making it through to the distributors is very small.”

Another example is Nottingham brewery Neon Raptor. Alex Fitzpatrick, co-owner of Brixton bottle shop Ghost Whale, found its beers became hard to get hold of seemingly overnight. “What happened? Who pressed the button that gave it this magic rainbow aura around everything it does?”

Beer being poured, from an old advertisement.

With CAMRA’s declaration of May as the month of mild in mind, Ron Pattinson has taken a look at how beer style come in and out of favour:

When styles start to decline, it can happen surprisingly quickly. It always kicks off the same way: young drinkers don’t adopt it. Then a style begins to be associated with old men. And no-one wants to drink what granddad’s drinking… Lager sales really took off in the late 1970s. The young drinkers who adopted it back then are now around 60. How long before Lager becomes associated with old blokes?

Generic beer pumps in photocopy style.

One of the upsides to putting this round-up together slightly later than usual is that it meant we caught a post from this very morning by the Pub Curmudgeon in which the details of various regional quirks of dispense from the 1970s-90s are recalled:

But, in the 1960s and 70s, if you went in the average pub across much of the Midlands and North, you would be likely to be served your beer in an oversize glass with a thick head reaching almost to the top, whereas in the South you would get beer from a handpump with a head no more than a quarter of an inch deep, or often just a thin coating of foam on the top. It’s also worth adding that, in the South, you would often get keg beer with little or no head as well. Getting a pint a totally flat-looking beer with plenty of CO2 still dissolved in it was a touch disconcerting.

And finally, from Twitter, one of those too-neat explanations that nonetheless sort of, maybe, kind of, checks out:

For more links and commentary check out Stan Hieronymus on Monday and Alan McLeod on Thursday.

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News pubs

News, nuggets and longreads 20 April 2019: Pub Crawling, Carlsberg, Craftonia

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that caught our attention in the past week, from Leeds to low alcohol beer.

For the Guardian Dave Simpson writes about the development of the post-punk scene in Leeds in the late 1970s, which took place in pubs, with the Yorkshire Ripper as a dark background presence:

Today, with its wood and tiles and punk soundtrack, [the Fenton] is almost as it was; Gill observes that the jukebox has moved rooms. “Pre-mobile phones, you’d have to go where you knew people would be,” Mekons singer Tom Greenhalgh explains, remembering “intense political debates and insane hedonism”, and legendary scene characters such as Barry the Badge. “A huge gay guy covered in badges from Armley Socialist Worker’s party. He was rock-hard, but then he could just grab you, snog you and stick his tongue down your throat.”

Roger Protz has been writing about lager in Britain for 40 years so his commentary on where the new ‘Danish Pilsner’ Carlsberg has just launched in the UK fits in was bound to be interesting. Where others have been cautiously positive, Mr Protz essentially dismisses the beer as more the same:

I was asked for my views by Carlsberg’s London-based PR company, who sent me some samples. The bottled version said it was brewed in the UK – presumably this means the Northampton factory – while the can says “brewed in the EU”. I said this made a mockery of the new beer being called “Danish Pilsner”… I added that 3.8 per cent ABV was too low to merit being called Pilsner: the classic Pilsner Urquell is 4.4 per cent and all claims to be a Pilsner should be judged against it. I found the Carlsberg beer to be thin and lacking in aroma and flavour.

A footnote from us: we were asked to take part in market research by Heineken earlier this week, which leads us to suspect some similar post-Camden reinvention is in the pipeline there, too.

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News, Nuggets and Longreads 13 April 2019: Peroni, Pricing, Perceptions

Sign on the wall of a Belgian bar.

Here’s everything that struck us as interesting or readworthy in the past week, from notes on enamel signs to news of the CAMRA AGM.

First, a suggestion for a different way of thinking about beer from Stan Hieronymus:

What if we tasted beer in some sort of historic reverse? That is, starting with a particular type of beer as it is brewed today, and following it with previous episodes of the same beer… I ask this, and ask it this way, because the Game of Thrones returns Sunday, and like Zak Jason I didn’t start watching the series when it debuted in 2011 and haven’t since.

Enamel Orval signs.
SOURCE: Eoghan Walsh/Brussels Beer City.

At Brussels Beer City Eoghan Walsh has turned his attention to an aspect of Belgian beer culture we’ve been aware of without really thinking about – who makes all those enamel signs you see in bars?

Emaillerie Belge is the last enamel advert producer in the Low Countries, and it has been making ad panels for Belgian breweries for almost a century… The company survived a tumultuous 20th century and several flirtations with bankruptcy. Now under new management, it’s working to recapture the glory days of the enamel ad industry, betting that its small scale, custom, and high quality output can succeed against low-cost, industrial enamel producers.

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