Following my predictions for what would happen to the beer and pub industry in the next 20 years, I asked the question “What will happen to UK on-trade beer sales in 2011?” There were 59 responses, broken down as follows:
Grow slightly: 2 (3%)
Stay about flat: 11 (19%)
Fall by up to 5%: 12 (20%)
Fall by 5-10%: 20 (34%)
Fall by over 10%: 14 (24%)
On-trade beer sales fell by an average of 7.3% over the past three years, and I can’t see anything much different happening this year. Over half of all respondents thought it would be at least as bad, if not worse.
But, as I said in the comments to the previous post, the fact that the overall market is contracting doesn’t mean there aren’t still opportunities for specialist pubs appealing to enthusiasts. The closure of the Four Heatons has no relevance to the opening of the Port Street Beer House. The risk is, of course, that the general contraction ultimately bites the specialist operators on the bum. You can only sustain a strategy of a rising share of a shrinking market for so long.
Cue howls of Righteous indignation at the news that pregnant women have used NHS fruit and vegetable vouchers to buy cigarettes and alcohol. I can’t say it remotely surprises me that, given a near-cash equivalent, people will seek to turn it into the most readily saleable commodities. And it shows that ordinary people remain very resourceful at evading the tentacles of political correctness.
Well, my not entirely serious poll asking what people thought of “craft beer” has come to an end. There were 68 responses, broken down as follows:
A useful term for quality beer made with care: 22 (32%)
A pretentious concept invented by beer snobs: 46 (68%)
So pretty much a 2:1 split there. The subject has been done to death on various blogs, so all I’ll add is my definition given in the comments to a previous post that craft beer is “beer brewed with the deliberate intention of appealing to beer enthusiasts.” And, putting my traditionalist hat on, “craft beer” as currently understood excludes pretty much everything that CAMRA was set up to defend in 1971.
As usual, Pete Robinson, writing in The Publican, pulls no punches in a trenchant and sadly all too realistic analysis of the parlous state of the British pub trade.
There never was any demand for non-smoking pubs so the industry will never find it possible to replace it's dwindling customer base. Nor is there sufficient demand to support 40-odd thousand food-led pubs. It's market forces, plain as.
So with the trade not even campaigning for any amendment to the law we'll see our once-great pub culture wither and die over the next 10 years. At best we'll be left with a few chains of managed, town-centre food pubs-come-coffee-houses, basically Wetherspoon-clones, totaling around 12,000 in all.
Sure we'll attempt to rebuild and one day in the distant future new pubs will again be built and old one's converted back from flats, shops and Indian restaurants. But they'll just be bars and food halls, a mere parody of what once was, like those 'English Pubs' that litter the streets of Benedorm.
We'll never recapture that quintessential time-honoured character that made British pubs unique - the envy of the world. Much of that's already gone, ever since we threw open our doors to the forces of political correctness. We lost something very special the day when we allowed the State behind the bar. It's one reason why the customers have been drifting away.
Countless previous generations have cherished this trade before handing it safely down to the next. To our shame we may be the last generation to remember what a real pub was like. In years to come your own son may be writing a dissertation on how the Great British pub disappeared into the pages of history.
A feature of the old-style licensing laws was that they gave leeway for towns to permit extended lunchtime opening on market days. Leafing through the 1979 edition of the Good Beer Guide, I found a number of examples of this – all in the South Midlands, with a particular concentration in Herefordshire. In Banbury, Kington and Ross-on-Wye, pubs could open until 4 pm instead of 2.30 on Thursdays, in Ledbury until 4 pm on Tuesdays, in Leominster until 5 pm on Fridays, and in sleepy Bromyard all day on Thursdays. I remember as a student in Birmingham making a Thursday expedition by train to Banbury to take advantage of their extended hours, but I wonder to what extent these extensions were really used back then, as opposed to being a hangover from a bygone age. I doubt whether the streets of Bromyard were full of drunks at 6 pm on a Thursday.
It’s also interesting that – broadly speaking – lunchtime closing was 2.30 pm in the South and Midlands, and 3.00 pm in London and the North. A few towns such as Northampton and Worcester even had 2 pm lunchtime closing. Around here, Rochdale was unusual in still having 2.30 pm closing, whereas a few places in the South Lancs coalfield such as Atherton and Westhoughton were 3.30 pm. 3.30 or 4 pm closing seems to have been common in South Wales. Across much of the South and West of England, morning opening was 10 pm. Nowadays, few people would contemplate going in a pub for a drink before 11.30, and many pubs don’t open until noon, if that. So what was the difference in social conditions ninety years ago that meant 10 am opening would be considered reasonable or necessary as part of a measure whose overall effect was to restrict access to alcohol?
“Craft beer” is a label given by beer snobs to beer that they feel entitled to be snobbish about. Discuss...
