Hop Stuff Brewery, James Yeomans, the Beerage & the Tory Party
Hop Stuff Brewery in South London has been brought out by Molson Coors leaving those who participated in crowd funding its expansion plans out of pocket.
I’ve suggested this might be the unacceptable face of craft beer.
https://kmflett.wordpress.com/2019/07/13/hop-stuff-the-unacceptable-face-of-craft-brewing/
Not necessarily related but of interest is the links that Hop Stuff’s main owner, former banker James Yeomans appears to have had with the Tory Party.
Zac Goldsmith, who lost the London Mayoral campaign to Sadiq Khan in 2016 launched his, widely criticised campaign, at Hop Stuff Brewery in 2016
Of course some Tories are very good at running businesses and some are not but it’s worth recalling that the original words ‘the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism’ were used by Tory Prime Minister Ted Heath to describe the activities of Lonrho in 1973.
The Sunday Times noted that Yeomans was not someone who could run a drink up in a crowd funded brewery (28th April) and while opinions about the quality of Hop Stuff’s beer seem to vary, the business side of things looks distinctly like drainpour.
The wider point however is that traditionally brewing and the Tory Party are linked. The Beerage was a term used to describe brewing members of the House of Lords and brewers donated money to the Tory Party. Multinational brewers are more interested in regulatory and tax environments in countries they operate in regardless to a large extent of which political party is in power. In Britain the Beerage is now regional brewers some of who still do donate to the Tories. The sums are not however particularly significant.
The interesting thing about HopStuff, apart from the bad out turn for crowdfunders, is that the new wave of craft beer is meant to be or at least promotes (thing Brewdog) a radical-ish image removed from the stuffy small ‘c’ conservative brewers of yesteryear.
Yeomans bucked the trend there but was not the best advert for doing so.
Meanwhile Molson Coors which is Canadian in origin but has a separate (if no doubt related) European wing has been associated with various right-wing causes but not with political parties.
Leave a Reply