Carlsberg has successfully bid to takeover Britvic the soft drinks manufacturer. The deal focuses on the contract to bottle Pepsi which Carlsberg already has in some other countries. It furthers Carlsberg’s ‘beyond beer’ strategy and earlier reports suggested it would take its share of the UK drinks industry to 26%.
In terms of beer however Carlsberg is nowhere near the UK market leader. However in a shameful episode (but hardly the first of the old Beerage to do it) Marstons had agreed to sell its share of its brewing joint venture with Carlsberg to them for £206m. It ends a 180 year old brewing history of Marstons which henceforth will be a pub company.
Carlsberg’s commitment to cask beer is questionable since it has been shutting cask breweries such as Jennings, Wychwood and Ringwood. Meanwhile Marstons has been in dispute with CAMRA about selling beer that is not cask through hand pumps, The dispute has its idiosyncracies because while it can be agreed Marstons should not be doing it, it also seems to suggest that handpumps are the only way of delivering real ale. CAMRA’s earlier commitment that keykeg beer is real ale seems to have been forgotten with a more fundamentalist group in charge. Perhaps I’m wrong here and would be pleased to be proved so.
CAMRA has sought commitments from Marstons that it will allow its pubs to sell a range of cask and rightly queried what Carlsberg’s plans for cask are which may also impact on Bass whose brand ownership arrangements are complex.
I’m not sure why Carlsberg should be listening to CAMRA (Marstons is a different matter, since it in part relies on cask drinkers in its pubs) and it might be thought that its a subject for a new Government to review whether what is proposed is in fact in the public interest. Obviously Tata steel and the water industry are at the top of the Labour industrial in-tray but this deal won’t happen overnight.
Time for CAMRA to mobilise an actual campaign and to reaquaint itself with how to wins friends with and influence a Labour Government
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