SIBA has published figures underlining that around 100 smaller breweries have closed in the last year. The rate of closure is slowing but the figure is significantly up on earlier years. There are however still over 1700 independent breweries in the UK and new ones are still appearing (which SIBA dont seem to have counted)
The issues are familiar ones including pandemic debt, business rates and a continuing cost of living crisis.
Beer prices continue to rise and despite a recent tax tweak it remains far cheaper to buy beer in a supermarket and drink it at home than to visit the pub. That is not a healthy situation if we understand the pub as being the hub of many communities.
A Guardian report has the two paragraphs below which appear consecutively
Margins in the sector have been eroded by wage and ingredient inflation in recent years, while many smaller players are still paying off loans taken to tide them through the Covid-19 pandemic.
The cost of living crisis has also made it harder for drinkers to afford craft beers, which are often more expensive because their hops and malts are often higher quality or imported.
Note that ‘wage inflation’ is an issue for breweries but the cost of living crisis means drinkers struggle to afford craft beers. There is a problem with the market here. If breweries cant afford to pay their workers a decent wage (and to be clear many have good records on this) then perhaps its not surprising that they struggle to sell beer to other workers whose employers take the same view.
The national living wage is set to rise (aged 21 and above) to £12.21. As the saying goes a rising tide floats all boats. If breweries cant afford to pay a living wage the difficult issue is whether they really have an functioning business.
Capitalism after all is a system of boom and bust. That said if as Tim Martin regularly calls for the tax regime for beer was less slanted to supermarkets and more to pubs, and the importance of pubs was related to sensible business rates matters could look very different.
There remains the key issue as the report notes over whether smaller breweries can get their beer on the bar in pubs faced with the market dominance of global big beer
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