As someone who brews their own and was looking in the early days to start my own brewery, I can understand why.
Beer brewing is a very expensive business these days, especially with the prices of electricity and gas. Which is extensively used in both the mashing, boil and fermentation phases.
That also not taken into account the lack of people drinking local in this country or large breweries having strangleholds on the pubs.
Plus alot of these breweries are producing poor quality beer that’s putting alot of people off.
Its worse in Northern Ireland as even when sucessful they are unable to get a license to sell from breweries and the number of pub licenses is restricted, and controlled by a few corporate interests. And dont want the competition.
Kelham Island Brewery (mentioned in the article) is being bailed out by local investors fwiw.
It’s hardly surprising considering how overly saturated the market is. I used to enjoy tasting new craft beers but there was a turning point in which tons of new brands popped up but the beer had barely any difference in flavours, it all became a bit samey.
Hardly surprising when hops effectively doubled in price due to a poor harvest combined with over saturated market of craft beer.
Camra really havent helped either. They have campaigned and kept beer prices for cask artificially low, and breweries that are mostly cask cant increase their prices because people are used to paying low prices for cask.
Round here people will not pay over £4 for a pint of cask, and expecting breweries to make profit on that is impossible
Keg is different as doesnt have that constraint as people expect to pay more
Maybe they could try making something other than IPAs.
Drinking in a pub is so expensive now. Having three pints three times a week costs more than my Council Tax.
Not surprising. High energy costs.
Craft beer market is oversaturated and producing very similar beers for the most part.
9 comments
As someone who brews their own and was looking in the early days to start my own brewery, I can understand why.
Beer brewing is a very expensive business these days, especially with the prices of electricity and gas. Which is extensively used in both the mashing, boil and fermentation phases.
That also not taken into account the lack of people drinking local in this country or large breweries having strangleholds on the pubs.
Plus alot of these breweries are producing poor quality beer that’s putting alot of people off.
Its worse in Northern Ireland as even when sucessful they are unable to get a license to sell from breweries and the number of pub licenses is restricted, and controlled by a few corporate interests. And dont want the competition.
Kelham Island Brewery (mentioned in the article) is being bailed out by local investors fwiw.
It’s hardly surprising considering how overly saturated the market is. I used to enjoy tasting new craft beers but there was a turning point in which tons of new brands popped up but the beer had barely any difference in flavours, it all became a bit samey.
Hardly surprising when hops effectively doubled in price due to a poor harvest combined with over saturated market of craft beer.
Camra really havent helped either. They have campaigned and kept beer prices for cask artificially low, and breweries that are mostly cask cant increase their prices because people are used to paying low prices for cask.
Round here people will not pay over £4 for a pint of cask, and expecting breweries to make profit on that is impossible
Keg is different as doesnt have that constraint as people expect to pay more
Maybe they could try making something other than IPAs.
Drinking in a pub is so expensive now. Having three pints three times a week costs more than my Council Tax.
Not surprising. High energy costs.
Craft beer market is oversaturated and producing very similar beers for the most part.