All hail Lord Lager!

The Morning Advertiser recently published some interesting statistics on beer sales in pubs, which showed that the market share of lager had reached a record 69.5%, or nearly seven out of ten of all pints sold. This was up from 65.8% six years ago. In fact, if you include “Pilsner”, which for some reason has its own separate category, lager reaches a full 70.5%.

The biggest loser over this period has been Bitter, which has fallen from 22.9% to 15.4%. Stout, which must be predominantly Guinness, has risen from 6.4% to 8.3%, while “Pale” has risen from 3.1% to 5.2%. I’d assume this includes cask pale ales like Wainwright and Sharp’s Atlantic as well as keg beers like Punk IPA and Neck Oil. It doesn’t split out a specific figure for cask, but obviously this can only be a subset of the 21% accounted for by Bitter, Pale and Mild, plus a sliver of the stout.

No doubt the usual beer snobs will attribute this trend to ordinary drinkers being brainwashed by the international brewers with glitzy advertising, but in reality it just reflects the UK increasingly aligning itself with all other major developed countries, where pale lager of some kind is the default beer. But it reflects a basic fact of life that brewers have to come to terms with.

Essentially, nearly 80% of the whole on-trade beer market is accounted for by lager and Guinness, leaving a mere 20% for everything else to pick over. My local CAMRA branch recently had a talk from Andy Slee, the new Chief Executive of SIBA, who made the point that most of the talk about beer on social media related to brands that made up less than 5% of the total market. He presented this as an opportunity, but surely it represents the reality of every market, that low-volume enthusiast products receive far more attention than mainstream ones.

This raises an issue for microbrewers. Most will have come in to the business motivated by their love of cask ale, and be geared up to produce that product, and possibly bottle a little bit of it. But they have to recognise that they are fishing in a diminishing pond. Some will be content with that, but the available market volume mostly lies in lager. This was question I asked in a Twitter poll:

POLL: Lager now accounts for over 70% of pub beer sales. Should microbreweries make a serious attempt to compete in this sector?

— Pub Curmudgeon 🌸🍻 (@oldmudgie) June 30, 2023

It is true that lager requires more investment in processing and equipment than cask brewing, but in recent years there has been a huge expansion in the production of “craft keg” from smaller breweries, and this does not seem to struggle to find space on bars. So the barriers to entry argument doesn’t really apply.

Some new breweries have put a lot of emphasis on lager, although they have generally been snapped up by the multinationals. Camden Hells and Meantime London Lager spring to mind. But, almost by definition, in comparison with ales, it is harder to brew a lager with a highly distinctive flavour, and if you do it might be offputting to customers. So does lager represent a huge vein of opportunity, or a potential graveyard of ambition?