Boom or bust?

Earlier this week, the Guardian published a rather self-contradictory article about the craft beer market. On the one hand, they say:

For the time being at least, the demand is still there. A report from the independent brewers’ trade body Siba, due for release in May but shared with the Guardian, will show double-digit growth in production volumes. Increased output correlates tightly with sales, reflecting Britain’s enduring thirst for the complex and diverse flavours that the craft sector offers, particularly compared with mass-market rivals.

But, on the other hand, they report:

But competition is fierce, customers’ budgets are squeezed and costs associated with Covid-19 – and Britain’s sluggish economic recovery from it – are piling up. “It’s like death by a thousand cuts at the moment,” said Alex Troncoso, co-founder of the award-winning Bristol-based brewer Lost & Grounded. He reels off a long but by no means exhaustive list of factors paring back the industry’s meteoric growth. Amid the inflation crisis, the cost of energy, ingredients and wages has soared. Debt repayments, including on government Covid loans, have become more punishing, as the Bank of England raises rates to keep a lid on prices.

These two statements just do not stack up. And my feeling is that, while a handful of craft brewers may be trading strongly, the second is much more generally true than the first. If the market really was buoyant, there would be scope to rebuild margins through increasing prices. Craft beer is not a homogenous commodity and there should be scope to charge more for well-regarded products. But intense and cut-throat competition in a market that is at best flat is more the reality they have to face.

A distinction also needs to be drawn between brewers mainly supplying cask ale to the one-trade, and those who concentrate more on craft keg and the off-trade. I’d guess the second category are struggling less, and there certainly still seem to be plenty of takers for garish cans priced at £3+.

Brewing differs from most other businesses, at least at the lower end, because most participants enter it to some degree as a labour of love rather than as a purely commercial proposition. The boom in brewery numbers during the 2010s was driven by a combination of low interests and the rise in interest in craft meaning that more wanted to seize the opportunity to give it a go. It wasn’t the case that consumers were saying there was a severe lack of choice when there were only 750 breweries. And, while competition is broadly a desirable thing, there is a law of diminishing returns as to what benefit to consumers an ever-increasing number of producers actually provides.

But the shock of lockdown combined with the increase in interest rates triggered by the rise in government spending to fund it brought these favourable conditions to a grinding halt. While one has to have sympathy for individual brewers left with no alternative but to cease trading, there is still considerable oversupply in the market, and there is likely to be a lot further to fall until some kind of equilibrium is restored.

It also has to be accepted that there are no broad sunlit uplands awaiting just over the horizon. The current conditions of higher interest rates (although still only normal by historic standards) and suppressed demand are likely to persist for some time. This is the “new normal” we were told we had to adjust to. There is also the likelihood that an incoming Labour government, faced with pressure to fund various areas of spending, will return to annual inflationary increases in beer duty, which has been fairly flat for the past eight years.

There are some parallels with the situation at Stonegate, Britain’s biggest pub company, which is currently struggling to refinance its enormous debts. While trading in many cases is reasonably healthy, the company is being overwhelmed by the huge burden of debt it took on to acquire Enterprise Inns just before Covid struck. This situation can be traced back as far as the 1989 Beer Orders, which resulted in the “Big Six” brewers selling off their tied estates, much of which were freehold, to debt-financed pubcos. Debt has been a millstone around the neck of the pub industry ever since, and company failures are in most cases caused far more by excessive debt than by poor trading.

I suspect at the end of the day a way will be found to kick Stonegate’s debt can further down the road. However, even if it were to become insolvent, many of its properties are sound businesses and would find willing buyers, so would not be permanently lost as pubs. But such an event would cast a shadow over the whole industry.