A sinking craft

Over the past decade or so there have been endless discussions around the subject of trying to define “craft beer”. Was it a question of the style of the beer, the nature of the ingredients, the size of the plant making it, whether it was free from control of big corporations, the socio-political stance of the brewery? Or maybe some kind of intangible combination of all these factors. While it was often a case of “you know it when you see it”, it was impossible to pin down a watertight definition.

I recently came across an interesting blogpost from Jeff Alworth about how the concept of “craft beer” has effectively now become misleading and redundant.

“Craft beer” is a conceptual cul de sac. We started using it with good intentions, but with a naïveté about how brewing works and how markets function. It now causes more trouble than it’s worth. I don’t have any problem with the Brewers Association using the terms in their marketing—I certainly would if I were them—but we should recognize it for what it is. I encourage members of the media to consider using different language. It will make us all understand beer better.

He also says:

It is very important for both the health of a market and for the culture of beer to have small family breweries. They don’t have to cater to lowest common denominator tastes. They develop new styles and preserve old traditions from the ravages of industrialization. I am a giant fan of little breweries!

But they are just breweries. They just make beer. And, for what it’s worth, big breweries also just make beer. In using the “craft” framework, I think people got into the habit of thinking that what happened in large plants was some kind of industrial-scale chemical synthesis, not brewing. That was wrong as well, and led to other misconceptions.

Any attempt to arbitrarily sort breweries into sheep and goats is doomed to failure. If you deliberately choose only to drink beer from small breweries, or from breweries who take a particular public political stance, that’s up to you. But don’t pretend it’s actually anything to do with the nature of the beer in the glass. It’s all shades of grey rather than black and white.

It was often implied in the early days of CAMRA that real ale came from small artisanal breweries and was made from wholesome natural ingredients, whereas keg beer was made from chemicals in plants resembling oil refineries. It was an appealing myth, but that’s all it ever was, and exactly the same is true today.

It is also important to remember that there is a significant differences between the US and UK beer markets, which means that what applies to one doesn’t necessarily read across to the other. In the US, virtually all smaller independent breweries had disappeared, whereas in this country we still had a stratum of established family breweries together a newer real ale producing microbrewery sector. Indeed the basic premise of the British craft movement, at least at first, was that it was about interesting beer that wasn’t real ale. They presented themselves as primarily tilting against not the giant corporations, but “real ale culture”.

The US retains a number of substantial craft breweries that have grown up in recent years and comprise the leading members of the Brewers’ Association. By contrast, in this country, most of the leading brands that are considered craft are now owned by major corporates, with the exception of BrewDog, who in a sense have become more gamekeeper than poacher anyway.

I also get the impression in this country that the appreciation of craft beer became linked to a much greater degree to a specific social identity, giving rise to the characteristically British derision directed at the “craft wanker”. Of course many people who don’t conform to this stereotype do drink craft beer, just as you don’t need to have a beard and beer gut to enjoy real ale, but it has certainly established itself in the public consciousness.

Can a copy beat the original?

After a successful introduction in Ireland, Draught Guinness 0.0 is now being rolled out in Great Britain. Both in canned and draught form, it has been one of the most successful beer launches of all time, and Guinness have had to expand production capacity at their Dublin Brewery to meet demand.

One report complained that it was only 55p a pint cheaper than the standard version, but surely that is about the kind of saving you would expect from not paying duty and the VAT on duty. It doesn’t cost any less to make, and indeed may even cost more due to the processes required for de-alcoholisation. Drinkers of alcohol-free beers have no right to expect a subsidy for being virtuous.

I wrote about the canned version last year, and concluded that, while it was “a triumph of the brewing technologist’s skill”, there was something of a sense of expectations unfulfilled about the experience of drinking it.

Draught or canned Guinness is certainly a very distinctive product in terms of its appearance, mouthfeel and taste, and the canned zero-alcohol version does a pretty good job of replicating that. From its look, and the first gulp, it’s just like a glass of standard Guinness. It’s only as you get further down that you realise something is missing, and by the time you reach the bottom of the glass you’re left with something rather dull and forgettable.

You end up feeling rather like this unfortunate cat.

So successful has Guinness 0.0 been that they have been suggestions that, given time, it could overtake the original alcohol-containing product. However, I would suggest this is part of the excessive hype surrounding alcohol-free beer, and there are two key reasons why it’s vanishingly unlikely to happen.

The first is that, however good Guinness 0.0 is, it can only ever be a diminished echo of the original product. It only exists because standard Guinness exists, just as decaffeinated coffee exists because of normal coffee. There are entirely valid reasons why people, in some circumstances, might want to drink alcohol-free beers, but all they are doing is part-way replicating the experience of normal beer.

And, never having known what normal beer is like, it becomes something of a meaningless activity. Someone might drink alcohol-free beer to join in a social occasion with their boozing friends, but there will come a tipping point when they think “Hey, Bob’s now the only one of us who’s actually drinking. Why are we even doing this?”

The second is that, while it tends of be downplayed in marketing and writing about beer, the key reason people drink it is not so much because of taste or refreshment, but because it has an effect on you. Not so much getting drunk as a gentle warm feeling, a slight relaxation of inhibitions and a stimulant to conversation. It can be seen as a social lubricant.

Alcohol-free beer can never do this, and so its original promise is never fulfilled. People are never going to go on alcohol-free pub crawls, unless tagging along with drinkers, and nor are they going to seek out obscure examples of artisanal alcohol-free beers. There are connoisseurs of fine teas and coffees, but those are natural products, whereas alcohol-free beer is by definition highly processed.

There is no doubt some scope for further expansion of the alcohol-free beer market, but ultimately it will inevitably hit a ceiling.

As a complete aside, a good example of the copy overtaking the original is the TV sitcom “Allo! Allo!”, which was originally a parody of the serious drama “Secret Army”, but ended up far surpassing it in terms of longevity and viewing figures.

Something must be done

As I mentioned in my post about the pub garden smoking ban, the government are now also threatening the drinks industry with Minimum Unit Pricing (MUP). The headline is misleading, as the pub sector would, for now, be largely immune from this, but the intention is very clear. I have written about this at length over the years, mainly in the content of Scotland, where it was introduced in 2018. The conclusion, as set out in the Scottish government’s own report, was that it had done little or nothing to reduce problem drinking and had, as many of us had predicted, led to undesirable side-effects. The main underlying motivation for the policy seems to punish and denormalise ordinary, moderate drinkers by increasing the price of a modest, everyday pleasure. It has the same logic as increasing the price of petrol as a strategy to improve road safety.

It is disappointing that many in the pub trade seem to believe that MUP would be a desirable policy. However, under any scenario it would still leave off-trade drinks much cheaper than those in the on-trade, so the idea that it might prompt a switch in drinking habits does not stand up to analysis. Indeed it could be argued that it might harm pubs by squeezing household budgets and leaving them with less disposable income.

Their motivation seems to be more a case of wanting to spite the off-trade who they perceive as rivals. However, most people divide their drinking allegiance between the two depending on circumstances, so it isn’t a binary choice between one or the other. In reality, the enemy of both is the public health lobby. It’s rather like the communists and anarchists being at each other’s throats during the Spanish Civil War, which only served to benefit Franco.

Something that tends not to be appreciated is that MUP is actually a policy that plays into the hands of the off-trade, as it in effect allows them to operate a government-sanctioned price fixing ring, something that most businesses yearn for, but is generally outlawed by competition law. The price elasticity of alcoholic drinks is well below 1, so, while they may lose some sales, they will more than make up for it through fatter margins on the drinks they do sell. It will give them more incentive to promote the sale of alcoholic drinks, as they will generate more profit per square foot, and it may also give them the opportunity to raise the prices of premium products to maintain a differential. Because of this, the drinks industry in general tends to be fairly relaxed about it. The people it really does hurt are drinkers of modest means.

The government have demanded that the industry do more to “tackle the harms of drinking”. However, as long as alcohol is sold legally, some people are going to abuse it. The only way they can completely eliminate any responsibility is to stop producing and selling alcohol entirely. In recent years, the industry has promoted a number of initiatives aimed at reducing the harms of alcohol, including setting up the Portman Group to monitor irresponsible advertising, and DrinkAware to advise on health risks. It has also reduced the strength of a vast array of beers and ciders.

But, however, far you go, it will never be enough for Public Health, and they will always want to go further. Appeasement only results in further demands. Surely all that should be expected of alcohol producers is that they should meet all the legal requirements placed on them. If government wants them to do more, that must be clearly set out.

The relationship between government and drinks producers is also likely to change over time. Health groups have demanded that the government ban MPs from receiving gifts from firms involved in “tobacco, alcohol and junk food”. Notice who they’re lumped in with? In future, alcohol producers will be increasing regarded not as valued contributors to a successful economy, but as pariahs involved in a “toxic trade”, who simply have to do as they are told and have no right to be consulted or involved in decision-making. There is no point in alcohol producers arguing that they are different from tobacco manufacturers, when Public Health regard them as two sides of the same coin. And yes, craft brewers, that means you too. Much of that will also be applied to retailers of alcohol such as pubs, not just to producers.

I made the point back in 2020 that, despite a lot of negative publicity, the drinks industry has in fact over the past fourteen escaped relatively lightly from the tide of lifestyle regulation. The duty escalator was abandoned, duty has been frozen in some years, and never increased above the rate of inflation, and there have been no significant restrictions on advertising and promotion.

But that is likely to change in the coming years so, over and above the pub garden smoking ban, expect to see MUP, above-inflation duty rises, severe curbs on advertising and sponsorship, display restrictions in shops, further attempts to reduce beer and cider strengths, and maybe even plain packaging. Buckle up, folks, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!