Undone by progress

In July of this year, Marston’s sold their remaining 40% stake in the Carlsberg-Marston’s brewing joint venture to Carlsberg, ending a long and proud history of the company’s involvement in brewing. Reducing their debt burden was given as a key reason behind this move. Not entirely surprisingly, three months later, Carlsberg announced that they were closing the Wolverhampton brewery that they had acquired from the joint venture, with operations being concentrated at the original Marston’s site at Burton-on-Trent. This was particularly poignant as Wolverhampton was the birthplace of the Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries company that eventually metamorphosed into Marston’s.

The history behind this is somewhat complicated. In 1999, Wolverhampton & Dudley, best known for Banks’s ales, took part in a bitter two-way takeover battle with Marston’s, with each company trying to take over the other. Wolves & Dudley were eventually successful, but only at the cost of taking on a huge burden of debt that was later to prove a millstone around their neck. In 2007, the combined company renamed itself as Marston’s, as that was a much more widely recognised name.

The debt burden was further increased by takeovers of the Jennings, Wychwood and Ringwood breweries, and then in 2017 of the large Eagle Brewery at Bedford, previously owned by Wells & Youngs. By this time, commentators were noting that its level of debt put it in a risky position, and the 2020 Covid lockdown brought the house of cards crashing down. With all pubs closed, the level of brewing activity greatly diminished, and the company’s share price plummeted. The disposal of 60% of the brewing activities to Carlsberg was somewhat in the nature of a fire sale, to prevent the company being overwhelmed by its debt obligations. The sale of the remaining 40% stake four years later only completed the process.

Even before this, it had been widely speculated that one of the two large breweries would have to close sooner or later. I’d assume that the decision was motivated by considerations that Burton, on an edge-of-town site, had more room for expansion, while Wolverhampton, close to the city centre, would fetch more for redevelopment. While the Wolverhampton site is superficially impressive, I went round it on a tour in 2018 and found the actual brewing and fermenting operations surprisingly cramped and haphazard. It wasn’t really a state-of-the-art modern brewery.

Inevitably, the decision was met with a great amount of sadness, but also a certain degree of anger. Labour’s recently-elected West Midlands condemned the decision and urged the company to reconsider.

This is a cultural asset lost because of decisions made on paper - without consideration for the impact on our community. We should be protecting our brewing heritage in Wolverhampton. I'm urging the owners to reconsider.https://t.co/TatIwxo7dn

— Richard Parker (@RichParkerLab) October 10, 2024

However, many of the responses to his tweet suggested he might be better employed concentrating has attention on stopping library closures in Birmingham rather than a brewery closure in Wolverhampton. It’s also noticeable that many of the people decrying the closure are the same who have over the years dismissed the beers produced by the plant as bland, mainstream pap.

Carlsberg are running a commercial business, not a preservation society, and there is limited scope for sentiment. In the fact of declining demand, operating two large ale breweries only 30 miles apart in Staffordshire simply did not make financial sense, and rationalising capacity was inevitable. They may give cause for lament, but I doubt whether over the past sixty years there has ever been a single brewery closure decision that those making it have later regretted in commercial terms. When a pub closes, there is the opportunity for customers to put their money where their mouth is and club together to buy it, but that simply isn’t an option for a large brewery supplying thousands of pubs.

The decline in ale demand is an unfortunate fact of life that companies have to come to terms with. Cask ale is now below 10% of the on-trade beer market, and a year or so ago my local giant Tesco about halved the amount of shelf space devoted to Premium Bottled Ales, slashing the number of lines stocked at the same time. Kent brewer Shepherd Neame recently announced a shift of emphasis from cask to craft in the face of falling sales.

Some may point out that certain smaller breweries and cask-focused pubs are going great guns and increasing sales, but an overall declining market does not affect everyone equally, and the wider picture is pretty clear. The founding members of CAMRA feared that real ale might only survive in a limited, cottage industry form and, fifty years later, that may eventually be coming to pass, as the big operators scale down their involvement and leave it to micros and small family brewers.

The topic of the Wolverhampton closure has also been discussed by Tandleman here.