How Small?

-

I'm backgrounding the Kertész piece again today as Jane suggested something else dear to my heart: beer. In yesterday's Guardian they ran a piece on an emerging trend: the takeover of 'craft' brewers and their products by large brewco's, which then continue to trade on the 'small brewer' image that the original brewers had as their USP and which obviously colours the consumers' choice in choosing their particular tipple. Brands such as Beavertown and Camden are set up now in direct competition with still genuinely independent breweries which operate on a very small scale and really can't operate at anything near the same commercial level as the giants with their enormously deep pockets, making the smaller fry yet more targets for the big fish to sweep up. One thing made me sit up in surprise in reading the piece was the revelation that Fuller's, that venerable old London brand, home to London Pride and ESB: two of the finest ales out there, is actually now owned by Asahi, the giant Japanese outfit.

But of course none of this is exactly new: the practice of small brewers being swallowed by an increasingly large brewing chain is an old practice in itself. Bass, one of Britain's oldest and finest brewers and also owner of the oldest trademark in the UK, was itself a voracious predator of smaller brewers as far back as the very early twentieth century, having been the world's largest brewing company just years before in the 1870s. By the 1960s it had merged with another giant to form Bass Charrington, which was in its turn swallowed up by Interbrew, and is now part of the Molson Coors group.

However, there are still plenty of smaller producers of fine ales out in the wild and The Society of Independent Brewers and Associates is aiming to codify the status of small brewer, so that consumers can make more informed decisions about their products of choice. They are a membership-based society with some basic rules for accreditation: the company must be British-owned, and genuinely small: less than 1% of UK beer production. They're reframing the sector as 'Indie', to distinguish it from the now bastardised 'craft' image, and there will be appropriate brand marking to suit. Their website is here, where you can buy indie beers online.

February next, though, I'll be making a pilgrimage to my favourite indie brewer: The White Horse Inn at Clun [blog posts passim]; as we're heading down to Shropshire for an arts festival there. I look forward to one of the finest pints of draught pale ale known to man, and which serves as an example that many emerging small brewers would do well to heed. Don't over-hop every damned beer you make: a few more traditional ales would be a welcome contrast to some of the current crop of over-astringent and frankly far too strong brews. There is such a thing a session beer: something that can be drunk in quantities that doesn't quickly become a suicide mission! Just a suggestion...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Sister Ray

-
Image
Ray Keats - aka Ann Key - local artist & family friend, died this morning. She'd been ill for some years, but never let it get in the way of her work or of tending to the massive network of friends, colleagues and fans she had accumulated over the decades. Her house on the High Street of Rachub, just below where we live - a former cockle factory(!) - bought many years ago when she and her late husband Ronald moved here from Manchester to set up home in Yr Achub, is currently still home to her paintings and drawings, and the front window displays her work, including the last drawing she made in hospital, just days before she died. Her good friend Colin has been a diamond in her latter years, looking out for her and just being there when she needed him. She will be much missed by this tiny community of ageing bohemians up here in the hills, but suffice it to say, George, her cat, will be well looked after now she's gone.
Read more