Camden Town, Goose Island, Blue Point, Meantime, Hop House 13, Blue Moon, Sharp’s Doom Bar, Lagunitas and London Fields. This pub cellar’s worth of beer brands have one thing in common: they are widely perceived as “craft” brews but are actually owned by multinational companies.
To some drinkers, the company behind the pint does not matter, as long as what is in the glass slakes the thirst and greases the wheels of social interaction.
However, the Society of Independent Brewers (Siba) begs to differ. The usually good-natured trade body for Britain’s craft brewers has turned from mild to bitter, with Carlsberg’s takeover of the London Fields brewery proving the final straw.
Deals such as these, said chief executive Mike Benner, are “made in the hope of capturing the original customers and target market of an established, previously independent craft beer brewery”.
These customers, he said, were won “on the back of the brewery being relatively small, independent and brewing quality, flavoursome beer”.
Benner added: “Consumers deserve to know that what they are buying is a genuine craft-brewed beer as research clearly shows that most beer drinkers believe craft beer to be produced by relatively small, independent brewers.”
These scathing comments come amid an effort by Siba to build a fence around the “craft” label with the launch of a new kitemarking system, the Assured Independent British Craft Brewer seal.
Its criteria are that brewers must produce less than 200,000 hectolitres a year, abide by Siba’s standards of ingredient quality and – crucially – be fully independent of any global beer company.
It’s the start of a fightback against a perceived effort by big business to appropriate the craft beer revolution. Adopting the maxim that if you can’t beat them you can buy them, a wave of craft beer takeovers engulfed the US first and has now reached Britain.
Disapproval among beer purists about this trend began to bubble over when Camden Town Brewery was sold to Budweiser maker AB InBev, in a deal reputedly worth £85m.
Self-declared “punk” beer brand Brewdog, credited by many with putting rocket burners under the UK’s craft beer scene, barked the loudest, pointedly removing Camden from the menu of its network of bars.
Just a few months later the Scottish brewer’s own craft credentials were called into question, first via a social media backlash against its legal pursuit of smaller companies and then by its acceptance of a sizeable private equity investment.
Yet Brewdog remains very much independent, something one of the British brewing world’s leading lights says is key to maintaining integrity.
Justin Hawke, who runs the Bristol-based Moor Beer Company, believes that staying out of the clutches of a major brewer is far more important than some other factors.
“For me size doesn’t matter if the brewery remains independent, in control of its own destiny and maintains quality, flavour and ethos,” Hawke said.
“But when a company is bought, you lose that independence, you lose the ability to control your own destiny. The owning company will take decisions driven by economics and shareholder value that will require you to change your ethos, quality, and flavour.”
Camden Town Brewery founder Jasper Cuppaidge has disputed that notion, telling the Guardian that the product could remain unsullied, an autonomous fiefdom within the AB InBev empire.
But Hawke does not believe that any business annexed by a global brewing empire can resist pressure to compromise quality and innovation in search of profit.
“No, that’s impossible. There’s no good example of that,” he said. “It sounds nice, it’s a nice thing to tell the owner who’s just given up control so they don’t feel bad about the process. But at the end of the day, we all know where things end up.”
Consumers have historically been just as sceptical about the whiff of deception when offshoots of major companies are dressed in artisanal clothing.
Coffee lovers who thought they’d discovered a challenger to chains such as Starbucks and Costa when Harris and Hoole hit the high street spat out their macchiatos when they realised it was owned by Tesco. “If it had been called Tesco Coffee, I wouldn’t have come in,” said one.
Animal rights groups urged a boycott of Body Shop when it was bought by L’Oreal, while there were misgivings around Coca-Cola’s purchase of Innocent smoothies and Unilever’s ownership of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream.
Siba hopes that its attempt to define and kitemark craft beer will be a weapon against the encroachment of big business. Now it must rely on drinkers to look for its seal of approval, even after the first few pints have started to work their magic.
Small beer or Megabrew?
- Camden Town Brewery – sold to AB InBev for £85m in 2015.
- Meantime – bought by SAB Miller for £50m, then sold to Asahi.
- Hop House 13 – launched by Guinness owner Diageo in 2015.
- Blue Point – sold to ABInBev in 2014 for $24m.
- Blue Moon – criticised over MillerCoors ownership.
- Goose Island – bought by ABInBev in 2011 for $40m.
- Sharp’s Doom Bar – owned by MolsonCoors since 2011.
- London Fields – bought by Carlsberg for about £1m in 2017.
- Lagunitas – Heineken completed takeover in 2017.
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