Let's talk about the future of craft beer
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- Опубликовано: 30 июл 2024
- On New Year's Day, I was having a half cut conversation about what the craft beer scene looks like in the future. In this video, I want to share a message that was part of that discussion, which delves into the evolving landscape of craft beer in the UK.
Supermarkets, Whetherspoons, the delicate balance between selling loads but being "cool". It's all discussed here.
More important though, we want to hear from you about this. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
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And thanks to Mark for allowing me to share the message and dissect it. Check out the Hop Vault if that's the sorta thing you wanna do: thehopvault.com 
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I can't speak for world wide situation, but I can say few things about craft beer scene here in Canada, more specific Quebec.I started home brew about 18 years a go because I encountered lots of crappy beers here when I moved from Europe. Than about last 5 -7 yeas craft breweries were opening what it felt like daily basis.Every time I went to my local craft beer store,they offered me beers from new breweries. Beer was decent and spending 5-7$ a can wasn't a big deal because the quality was there.
Now last 2 years I encounter more disappointments than satisfactions, styles described on the can that just don't test as they should, cutting costs,tumbling qualities, less classic styles....so I'm back to home brewing, cost less,sure it's more work and you only have 1 type of beer at a time,but at least I drink what I like and what is quality .
My few cents .
Cheers.
Great to get a Canadian perspective on this. Cheers 🍻
Interesting through provoking video. I have always thought that 'normal' pubs should put in one fridge of craft cans and bottles just as another option. I think that is what you are referring to towards the end of the video and I for one as a consumer would think it would be a great move and with long dates on cans it should help the pubs bring punters in and the breweries sell beers and get their name out there. What do you think?
I think the future of craft beer is that we're going to continue to see closures due to a saturated market and rising production costs. There will probably be more take overs such as Mondo being bought by Hopback as more traditional breweries expand into the craft "market". Those breweries which produce quality stuff will hopefully survive but a lot of mediocre craft breweries will go under
A great discussion on the industry as a whole. Would have to agree with most of what is said here Chris.
New sub (now we’ve made friends on Insta!). Some very interesting points. Weatherspoons may end up flogging aged stock but I will never drink it. They will be a vulture stripping the carcass and surely part of the reason why the average British beer drinker won’t pay a proper rate for good beer that’s crafted with skill and love. I worry about the next few months and fear several more good craft brewers will hit the wall (I still haven’t got over Dig Brew). I just hope that one day queues will form outside UK breweries for cans of their latest release like they do in the US and that crowd funding won’t be a necessity for so many.
Welcome brothers! We certainly share your grief over Dig Brew. Their founder Oli did a great post on Insta, sort of around this, once Cloudwater went in supermarkets. That always stuck with me and made me realise what a big deal it was. Thanks for commenting, let’s keep in touch! - Chris
@@planetbeertv for sure - we should hook up sometime! Yeah we saw that post. Having heard Paul Jones on This Week in Craft Beer around a year ago I was kind of expecting Cloudwater to go bang because it’s clearly bloody tough for them. Would be a big shame but that supermarket idea 🫣
really interesting watch - cool insight and well put together. Interesting to see the UK perspective which is a little bit or a bell weather for other European nations lagging behind slightly.
Wasn't clear on your comment about cans & bottles being a zero sum game. Are you able to clarify?
Essentially, bottle shops are competing for a share of the same pool of customers. And those customers have a finite budget. So if they buy a can of Brand New DIPA from Bottle Shop 1, that’s a can of Brand New DIPA which Bottle Shop 2 won’t be selling to that same person. Unless of course, the customer buys a can from each - but that’s certainly not the norm. Not in this economic climate anyway 😂
Thanks for the comment. Where abouts are you based?
Fascinating conversation. Wetherspoons is an interesting one. As an ex-employee and a current drinker, I’ve always been thankful they are there. I can understand the arguments against, but the reality is, in many parts of the country, Wetherspoons is either a gateway to craft, or, sadly, one of the few options available full stop
you mate "Mark" know his shit. Nicely broken down.
It's noticeable the quality of breweries that have now put cans into Spoons. Up my way, Brew York have one of their core beers as a permanent option, along with Roosters (though, both in supermarkets obviously). The 'short dated' beer thing is an interesting one - overall it's a myth (in terms of their entire range), but I can definitely see how they provide an option to local real ale brewers that want to shift stuff that would otherwise go down the drain. Is that a bad thing overall? I mean, there was one occasion when they were knocking out a 6% craft stout in a place near mine for £1.99. That can't be good for the overall industry. But the thing is that (in my experience) that's very much a rare occasion, where typically all they have on the pumps is stuff from small, regional breweries who are knocking out cheap/lower quality ale. Is the average craft beer person going to be tempted away from the bottle shop or local bar because spoons are selling a can of Brew York for £3.37? Probably not to be honest, I could actually buy the same beer directly from the brewery for less. But, it might actually encourage more people to give those beers a try rather than ordering their normal macro 'premium' lager. I know that spoons isn't popular with the sorts of crowd that are into craft beer - but I struggle to find that much fault with them. I mean, even if you just want to compare them to the other chain places on the typical high-street, surely they're superior to Walkabout/O'Neils/Sizzling Pubs etc etc?
The whole craft beer scene is and will continue to be impacted on by the current economic climate, there is no getting away from it. I can only speak for myself here but Pre-lockdown and especially during lockdown I was spending anywhere between £50 - £80 a month on beers, exploring different styles, new breweries and varying ABV's. Over the last 12 months my spending on beer has dropped dramatically, due to an increase in costs in other areas of my life. In the summer I explored Wheat Beer and German lagers which are much cheaper overall than the IPA, DIPA's, TIPA's and Impy Stouts I would have drank 2 or 3 years ago. Now, when I do decide to splash out and visit a bottle shop/order online I am very selective over what beers I purchase. Where previously I would see a new brewery and take a risk, I now stick to what I KNOW will be a well constructed beer. Hence why I believe Verdant, DEYA, Beak, Cloudwater, Track etc etc....and the like are still going strong despite not entering the Supermarket environment at all and if they have, they have still maintained some of the quality they are synonymous for at the supermarket price point.
So in answer to your question as to where the future of craft beer is going. My view is that the more established breweries mentioned above who are renowned for quality will survive, as they have got a good enough reputation amongst craft beer drinkers for their releases to still be sought after (I shall be on the Verdant Website ready to order Putty when it is released). Newer breweries wanting to enter the market will have to overcome a huge barrier of entry to compete and stay in business. However, it only takes 1 beer from an ambitious brewery to get everyone talking and they would stand a chance.
Cheers - A great view on the craft beer world today- Off to Leeds on Thursday to the Northern Monk AGM - Looking forward to seeing if their brewery bar wows me! My favourite beer from them is still PATRONS PROJECT 10.07 // NORTHERN BLOC // CULINARY CONCEPTS // HOMES // OLOGY // FRUITED SOUR IPA - Currently drinking Cloudwater 'The Good Stuff' Christmas present subscription - Just had a lovely Resident Culture IPA hopped exclusively with Galaxy (Forever Alone) - lovely and sticky - Got a load of Brewdog shares and my most recent favourite was Born To Die..xxx
In NE England and there's a shortage of everything craft so I usually buy direct from brewery (Verdant, Track, Deya etc).
There's one perfect "old man" pub which has a huge selection of cask but we go in for the 2 craft keg options which are usually Pollys or Tiny Rebel but sometimes there's a bit of Cloudwater or Verdant. They're getting older kegs, had Bloom months later but we count or blessings. It's always £5.X a pint, round here no one is accepting 2/3rds or £8 a pint so they must be geting a heavy discount. The odd DIPA doesn't get a mark up either and I've almost gone "you sure?" at the price.
Few miles up the road around Newcastle, you can get Jakehead in any decent place but it doesn't seem to stretch down to us, probably because Wylam charge London prices but I'd love to walk into the local knowing it was an option.
I've seen 3 bottle shops come and go and cling to the last one for some variety but it's 50/50 as to what you're going to get. There's some shite local and national breweries that you wonder why they bothered to stick it in a can so you end up buying the same 5-10 breweries. Awful to say but maybe this is a good time to flush the crap and hope that you might see long dated craft in the normal pubs
Wylam is an interesting one for sure. I remember back in 2021, getting a can of Revenge of the Sticky Bud DIPA from the Hop Vault. Loving it and then thinking “hey, I’ll be smart and get some more from Wylam’s webstore”. But bizarrely, it was more expensive per can than I got in the bottle shop. And that’s before postage. I have no idea what witchcraft was at play there but suffice to say, I’ve not ordered from Wylam direct! Cheers for the feedback 🍻
You know my opinion on Spoons...😱 This is an excellent video.. very thought provoking ❤️👍
Say what you like about Spoons but where else are you going to see a man swaying, holding a Guinness with a parrot on his shoulder at 10 in the morning?
The Mossy Well (near Ally Pally) is my local Spoons and yes they do stock a good few craft beers in can and sometimes have cask craft from breweries such as Mad Squirrel. I rarely drink there but when I do it's nice to see it on the menu
The answer is really simple. Here in the US in every liquor store there is an oversaturation of hoppy and flavored beers. Most people just do not want pine, burnt, perfume, and sour flavors (= hops, roasted grains, artificial flavoring, and lactic acid), despite all the forced marketing. In fact I have never met anybody who do enjoy these types of beers (at least in the USA), outside of the small insulated "internet craft beer community".
Me personally, I love a good Spicy Ale - [Hefeweizen, Weissbier, Tripel, Quad, and Saison]. Now we have over ~30 mini / micro brewers in my giant city and but not a single one makes a Spicy Ale, because all they make is IPA, Pale Ale, and IPA. Therefore I am forced to buy from macro craft brewers and EU import brands that sell exactly what I want.
That’s interesting. We’ve almost certainly reached saturation point with regards hazy IPAs and pales. Much of the ‘Internet craft beer community’ would agree there. But I’d say this is because they are accessible to the casual beer drinker who is willing to dip their toe in something different. Certainly, here in the UK, that’s the case - the hoppy IPA and the hazy pale is the start of many people’s love affair with craft beer.
They wouldn’t be brewed in the volume they are if they didn’t have a wider appeal. Obviously, the UK is smaller than most US states so this clearly doesn’t apply to where you are. Thanks for giving us a US perspective though! It’s interesting to see the differences in market.
Part of the issue are the consumers, the customers who demand ONLY NE IPA.
I have a few friends that say they’re into ‘craft beer’ but will only drink hazy ipa; the most expensive beer style to make outside of impy stouts.
This has driven the market to the point we’re seeing now, supermarkets oversaturated with hazy ipa, the style makes no sense to go into a supermarket.
We need people to want to expand their horizons and learn what ‘craft’ actually means.
Really enjoying your content, keep it up.
Thanks Andrew. Yeah it's a dominating style but of course that's because it is extremely accessible taste-wise. Absolutely agree we've hit a saturation point with NEIPAs and we need to see a more popular embrace of other styles. The campaign to get more Biere De Garde and Pre-proabition Lagers on the supermarket shelves starts here 😂
@@planetbeertv I think their is a place for quality Traditional Beers later this year myself I am opening a Historical Brewery specifically to bring back some of the Old World Beers of Halifax mainly Websters Green Label and Pennine Bitter our output will be in Bottle and keg and we are lucky enough to have 6 pubs to put it in which we own i would not be happy to find one of my beers in Wetherspoons or Tesco. I can look at some of Rodger Protz Beer Almanacs from the 1980s and Early 1990s and see what he said then. Basically a lot of the current Breweries out there started as homebrewers that is where craft came from. I have heard a couple of Homebrew shop owners state that the homebrew scene has died over the last year indeed I see loads of homebrew stuff for sale on social media and other channels from lockdown I have tried very few Neipas I don't find the style very tasty or even palatable I do think that the hazy beer trend will be over in a couple of years time.
From a main stream perspective there's lots of flaws with craft beer.
The main one is there's lots of expensive underwhelming beers out there. So it's only really gonna appeal to people who have a lot of spare money.
When you have to tighten the purse strings, it's the 1st that goes, and you go back to a box of super market lager for a tenner.
Agree with lots of expensive underwhelming beers, it's not so much the cost so much as the chance of the beer being decent is a gamble. Don't mind paying a premium if you know it's going to be good, rather than potentially a daft gimmick
There’s certainly something in that. Which probably helps fuel the 80/20 rule too, because people stung by what they feel is expensive poor quality will default to the breweries that can deliver consistency and value. I’d say most crafties fall back to your Verdants and your DEYAs before the supermarket lagers, but depends on your disposable income and drinking habits I guess.
The bubble absolutely is bursting. Too many mediocre brewers making mediocre beers that oddly enough taste more or less the same. The rise of hard seltzers certainly doesn't help.
I would disagree hard on Northern Monk, everything they do has fallen off a monumental cliff in terms of being interesting and quality (whether that's because it got worse or they just fell behind who knows) they seem to only really peak peoples interest when they rebrew that tank petrol DDH IPA, apart from that you don't see anything on forums etc anymore, it's quiet.
That’s a fair point. But isn’t that just conflating forum hype with ‘interesting’ beer? I wouldn’t say the quality of the brewing or beer has got worse, if anything, with the upgrade in equipment it’s got more consistent. Or do you mean the styles they’re choosing to brew are less imaginative and innovative?
Btw.. Thanks for the comment, Jack 🍻
- Chris
@@planetbeertv "But isn’t that just conflating forum hype with ‘interesting’ beer?"
For me? no. If you brew high-quality beer you get noticed and noise within small circles gets larger and you get noticed. Could it be that they are just too big to attract such murmurings? Maybe OR have most people in those forums moved on from their beer, maybe? But I would counter that people don't just move on because the brewery gets bigger, they generally move on because quality goes down or they find better.
Like for me, Deya is a prime example, during 2018-2021 they were my favorite brewery, underwhelming batches of Steady started coming in droves, and Into the Haze got worse and worse, and then specials fell off a cliff. I haven't put a webshop order in with them for two years now.
"Wouldn’t say the quality of the brewing or beer has got worse, if anything, with the upgrade in equipment it’s got more consistent"
Consistency only counts for something, if it's consistently good or retains what made it great to begin with. Let's take Faith as an example, it was one of the best core range pales in the country 3-4 years ago, but now it's just an okay hazy pale you can get in a Supermarket which makes it convenient, tonnes of core range pales have surpassed it at this point, Sonoma, Lightbulb, PMST, Sundialer, Floret, the list could go on.
"Or do you mean the styles they’re choosing to brew are less imaginative and innovative?"
It's probably not this, it's just that nobody talks about them anymore in those trusted circles and what I have had myself that I have gone out my way to get, has been underwhelming in comparison to what I normally drink.
Just my opinion btw. I am somewhat equating quality to how much I see a brewery spoken about in smaller circles, but that's because I trust those circles and the information generally results in me drinking excellent beer.
Agreed. Haven’t been wowed by one of their beers in a long while.
@@BrewBrosUK Sorry, I went off on one with that wall of text 🤣😅
Not at all, it’s all gold! Opinions on the industry is exactly what we’re after. Thanks for sharing! With more opinions like yours, we can discuss this in more detail.
v interesting discussion, I for one though will never drink in a Spoons, i've boycotted it since Brexit! unless they change the CEO or the conditions for their staff i'll never go, even if u can get good craft beer at a cheaper price
Quite right too 👍
Paul
Paul should be ashamed of that shocking can in his photo 😄
In my defense I have really poor eyesight and I thought it was a can of Punk
😂@@planetbeertv
beer is too expensive now. I went back to cheap liquor.
There’s so many mediocre beers out there .