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Budweiser American Ale

FEATURES


The Britain's New Independents

Ensuring Choice for Beer Drinkers

by Roger Protz

Portland Brewing Picture

Owner Ray Ashworth fills the grist mill at
Woodforde's Brewery in Norfolk.

At a time of worrying turbulence in the British brewing industry—with falling consumption fueling mergers, takeovers and closures among the ranks of the regional producers—there is a quiet success story to be told. Unheralded and unnoticed, several of the pioneers of the small craft brewing movement that started in the late 1970s and early 1980s have grown their businesses to a point where they rival some regionals in size and are buying pubs to build their own "tied estates.” The terms "micro" and "minnow" no longer apply.

 

Introduction • The Haunt of Kings • Ringwood Prospers
• Brews of the Norfork Broads
• God’s Own Country • Small and Uncompromising

 

he new independents—ranging from brewpubs through tiny, five-barrel a week operations to sizeable and well-established small commercial breweries—have brought much needed variety to a market dominated by four national brewing giants. Scottish Courage, Bass, Carlsberg-Tetley, and Whitbread produce around 80 percent of all the beer brewed in Britain. The old independents, the 35 family-owned breweries, and bigger regional companies such as Greene King and Marston's, have seen their market share slump from 22 percent to 15 percent in a decade.

The arrival of several hundred new independents over the past 20 years has been vital in ensuring choice for drinkers. And it has been the new independents that have dared to break the mold and widen the beery horizons with porters, stouts, spring, summer and autumn beers that give British drinkers more than the conventional "pint of bitter."

The Ringwood Brewery is the granddaddy of Britain's craft breweries. It celebrates 21 years of brewing this year and has produced a special beer called 21 Not Out to mark the occasion. The name is a cricketing analogy and the label shows a red cricket ball and wicket against a green turf background. In cricketing terms, a batsman scoring 21 runs is not an especially remarkable feat (50 runs gets you a round of applause, 100 or "a century" wins a standing ovation) but for a small brewery to have survived for 21 years is a considerable achievement.

Ringwood started at an inauspicious time in 1978. The election of Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister saw beer consumption plummet as her government cynically wrecked the country's heavy industrial base in order to break the power of the labor unions. Economic recession and heavy unemployment emptied the nation's pubs. Many of the new wave of micro breweries, established in the late 1970s as beer drinking was on the increase, foundered. Ringwood survived and prospered as a result of being in an area of low unemployment and high incomes.

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This story originally appeared in All About Beer Magazine in July 1999.


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