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‘It all disappeared with Brexit’: Craft beer boom ends as more than 100 UK firms go bust
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
519 points (98.5% liked)
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Also P6 before they mention the cost of living crisis... I love craft beer but 10 quid a pint is tough to swallow when you're staying down an electricity bill that doubled in the last 12 months plus all your groceries went up by his knows how much
I'm happy enough to blame brexit but when it comes to discretionary purchases like craft beer i doubt it's even the main culprit... mind you I still drink it, but then I'm borgouis or something
That's either bathtub-sized batches (and all the work that means) or they're gouging. Rule of thumb if you can find it in supermarkets they're not brewing in bathtubs as supermarkets demand quite large minimum volumes.
Over here in Germany we have Störtebeker, they're not exactly a microbrewery but a (quite old, actually) small, independent, regional, brewery who for the longest time simply brewed their local Pils and maybe one or two other bog-standard things. Then they had a look at the market and came up with new recipes using all kinds of fancy methods and special yeasts and aroma hops and everything, leading to things like their Atlantic Ale, the missing link between Pils and IPA, for about 1.30€ per half litre bottle. That's about the same price range as big beer brands with TV ads, or a Budweiser (Czech of course).
Some pictures for a sense of scale. Sure that's way beyond the bathtub league but compared to actually big brewers it's tiny.
Occasionally they have actually expensive stuff but then you're looking at five times ice-distilled beer or such. Shouldn't be surprising that that's five times more expensive you're buying quite a bit less water.
If you want to brew at the bathtub scale, commercially, open a pub or probably better restaurant and do beer pairings.