When I first began working in the beer industry, the words “craft beer” were used as a shorthand to describe any beer that wasn’t cask or a more well-understood style or brand, such as lager or Guinness. (A caveat here: in Lancashire, where I live, “normal” beer has always been cask. When I worked in a local pub, calling something craft beer was a useful, if not mostly meaningless, way to explain to a customer that what they were getting wasn’t a pint of bitter.)
Over time, people came to understand that craft beer usually referred to one of those new American-style beers, full of hops and probably hazy. People were suspicious at first. Then they grew to love it, coming in each week to try new beers by breweries with unusual names, excited to taste the latest inventions in hops and malt.
Craft beer quickly became big business, which was a difficult hypocrisy to settle for many of its fans. This alternative style of beer was marketed as underground, as “punk”, and sold to drinkers as independent, fresh, exciting, and nothing to do with the big corporate beer conglomerates that ruled the pubs and taps up and down the country.
In the US, craft beer had created a whole universe of beer drinkers who wanted to care about the quality of their beer and the artisanal way in which it was made – by skilled professionals, in small batches, often in their own brew pubs. There was nothing mass-produced about the original scene. The point was to have beer that was as individual as its brewery, a complete departure from the homogeneity of Big Beer, where a pint was the same no matter where you drank it, when you drank it and in what year.
When this phenomenon came over to the UK and Ireland, it struck a chord. We are nations of beer lovers. What is not to love about a trend that inspires and celebrates uniqueness, skill, and taste? It took a while for certain styles to catch on – hazy beers are to this day looked on uneasily by some drinkers – but after years of running parallel to the big names, craft beer is now found in almost every pub in the country. The demand for a crisp, juicy, hazy pale ale, or a grapefruit-tart IPA, has seen taps emerge from darkly stained Victorian bar tops to serve Neck Oil, Camden Pale Ale or Punk IPA, where in the past there might have been only bitter, pale and stout.
But things change. How have small, independent breweries managed to keep up with an insatiable demand for craft beer? In a capitalist society, they grow or die, and to grow, they often sell out to multinationals. Sharp’s brewery in Rock, Cornwall, was one of the first. It sold its brewery to Molson Coors in 2011, moving some of its production to the company’s beer production unit in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire.
Meantime, perhaps one of the first “craft” breweries in England was sold to SABMiller, and then Asahi. Camden Town Brewery sold to Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), the largest beer company in the world, in 2015. Beavertown, the brewery that brought you Neck Oil, partially sold its business to Heineken in 2018, and then sold the rest of it in 2022. Brixton Brewery also sold to Heineken. Many more breweries followed suit, selling their breweries to multinationals but keeping their branding.
This is where it gets muddy for beer fans, and confusing for the average beer drinker. In a recent survey commissioned by the Society of Independent Brewers and Associates (Siba), drinkers were asked whether certain beer brands were “independent”, and 40% thought that Neck Oil was, unaware it was now, for all intents and purposes, a Heineken-brewed beer. Three-quarters of drinkers surveyed said they felt they were being misled when formerly independent brands were in fact owned by multinationals. Does it really matter if a business sells out to a larger one? By the looks of it, yes.
The reason breweries sell is because of the money. It’s obvious why a multinational such as Heineken would want a brewery such as Beavertown on its books. Drinkers were choosing craft beer over their portfolio of lagers and one cider (Strongbow, if you’re interested) and this was impacting on their sales. The solution? Buy the breweries making the beer that people are drinking instead, and then continue the saturation of the market of these particular craft beers. In fact, as of 2023, Beavertown Neck Oil Session IPA was the leading craft beer brand in the UK ranked by on-trade sales.
Beer fans are starting to realise that their favourite breweries might not be the paragons of independence and system-subversion they once thought they were, and it’s leaving an unpleasant taste. Now that many of these breweries have become part of large corporate entities, the idea of standing against the man, colourful can in hand, is a ridiculous one.
It’s sowing seeds of doubt across the whole industry, too – the word “craft” never meant anything specific, and so it can be used to market beers that aren’t “craft” in any understanding of the term. If we’d had a clear definition of the term from the start, perhaps we wouldn’t be in this pickle. This is why small, independent breweries are ditching the craft beer tag and moving away from the idea that “craft beer equals good beer”.
Breweries such as Cloudwater and Track in Manchester are completely independent, and do not use the word “craft” on any of their merchandise. DEYA, a Cheltenham-based brewery, prefers to use the terms “independent” and “hop forward”. What beer drinkers are looking for is flavour, value and experience, not a hollow statement against the man, and this is something that the multinationals just can’t seem to offer, because they never really understood the appeal of the scene in the first place.
People aren’t daft. They know the beer tastes different once it moves off-site to a large manufacturing plant and recipes start being tweaked to cut costs. And that’s why Siba’s new Indie Beer campaign, where drinkers can search to find out exactly who makes their beer, couldn’t have come at a better time.
Just like nobody really believes that the packet sandwiches at a petrol station were “freshly made just for you”, we are getting wise to the marketing gimmick that Heineken et al are selling when they use the word “craft”.
Katie Mather is a food and drink writer, and deputy editor of Pellicle magazine