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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
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Brexit crushing small business while leaving the larger businesses relatively unscathed was part of the plan all along, not just in regards to beer. The big players always knew they could deal with added fees and paperwork by passing on the cost to the consumer because they were already part of big pub chain and franchise monopolies.
Many pubs go though a hight turnover of landlords as they are all run as franchises now, with landlords forced to buy from the owning brewery while also paying rent to them, but with margins so thin and brewerys setting the prices they can't survive unless the place is always busy. So they quit and then in then another hopeful steps in to repeat the process. The brewery don't care, they still get thier money.
The Independent ones that were quick to react stopped selling to pubs and started selling to supermarkets where margins were better. Either that or they caved in and sold the brand.
Now the multinationals have successfully crushed craft beer, the threat to thier profits that was showing people you don't have to drink washed out larger that they keep putting a new name on every year to make it sound better.
The new tax rules coming out that penalize higher alcohol content is a further step towards the dominance of cheap, mass produced, piss water. More work being done by the conservatives on behalf of thier corporate paymasters.
With so many Tory plans that go "wrong", as it always favours the rich one has to conclude that it's a feature not a bug.
Plus the paperwork for a shipment is largely the same regardless of how big it is. If you want to ship 50k worth of beer you have to hire the same lawyer to do the same stuff as the business that does multi million dollar shipments.
Brexit was obviously a plan brewed by the ultra wealthy of the UK. They all have money stashed on the Cayman Islands and the only way to onshore that money without heavy taxation was to get out of the EU and change the UK tax laws. Also no more pesky European Court of Human Rights
Yet I manage to get a decent craft ale everytime I go to the pub, these businesses haven't been crushed at all.
I was at a beer festival just a few weeks back and there were tons of brewers there seemingly fine.
New duty rules:
(1) it doesn't penalize still cider (which tends to be the typical craft ciders), with even a strong still craft cider usually being below 8.4% abv.
(2) plenty of craft beers <= 3.4% abv, e.g. milds, many bitters, and the highest rate doesn't kick in until 8.5%. Nice beers don't have to be strong.