Abstract
The British beer market developed and operated historically separately from the continental and international beer markets. Since the 1970s, it started to replicate some of the trends that were common to its neighboring markets. Since then, the British beer market has been largely dominated by lagers that were being produced by foreign-headquartered companies. As the appetite for lagers grew, foreign-headquartered companies came to dominate the overall British beer market. Brexit and the emergence of craft breweries could have led to a revival of the British beer industry through both more exotic and diversified domestic production and the decrease of EU imports. However, this does not seem to have panned out. This chapter investigates the Britishness of the UK’s beer in light of globalization, which has spurred integration with foreign markets and with regards to both Brexit and the emergence of craft brewers which might have reversed this tendency.
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Notes
- 1.
Bass, Allied Watneys/Grand Metropolitan, Scottish, Newcastle, Courage and Whitbread. Bass were acquired by ABInbev. Its brewery, and some of its brands, were subsequently sold to Colson Moors. Grand Metropolitan merged with Guinness plc. to form Diageo. Scottish and Newcastle were acquired by Heineken and Carlsberg, respectively. Courage was taken over by Marston’s Brewery which itself sold 60% of its shares to Carlsberg. Whitbread still exists, but has largely moved out of the brewing industry.
- 2.
It should be noted that the 2020/2021 data could also have been influenced by the arrival of COVID-19.
- 3.
It should be borne in mind that in some cases, mostly the most popular ones, the brand name has been used, whereas in other cases the beer brand might already refer to the brewer. We have not adapted this and have instead used the original data. Consumption data for the different brands was not available, so we used this data as a proxy and are well aware that there are several lacunae with this approach. However, having more detailed data would not change our main arguments, but might actually support them more strongly.
- 4.
Including them would not have changed the major arguments below. There are still a number of British owned cider producers, such as Thatchers, Brothers Cider Co., H. Weston (Weston, Old Rosie), the SHS Group (Merrydown), and Orchard Pig. However, the most popular options are no longer British-owned: Strongbow, Woodpecker, Old Mout, and Bulmers belong to Heineken (the Netherlands), Kopparberg, and Rekoderlig to, respectively, the Swedish Kopparbergs Brewery and Åbro Bryggeri, Magners, Gaymer, K Cider, and Blackthorn to the C&C Group (Ireland), Carling to Molson Coors (Canada/United States of America), Somersby to Carlsberg (Denmark), Frosty Jack and Kingstone to the French cooperative Agrial, and Savanna Dry to the Distell Group Limited (South Africa).
- 5.
Fame refers to the percentage of people who indicate a knowledge of the product. Popularity refers to the proportion of people having a positive opinion of the product.
- 6.
In the UK, the Society for Independent Brewers (SIBA), for example, runs the Assured Independent British Craft Breweries initiative, whose logo can be used to identify breweries that are small, independent, and that brew quality beer.
- 7.
Brewdog, of which 22% is owned by US-based TSG Consumer Partners, has launched a new way of acquiring funding through its ‘Equity for Punks’ scheme which was launched internationally. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that it is not only UK citizens who own shares in the company.
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Van Kerckhoven, S., O’Dubhghaill, S. (2023). The Last of the Britons? The Impact of Globalization and Brexit on the UK Beer Industry. In: Patterson, M.W., Hoalst-Pullen, N. (eds) The Geography of Beer. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39008-1_4
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