In the 1970s, those UK large breweries were amongst the largest in the world. But with domestic possibilities extremely limited, what could they do?
At a time when most beer was consumed in pubs, the number of them you controlled determined how much beer you could sell. Roughly. Which is why they had gobbled up ramshackle breweries, purely for the pubs that they owned.
This is also when the Big Six started to rationalise their production Through closing multiple older breweries and replacing them with new more “rational” plants. Which were mostly a total disaster.
The most insane proposals came from Bass Charrington, whose chairman came from outside the brewing industry. He wanted to concentrate brewing in just two plants: the M & B brewery in Cape Hill, Birmingham and Runcorn in Lancashire. It didn’t end well.
Large numbers of regional breweries were closed. Replaced with massive keg plants that never operated to capacity. The Courage brewery that replaced Simonds Reading brewery is a good example. It never brewed the full six million barrels it was capable of. That would have been about 17% of the UK's total output. And has closed.
When beer consumption began to fall, the UK was left with serious overcapacity. Assuming demand would continue to rise, big brewers had invested in massive plants to expand capacity.
The new “megakeggeries”, as CAMRA called them, were no great success. Whitbread’s plant in Luton and Bass Charrington’s in Runcorn were plagued with technical problems and industrial unrest. Both closed. Poor labour relations were rare amongst family brewers with their more paternalistic approach.
| Big brewery tied houses in 1970 | |
| Bass Charrington | 9,450 |
| Whitbread | 8,280 |
| Allied | 8,250 |
| Watney Mann | 6,135 |
| Courage | 6,000 |
| S&N | 1,700 |
| Guinness | 2 |
| Total | 39,817 |
| Source: | |
| Investors' Chronicle, 13 November 1970. | |
Runcorn is in Cheshire, just south of the Mersey which is the traditional boundary between it and Lancashire.
ReplyDeleteThe buying up of tied estates by breweries led of course to the Monopolies Commission investigation and Beer Orders in the late eighties which restricted the number of pubs they could own, and was championed by CAMRA who envisaged greater freedom for pubs to stock guest beers and more choice for customers rather than the rise of debt-laden pubcos screwing their tenants and telling them who they could their order drinks from, and the transition of the Big Six from brewing to property and hotel businesses.
Matt the Beer Orders Act of 1989 seems flawed as it allowed a new set of select companies control the British pub trade the Pubco’s which from what I heard sound dreadful.
DeleteOscar
Not just the Big Six. Home Ales in Nottingham spent £30 million on a new brewery.
ReplyDeleteI am always puzzled why British brewers were never able to crack the US market. Bass made a limited effort but never moved past a niche product.
ReplyDeleteIn the 1970s wine finally started taking off in the US as producers got a lot smarter about marketing. I think brewers like Bass and Fullers could have moved a lot of beer to the same drinkers who started consuming a lot of Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, but they never took advantage. It's not like so called premium US beers like the Miller version of Lowenbrau were any good.
As Scottish and Newcastle had a virtual stranglehold on the North East (other than the area covered by Vaux) the "Big Six" arrangement didn't make a great deal of difference when I lived in Newcastle as S&N were the native brewers.
ReplyDeleteHowever the Big six process ran rampant over Yorkshire with John Smiths swallowed up by Courage, then Websters and Wilsons by Watney Mann and Tetley being merged into Allied Brewers. Bloody sootherners.
The most obvious immediate effect was for the southern companies to gradually alter the pub signage and livery to resemble the parent company.
For example a lot of John Smiths pub signage, especially the wall signs were removed and replaced with signs that adopted the same Courage font, in gold, and the only difference was the background of blue as opposed to Courage's red. I expect the idea was to eventually just to rebrand all the pubs as Courage houses.
Webster and Wilson pubs often suffered the vandalism of displaying "Websters Wilsons" on their signage in identical font and colours (white on green?) as I last saw in Bradford back in around '75.
Tetleys didn't seem to suffer too much as Allied Breweries at least kept their Tetley, Ansells and Ind Coope operations fairly well separated.
Did cask John Smith's have a good reputation? You hear a lot of nostalgia for Tetley and Boddingtons etc but never for John Smith's.
ReplyDeleteThom Farrell
ReplyDeleteJohn Smith produced no cask beer at all between about 1974 and 1984 but when they went for cask they went for it in a big way. The GBG entry for John Smith's bitter used to comment "the quality control for this beer is excellent". They were always well established in Darlington but they made a push into the mid Durham area in the 1980's. Our local village pub switched from Vaux to John Smiths and the locals absolutely adored it. Even more so when the success of the bitter led to the introduction of cask Magnet.
I went to live in Darlington, where there was quite a wide selection of beers available, but John Smiths was by far the most popular beer in town.