We'll kick off with brewing itself. What sort of breweries would exist in the future?
"The current trend towards fewer but much larger breweries, such as Whitbread's at Luton, may well continue until the brewing giants each have only one or two units serving the whole country. At the same time, the continuing rationalisation of brewing materials and the added desirability of preparing them economically in large quantities may mean that these strategically-sited production centres will be supplied with concentrated wort from adjacent new materials "factories".
At first sight, this manner of production may appear to be ideal, but there is another school of thought that says we could well see a return to localised brewing in the future, though with small, highly-automated continuous plant, probably controlled from the company's head office many miles away. An important advantage of this system, of course, would be in the huge savings in transport costs."
Brewers' Guardian, Volume 99, January 1970, page 33.
As it turned out, neither of those predictions turned out to be true. Whitbread’s ill-fated Luton plant probably wasn’t the best example of a new brewery to pick. Bass Charrington genuinely had a plan of serving the whole of the UK from just two breweries. Neither did concentrated wort factories appear. So, 100% miss in the first paragraph.
The other extreme – small, local continuous fermentation plants – didn’t happen, either. Mostly because continuous fermentation couldn’t be got to work. At least, it couldn’t be made to produce beer people actually wanted to drink.
What really happened? The big brewers did build megabreweries. Bass had Runcorn. Courage had Worton Grange. And where are they now? All closed. And, while the nightmare of just a handful of breweries producing all the country's beer never materialised, the bulk is brewed in just a few large breweries.
What's completely missing are the new arrivals at the bottom end. Not continuous-fermentation plants, but small traditional breweries. Though you can't really blame anyone in 1970, before any new breweries had been founded (other than Traquair House), for not predicting that.
It all goes to show what a mug's game predicting the long-term future is.
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4 comments:
Britain was perhaps fortunately preserved from the dreaded continuous production method of beer production, but here in Australia the biggest brewers, CUB, eagerly embraced what they call the wortstream production method. So thats many of the big name brands covered. VB, Carlton, Fosters, you name 'em. They all taste of soap.
I don't imagine the other half of the Big Two (Lion Nathan) are any different. Thats Swan, Castlemain, Tooheys etc. Of course if you drink them at freezing point, you can't taste anything anyway.
But maybe the prediction wasn't off, just the location.
Sounds dreadful for beer drinking.
Oscar
In the US in the early 60s, Carling tried continuous brewing and couldn't make it work.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/fort-worth-star-telegram-carling/84942627/
They also couldn't establish their national brands in the US, whether brewed in old plants, the new continuous brewing brewery, or new conventional breweries. The brands are gone in the US, almost extinct in their original Canada home, but live on in Britain.
DB breweries (Dominion) of New Zealand, now part of Heineken, has used continuous brewing at several sites over years:
https://www.roadshow.org/content/resources/NZscientists/mortonCoutts.php
Its not clear to me whether the multinational ownership has affected their brewing methods.
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