This is a recurring theme with these startups. That they only lasted a couple of years. The failure rate in the first five years was very high. I'd be interested to know what the failure rate for breweries founded more recently is. Does a high percentage throw in the towel in the initial years of operation? Not sure where I'd get that information from.
Mendip
Temple Cloud,
Somerset.
Founded: 1978
Closed: 1984
Tied houses: 0
A new brewery close to Bristol. Another brewer which wasn’t around for long and left few ripples in the brewing world. I’m sure that I never tried their beer.
| beer | style | format | OG | description |
| Mendip Special | Pale Ale | draught | 1040 | rich, nutty and hoppy |
| Mendip Special Bitter | Pale Ale | draught | 1035 | well hopped |
New Forest
Codnam,
Hampshire
Founded: 1979
Closed: 1988
Tied houses: 0
Another new brewery in a Southern English village. Hanging around for 9 years, they lasted longer than many of the brewery startups in the 1970s.
| beer | style | format | OG | description |
| New Forest Real Ale | Pale Ale | draught | 1038 |
Raven
Brighton,
E. Sussex.
Founded: 1979/1983
Closed: 1982/1987
Tied houses: 0
| beer | style | format | OG | description |
| Brighton Best Bitter | Pale Ale | draught | 1048 | |
| Raven Bitter | Pale Ale | draught | 1039 |
Posts
7 comments:
There are a couple of places you could find out how many new breweries have opened then shut after a few years more recently, HMRC registration records or, and probably more accessible, the Good Beer Guide. I can think of at least half a dozen in the Manchester area which have done so in the last decade, for a variety of reasons: homebrewers spending their redundancy money before going back to their original career, divorce, death, retirement, cuckoo brewers in premises which shut, and of course of late rapidly rising costs.
Try Quaffale - http://www.quaffale.org.uk/php/closed.php
The SIBA Brewery Tracker seems to have information for the past two years (is that it?); Statista has a piece on number of breweries in the UK between 2018 and 2022; measuring slightly different things. A Guardian search brings up lots of gloomy reports on the demise of craft beer due to Brexit and other institutional hobby horses. As Matt says, I would have thought there should be some govt agency tracking brewery numbers, beer production by brewery, or just changes in numbers in a category of businesses (Companies House), or similar.
Question for Ron, if you did not try any of the beers that you filled the description box in for, how did you go about finding the words to describe these beers which you did not try?
Oscar
A large proportion of small businesses fail, and breweries are no exception. Some make good beer, but can’t run a business; some are nice people who can’t brew. This is the case even without periods of crisis such as the present.
The stranglehold on pubs held by first the big breweries and now by the big pub companies is another major factor. If you can’t sell your beer, it doesn't matter how good it is.
There is one agency which knows exactly how many breweries are (legally) operating and how much beer they are making, and that's HMRC. But as far as I know they don't publish any data on that, even in anonymised form.
Difficult to see how BREXIT would have any effect but COVID certainly was less than helpful.
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