The headline is the huge growth in popularity. Notice the big jump in Lager sales in 1975 and 1976. Two years with particularly hot summers. I'm guessing that if I had the numbers broken down by month that a lot of the growth would have occurred during the hotter months. Over the whole period, Lager sales increased by 227%. Which is a fuck load by anyone's standards.
The biggest losers were bottled beers: Brown Ale, down 65%, and Stout, down 57%. Not helped by by the fact that bottled beer sales were down 23%. You can see that once popular beers, such as Light Ale and Brown Ale, were on their way to oblivion. The fall in bottled sales would have been even more dramatic, had their not been 168% increase in Lager sales.
These can't have been very good time for Guinness, as they totally dominated the Stout market. And bottles Stout was one of the biggest losers. Though this may have been distorted by increasing sales of draught Guinness. Unfortunately, this is impossible to see as draught Stout was, for some reason, lumped in with Bitter.
Amongst the draught beers, Mild sales fell 37% and Bitter sales 7%. Not as bad as the decline in bottled beers, but still significant. In the later decades, as Mild vanished into the void, Bitter sales would come under more pressure. As we will see in a later post.
Sales of Strong Ales were tiny. In 1981, just 318,000 hl. Out of a total consumption of 63.6 million hl.
| UK beer sales by type 1971 - 1981 (%) | ||||||||||||
| Type | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | change 1971-1981 |
| Draught | ||||||||||||
| Mild | 17.7 | 15.9 | 14.2 | 13.8 | 13.3 | 12.6 | 12.7 | 11.9 | 11.4 | 11.3 | 11.2 | -36.72% |
| Bitter & Stout | 48.7 | 48.9 | 47.6 | 47.4 | 46.9 | 45.9 | 46.8 | 45.6 | 44.7 | 44.5 | 45.1 | -7.39% |
| Lager: | 7.1 | 8.6 | 11.3 | 12.6 | 15.6 | 18.5 | 19.0 | 20.6 | 22.1 | 23.0 | 23.2 | 226.76% |
| total draught | 73.5 | 73.4 | 73.1 | 73.8 | 75.8 | 77.0 | 78.5 | 78.1 | 78.2 | 78.8 | 79.5 | 8.16% |
| Bottled | ||||||||||||
| Light, Pale and Export: | 11.5 | 11.4 | 11.9 | 11.7 | 10.9 | 9.9 | 8.9 | 8.5 | 8.1 | 7.5 | 7.4 | -35.65% |
| Lager: | 2.8 | 3.1 | 3.5 | 3.7 | 4.2 | 5.1 | 5.4 | 6.3 | 7.0 | 7.6 | 7.5 | 167.86% |
| Brown: | 4.0 | 3.9 | 3.7 | 3.5 | 2.8 | 2.4 | 2.0 | 1.9 | 1.8 | 1.6 | 1.4 | -65.00% |
| Stout: | 7.0 | 6.8 | 6.4 | 5.9 | 5.0 | 4.3 | 3.9 | 3.7 | 3.5 | 3.2 | 3.0 | -57.14% |
| Strong Ales and Barley Wines | 0.6 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 0.6 | 0.6 | 0.6 | 0.6 | 0.6 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.5 | -16.67% |
| party containers | 0.6 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 0.8 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 0.9 | 0.9 | 0.7 | 0.6 | 0.00% |
| Total bottled | 26.5 | 26.6 | 26.9 | 26.2 | 24.2 | 23.0 | 21.5 | 21.9 | 21.8 | 21.1 | 20.4 | -23.02% |
| Source: | ||||||||||||
| The Brewers' Society Statistical Handbook 1980, page 10. | ||||||||||||
| The Brewers' Society Statistical Handbook 1988, page 15. | ||||||||||||
I started drinking in pubs in the late eighties. There were two locally, a large Whitbread house which was keg and attracted all the teenagers and a Holt's estate pub which was cask and mostly frequented by older people. I switched from the first to the second after a couple of years.
ReplyDeleteIt was interesting in the Whitbread house that the middle aged drinkers - who would have been teenagers in the seventies - nearly all drank lager whereas we mostly drank the keg bitter Trophy (which was also a bit cheaper). The Holt's pub had a fairly even split between the cask bitter and mild (one of the regulars appeared on a Sunday dinnertime once with his daughter's new boyfriend from London in tow. The lad asked him what he wanted to drink and when he said he'd have a pint of mild he'd never heard of it and thought he was having his leg pulled before being reassured that the bar staff wouldn't laugh when he asked for it). They also sold quite a bit of bottled beer, including bottle conditioned Guinness which I occasionally drank there and Holt's own brown and pale ales which were mostly mixed with the draught beer.