CALLED TO THE BAR

In March 2019 I finally made a long overdue trip to Huddersfield and visited Magic Rock’s taproom for the first time. I loved it and was able to have a beer with head brewer Stu. He gave me a quick brewery trip and we chatted about the new canning line whose instalment he’d overseen. A couple of weeks later, the news broke that Magic Rock had been bought by the Australian food and drinks giant Lion, whose parent company is Kirin Holdings.

Even though I had been in the brewery a fortnight before, I had picked up no clue as to what was going to happen. More pertinently, though, I still felt that I would drink Magic Rock’s beers. I still do. Furthermore, I often buy a Lupuloid from Beavertown (who sold a 49% stake in their business to Heineken in 2018), and also recently enjoyed a DIPA from Brixton Brewery (fully owned by Heineken).

However, I also buy and drink lots of beers from many independent breweries, such as Burning Sky, St Mars of the Desert and The Kernel. In drinking these beers I know I am supporting a business without outside interference, where the owner (who is also often the brewer) makes the decisions on what beers to brew (though you could argue that market demand for the current rash of hazy, juicy NEIPAs is also a massive outside influencer) and there isn’t what feels like a human shield of a PR company fielding my queries.

Mind you, I am not just drinking these indie beers to feel better about myself, they are pristine beers that rock my soul. This then makes me think — why does St Mars of the Desert’s Jack D’Or rock the foundations of my soul when Lupuloid, even though I enjoy it, doesn’t? Both beers taste good, but there seems to be an additional ingredient in one beer that isn’t in the other, independence. Perhaps independence is a story that adds to a beer’s appeal, that eternal story of David versus Goliath or Jack clambering up the Beanstalk to face the giant.

Perhaps it is a psychological condition to like independent beers, and some of us are wired to behave this way, and yes it does make us feel better about ourselves. The latter point reminds of something a friend recently said to me about the demos she goes on — about how it helps her mental health to shout and let her feelings out. This is going on a demo as a cathartic experience.

These thoughts on independence have been flitting around in my mind for some time, but various debates about independence, as well as the justness of selling your beers through massive supermarkets (ie Cloudwater), have made me want to try and understand how independence is such an important part of the craft beer world. This in its turn is linked with some thoughts I was having about why some breweries go for perpetual growth and others reach a level that they don’t want to go beyond.

It’s an obvious statement, but sometimes forgotten by beer lovers to whom some breweries might be as important to their lives as a football team or rock group is to others, a brewery is a business. No one sets up a brewery to lose money or not sell beer. There is a joy in knowing that people like your beer, whether in the on- or off-trade, and a warm sense of satisfaction that they want to spend time and money in your tap-room.

However, the price of success is the necessity of growth. The more people like to drink your beers the more you have to brew. You have to upscale your equipment. For instance, you might have agreed to supply a major supermarket chain with more canned brands, so a new canning line is brought in. In order to make use of this new kit, more has to be brewed, so you have to grow. Quality is important and, in order to maintain it, better and more precise equipment has to be found. So you have to grow. Growth is an inescapable part of a brewery’s business. Inevitably, with this growth comes the interest of big companies, global in their outreach, almost like ancient imperial states that suddenly realised they needed to possess a neighbouring country which was catching up on them. This then is when independence becomes important.

Business is about growth, about making money, whether it’s enough to live comfortably on or make a fortune and retire to the Cotswolds or the Bahamas. However, in these environmental conscious days, there is also an ethical dimension in the way a business grows, which we are seeing a lot more in the brewing industry. The likes of SMOTD, The Kernel and Burning Sky are in their own ways guardians of this new kind of growth, not a reaction, but perhaps a reflection of their founders’ values, in the same way a brewery that has deliberately grown large enough to attract buyers is also a reflection of its founders’ values.

As for independence, recently I was approached by a PR company acting for a large brewery. The upshot of the email was that if I was able to sell a story on a particular aspect of this brewery they were keen to promote, I would get access to various key personnel for quotes I could use in any published article. I politely turned it down.

After all, I am independent.

Adrian Tierney-Jones