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| Pour for me, pour for you: 15 new breweries have opened across Greater Manchester in the last 18 months |
CRAFT BEER is one of the latest trends to emerge on the UK’s drinking scene over the last year, popular for their unique cross between an ale and a lager, and brimming with flavour.
Having been at a lowly 800 in 2011, the number of breweries in the UK now stands at just over 1,100, and that is thanks in no small part to the revolution of Craft Beer, which has also had an impact on the 1.3% increase in beer sales recorded in 2014.
“There is a real appetite both for drinking it and brewing it, and being involved in the industry,” said Mark Welsby, one of the founders of Manchester’s Runaway Brewery which set up last year.
“I wanted to do something that I knew I would enjoy doing, that I could motivate myself to do, so brewing gave me an opportunity to do all that and to work in an industry which is very collaborative.”
Microbrewing itself isn’t new as people have been brewing their own drinks in kitchens and cellars for a long time with kits starting from as little as £20, but on a commercial scale people are starting to see more and more varieties from different brewers.
“Before this kind of modern Craft Beer scene, I suppose to a large degree bigger breweries saw microbreweries as a bit of an anomaly,” continued Mark.
“Perhaps slightly funny eccentric people doing in their garage what they did on a big scale.”
That is how another of Manchester’s growing number of breweries, ShinDigger, started out as co-founder George Grant, 24, explained:
“So basically I was living with my business partner Paul, and in our third year of living together and our final year of University we just thought it would be a fun thing to do actually.
“We put in about £100 each to buy a home brew kit, initially with the idea that it would just be a laugh and make beer cheaper at a time when we were students and didn’t have very much money.”
The Rebel Revolution
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| Watt have you been drinking? BrewDog's 'mission' is to make others as passionate about good beer as they are. Credit: BrewDog |
The inception of Craft Beer to the UK market goes back a little bit further though, and a few hundred miles north to Scotland where BrewDog first launched in 2007.
“BrewDog was born out of a frustration with the state of beer in the UK,” said James Watt, co-founder of the brewery.
“As fans of the American Craft Beer scene, we both disliked the bland, yellow fizzy lagers and stuffy ales that seemed to constitute ‘beer’ in most British pubs and off licenses.”
The decline in the number of pubs has been well documented, falling from 60,600 in 1997 to approximately 49,500 in 2015, although that is an increase on a low of just over 48,000 in 2013.
Of those 49,500, around 18,000 pubs are privately owned which represents what Mark believes has been a problem in the industry as chain-owned pubs, or ‘PubCos’ have multiplied.
“How many pubs have you been to where you’ve got the same five or six drinks on all the time? Guinness, Carling, if you’re lucky maybe some continental lager of some description,” he asked.
“That isn’t choice, there is virtually no difference between a lot of those products other than branding.
“What the Craft Beer scene is doing is saying ‘look at the variety, look at all the weird and wonderful things you can do with beer to actually go with food instead of having wine, or you might have it aged in spirit casks; all sorts of stuff to get lots and lots of different flavours, so it kind of challenges what peoples’ perceptions of beer is, and that to me is very exciting.”
In eight years BrewDog has grown enormously as a result of it's popularity, boasting 28 bars worldwide and over 15,000 shareholders in it’s Equity for Punks crowdfunding scheme, which allowed James and his partner Martin Dickie to raise the money needed to open a new brewery in 2012.
“Our Equity for Punks shareholders are our biggest advocates and ambassadors, and it’s that advocacy that brings in new recruits in the craft beer revolution,” continued James, after stating how BrewDog’s mission is to make people as passionate about ‘great’ beer as they are.
“Breweries like Anchor Steam and Sierra Nevada in the US have proven that craft beer breweries can be scaled up without losing their quality and passion, and the equipment in our new facility doesn't replace any of the human interaction with beer.
“The brewing process remains exactly the same; the equipment and scale just helps us to meet the demand for our beers,” he added, although some brewers like Mark are wary about just how big a brewery can get before it does start to have an effect.
“I could see us probably trebling in size, maximum, but after that you really do get to the point where you’re no longer able to use ingredients in the same way and in the same numbers without it really starting to affect your margins and your costs.”
Doing it differently
For ‘gypsy brewers’ ShinDigger, scaling and expansion isn’t particularly a problem as they don’t own their own brewery.
Instead they outsource and use other breweries to produce their beer at, leaving more experienced brewers to do the day-to-day care for the beer while they turn up on brew days to make it.
“One of the advantages [to gypsy brewing] is that you can scale very quickly because instead of having to invest in new kit you can just brew at another brewery, or go to a new brewery to brew,” said George, who graduated from the University of Manchester with a degree in International Business.
“We’ve come at it from a very different angle to everyone else; we don’t necessarily see the growth of the business model to be the same way, so that’s why we gypsy brew.
“Most people don’t gypsy brew for as long as we do, but what we’re passionate about is spreading the message of Craft Beer and getting more people drinking good beer rather than drinking some of the s**t that’s out there.”
Innovation
One of the fantastic, if not sometimes confusing things about Craft Beer is that there is no specific definition of it in the UK, although there are certain values that the producers stick by which revolve around flavour, passion and a dislike for mass-produced lagers.
“Innovation doesn’t just stop with ingredients and we are building new ways of brewing beer here; we even have a hop cannon,” said James, who has broken headlines as well as boundaries with stunts including beer packaged in taxidermy, brewing at the bottom of the sea, and driving a tank through London.
He added: “People are also getting more savvy to marketing from the big breweries now, and are less likely to blindly assume a beer tastes good simply because there is a £50million advertising push behind it.”
At ShinDigger they are innovating in another way, and one of the initiatives just launched is a collaborative project where the brewery works with other people from different industries to launch and sell beer, as George describes.
“We want to do collaborations with other kind of elements of youth culture such as musicians, and we’ve got another one potentially lined up that is kind of like a lifestyle/website magazine thing, and it’s just a way to get our message out there.”
The first in the project is a collaboration with Manchester DJ and Producer Werkha, who launches his debut album this summer, and ShinDigger is releasing a Manchester Red Ale alongside the album, influenced by their connections to Manchester.
“So the idea is we make a beer with him, and then we’re getting out there to Werkha’s fans and at the same time to our fans, we’re getting out Werkha, so it’s mutually beneficial for both of us promoting each other because we both like what each other are doing.”
“I am the re-invention”
The young adult market has been a notoriously difficult one to penetrate for ale, with it’s ‘old man’ stigma, but in Craft Beer there is a new appeal that perhaps comes at a time when this generation is looking for it’s own identity and re-invention.
“I do think it’s an urban thing,” says George, “but I think that’s almost like a microcosm of society itself in the beer world where everything that happens in this country often stems, so new trends start in London, and then they spill out to the more liberal cities like Bristol, Manchester… Now you’re sort of seeing Manchester starting to put itself on the map with breweries like Cloudwater, then there’s a big crop of us coming through.”
Some comparisons have even been drawn to the 1980s and 90s, where Manchester reacted to the Thatcher government and re-invented itself, particularly in the music scene, and Mark would be happy to see a similar re-invention.
“I wonder whether this will be the beer decade, that would be brilliant.
“I hope Manchester leads the way because that would be great; it’s a modern progressive city and it always has been so it makes sense in lots of ways for it to be at the forefront of that.”
RELATED LINKS:
ShinDigger: http://shindiggerbrewing.co/
Runaway Brewery: http://www.therunawaybrewery.com/
BrewDog: https://www.brewdog.com/
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