RUNAWAY... to Manchester and be part of the growing Craft Beer scene
HAVING been on the verge of a collapse a few years ago, Britain’s well-loved pubs are now becoming a key attraction for tourists.
Of the 34.6million tourists to visit last year from abroad, around 13million visited a pub to experience what is commonly seen as a British stereotype, but not just to have a photo in the likes of The Rovers Return or The Queen Vic.
Beer Tourism has always kindled an interest among beer enthusiasts, whether that be trying a pint from a particular brewer from another region like Thwaites in Lancashire, or spending a weekend in Germany.
But the recent growth in craft beer is something that has really captivated people who are keen to try some of the 5,000 brands of beer that now exist in the UK.
“Beer tourism is becoming a really big thing now, with people coming to the UK where traditionally everyone buggered off to Belgium for two weeks to go and drink Belgian beer,” says Mark Welsby, co-founder of Runaway Brewery in Manchester, “but people are now coming to the UK because the beer scene is exciting… That’s pretty cool!”
Showcasing Runaway’s facilities and beer at Shebeen Festival, Mark mused: “Maybe meet the brewer and all that kind of stuff instead of going to a gig?
“I mean it’s happening already isn’t it?” he continued. “Some of the beer festivals we’ve seen coming up, IndyMan Beer Conference; it’s on every October, it’s probably the most influential craft beer festival in the UK now, and people literally come from all over Europe to come to that festival.”
Last year over 3,000 people visited the festival at Victoria Baths in Manchester over the four days, with 47 different breweries ranging from all over the UK, as well as accommodating European breweries from Italy, Denmark, Spain and The Netherlands, plus some brewers from the biggest consumer and producer of craft beer in the world, the USA.
Festival organiser Jonny Heyes explains “The beer world is a dynamic industry, more women and young people are drinking beer and it’s losing it’s stuffy, old man image, yet something was lacking in Britain’s beer festivals so we thought we’d change that."
BlackJack Brewery was one of the venues for this year's festival
There was also music and art on show to exhibit the elements
Keystone will bring to the Green Quarter
15 new breweries have opened across Greater Manchester in the last 18 months, and the emergence of these festivals is starting to open up the scene which until now has been very London based, with London Craft Beer Festival (August) and London Beer Week (February) being the only major festivals showcasing the growing Craft Beer scene.
“I hope Manchester leads the way, certainly,” says Mark, who exhibits at both IndyMan and Shebeen, as well as supplying many local pubs across Manchester.
“It’s a modern progressive city, it always has been, so it makes sense in lots of ways for it to be at the forefront of that.”
A unique network of pubs is one of the things the British Beer and Pub Association says makes the experience attractive, and that the way they are evolving to include traditional food and accommodation will only add to that and ‘make for a great opportunity for this niche in our tourism market to grow further’.
A spokesperson added: “We have worked hard to get the tourism authorities to put beer and pubs at the heart of our tourism offering, and they have responded positively.
“For beer lovers, we have a great variety of styles and many that offer something quintessentially British, with our bitters, golden ales, porters, IPAs, stouts and milds.”
A NORTH-South divide is often something associated with wealth, but ironically it’s also a difference when it comes to the latest figures for binge drinking.
The stats, collected and published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), show an overall drop in the number of people who binged in the previous week, although that comes as a result of more young adults claiming to have binged less, with the other categories seeing a slight increase.
Young adults were again the stand out category in the number of people claiming to be teetotal, becoming equally as likely to drink no alcohol as over 65s.
It follows the same trend as the number of young adults saying they were frequent drinkers, a statistic which has fallen by more than two-thirds since 2005.
Chief Executive of DrinkAware, Elaine Hindal, commented on the trend, saying: “The increased number of those choosing not to drink alcohol could be down to a range of factors including better education about the health impact of drinking to harmful levels, increasingly ethnically diverse communities and the cost of living.”
However she highlighted the divide as ‘a cause for concern’, adding: “The figures suggest people in the north of England and Scotland are more likely to have binged than adults elsewhere in Great Britain.
“People may not realise that drinking two large glasses of wine in one day for women, or three pints of strong beer for men is regarded as binge drinking and has consequences for health," she finished.
As a nation famed for it’s beer and pubs, there has been a significant shift away from from that sort of culture to a more active, health conscious one.
In fact figures released by the Leisure Database Company showed gym memberships exceeding 8million for the first time ever in Britain for 2014.
Taking that and the increasing population of other ethnic communities that are forbidden to drink alcohol into consideration, it is really no surprise that this trend is occurring.
Student Culture
Despite the figures though, one of the other trends visible on the map is the consistency of student cities showing above-average figures for binge drinking.
While younger people drink less frequently than older people, they drink more on those occasions, and that can still cause severe health problems.
A study carried out by research group Alcohol Research UK suggested that participation in sports teams is associated with higher levels of alcohol consumption, particularly those who were sponsored by alcohol-related businesses.
The findings also showed that while 4% of the people surveyed were alcohol abstainers, the remaining Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test scores were higher in sports teams when compared to a similar study carried out on University students in general.
This was confirmed in my own survey of about 40 students, with 11 out of 18 people who drank more than eight units of alcohol per week believing that being part of a sports society influences the amount they drink.
“From experience it is stated that drinking is not compulsory, but it is very hard to fit in without doing so,” commented one male participant, while another added “Yes, we are contractually obliged to go to Bierkeller once a month to get drunk.”
Interestingly though, an extra five people said that just being part of a society was enough to influence their drinking habits, while 59% of participants felt that being a student was in itself a reason for drinking more alcohol.
There is still a massive issue with the amount of money alcohol abuse can cost, with the latest figures from the Department of Health suggesting alcohol-fuelled harm can cost the government around £21billion a year.
A staggering £2.8billion of that is burdened on the NHS, including treatments of diseases and illnesses caused by alcohol, although there has been a significant 17% drop in the number of people having to stay overnight as a result of drinking from 2011/12 to 2012/13.
However alcohol-related admissions are again up for the last year, continuing the trend which has resulted in a 37% increase in admissions over the last decade, and contradicting data which suggests that overall consumption is down.
Again figures suggest that there is more of a problem in the North with 820 per 100,000 people in the North East being admitted to hospital, compared to 490 per 100,000 in the South East. The national average for England is 610 admissions per 100,000 people.
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
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.”
