Less than a year ago, I was ruminating on the future of craft beer. Things were looking grim even then, and since that time something like a dozen or more other breweries in this country alone have gone through the mill, including Australia’s oldest craft brewery, Grand Ridge, which has been brewing since the 80’s and has announced it has entered voluntary administration in hopes of selling the business. It joins something like 7 other breweries in this financial quarter alone.
It’s hard, sometimes, to remain optimistic as a craft beer consumer in these wintry economic climes. All of your favourite breweries, from tiny experimental brewhouses to people who have previously made millions in beer are popping in and out of receivership and voluntary administration, being scooped up, sold off or shut down by the big players or are quietly shuttering their doors. As the cost to produce something like an IPA rises by 25%* the great diversity of beer production seems to be regressing to lager, and the breadth of scope we used to have when it came to choice is gradually becoming simply Dortmunder lager, cerveza, or ‘upscale’ CUB lager clones.
*According to The Crafty Pint
Of course, that’s not all bad news if you like a lager. Which I do. But I miss the excitement of the craft beer world. The discovery. The frontiersmanship. The competition. The friendly rivalry. The novelty. More and more breweries are having to tighten their belts, put their nose to the grindstone and just make what sells. The more the government squeezes them for excise, and the more the big players squeeze them out of competition with massively undercut pricing and tap contracts, the more that the cost of hops, malt, yeast, packaging, etc. rises they have no option to continue doing the thing that people do and must simply fit their cog into the capitalist machine. For clarification, by ‘doing the thing that people do’ I’m referring to the human trait of rejoicing in creativity. I’m not mad at them for doing it – they’re businesses, they have livelihoods and responsibilities. I totally get it. I’m not mad at them, I’m mad that they aren’t allowed to spread their wings and foster the inventiveness and creativity that they could, and undoubtedly would if given the chance.
Obviously, giving up creative direction and instead cleaving to the mainstream is one way to get around these issues. Another is the dreaded shrinkflation. If you’ve never heard the term, it’s how companies get around admitting that you’re getting less value for buying their products – think Schweppes unveiling their ‘exciting new rebranding’ and trying to slip past people that the bottles are now at least 150ml lighter. Or chocolate bars with a ‘new formula!’ the sole difference being that they weigh an eighth less now. Or, more germane to this conversation, breweries now eschewing the classic 24 unit slab and selling their beers in ten, sixteen, eighteen or twenty packs. New Look, Same Great Price!
For example – the prize at the bar where I do trivia used to be a slab of Kaiju Krush. Which was great – it’s one of the best pales on the market. But that became a bit exxy so the pub started shopping around for something more competitively priced. Enter Young Henry’s Newtowner, donated gratis by their rep. I tried valiantly to get past the taste, but even when it was free it largely just ended up as slug traps out in the garden. Then, a white knight swooped in to save the day, and that white knight was Tallboy and Moose stepping up to provide a more palatable slab of either their lager or XPA. And the people rejoiced. But then, that slab became a ‘case’, with eight fewer beers to a box. For a team of two, that amounts to just over a sixer each for a trivia victory, which doesn’t feel especially glorious. For those people who come in a group of six or more, well… enjoy your 2 and-a-bit beers, chumps.
Now, the staff supplement this case for us with a spare 4-pack of the same to pad it out a bit. Is that because we (barely humblebrag incoming) just kept winning, had more beer than we knew what to do with and started donating a pack to the staff? Or is it because they realise that a case comprising only 2/3 of what it used to is just an unsatisfying unit? I guess we’ll never know.*
*Spoilers: It’s the first one.
Again, I want to stress that I don’t blame the breweries themselves for all this. It’s not a cynical ploy for them to stretch out their profits. It’s the only way for a lot of them to keep their heads above water. Tax on making booze can be as high as half of the cost of production. It runs to $20 per slab. Add to that the fact that people are buying fewer ‘luxuries’ or not going out, the rising cost of… fucking everything in the world, the losses that suppliers of things like malt and yeast have to eat when the breweries they supply default on their payments and go into administration, and a proper slab for a hundred bucks is almost a bargain these days.
It feels like optimism is tricky – will this year yield more devastating floods? More crippling bushfires? More global pandemics? More recessions and cost of living crises? More worldwide supply-chain breakdowns? More of any number of other climate-change related disasters that affect the base suppliers of the things we need to live, or to live well? In the meantime… I don’t know. If you don’t care about beer, well, I can’t imagine you read this far. If you do but you are yourself in dire financial straits and can’t afford something fancy and instead only occasionally pick up whatever’s on special, that’s fine too. But if you are in a position with the privilege to care about AND act on it, buy a slab of something special to tuck into the fridge, even if it is only a 16 pack, hug a brewer and pray for the best. The time will come, I’m sure, when things settle down some and we can all breathe a little easier and brewers can start to take creative risks again. We can clink glasses of some exotic new style brimming with lush new hop varietals and thank our lucky stars that the dark days for the craft beer world are over.
Exit Pursued by a Beer 