‘It all disappeared with Brexit’: Craft beer boom ends as more than 100 UK firms go bust
‘It all disappeared with Brexit’: Craft beer boom ends as more than 100 UK firms go bust
More than a hundred breweries have shut in the past two years as new trade barriers were compounded by Covid and tax changes
Years after, what else is there to say? The citizens were duped and they voted for this.
138And those of us that weren't duped (and did actually vote) are stuck along for the ride, all the while knowing how preventable this whole mess was.
For starters, some of the people voting to leave didn't even know what the EU was, some voted simply because they wanted to spite David Cameron, and some thought it'd get rid of the "foreigners". All absolutely dumbfuck reasons to fuck over the country by voting leave.
Furthermore, a bunch of the remainers didn't even vote because they assumed we'd win, which is also a massively dumbfuck reason not to vote, as by doing so they effectively voted to leave instead.
To be slightly fair to them though, I'd too have a hard time imagining that there'd be so many people willing to vote so completely against their own interests based off almost solely off the words of two slimy rich bastards and a bus.
47Should watch us here in the US. We always vote against our interests and it always turns to shite.
Not voting or voting without knowing what's being voted for are yet another thing we're #1 at.
12
Well, yeah, but the US was duped into voting for an orange criminal too.
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Even if “we were lied to”, it’s a vulgar lie to vote for, true or not. No?
15💀
7Indeed, but it still surprises me somehow that the consequences of that whole fiasco are so large
5They didn't.
-1They voted for it twice, and it won by an even larger margin the second time!
They deserve everything that has happened to them. The most infuriating part is that they'll never admit they were wrong.
-7
Can I just add that a lot of UK craft beer firms went bust because they were started by a bunch of trust-fund babies with sleeve tattoos and no experience and their beer was disgusting over-hopped SHITE
That would explain about 70% of this statistic
96Spot on.
13I forgot about the beards tho
6
Hear, hear
4
I love how nearly every nation is having a housing crisis. We all know what the true crisis is but even in "communist" China they refuse to acknowledge that greed and the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands is the problem. We're headed to the destruction of humanity as we know it. Such a dumb species. I only hope the bottom 90% of humanity realizes soon enough and restructures society that is equitable based on need followed by a distant accumulated wealth.
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11At least House Buyers can keep their House for 90 Years after Purchase.
This helps the Housing Crisis i little bit.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Kimi Karjalainen and his brother Marko poured their life savings into Bone Machine Brewing Co when it opened in Pocklington, East Yorkshire, in 2017 before moving to Hull, as part of the craft beer revolution that swept Britain.
Post-Brexit trading arrangements with European Union countries meant that Bone Machine’s craft beers needed to be accompanied by expensive and time-consuming paperwork.
Bone Machine is one of more than 100 small brewers that have been forced out of business in the past 18 months, hit by a combination of Brexit, the pandemic and the cost of living crisis and now threatened by changes to beer duty laws.
So while people were getting worse off, the multinational brewers were going to pubs, to free houses, and saying ‘we’ll give you cheap kegs, but we want control of all your lines’.”
Other issues affecting the industry have been the shortage of carbon dioxide following the early stages of the energy crisis, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine which raised the cost of barley and hops.
Larger companies have been doing well, including Brewdog, the Camden Town Brewery and Beavertown, which the Grocer reported had seen supermarket sales rise by more than a quarter.
The original article contains 958 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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but kimi kimi kimi, you set up a business in the UK.... "heavily geared for export [to EU countries]" …. in 2017....?
21There was no change in trade regulations until 2021. The UK government insisted all along that they would get "the best of both worlds" and "no friction". While there was a reduction in demand from the EU side, acknowledged by most pre-established businesses, if you started in 2017 you wouldn't have seen it.
Kimi was a mug for believing lies from the UK government, or hoping/betting that things wouldn't get as bad as they did. A softer, saner agreement achieving EEA-like status would have been fine for him, after all. But nope, we got our hard brexit...
22I grew up several miles from Pocklington (the home of the business named in the article) and having any industry up there other than pig-farming would have been a welcome change. The British government forced this country into an idiotic referendum on a matter where very few people understood the consequences of the "Leave" decision, and then doubled down on their failed gamble by fucking up the post-Brexit negotiations.
Blaming entrepreneurs, who were simply trying to create a business & employ people, something that this government purports to support, for lacking the foresight to realise how incompetent and self-serving this government is, seems delusional.
19Bro, every person with half a brain knew knew knew how stupid Brexit was, and knew knew knew the exact consequences of the referendum passed. To the fucking detail smart people fucking knew this, and everything that happened, was going to happen.
It's the fucking idiots, racists, basically trump maga equivalents in the UK who were too smooth-brained to understand complex shit who voted to leave. All of us with just a slight wrinkle (edit - a slight wrinkle in our brains, adding this because I'm sure you don't follow - end edit) knew this would happen, foresaw it happening, talked about how all this dumb shit would happen, but yet here we are.
Blame the propaganda machine that got the smoothies to vote to leave before you start throwing shade at people making fun of the idiots (I don't know if the person in the article is a brexiter or not, if not I feel for them, but they have their fellow countrymen to blame, not us commentators on the internet who are laughing at the leopards eating faces of the leopards eating faces party.
13Entrepreneurs main task is to evaluate and use risk to enter a market for profit.
You would have to be pretty bad at risk management to watch the tory goverment self immolating at every turn for years and not think that that would affect the likely success of your buisness.
This is especially true if your buisness depended deeply on trade agreements that your local government just tore up very, very publically and then refused to renegotiate very, very publically.
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Also P6 before they mention the cost of living crisis... I love craft beer but 10 quid a pint is tough to swallow when you're staying down an electricity bill that doubled in the last 12 months plus all your groceries went up by his knows how much
I'm happy enough to blame brexit but when it comes to discretionary purchases like craft beer i doubt it's even the main culprit... mind you I still drink it, but then I'm borgouis or something
810 quid a pint
That's either bathtub-sized batches (and all the work that means) or they're gouging. Rule of thumb if you can find it in supermarkets they're not brewing in bathtubs as supermarkets demand quite large minimum volumes.
Over here in Germany we have Störtebeker, they're not exactly a microbrewery but a (quite old, actually) small, independent, regional, brewery who for the longest time simply brewed their local Pils and maybe one or two other bog-standard things. Then they had a look at the market and came up with new recipes using all kinds of fancy methods and special yeasts and aroma hops and everything, leading to things like their Atlantic Ale, the missing link between Pils and IPA, for about 1.30€ per half litre bottle. That's about the same price range as big beer brands with TV ads, or a Budweiser (Czech of course).
Some pictures for a sense of scale. Sure that's way beyond the bathtub league but compared to actually big brewers it's tiny.
Occasionally they have actually expensive stuff but then you're looking at five times ice-distilled beer or such. Shouldn't be surprising that that's five times more expensive you're buying quite a bit less water.
If you want to brew at the bathtub scale, commercially, open a pub or probably better restaurant and do beer pairings.
4
Other issues affecting the industry have been the shortage of carbon dioxide following the early stages of the energy crisis
My kneejerk reaction is that that's probably self-solving. Like, you only need so much food-grade carbon dioxide, so you only have so many facilities capturing it from power plants or whatever rather than just dumping it into the atmosphere. Makes no sense to increase capture if there's no demand. But if supply falls off, then it makes sense to capture from more sources of carbon dioxide.
googles
Huh. Apparently the brewing industry is actually a source of food-grade carbon dioxide, not a consumer.
https://www.linde-gas.com/en/products_and_supply/food_grade_gases/index.html
We supply food grade carbon dioxide (CO2) , nitrogen (N2), and oxygen (O2) along with other gases authorised for foodstuffs as individual gases in cylinders under high pressure as well as liquids in insulated tanks for subsequent mixing at the packaging machine and premixed.
Carbon dioxide is taken from natural wells or captured as a by-product of fermentation processes (wine, beer) or ammonia production.
16Well brewed beer shouldn't need additional carbonation, it's not a soft drink. They need it as they're making shit beer at a massive mark up as "craft".
15It's needed for purging tanks to avoid oxidation, pressurisation, moving it through lines etc, not necessarily carbonation.
4
And I wonder if old mate and the rest of his family voted leave or stay. I'm pretty short on sympathy for self inflicted damage nowadays
16So sad what Brexit has taken from the UK
12Any bot makers want to make one to check for an archive.is paywall bypass?
10Thank you, and that would be great indeed!
512ft.io works for me most of the time
2
Lol
-2I bet there have been some great craft beers out there - and I'm sorry for them and their businesses and that I never got to taste them - but the vast majority was disgusting. A beer should be a beer and not a fucking disgrace to nature.
-2I don't know about vast majority but I agree that a good solid chunk are gross. Sometimes just because you can doesn't mean you should. World doesn't need 20 different types of salty tangerine beer.
2
Just sounds like they had to fill out some extra paperwork but just decided to go out of business instead?? He could not being himself to fill out export paperwork.
-4So did you read the article?
Expensive and lengthy paperwork.
Higher export / import costs & tariffs
Covid
Exploding cost of living
Changed laws
Raised taxes7Yeah I did actually read it, he said export was 30 to 40% of his business and sending it all over the eu was a lot of paperwork. What he should have done is found a distributor one set of paperwork to get his product into the distribution warehouse then they handle the rest and deliver all over the eu to his existing clients for a fee. That was the only part he didn't wanna do the rest of the shit you listed affects all other industry in the UK it's not special to this guy or to beer. You raise your prices to cover costs.
1
I mean they made their bed, now they should just sleep in it and shut up.
-5About 25% of the population voted to leave.
Vote, people. Because if you don't, a minority might choose your future for you. You can avoid politics, but politics won't avoid you.
18Half the country didn't vote for this and about 3.5 million EU citizens living in the UK weren't allowed to vote (which was against EU regulations but nobody seems to care). So quit the "they asked for it" bullshit.
14About 40% of eligible voters didn't participate...
Edit: about 30%
4
True, however Putin had his fingers in it as he did with the US election. France managed to avoid the fall out the same window or we would be in a heap of trouble.
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