2024 saw a string of brewery closures and takeovers. Wild Card in Walthamstow sadly fell victim to an accumulation of COVID debts, while venture capitalists Keystone (Breal) consolidated their brewery holdings, owning Black Sheep in Masham, Brew by Numbers and Brick in London, and Purity in the Midlands.
It reflected tough times for breweries that had developed in the earlier craft beer boom and is a reminder that market capitalism thrives on boom and bust.
The picture for craft was not entirely bleak, however. An analysis of craft breweries and independent pubs in London in 2024 by Beer Guide London, which does regular visits and checks ,found that the number of London craft breweries had declined only slightly to 101, and the number of Indy pub and tap room closures and openings more or less balanced each other out.
This is significant because the size of London and the wealth of some of its inhabitants makes it the busiest market for beer in the UK, and so it’s a useful barometer of where matters stand.
Yet much of this, Breal/Keystone notwithstanding, is at the micro level. The real concern for 2025 is at the macro level and what Global Big Beer is up to. Here the impact is across all beer, not just what is defined as craft but cask as well.
People not profit
A key issue for socialists is to look for ways of doing things that puts people not profit and the market at the centre of matters. But we first need to understand what Capital itself is up to, and how it is organised
The biggest impact of global big beer in the UK in the last period has been from Diageo. They are of course a global drinks business well beyond beer, owning Johnnie Walker whisky and according to their most recent results in January 2025 promoting higher end, higher profit products, such as tequila in some markets.
They also own Guinness and the media has been full of stories that there is a shortage of it in the UK. Why does not seem to have been satisfactorily explained, but it is at least partly related to a surge in the popularity of the drink, possibly extending to other stouts and porters as well.
One interesting impact which reflects how global beer and independent brewers interact in the market has been to boost the sales of London Black, like Guinness a nitro beer, which is produced by the South London craft brewer Anspach and Hobday. However, it boosted even more sales of Murphy’s Stout, now owned by Heineken.
Another global brewer making waves in the UK in the last year has been Carlsberg. Until the summer of 2024 Carlsberg and Marstons were in a joint venture with Carlsberg brewing the beer for Marstons’ pubs. Marstons is one of the largest UK-owned national brewers. The nearest comparison might be with Bury St Edmunds-based Greene King, although that is now owned by a Hong Kong-based business.
Marstons took the decision to exit brewing altogether and become a pub company. It is a well-trodden path. In London Fullers beers are now brewed by the global giant Asahi while Youngs beers are brewed by Carlsberg.
It underlines of course that capitalism tends towards monopoly, but the practical issue is what it means for the beer sold in pubs. Carlsberg, known as a lager brewer, is now also a major cask ale brewer in the UK.The signs are that this is not exactly central to its business model.
Marston’s flagship beer Pedigree was the last to be brewed by a method known as the Burton Union system (it was also originally used for Bass). Carlsberg decided that the Union System was inefficient and outdated, and moved the brewing of Pedigree to the routine method of cask beer production.
The move suggested that Carlsberg had scant interests in the history of British brewing and its unique heritage. Fortunately thanks to the intercession of US Brewer Garret Oliver, whose Brooklyn beers are brewed in the UK under licence by Carlsberg, a good deal of the historic Union system was in fact moved to the major Indy brewer Thornbridge at Bakewell. The brewing tradition for now remains.
Carlsberg was far from done however. It went on to announce the closure of Banks’s brewery in Wolverhampton early in 2025 on its 150th anniversary. This meant the end of several well-known cask beer brands including Banks’s mild and Marston’s Old Empire IPA.
There were petitions and protests from MPs, but Carlsberg has proceeded anyway and the brewery will close in autumn 2025. Such activity means little to a global brewer. It argues that it is focused on producing cask beer at Burton.
Interestingly while the figures are not very reliable, no cask beer produced by a global big beer company featured in the best-selling beers for 2024. Rather it was the likes of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord and St Austell’s Tribute, beers produced by largish independent brewers.
In fact the major trend in the UK from global big beer in 2024 was for Spanish lager. Nearly all the better-known brands are brewed in the UK often at lower strengths and to tweaked recipes. One heavily promoted Spanish lager, Madri, is unknown in Spain because it has never been brewed there – it is produced by Molson Coors in Tadcaster.
The impact of global big beer has been felt in the craft as well as the cask sector, however. The start of 2025 saw the announcement that Huddersfield’s Magic Rock Brewery was closing. Last year Fourpure made a similar announcement, closed its Bermondsey tap and brewing operations and moved to the Magic Rock site.
Both breweries had been part of the early craft beer wave after 2010 and both had been stocked by major supermarkets.
The problems came when both breweries were bought by Australian brewer Lion, which in turn is owned by Japanese brewer Kirin. The acquisitions came at a time when big beer decided that rather than try and compete with craft beer it would simply buy itself into the market.
It didn’t work. As soon as the breweries lost their independent status they lost the status that attracted drinkers to them, and became just as another mass market product, however good the beer may still have been.
Global Big Beer restricts choice
After a while Lion decided that ownership of Magic Rock and Fourpure hadn’t worked and offloaded them to a new owner. While they became independent again the thrill, as it were, had gone.
The Fourpure and Magic Rock brands have now been acquired by Private Equity outfit Keystone (formerly Breal) and the beers will be produced at Black Sheep in Masham. The local provenance and community focus of craft beer has gone in both cases.
A key thing for socialists who are interested in and active in the areas of beer and hospitality is to get across to a wider layer of people just what Global Big Beer is, and what its activities mean in terms of restricting choice in pubs and bars and promoting bogus supposedly independent beers and lagers.
A counterattack is underway with a website that allows people to check whether the beer they are drinking is genuinely independent rather global big beer passing itself off as independent. https://www.whoownsmybeer.com/
That still leaves the question for socialists of what is to be done – and indeed what can and could be done. This will be the subject of another article.
