Britain’s traditional pubs are hoping a new law will galvanize the country’s budding beer renaissance and save them from a steep crisis that is forcing dozens of premises to close every week.
Cut-price competition from supermarkets, the smoking ban and healthier drinking habits have all fueled the decline of an institution as traditionally British as football and fish-and-chips.
“Pubs are currently under threat as never before,” the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), a pressure group, bemoaned in a statement earlier this year, revealing that 29 pubs were being forced to close every week.
Photo: AFP
Although many town centers remain hotbeds of rowdy drinkers come Friday and Saturday nights, official figures show that alcohol consumption has fallen about 18 percent since 2004 and that binge-drinking has declined more than 30 percent among young people.
However, pubs trying to adapt to changing habits, including the popularity of craft beers from drinkers who now prefer the quality of their tipple to quantity, face a major stumbling block.
About half them are currently “tied” to Pub Companies — a version of a centuries-old system dominated by the biggest brewer companies that has historically dictated which beers pubs can sell.
Photo: AFP
Brigid Simmonds, chief executive of the British Beer & Pub Association, which represents the giant “PubCos,” said that the “tied” system helps provide a low-cost way to own a pub and keep prices low.
However, campaigners have dismissed these claims, and scored a historic victory in the final days of the last parliament when a law was passed to end the tie system once and for all.
Campaigner Simon Clarke, co-landlord of The Eagle Ale House in south London, said the law change would widen the choice and cut costs for publicans no longer forced to buy through the PubCos.
He praised campaigners who fought a seven-year battle against the lobbying power of the pub industry.
“This is largely due to the... strength of people who have lost their pubs and stayed with it. They begrudge what’s happened to them and could have walked away, but they stuck with it,” he said.
Small-scale brewers have already been capitalizing on the shifting tastes, with applications to start breweries tripling in the past five years.
Fresh-faced young entrepreneurs are now snapping up disused railway arches in the hip London district of Bermondsey, turning them into state-of-the-art factories full of gleaming vats, valves and pipes.
A recent addition to the “Bermondsey Beer Mile” is UBrew, which offers all levels of brewers the chance to make their own beer using shared equipment.
Co-founder Will Horsfall said UBrew was tapping into the demand for well-crafted beer using local ingredients wherever possible.
“Twenty years ago, London had a terrible reputation for food, whereas now we are one of the most exciting places to eat in Europe, and I think that’s happening with beer too,” he said.
“Generally speaking, people are drinking for pleasure much more than inebriation. The alcohol content is part of the enjoyment of it, but it’s not the be all and end all,” he said. “We are watching the winification of beer. In the same way that people for a long time have talked about grape varieties and regional differences, that’s now happening with beer.”
Beer writer and CAMRA member Roger Protz said that the movement was partly a reaction against multinational brewers.
“For too long, people have been drinking industrial beers brewed by global brewers, which are brewed only for profit,” he said over a pint. “People are now looking for one thing and one thing alone, and that is taste.”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since
purpose: Tesla’s CEO sought to meet senior Chinese officials to discuss the rollout of its ‘full self-driving’ software in China and approval to transfer data they had collected Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk arrived in Beijing yesterday on an unannounced visit, where he is expected to meet senior officials to discuss the rollout of "full self-driving" (FSD) software and permission to transfer data overseas, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Chinese state media reported that he met Premier Li Qiang (李強) in Beijing, during which Li told Musk that Tesla's development in China could be regarded as a successful example of US-China economic and trade cooperation. Musk confirmed his meeting with the premier yesterday with a post on social media platform X. "Honored to meet with Premier Li