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29-05-2016, 11:02
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A few years ago if a big brewery took over a small one, it was a disaster — (almost) everyone agreed. But now, is the consensus in the process of swinging the other way?In yesterday’s News, Nuggets & Longreads round-up (http://boakandbailey.com/2016/05/news-nuggets-longreads-28-may-2016-ancient-beer-diy-pubs-panhead/) we mentioned in passing that New Zealand brewery Panhead had been taken over by Lion and that people generally seemed fine with this. This prompted Luke Robertson (https://twitter.com/AleOfATime), who is based in Australia and blogs at*Ale of A Time (http://aleofatime.com/), to drop us an email. Quoted with his permission, here’s a chunk of what he said:
To me it feels like people don’t want to be lumped in with the stereotypical angry beer nerds. So as a result everyone comes out in 100% full support without a hint of any concern. I mentioned to a good friend yesterday that I think everyone is trying to outdo each other in that aspect. With blindly positive cheering and clapping. The more positive, the better; regardless of*what you actually feel.
Deep down I think there is a lot of concern. Panhead are beloved and the founder is a great guy who has built a great and unique brand with the beers to back it up. While Lion have handled their acquisitions amazingly well in both Aus and NZ, I think if people were pressed on the issue they wouldn’t be as in support as they are in public… I may be way off base but the lack of dissenting opinion, or anything that isn’t ‘Yay isn’t this awesome?! GO BEER!’ is beginning to all seem a bit fake.
Second guessing whether what people say is sincere, unless you know them personally and well, is a mug’s game, but we have certainly noticed the same shift in the (ahem)*‘discourse’ and felt uneasy about it.
The Small is Beautiful party line goes something like this: big breweries taking over little ones is*never good news; those breweries lose their character and the beers get more boring; and overall consumer choice is reduced as those beers become more ubiquitous. (We have some sympathy with this view (http://boakandbailey.com/2014/03/the-good-the-bad-and-the-interesting/).) And the most extreme critics — the angriest of the beer nerds — argue that it’s all part of a global conspiracy to crush or at least control the threat of craft beer (https://thepourfool.com/2015/01/24/elysian-and-abinbev-greed-overweening-ambition-and-the-whoring-out-of-a-culture/). (Which*can sound a bit hysterical but that doesn’t mean there’s not something in it.)
Let’s wait and see if the beer changes before we complain, goes one of the well-established, more neutral lines of argument. This is might be good news, goes*another, because takeovers can increase the availability of a beloved brand, and might also improve quality and consistency. (On which more in a later post.) And these kinds of deals get craft beer into more outlets and so*spread the word, advance the cause.
What we’ve been hearing in the last year or so, though, as the pace of acquisitions has stepped up, is something else: an expectation that drinkers won’t just accept takeovers, or cautiously welcome them, but will be*delighted by them.
At the same time, anyone who does have concerns is dismissed as immature, or as a god-damned tree-hugging hippy who should go and live in Soviet Russia if they hate capitalism so much. (Sorry, straw-manning there. But only a bit.) Dissent is hysteria — we got in on the act with this two paras up, for goodness’ sake — and dissenters are loons.
Maybe this is just a natural turn for the conversation to take — the result of fatigue after a decade or two of evangelising, whooping, branded T-shirt-wearing hop-tattoo craft beer tribal triumphalism. And perhaps there’s some old-fashioned*hipsterish contrarianism (http://boakandbailey.com/2014/12/hipster-school-of-thought-no/) in it, too.
http://i0.wp.com/boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ultimate-hipster.jpg?resize=459%2C329
At any rate,*if we were in charge of PR for a multi-national brewing firm we’d be delighted.*The outstanding question is, would we also be taking credit? Would we be looking at a bill for lobbying and*‘influencing’ — a sponsorship deal here, a blogger outreach event there — and thinking, ‘Well, that was money well-spent’?
Is It OK Not To Be OK With Brewery Takeovers in 2016? (http://boakandbailey.com/2016/05/is-it-ok-not-to-be-ok-with-brewery-takeovers-in-2016/) from Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Beer blogging since 2007, covering real ale, craft beer, pubs and British beer history. (http://boakandbailey.com)


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