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The British Beer and Pub Association have just released their latest British Beer Barometer statistics covering the first quatrter of 2016. As very often in their publicity, they concentrate on the perhaps misleading quarter-on-quarter figures rather than the more meaningful annualised ones. The link to download the table is missing from the press release, but can be found here.
Looking at the annual figures, year-on-year on-trade sales show a 2.4% decline, a better figure than in most recent years, but still indicative of a long-term downward trend. Compared with ten years ago, on-trade sales are down by 36%, whereas off-trade sales have fallen by only 2%. I wonder what might have happened in the early part of that period to encourage that trend.
Off-trade sales are also now 6% above the on-trade, suggesting that particular tipping point is long gone.


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