Visit the Shut up about Barclay Perkins site

I've collected beer statistics long before I started writing seriously. That's just the number-obsessed idiot that I am.

When throwing together a chapter of my latest wonderful book, Austerity, yesterday, I was shocked to realise that I'd never properly harvested the figures for beer imports into the UK. A shocking omission.

Something I promptly corrected. Spending an hour of my free day on Brewers' Almanack data extractions. Well worth it. Every number collected will come in useful someday. That's proived true so far.

Only the second half of the table is worth attention. The top half is clearly just Guinness Extra Stout. Technically an import. But not necessarily in drinkers' perception. That's not even all the Guinness sold in the UK. Their Park Royal brewery in London served the bottom half of the country.

Other than Guinness, the imports all look like Lager. Mostly from Denmark. So Carlsberg and Tuborg.With Dutch beer rising at the end. Which seems to correspond with Allied Breweries' purchase of Oranjeboom in 1967. Coincidence?

Those Dutch imports can't be Heineken, as you might expect. At this point, Heineken Pils, very unusually, was brewed under licence in the UK.

Weird how imports from Czechoslovakia collapse in 1968. I wonder why that was? And that beer being imported from Norway - what was that? I can't remember seeing Norwegian beer in the UK.

In case you get excited about the Belgian beer available back then, from what I see in the Whitbread Gravity Book, it was Stella, Lamot Pils and Ekla Pils.

UK beer imports 1961 -1969
Country of origin 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969
Irish Republic 1,329,752 1,245,451 1,215,539 1,281,126 1,215,168 1,240,440 1,277,257 1,313,038 1,252,844
Commonwealth Countries 1,740 2,303 3,793 3,007 3,344 2,226 2,738 2,890 2,730
Total Commonwealth Countries 1,331,492 1,247,758 1,219,332 1,284,133 1,218,512 1,248,066 1,279,995 1,315,928 1,255,574
Denmark 178,975 148,018 149,974 159,164 143,189 156,147 178,892 195,370 215,136
W. Germany 8,926 7,601 9,805 13,925 12,485 18,254 20,487 28,247 36,382
Netherlands 28,077 21,212 23,321 28,245 28,363 28,836 37,734 63,375 81,745
Belgium 8,907 8,391 5,303 5,803 5,053 5,287 5,752 4,993 4,770
Norway 2,390 2.308 3,887 4,491 6,081 5,344 5,945 5,109 6,327
Czechoslovakia 1,083 1,038 922 1,391 1,276 529 400 601 999
Sweden 670 578 1,112 459 460 863 226 112 591
Other Foreign Countries 655 589 853 1,392 1,166 3,352 1,607 2,866 5,332
Total Foreign Countries 229,689 189,795 195,177 214,870 198,073 218,612 251,013 300,673 351,284
Total bulk barrels 1,561,181 1,437,553 1,414,509 1,499,003 1,416,585 1,467,278 1,531,038 1,616,001 1,606,858
Source:
“1971 Brewers' Almanack”, page 55.




More...