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Shut up about Barclay Perkins - The Big Six
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The buying spree initiated by Eddie Taylor in the 1950s and 1960s came to an end in the 1970s, when the Labour government stopped further takeovers by the large brewing groups. Effectively freezing the six as they were. Any expansion had to come from off sales or adventures abroad.
In the 1970s, those UK large breweries were amongst the largest in the world. But with domestic possibilities extremely limited, what could they do?
At a time when most beer was consumed in pubs, the number of them you controlled determined how much beer you could sell. Roughly. Which is why they had gobbled up ramshackle breweries, purely for the pubs that they owned.
This is also when the Big Six started to rationalise their production Through closing multiple older breweries and replacing them with new more “rational” plants. Which were mostly a total disaster.
The most insane proposals came from Bass Charrington, whose chairman came from outside the brewing industry. He wanted to concentrate brewing in just two plants: the M & B brewery in Cape Hill, Birmingham and Runcorn in Lancashire. It didn’t end well.
Large numbers of regional breweries were closed. Replaced with massive keg plants that never operated to capacity. The Courage brewery that replaced Simonds Reading brewery is a good example. It never brewed the full six million barrels it was capable of. That would have been about 17% of the UK's total output. And has closed.
When beer consumption began to fall, the UK was left with serious overcapacity. Assuming demand would continue to rise, big brewers had invested in massive plants to expand capacity.
The new “megakeggeries”, as CAMRA called them, were no great success. Whitbread’s plant in Luton and Bass Charrington’s in Runcorn were plagued with technical problems and industrial unrest. Both closed. Poor labour relations were rare amongst family brewers with their more paternalistic approach.
Big brewery tied houses in 1970 |
Bass Charrington |
9,450 |
Whitbread |
8,280 |
Allied |
8,250 |
Watney Mann |
6,135 |
Courage |
6,000 |
S&N |
1,700 |
Guinness |
2 |
Total |
39,817 |
Source: |
Investors' Chronicle, 13 November 1970. |
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