May 23, 2025

Drowning in a puddle

Hello

Firstly: sorry it’s been ages since I sent one of these, I have been waiting to have the money to pay my Buttondown subscription lmao. A success limitation there. (If you want to know why I use Buttondown not Substack even though Substack is free there’s more at the end of this email)

Anyway, good news, I’ve paid the fees. That’s the end of good news for this email, which is about almost universally bad news I’m afraid but with some constructive ideas about what to do about it.

Right, so, where to start. How about SIBA (Society of Independent Brewers and Asssociates) announcing today that, in the time since they published the same figures from 2024, 136 UK breweries have closed.

The report self-acknowledges that there’s a little bit of that down to breweries that announced their closure earlier only finally winding down in the past 12 months and also that they’ve just got better at finding out if places have closed. But, as Andy Slee, the chief exec says “clearly things are not moving in the direction the industry would have hoped.”

Cask ale is having a rough time of it. Although the full report from last year says that there’d been a 10% increase year-on-year on cask sales. Great!

Except that the 2023 report confirms that, despite finally recovering above 2021 levels, cask was still nowhere near 2019 levels. So 10% year on year means a (small) recovery that, in 2022, the industry hadn’t looked set to make, not a miraculous increase. And it wasn’t entirely 2020 and the lockdown effect, sales of cask had been in severe decline since 2015 - so much so they nearly halved up to 2022.

No good news: everything bad, then. Especially when you consider that the majority of independent breweries (60%, according to the SIBA report) can’t supply to any pubs within 40 miles of their location. And I reckon that’s probably heavily distorted by London so probably far worse than the stat sounds.

“Wait, why can’t they take beer round the corner, stick it in a van and that?” Well I’d imagine they’d love to. Problem is the pubs can’t buy it off them because even most freehouses are actually weirdly tied up with contracts about specific things, only get their cask from Molson Coors or something. And by the time you’ve gone through whatever extra hoops the beer costs so much to get it’s not worth it, even where you can find a way.

I am, luckily, in no such situation. How long I can maintain that I’m not 100% sure but I seem to be getting away with it for now - my only ‘tie’ is a honour one that I’m happy to respect, ordering Mighty Oak regularly because they helped me reconnect my real ale lines. But since their beers are universally total bangers I’d be doing that anyway.

JOYFUL BEER ASIDE: I bought one of Mighty Oak’s casks, Katzenjammer, because the pump clip looks like my cat (see below) - honestly, wasn’t really expecting to like it myself because it’s an amber ale but I thought I’d branch out a bit from strictly boring and brown. Great news! It’s the nicest beer any of us have ever drunk and the only bad thing about it is that it’s a seasonal not in their core range. We have one last cask from the current batch coming in this week and I imagine it’ll go in the same 36 hour window the last two have. If you find it somewhere, you must have a pint.

Anyway, sorry, back to the doom and gloom. I can buy ales from anywhere and it turns out all three of my main suppliers are within 40 miles of my pub (Mighty Oak only just but still, brownie points for me) so I thought I better try and sign up some new ones.

A handy thing I instantly thought of about that was “where can I look at a map of breweries” and was massively relieved SIBA has one. Which told me I’ve got a lot of emails to send but the first one was to Brockley Brewery, who I’ve been asked for a couple of times and are certainly local to me.

CRINGE ASIDE: in the idk 30 minutes between me emailing Brockley and me going and doing the banking in the Post Office, someone from a brewery rang the pub phone and the barmaid on duty took down the number. Brilliant, I think, Brockley must be well keen.

Did think “eh that’s not a London number” but idk, people might be working from home or something couldn’t they? Anyway, I’m so excited I start the conversation with “I’m so glad you got back to me, I’m really keen to get your beers in” before the person on the other end of the line has got a word in. I also can’t really hear on the phone so it takes me a minute to work out what they say next, which is “I’m so glad to hear that not winning our competition didn’t put you off.”

My brain starts making rapid calculations. What competition. What brewery name did they actually say. About 10 seconds later I’ve worked out I’m actually on the phone to Hawkstone, Jeremy Clarkson’s brewery who I’m actually not in a massively urgent rush to stock the beers of and is a lot more than 40 miles away from me. I’d only entered a competition to win a free keg before Christmas because having to work out what to do with 11 gallons of free beer is a pretty good problem.

Anyway, used my 39 years of experience being excruciatingly autistic to style out the cringe and now they’ve sent me a sample box so look forward to some reviews in the style of a car journalist turned pub manager soon.

At least there’s that, being able to choose to support and showcase local breweries where I can. And with my pub’s refurb featuring a dedicated beer festival area that can be a pretty extensive amount.

I don’t know how much I’d get on with a situation where I couldn’t make those choices. Even when I worked at Wetherspoons we could always choose the ales (outside of being obliged to take some festival ones etc) and it feels like a real shame that something already struggling is being put in a harder position because of getting tied up.

I can imagine a lot of pub managers are giving up on real ales if they’re only allowed to access a narrow range and customers aren’t that fussed about them. It is a lot of separate trouble to go to for the same casks of London Pride or whatever (a perfectly good beer I’ve drunk plenty of but not exactly a destination one) and there’s the additional risk that on lines where you’re not switching the ales over regularly, they might not be being cleaned as often as they should. Which is often, for unpasteurised beer.

(Even if you’re hooking up a cask of the same thing you need to flush the line, ideally because the beer at the end of the cask will be significantly evolved from the beer at the start of it, since it’s still fermenting. Has Brad Leone done an It’s Alive about cask beer?)

Anyway what was I even talking about. Oh, a thing that is good and I think should happen: a pan-European-supported bid to get cask ale UNESCO world heritage status. And if you can’t be bothered to read all that (although you should because it’s interesting) then you can just sign the petition here to try and get the UK government to do something which, admittedly, is a fairly distant hope.

In other news the government is throwing out more 1am closes, after the roaring success of 88% of publicans having no interest whatsoever in doing it for VE day. Because opening until 1am on a Thursday is bonkers stuff.

I don’t know if anyone’s suggested to the ailing British car manufacturing industry that they could just try staying open until 1am a couple of times and that might fix things. Like, say, if the Lionnesses make the semi-final and final of the women’s Euros. Fair play, I think it’s right to make it even with the women’s and men’s teams, which apparently the extension last year was real for - given I was very much working in a pub that night and only managed to leave at 3am despite closing at midnight, I’m glad we thought that was fake news.

Does staying open until people are really, totally wasted help? Not really. You’ll spend more staff hours on staying open late than you will anything else (the clean-up alone is twice as long because the pub is five times as destroyed) and no one enjoys that kind of shift. I don’t really know who the government thinks they’re playing into with these extensions - it’s definitely not licensing bodies or the pub trade.

Given the source of most of their ideas it’s presumably an either real or imagined GB News phone-in. And it’s very clearly not the biggest problem with a very sharp slide into a Cold War both-sides-ing of both Trump and Kremlin fascism but there is something particularly distasteful to suggesting you can make up for stripping people’s rights by having the pub open another two hours. Just have a pint about it mate, it’ll be fine, that vomit you can feel rising isn’t from rage at the insanely privileged taking from the most vulnerable, it’s just poorly-settled creamflow.

Right, what else before I send this off at 4pm on a Friday, a time everyone wants to receive an email? Oh, I’m going to do a podcast version of this because god knows, there aren’t enough navel-gazing industry podcasts in the world.

Think that’s about it. I’ll try and write something funny about darts in my next one.

Cheers,

Hazel

TL;DR the reason I don’t use Substack is because of the nazis. And the transphobes. And the right wing grifters. And everyone else who Substack knowingly allows to use the platform and not only won’t remove, won’t even demonetize. Because they make Substack lots of money, too.

It’s a real pain because Substack is a well built platform and has excellent discoverability; it’s much easier to grow a newsletter on there and it has loads of built-in tools to help that. For the amount I pay because I have a certain number of subscribers on here, I could be adding christ only knows what to a Substack.

And I do get why, if a chunk of your income is reliant on Substack, it’s hard to transfer. The truth is Buttondown does not have comparable analytics or the same shared platform for linking newsletters together or the familiarity. Calling it simpler is probably the most complimentary way to go about it. It’s just that I won’t drink in the nazi bar and I wouldn’t put my silly little zine about pubs there physically, so neither will I my newsletter.