h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

For Pubco read Money Grabbing *words not to be used on h2g2*, with no interest in the beer industry.

Due to stupid duty / tax levels and economic policies, it is currently much more profitable to pull down a large old pub and build a block of flats with a supermarket underneath on the same site.
Even if the pub is making a good profit.

Smaller pubs are also currently worth more as flats / shops / offices than as pubs.

And yet at the same time there are a lot of new bars springing up, most are mainly food based but there are some pure beer houses.

Did actually debate with myself - not on pubs vs bars or pubs vs motorways but on whether I should see if there also was an anglicised spelling of Hälsingborg or if I should stay Scandinavian and write Helsingør. Ended up falling between chairs...

Helsingborg have given up the ä for the old times e...

It is somewhat interesting to see the difference between the UK and the US. Craft brewing and pub culture is taking off here, while it seems to be in decline on the far side of the Pond. Good neighborhood pubs are opening in droves in some parts of the US, mostly featuring good local craft brews.

Not so Marv

There is rapid growth in the small independent brewers.
and some steady growth in the "Free Trade"


However the traditional Brewers who have become owned by big companies are merging and disappearing, causing the loss of many fine old breweries and beers.

Some years ago the government forced the then dominant brewers to reduce the size of their tied estates.
Instead the big brewers spit their businesses separating the brewing and pub arms of the business, whilst using the new pub co's to maintain a lot of the old restrictive practices ie tied supply.

Many of the pubco's were sold in the 80's and 90's at excessive margins, with the result that now they are stuffed by the downturn.

Password joke:

http://image-store.slidesharecdn.com/fa443aba-7f44-11e3-8b23-12313d14c88b-large.jpg

I remember reading several years back that although beer sales in general were falling real ale sales were increasing. Don't know how true that is but I know that in the past decade or so several interesting breweries have opened in the Leeds area.

I saw that joke a couple of weeks ago Ti, I found it quite humorous.

One of the service desk sites for one of our suppliers remembers the previous 10 passwords you used and also recognizes the 5 first characters in a new password if you try to modify an earlier one.

Drives me bonkers each time I'm asked to renew it, it does. Have to write down the new password every time! And how secure is that?

And yet, someone managed to hack into their system and copy the whole database of one of their customers; The Swedish Enforcement Authority.

Matina, a G&T please, to calm me down a bit before bedtime...

Bagpuss, real ale sales are growing. Or rather, sales from the microbreweries are growing. The big family brewers aren't doing so well, and it shows with them trying to get in on the "craft" banner.
But the microbrewers are mostly at full capacity. I was chatting with several of them yesterday, starting the day at a brewery in Manchester drinking with brewers meeting up there before heading off to the beer festival, and every single one of them is brewing at or near full capacity.
As you say, there's more and more breweries opening up, and I got to talk to two of those yesterday too, both are currently getting their kit up and running, and have already got orders coming in for when they're producing beer.

When it comes to the pubs, the free houses are doing really well. It's the tied houses, those that are limited in what they can do, and sell, those are the ones that are struggling and closing, because the PubCos are syphoning out as much money as they possibly can before the business model is regulated.

*reposing in a Lazy Bastard recliner, Lil sips tea, nibbles tentatively on a Heisenberg Uncertainty doughnut and listens to the beer conversation*

*examining the remaining s, hoping there's still a Moebius left*

IIEM, a Rooibos tea please!

My local which re-opened before Christmas after a year of closure is doing ok. It is much brighter and modern looking than it was and I personally think it is a breath of fresh air. It is a free house now so the beer has improved. Its Friday and I shall be imbibing there later

It's amazing the difference that can be made when a pub is allowed to be run as the manager/landlord wants it to! They're the ones who're there everyday, and they're the ones who know what the customers there want. So I can never understand it when a head office a couple of hundred miles away dictates how the pub should be run. It's daft.

Also totally forgot to say...

One of the breweries here in Manchester has taken to part filling casks at the end of their brew runs. What they do when they finish the brewing, is they fill up casks and kegs with the beer, but there's usually anywhere between a gallon or five left over. They can't sell part casks, so this stuff is normally thrown away as ullage and declared to the tax man as such.
What this brewery is trying out though, is putting it into casks, setting up a small bar in the brewery, and declaring it as hospitality/promotional use. Which means anyone who likes their beers can come along to the brewery and have a pint or two for free while having a nose around, a bit of a chat, or just generally chilling out.

Yes, there now is such a thing as free beer in Manchester. Not sure how long it'll keep up, hopefully quite a while as long as no-one takes the piff. The brewery is looking to set up a brewery tap on site, and get a licence to sell the beer there, so it'll stop then. But for now, what a place to set up the new h2g2 office in

Ullage! OMG that's a word my dad uses (I think, like many others, picked up from 'Call my bluff' in the 70s) and I have *never* known anybody else to use it.

That's made my day, Pastey, thank you

Mol

You might almost think that the BBC editors read this thread to get ideas to riff on.

Here's today's
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25656701

Pastey: "I can never understand it when a head office a couple of hundred miles away dictates how the pub should be run."

Playing Devil's Advocate here, I imagine that there are economies of scale and improved bargaining power if all your pubs are going to stock the same stuff. Plus is a single landlord is in charge the pub will sink or swim based on his or her ability, so dictating terms probably seems the safer bet.

My favourite pub in Leeds died a death when the landlord changed. It's now been turned into flats. And the entrance is in the *wrong* place.

Of course the pub was only as good as it was because (despite brewery ties) the previous landlords had been pretty much free to do what they wanted.

I can understand the devil's advocate arguments for some things. Buying power is a massive one. There's no surprise that a PubCo will only stock Coke or Pepsi in its entire chain, and that their house spirits will all be the same. It's also not surprising that the food menu will be identical, not just because of the buying in of the ready made food, but also things like printing of the menus.

I'm not actually against the chain and tied system, it can work, and has been shown to work. The problem is it's been totally abused.

When it works, the landlord has to buy in x amount of wet stock from the brewery. So say a small pub has to buy £2000 a month of stock from the brewery, the landlord will initially make that up from house kegs. These are the branded lagers like Stella and Kronenburg, as well as Guinness. The brewery/pubco is the landlords best supplier for these and usually they have to get them through the brewery in exchange for all the dispense equipment. So that'll make a nice dent in the £2k. Next up is spirits, these are usually available in a good tie at about the same price as getting them from the supermarket and can add up quite quickly. They'll then order in their soft drinks, these are usually cheap but pubs can go through a lot. At this point, the pub's only really got left their ales, and if they're not selling much of anything, they'll need to get all their ales in from the brewery/pubco. Sometimes this still leaves them short, but if it's a good tie and they've a good working relationship, they'll be able to show that 100% of their wet purchases are through the tie, and everyone's happy.
If they've been busy, and have ordered more than their minimum already, they can get in their ales from anywhere. Usually there's an agreement that they have to stock at least one or two from the brewery/pubco range, but then they can look at getting the rest direct from micro-breweries or through wholesalers where they can get a wider range at a better price.

This is how the tied system works, when it works.

Unfortunately, it's been heavily abused. PubCos tend to force pubs to buy 100% of their wet sales through the PubCo, not up to a certain amount, the full 100%. This means that the pub can't get in a wider range, or what the customer wants, they're stuck with the PubCo's range. And they're stuck with the PubCos prices. The PubCos have that buying power, they buy in dirt cheap. But they don't pass this saving on to the landlords, they usually charge far more than market value and landlords end up paying more for their wet stock than if they were a free house.

The other way that the PubCos make their money is rent. The PubCos own the buildings, and charge the landlords rent. Fair enough, that's business. But usually the rent is set at a low rate to entice landlords in, and then goes up very quickly. Also, it's attached to the profitability of the pub. If the pub is doing well through the hard work of the landlords, it's more profitable so the PubCos stick the rent up. Usually the rent on PubCos premises is also far in excess of that of the freehouses.

The whole system has been abused, and is collapsing. Yes, there's lots of pubs closing, but it's almost always the PubCo ones. There's more and more successful freehouses each year.