The Monopolies & Mergers commission report had a powerful impact in a different direction. Millions of pub-goers and beer drinkers were aware there was something seriously wrong with the brewing industry. In the finest British tradition, they decided to support the underdogs—the remaining family and regional brewers, and the new wave of micros. Their sales started to increase, as did CAMRA membership. Within the space of 20 years, CAMRA has seen its numbers double, treble and quadruple.
The micros have their own umbrella organisation: the Society of Independent Brewers. It works closely with CAMRA and their joint lobbying achieved a significant victory in 2002 when the government introduced Progressive Beer Duty. The scheme enables brewers who produce up to 60,000 hectoliters a year (about 51,000 U.S. barrels) to pay less excise duty than bigger brewers. The result has been an astonishing growth in the number of craft breweries.
Julian Grocock, chief executive of SIBA, credits the close relationship with CAMRA: “Today’s revolutionized British independent brewing industry has its roots in the groundswell of consumer resistance that CAMRA first mobilized forty years ago, “inspiring not only surviving family companies, but also microbrewers who have brought imagination, innovation, and unprecedented choice and diversity to an age-old craft.”
Today the total number of British breweries stands at more than 700, four times as many as when CAMRA was founded. Choice and diversity for drinkers has never been better.
The Impact
CAMRA’s activities have not been confined to Britain. It was active in setting up the European Beer Consumers’ Union, which has groups in most European and Scandinavian countries. EBCU lobbies national and European governments and has played a crucial role in safeguarding the future of lambic brewing in Belgium. The impact in the United States is more complex. There’s no equivalent of CAMRA: I spoke back in the 1990s at a meeting in Manhattan with a view to starting an American beer consumers’ movement but the few people who attended suggested there was little enthusiasm for the idea.
But there has been cross-fertilization in other ways. The U.S. had small craft breweries before Britain, but such legendary figures as Fritz Maytag at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco and the late Bert Grant in Yakima Valley always stressed the influence of British beer on their activities.
Protesters at the 2008 Great British Beer Festival, all wearing the likeness of Alistair Darling, the chancellor responsible for raising the tax on beer.
And there’s no doubt that the Great British Beer Festival sparked its American counterpart. I remember showing Charlie Papazian round the Great British when it was held in Leeds, Yorkshire, and he returned home to fashion his plans for the Great American equivalent. The number of Americans who now regularly attend the Great British and the Brits who make the journey in the opposite direction are testimony to a shared love of good beer.
The revival of interest on both side of the Atlantic in such historic beer styles as porter, stout and IPA is a further indication of the shared interests and passions of beer lovers and brewers in both countries. The growth of craft brewing has reached Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand now has a small but vigorous CAMRA-inspired consumer group. Australia, in common with the United States, is just too big a country to have an effective consumer movement but its annual Beer Expo in Melbourne, inspired by the Great British, will encourage more craft breweries to fire their mash tuns.
“None of us had foreseen the incredible growth of the microbrewers that now offer all discerning drinkers hope for the future of good beer—not only in Britain but also in North America and around the world,” notes CAMRA founder Michael Hardman. “If CAMRA can claim credit for a tiny part of this success, and I believe we can, it is just reward for all the hard work and time given freely by so many people.”
