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‘It all disappeared with Brexit’: Craft beer boom ends as more than 100 UK firms go bust
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
503 points (98.5% liked)
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but kimi kimi kimi, you set up a business in the UK.... "heavily geared for export [to EU countries]" …. in 2017....?
There was no change in trade regulations until 2021. The UK government insisted all along that they would get "the best of both worlds" and "no friction". While there was a reduction in demand from the EU side, acknowledged by most pre-established businesses, if you started in 2017 you wouldn't have seen it.
Kimi was a mug for believing lies from the UK government, or hoping/betting that things wouldn't get as bad as they did. A softer, saner agreement achieving EEA-like status would have been fine for him, after all. But nope, we got our hard brexit...
I grew up several miles from Pocklington (the home of the business named in the article) and having any industry up there other than pig-farming would have been a welcome change. The British government forced this country into an idiotic referendum on a matter where very few people understood the consequences of the "Leave" decision, and then doubled down on their failed gamble by fucking up the post-Brexit negotiations.
Blaming entrepreneurs, who were simply trying to create a business & employ people, something that this government purports to support, for lacking the foresight to realise how incompetent and self-serving this government is, seems delusional.
Bro, every person with half a brain knew knew knew how stupid Brexit was, and knew knew knew the exact consequences of the referendum passed. To the fucking detail smart people fucking knew this, and everything that happened, was going to happen.
It's the fucking idiots, racists, basically trump maga equivalents in the UK who were too smooth-brained to understand complex shit who voted to leave. All of us with just a slight wrinkle (edit - a slight wrinkle in our brains, adding this because I'm sure you don't follow - end edit) knew this would happen, foresaw it happening, talked about how all this dumb shit would happen, but yet here we are.
Blame the propaganda machine that got the smoothies to vote to leave before you start throwing shade at people making fun of the idiots (I don't know if the person in the article is a brexiter or not, if not I feel for them, but they have their fellow countrymen to blame, not us commentators on the internet who are laughing at the leopards eating faces of the leopards eating faces party.
Entrepreneurs main task is to evaluate and use risk to enter a market for profit.
You would have to be pretty bad at risk management to watch the tory goverment self immolating at every turn for years and not think that that would affect the likely success of your buisness.
This is especially true if your buisness depended deeply on trade agreements that your local government just tore up very, very publically and then refused to renegotiate very, very publically.
Also P6 before they mention the cost of living crisis... I love craft beer but 10 quid a pint is tough to swallow when you're staying down an electricity bill that doubled in the last 12 months plus all your groceries went up by his knows how much
I'm happy enough to blame brexit but when it comes to discretionary purchases like craft beer i doubt it's even the main culprit... mind you I still drink it, but then I'm borgouis or something
That's either bathtub-sized batches (and all the work that means) or they're gouging. Rule of thumb if you can find it in supermarkets they're not brewing in bathtubs as supermarkets demand quite large minimum volumes.
Over here in Germany we have Störtebeker, they're not exactly a microbrewery but a (quite old, actually) small, independent, regional, brewery who for the longest time simply brewed their local Pils and maybe one or two other bog-standard things. Then they had a look at the market and came up with new recipes using all kinds of fancy methods and special yeasts and aroma hops and everything, leading to things like their Atlantic Ale, the missing link between Pils and IPA, for about 1.30€ per half litre bottle. That's about the same price range as big beer brands with TV ads, or a Budweiser (Czech of course).
Some pictures for a sense of scale. Sure that's way beyond the bathtub league but compared to actually big brewers it's tiny.
Occasionally they have actually expensive stuff but then you're looking at five times ice-distilled beer or such. Shouldn't be surprising that that's five times more expensive you're buying quite a bit less water.
If you want to brew at the bathtub scale, commercially, open a pub or probably better restaurant and do beer pairings.