Big boys hit craft beer trail

It’s Tuesday, so it must be Coventry. An alarm goes off and I wake in another unfamiliar, sterile hotel room.

I remember last night’s final drink in the hotel bar, a strip-lit box that makes an IKEA showroom look like a hobbit hole. And I wish for the hundredth time this month that conference centres and exhibition spaces didn’t seem to feel genuinely offended by anything that doesn’t come from a corporate cookie cutter template that seeks to make every town identical. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think this distaste for branded conformity is why the quirky individuality of pubs endures so vibrantly.

I also think it’s one of the reasons an ever-increasing number of those pubs think they should be stocking craft beer. I’m in Coventry because I’m staffing a stand at Carlsberg’s Christmas trade shows.

These shows are a part exhibition, part-thank you shindig after a difficult year (and these days, they’re all difficult years) for pubs that have no tied relations with the big green brewer but do some wholesale business with them across anything or everything they need to buy.

Hang on — so I’m grumbling about branded blandness and yet I’m here schilling for one of the world’s biggest, most monolithic beer brands? Well, not quite. Carlsberg has seen where things are going in craft beer. It recognises that drinkers and pubs want flavour, variety, and product stories about small artisanal producers. Crucially, it has also realised that it cannot credibly offer these things from its own business.

That’s why Carlsberg has put together its ‘Crafted’ range of beers such as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Brooklyn Lager, Duvel, and Goose Island IPA, all available from a onestop, one-invoice range.

Carlsberg is not paying me to say how wonderful Carlsberg is, or that Carlsberg is a craft brewer; they’re paying me to say exactly what I think about some of my favourite beers. Deals don’t come much sweeter than that.

Carlsberg is not the only company to have thought of this idea. In the summer, I attended the launch of the Boutique Beers range by Matthew Clark. Both ranges offer a mix of US-style pale ales and IPAs mixed in with some classics of the Belgian brewing tradition, and a few more mainstream offerings. Rumour has it more such ranges are on the way from other companies.

In both the Carlsberg and Matthew Clark ranges, established craft drinkers will likely sneer at the idea that this is a mix of interesting craft beers (the Matthew Clark range in particular contains some brands I would struggle to think of as either craft or ‘boutique’, given that they are mainstream lagers from global brewers. (Estrella and Peroni? ‘Boutique?’ Really?) I could easily dismiss even the good beers as representing craft 10 years ago, and attack these companies for not reflecting the current vibrancy and diversity of style that has since developed in the British craft brewing industry today.

But to do so would be to completely miss the point.

Mainstream

Coventry is the last of five trade shows. During these five days, I’ve only spoken to one or two people who run craft beer bars (and to their surprise, there was at least one product in the Carlsberg range that was new and appealing to them). Some people are hoteliers who want to stock cask ale but don’t have the throughput, so are looking for an alternative. Others are restaurateurs who recognise they need to offer some interesting bottled beers alongside their wine lists.

There are working men’s club bar managers who were persuaded against their better judgment by a sales rep to install a Brooklyn Lager or Grimbergen Blond font, only to watch the beer fly off the bar, and now want to see what else there is. I still hear people, even now, insisting that craft beer is a niche proposition aimed at London hipsters.

Contrary to that, I’ve been saying for a year now that craft beer has gone mainstream. Here is the proof. Craft has grown bigger than the beer geek scene that nurtured it into existence. It has more layers now. Brooklyn, Duvel and Sierra Nevada are familiar, recognised brands.

They also happen still to be phenomenal beers. The hardcore craftophile may have moved on to saisons and sours (perhaps thinking: “Let’s see you try to turn this into a mainstream movement!”), but the first waves of craft — the new wave of American craft and the old world standards of British and European quality beer — has reached the mainstream drinker and the ordinary boozer. And if this means that eventually, one day, wretched establishments such as Holiday Inn Express might stock a beer that’s fit to drink, then I’m all for it.