Roll out the barrel…
FACT: BEER sales in the UK on-trade are in decline. There, now we've got that out of the way, we can get on with trying to address the issue.
Key to doing this is looking at where and how sales are being lost, particularly of what is far and away the most important of pubs' core products - draught lager.
There are few better ways of doing this than consulting the British Beer & Pub Association's (BBPA) Annual Barrelage Survey, the latest copy of which has been exclusively seen by The Publican. This survey is the most comprehensive source of data on the UK beer - lager, ale and stout - market available.
Let's not get dramatic here. There were just under 12 million barrels of draught lager sold into the on-trade in 2006, according to the survey so the market is not exactly imploding.
However, this figure was a decline on 2005, which itself was a decline on 2004. And back at the beginning of the 1990s, there were just under 14 million barrels of draught lager sold into the UK on-trade.
Look closer
Any licensee skimming the survey could be lulled into a false sense of security by the overall rise in lager sales in recent years.
If they looked closer, however, splitting sales into those for the on-trade and those for the off-trade, it makes altogether more depressing reading for pubs. Supermarkets and off-licences are attracting customers away from the bar.
The BBPA's survey does not split lager's relative sales year-by-year into draught and packaged. What it does do is split total UK beer sales into lager, ale and stout categories (see chart, above). Are there any particular draught lagers letting the side down? Perhaps. Standard lager last year had a 43.5 per cent share of the beer market. This was good news for the category, winning one per cent more of the market than it held the year before. Premium lager, meanwhile, had conceded 0.6 per cent since 2005.
Retailers were quick to offer reasons for these ebbs and flows in either category - that standard lager is on the rise due to the continued success of extra cold formats, and that premium's leader, Stella Artois, is not the force it once was. You can find their insights throughout this Focus.
The BBPA Annual Barrelage Survey is based on invoiced sales of beer by the BBPA's members, a group which accounts for 98 per cent of UK beer production.
