Why not take Tetley's from macro to micro?

Last Friday saw the end of 189 years of brewing history in Leeds and the closure of what was the biggest cask brewery in the world — the famous Tetley's Leeds Brewery. Workers were filmed leaving in tears, Leeds beer drinkers raised a glass to the end of an era and a large hole has been left in the city's economy and its centre.

A Carlsberg UK spokesman was quoted: "This is obviously a very sad day for the city of Leeds but also for Carlsberg UK". The fateful day for Tetley's was actually some 10 years ago, when the former family-run brewery ended up in Danish hands and it suddenly became emblazoned with the ubiquitous green Carlsberg logo.

We all know beer sales are falling and habits have changed since the Leeds workers downed many a pint of Tetley's (and had nothing like the choice they thankfully have nowadays).

But this decision has been taken when cask beer is expanding — indeed, as Carlsberg takes Tetley's away from Leeds, fantastic breweries are popping up across the city — and happily they are now taking on pubs.

It is what Dr Isaac Sheps and people in the city call "restructuring". Yet real restructuring would surely have been to cash in on the hugely valuable city-centre site and set up a smaller, purpose-built brewery to continue to brew in the Leeds area and reclaim Tetley's dynamism, lost in Carlsberg's hands.

This isn't restructuring for Tetley's; it is the destruction of a brand. I say this not out of sentiment, but as a former marketing professional. Even in the world of global brands, once a product has lost its integrity, it withers and fades — and brewing the famous Leeds beer in Wolverhampton is a loss of integrity.

So we have a company whose whole raison d'être is —or was — to brew beer, saying it no longer wishes to brew a hugely popular one. This is the dangerous modus operandi of big business, where only one thing counts regardless of what the firm's purpose is meant to be. So we have giant brewers no longer wanting to brew beer and giant pubcos actively seeking to sell off pubs for development. Big is the enemy of the good, but also so often the enemy of British beer and the British pub.

We are at least fortunate that in brewing and pub owning, we have smaller, innovative firms who succeed with passion in doing what they went into business to do. The future is bright, but let's hope none of them do what Tetley's did: "get too big" and lose sight of what it was they went into business to do in the first place.