No part of the recent history of UK brewing and the pub
trade is more significant than the growth and behaviour of the Big Six combines
that, by the 70s, dominated the industry. They owned and ran tens of thousands
of pubs, and their attitude to traditional beer was uniformly hostile. On their
watch, whole tied estates were turned over to keg and bright beer and national
brands promoted over all else.
Yes folks, it really existed once upon a time
More or less in order of size, the Big Six were Bass
Charrington (later just Bass), which at its peak had over 10,000 houses, Allied
Breweries, Courage, Grand Metropolitan, Whitbread, and Scottish and Newcastle.
The last named did not have the largest tied estate, but did enjoy a
significant presence in the free trade. They were the result of post-war
mergers and acquisitions on a huge scale.
Bass combined Charrington of London, the Burton brands of
Bass and Worthington, Mitchells and Butlers in the West Midlands, and Tennants
in Scotland. Allied retained some individual identity for its three largest
constituents, Tetley (formerly Tetley Walker), Ansells and Ind Coope. Courage
had taken over John Smiths of Tadcaster who in turn had bought out smaller
players like the Barnsley Brewery.
Whitbread was a curious mixture of subsidiaries bought up
outright, and investment by Colonel Whitbread, the latter often to protect
small regional brewers from hostile takeover (Boddingtons being a well known
example). But, over time, those protective investments led to total
assimilation. Scottish and Newcastle was the amalgamation of William Youngers
and the Newcastle brewery.
So what was hotel chain Grand Met doing there? Well, it had
taken over the amalgamation of Watney Mann and Truman, later just Watney’s,
which had also acquired smaller players such as Websters and Wilsons in the
north, and Ushers in the west country. Watney’s, apart from brewing the most
reviled national keg brand known to mankind, had the dubious distinction of
having invented keg beer.
How successful were they at wiping out cask beer? John
Smiths had gone all keg as early as 1970. Newcastle was by the mid 70s a “beer desert”,
as not only the Newcastle brewery, but also the Federation clubs brewery had
been turned over to tank and keg production. Traditional beer was a rarity in
Bass and Grand Met pubs, and Younger’s free trade presence just meant more national
keg brews.
Regional brewers weren’t immune to this tendency: Greenalls,
Greene King, Matthew Brown, Mansfield, and yes, even Fullers turned significant
parts of their estates over to keg beer. And in support of this move was the relentless
use of advertising to promote fizzy beer of dubious quality as some kind of
lifestyle choice, while in reality it was there to ramp up profits.
So that’s one thing that hasn’t changed in the past 40
years, then. More later.
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