There is little that sparks debate and fires emotions in the beer world as much as those occasions when a multinational buys an independent brewing company. Case in point this year: the acquisition of the Fermentum Group – home to Stone & Wood, Fixation and Two Birds among others – by Kirin-owned Lion.
The issue of who owns your beer, and the intricacies of the debate – whether it matters, why it matters, who it matters to, and so on – has been around almost as long as brewers have been making and selling beer in Australia. Since the Craft Beer Industry Association transitioned to become the Independent Brewers Association (IBA) in May 2017, it’s a debate that comes with definitions about who is and isn’t allowed inside the tent marked independent too.
It’s an area we’ve addressed many times over the years, often in articles accompanied by infographics highlighting which brands are owned by multinational companies or the country’s major retail chains. In recent years, we’ve also tracked the rise of what we term “indie families” – groups of beverage brands sitting under the one banner, such as Fermentum (pre-sale), Good Drinks, Tribe Breweries and the fast-growing portfolio amassed by Mighty Craft (formerly Founders First).
Now that Coles and the Endeavour Group are placing greater focus on the development and promotion of their own craft brands, it’s a situation that changes so frequently we decided we needed a more fluid way of presenting the information. So we’ve created a new page on The Crafty Pint featuring an interactive version of the Who Owns Your Beer? infographic.
VIEW WHO OWNS YOUR BEER?
This allows us to add and remove brands as they’re bought, sold or conceived by a supermarket’s marketing agency, as well as including links to articles providing more information on the businesses and brands involved.
It’s both a clearcut situation – if you care about independence, only buy beers from indie brewers (and indie retailers if there's one close to your home) – and a complex one. Independence doesn’t guarantee great beer or owners running good businesses; acquired craft brands are still making great beers and doing good things in their communities; some indies are owned by operations with no interest in beer or those making it other than the profit they can extract; not all independent brewers are IBA members (and thus can’t currently use the independence seal on their packaging).
When addressing the question, “What is craft beer?” in the introductory section of my first book on Australian beer back in 2014 – back before the debate become more laser-focused on ownership rather than something as abstract as “craft” – I suggested it was pretty much impossible to define as different people have their own parameters when making a choice. It’s the same here: some care about ownership, and the IBA is working to increase the number of beer drinkers that do, while others just want something they enjoy drinking that they perceive as offering good value.
Wherever you sit on the issue, we like our readers to be in possession of as many facts as possible so they can make informed decisions. As such, we wanted to give that information a clear and easy-to-navigate home on The Crafty Pint and will be keeping the Who Owns Your Beer? page updated as brands change hands and pop up in fridges.
Speaking of which, if you spot something we’ve missed or know of anything in the pipeline that will need adding, drop us a line.
We've spotted earlier versions of Who Owns Your Beer? hanging from walls in breweries and venues across Australia on our travels, and we're working on a nice, clean means for readers to download and print the interactive version. In the meantime, if you want one and can't wait, get in touch and we'll create a PDF for you.
For more background on this, check out Infiltrating And Taking Over, one of the features we produced for the Ten Years Of Crafty series.
James Smith launched The Crafty Pint in 2010, two years after moving to Australia from the UK. He was taken to Mountain Goat within weeks of landing in Melbourne, joined their indoor cricket team, and is still navigating the rabbit hole that is craft beer to this day.
The beers that turned you on to good beer:
- Watching pints of McEwan's 80 Shilling settle when visiting family in Edinburgh.
- Pints of flat Bass from the jug at the Cap & Stocking in Kegworth.
- A first Paulaner Hefeweizen when working in Munich in 1998: “This smells of bananas!”
- Castle Rock Harvest Pale – how could a 3.8 percent ABV beer be so good? (It turns out it was an early example of the three Cs – Cascade, Centennial and Columbus – in an English bitter).
- Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA poured through hops at the Sunset Grill in Cambridge, MA, in the company of a man who turned out to be the Beer Nut (while we were both covering a double murder case at the time).
- Ordering a Mountain Goat Hightail on my first day as an Aussie resident as it was local and I’d never heard of it; “A dark Australian beer; well I never…”
- Murray’s Icon 2IPA at Beer DeLuxe Fed Square, recommended by a guy I’d not long known who's now the main man at Fixation, served by Mik Halse, now head of sales at Hawkers. How could an Australian beer smell as good as that?!?
You've got three beers to turn someone else on to good beer; what are they and why?
- Any really good, fresh and balanced West Coast style IPA. Punchy hop aromatics are the most obvious way to capture someone's attention and these IPAs, done well, present the key components in beer (if you're sticking to just water, malt, hops and yeast) in harmony yet with the volume turned up.
- Saison Dupont. Arguably a selfish choice here as I bloody love the broad saison style and dearly hope it will finally take hold in Australia one day. Given a choice, I'd probably crack one enlivened with Brettanomyces like Molly Rose Matilde for myself but, when it comes to turning on someone new, you've got to go with the classic.
- Rodenbach Caractère Rouge. Because if you don't enjoy or can't appreciate this beer, I'll never win you over. And because Filip, the fruit and wood specialist at Rodenbach that designed it, is a beautiful human.
The last beer you enjoyed:
Fixation IPA at The Incubator.
Three things that represent you:
- The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Golden Plains
NB All articles written by James in the first eight years of the site appear as By Crafty Pint. Today, that's used for collaborative efforts by the wider team.
