AB-InBev buys London craft brewer Camden Town

How bizarre: Only three weeks after AB-InBev put the London craft brewer Meantime on the market in order to assuage worries that European competition regulators might have about the AB-InBev+SABMiller tie-up, AB-InBev on 21 December 2015 announced that it has taken over the craft brewer Camden Town, a similar brand to Meantime. Insiders wonder: why does AB-InBev think that Meantime will not pass muster with the antitrust people but Camden Town will?

AB-InBev did not disclose how much it paid to get its hands on London’s Camden Town Brewing Company, but UK media say the deal values the 60,000 hl brewery at about GBP 85 million (USD 127 million).

Camden Town was founded by Jasper Cuppaidge in 2010 with just three staff. He has since built it into a well-known staple of London pubs. With Cuppaidge, his family and three best friends owning 95 percent of the company’s equity, this suggests that they will share a combined payout of more than GBP 80 million.

The company’s latest accounts for the year to the end of 2014 show a pre-tax profit of GBP 319,000 (USD 460,000) on revenues of more than GBP 9.5 million (USD 1.5 million).

This sale has, says The Guardian newspaper, “caused much angst among the craft cognoscenti, many of whom (particularly those who last year helped Camden crowdfund GBP 2.75 million) felt emotionally invested in the company’s David-and-Goliath-type struggle. That struggle ended, amid the usual PR spin about “partnership” and acting in the company’s long-term interests, with Goliath getting his wallet out and making David and his backers very rich.”

The Guardian goes on to argue that “with its slick branding, rapid expansion and flexible attitude to local provenance (its “Camden” beers are also contract brewed in Belgium), Camden had the feel of a brewery that was shaping up to sell out. It is not the first; it will not be the last. A significant minority of new-wave British breweries are run, not by hapless beer enthusiasts, but by ambitious business people.”

The first of the craft beer purists to respond was, unsurprisingly, James Watt, the founder of craft beer group BrewDog. He rounded on his rival for selling out to a global behemoth of the drinks industry and announced that BrewDog will no longer stock any Camden Town beers in its bars.