Annual report | Krones, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of filling and packaging technology, published its 2020 Annual Report at the end of April. Titled “Focus on strengths”, the report highlights Krones’ medium and long-term growth opportunities.

A challenging year | At the beginning of April, The Brewers Association released annual production figures for the U.S. craft brewing industry. In 2020, small and independent brewers collectively produced 23.1 million barrels of beer and realized a 9 % decline, decreasing craft’s overall beer market share by volume to 12.3 %, down from 13.6 % the previous year (Volume by craft brewers represent total taxable production).

Making sense of the world | Narratives help us make sense of the world and ourselves. Take globalisation. It was presented to us as an inevitable process, forging global champions in its wake. In the brewing industry, the narrative of “biggest is best” was countered by the craft brewers’ own narrative, which was modelled on the biblical story of David and Goliath. These narratives have reached closure. Do we still need a compelling new narrative to maintain a conversation around beer?

0.0 beers on the rise | There is a new prohibition afoot in the United States, but it is very different from the one ushered in by the 1920 Volstead Act, passed by Congress to ostensibly save society-at-large from the scourge of alcohol. This new anti-alcohol sentiment is driven by a grassroots movement of young individualists, still concerned with society, yet, unlike their forebears, more inward-looking and dedicated to a new personal ethos of self-care, fitness, and healthy living. Rather than succumb to what many perceive to be peer pressure to drink more than they would want or should, they prefer to arise each morning clear-headed, able to take on the challenges of the day. They are responsible dads, avid sportsmen, fitness buffs, serious professionals, good citizens.

Preliminary figures | Krones, one of the leading manufacturers of filling and packaging technology, slightly exceeded its most recently outlook according to the preliminary figures for 2020. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, revenue fell 16.1 per cent year-on-year, from 3958.9 million EUR to 3322.7 million EUR. This is a slightly smaller revenue shortfall than the 17 per cent decrease forecast in early November 2020.

A matter of definition | Back a generation or so ago, it was easy to determine who was and who was not a craft brewer. At the beginning of the craft brew movement, the BA’s members were simply called “microbreweries,” and there was no need for a legal mind to parse the qualification criteria for membership. In the following article BRAUWELT International author Elva Ellen Kowald shows that today defining “craft” can be a “crafty” business indeed.

Beer and nostalgia | As the deadly pandemic wears on, many of us can be forgiven for feeling nostalgic, pining for the times when life felt normal: when we got together as a family, when we had an after-work beer with colleagues, when we hugged our friends and kissed our grannies. Who can blame brewers for tapping into the value of sentimentality to provide exhausted, anxious consumers with emotional escapism?

Category building | The new cider wave really got going only in the second decade of the new millennium. Between 2010 and 2014, seven of today’s ten market leaders in hard ciders, along with a plethora of specialty cideries, were founded.

BarthHaas Report 2019/2020 | In 2019, world beer production increased for the first time in five years. Production rose by 9.1 million hl or 0.5 % to reach 1.913 billion hl after falling five years in a row.

2020 review | We failed to see it coming, the death toll, the lockdowns, the job losses, the economic malaise. And we still do not get the full picture. The United States and the United Kingdom, two countries hit hardest by covid-19, show the full impact the coronavirus crisis had on the brewing industry.