A new wave in craft: lagers on the rise

Craft lagers | Something strange is afoot in the American craft brew market: Almost every brewery is now making at least one blond lager! Why? Well, it offers new opportunities for both artisanal breweries and quality raw materials suppliers.

The Brexit fiasco

Beer in Ireland | Call it the luck of the Irish? While Ireland’s craft brewers have been struggling to build a local base by taking on the almighty duopoly of Guinness and Heineken, their bulging portfolios and deep pockets, consumers have moved on to drinking wines and spirits instead. And worse is to come. Once the UK leaves the EU, the whole industry will need to face up to its devastating consequences.

Beer in Quebec

A taste revolution | Dating from the 1990s, the new generation of Quebec breweries is now represented by over 100 companies across a province that has been crowned as “New Belgium”. Journalist Julien Abadie de Slate sums up this recognition as follows: “Having emerged barely 25 years ago, québécois microbreweries are now among the most inventive in the world. This proves that brewing terroirs are not invented – they are built!”.

Bioriet V.O.F. | With the vision to free the European market from plastic straws even before 2021, a Dutch Start-up developed a premium paper straw in 2018 and brought it into production. In doing so, the two entrepreneurs behind Bioriet especially focus on resistance and sustainability.

Germany | AB-InBev has bought a 20 percent stake in Munich craft brewer Crew Republic, which, at 9,000 hl in annual beer sales, is among Germany’s largest. But over the past few years it has seen its spare capital shrink while it has struggled to hike sales.   

Germany | As of March 2020, several dozen Bavarian breweries will increase the deposit on beer crates from currently EUR 1.50 to EUR 6. This is meant to persuade tardy consumers to return crates more quickly rather than throw them away or store them in their basements.

Germany | Once the pride of German brewers, the country’s much-touted return-refill system for beer bottles and crates is becoming more and more unmanageable, as brewers flood the market with proprietary containers, thus adding to the SKU deluge.  

USA | AB-InBev let a deadline to buy all of Portland-based Craft Brew Alliance pass on 23 August 2019. Under a 2016 agreement, it had until the following day to purchase the rest of CBA’s shares, it did not own, for a pre-determined price of USD 24.50 per share. The decision sent shares of CBA down.

Vietnam | With a population of nearly 100 million people and beer accounting for 95 percent of alcohol consumption, the southeast Asian country has become an alluring market for brewers.

Germany | Beer production declined 2.7 percent during the first six months of 2019, compared with the same period in 2018. German brewers sold around 46 million hl beer in the first half – excluding non-alcoholic beers and malt beverages.