Falling and Rising Numbers

In our CAMRA Branch, our Pubs Officer is on the ball. He produced some figures the other night, which I have laboriously put into a table after crunching the numbers, probably incorrectly.

Rochdale, Oldham and Bury now has as off April 2011, 626 pubs. The corresponding number in 2010 was 643. That's a drop of 17 overall. The surprising thing is that while pub numbers overall have fallen, in each year, in each area, the number of cask pubs has risen and keg pubs declined. Now you may be surprised at the number of keg pubs we have - I was for sure - but then again, this is mainly a poor area and poor areas have keg pubs and lots of them. At least in this neck of the woods.  The North that is. We have though gone from a cask minority to a cask majority, so that is pleasing to me at least.

Now I'd like to spot trends, identify market weaknesses and do many other things, but I won't, except to say, if you run a traditional keg pub, better start thinking about changing over to cask if you want to increase your survival chances. The other trend of course is that from a CAMRA point of view, we have far too many keg pubs in our branch area and we need to target some of the better ones for change - for a bit of good old fashioned campaigning in other words. There's loads of other things to spot though, but keg isn't doing well out of the decrease in pubs year on year, here at least.

As for new wave keg pubs? We don't really have any. Not any that sell British new wave keg anyway.

Here's the details.

God knows how Ron does his tables and makes it all so neat. It took me ages and I'm not doing it again - even if the arithmetic is skewiff.

Illogical CAMRA Says City Analyst

Both The Morning Advertiser and The Publican publish a view from Douglas Jack of Numis (no, I don't know who they are either), who alleges that removing the tie would reduce pub product range, investment, support and supply, driving up prices as a result. He goes on to give a few reasons for this by saying that CAMRA’s claim that the beer tie had inflated price to the consumer by 50p a pint was “fictitious”. He said that the average beer price across Punch and Enterprise pubs at 30 September was £2.62 a pint — 3% above the average of £2.54 a pint. The average free trade price was £2.56. He reckon's that Punch and Enterprise’s average beer price is also below the average in the tenanted sector of £2.73 “reflecting higher purchasing power that is passed on to tenants through investment and support”.

Now I'm always a little suspicious of figures trotted out these days, but I'm sure it will come as somewhat of a shock to most Enterprise and Punch tenants to know they are benefiting in such a way. Maybe Enterprise and Punch do stay competitive on price, but as we've read before, it seems to be at the expense of their licensees who work hugely long hours for little reward. Rather than the commonly held view that the lion's share of the money taken by a pub going to the PubCo, it seems according to Jack that everything in the garden is rosy. He also ignores that whatever changes the PubCos have made have been forced on them by public scrutiny, not by their own heartfelt conversion to the shining path.

I 'm getting to the stage where I no longer know what to believe, but I'll leave you with this thought. I am (reliably) told that The Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) sell their beers to Enterprise for £55 a nine. They sell them to their tenants for £90 a pop. God knows what discounts they screw out of the bigger brewers. Of course you could choose to believe that the benefit of this "higher purchasing power" goes to "investment and support" as Mr Jack seemingly does, or you could take the view that it services the huge debt created by a dodgy business model. Wonder which it is?

CAMRA may well get it wrong, but City analysts don't always get it right either.

Anyone Understand This?

I read in The Publican that SABMiller saw its UK beer volumes rise by 15% in the first six months of the year. The article goes on to say that lager volumes fell by 1%, but gives no clue as to how the overall rise in volumes is derived.

Well one might conclude that this rise is ale volumes, as they don't brew stout, but can that really be true?  To me this just doesn't add up.

Footnote: A look at SABMiller's trading statement leaves me none the wiser, except to conclude that the Publican is mixing up world and UK positions.

Sobering Statistics

From the Scotsman:

1.6 million

fewer pints of beer a day sold in pubs, bars and restaurants in April to June this year, compared with the same period last year

7 million
fewer pints a day now sold in pubs from the height of the market in 1979

10.6 per cent
fall in beer sales in British pubs between April and June this year, compared with the same period last year

£88 million
less in beer duty and VAT collected by the Treasury in April to June this year, compared with the same period last year

27
pubs closed each week in the UK over the past year

57,000
pubs estimated in Britain in 2008

69,000
pubs in Britain in 1980

350
pubs closed in Scotland in the past two years

78 per cent
fall in profits of major brewers in the UK between 2004-6

The on trade is in trouble and while it can be persuasively argued that by and large the pubs being closed are at the lower end of the market and would have been shaken out by any downturn in social habit and economic fortune, there is a worrying underlying trend for those of us who like to drink beer in pubs.

The 7 million pints less being drunk daily is an astonishing figure. It equates to nearly 25,000 UK barrels a day or the loss of the production of a brewery the size of Highgate, McMullens, or Bathams every day!