Britons will soon find it dearer to drown their sorrows. But thankfully for English football fans, hefty price rises will probably not come until next year
room at Northern Monk, a craft brewery, Russell Bisset’s immediate concern is the cocktail—beer, forest-fruit gin and fresh muddled raspberries—that will be sold at that evening’s football World Cup game. But his real worry is soaring costs. The brewing industry is particularly reliant on things that are getting pricier. Mr Bisset, who owns Northern Monk, says it costs about 26% more to brew a pint now than it did in 2021. BrewDog, the country’s largest craft brewer, reckons something similar.
Expensive energy has secondary effects. Craft breweries use liquid carbon dioxide, a by-product of other industrial manufacturing processes, to store, move and carbonate beer. The largest supplier of carbon dioxide in England is a firm that owns fertiliser factories; spikes in the price of natural gas prompted these factories to stop production earlier this year because the bills were unaffordable.
Other inputs are also getting pricier. The cost of grains like barley and wheat spiked in the spring and summer with the war in Ukraine. Prices have since fallen, but are still well above pre-pandemic levels. Craft beermakers import hops from America, where growers breed varieties with aromatic flavours like stone fruit and citrus. Mr Bisset reckons he spends 16% more on hops now than he did a year ago; about half of that rise is because of fluctuations in the sterling-dollar exchange rate.
In better times, brewers might already have passed these costs on to drinkers. But that has been hard during a cost-of-living crisis, particularly after a planned freeze on beer duties was scrapped as part of the government’slast month. The price of alcoholic drinks has risen more slowly than overall inflation.
An extended run for the England team at the World Cup, allied to the usual end-of-year celebrations, would help . But a raft of planned railway strikes may hurt footfall. And once revenues fall back after the holidays, brewers are likely to start charging more. At Northern Monk, Mr Bisset plans a price increase of 11% in January. Oliver Robinson of Robinsons Brewery, a Stockport-based company, intends to raise prices in March; so does BrewDog.
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