Britain’s burgeoning craft beer scene has been dealt a hammer blow by the decision to leave the European Union, with hundreds of microbreweries going to the wall in the past 18 months.
According to Guardian reports, the craft beer boom has all but ended as inflationary pressures and difficulties exporting and importing make brewing prohibitively cumbersome.
Speaking to the newspaper, Kimi Karjalainenm, who started Bone Machine Brewery alongside his brother Marko in East Yorkshire, said he’d put £70,000 into the project since 2017, but now that’s all gone.
“It just got too much – Brexit,” Karjalainen said. “We were heavily geared for export. We’d be selling to Finland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Netherlands, Italy, Spain. We had Hungary in the pipeline. And it all disappeared with Brexit.”
Post-Brexit trading arrangements with European Union countries meant that Bone Machine’s craft beers needed to be accompanied by expensive and time-consuming paperwork.
“Everyone was saying ‘it’s too complicated to import anything from the UK any more’,” Karjalainen said. “In terms of pure output, that was about 30% to 40% of what we made. In terms of income, it was probably more than half.”
Bone Machine is just one of over 100 microbreweries that have had to shutter their doors over the past 18 months.
In addition to the litany of challenges breweries have faced in a post-Brexit world, brewers can add impending duty laws and a shortage of carbon dioxide in the latest development of the energy crisis.
“There are brewery shutdowns every year. That’s just normal business,” Yvan Seth, founder of independent craft beer distributor Jolly Good Beer said.
“But there’s more shutting down this year than in the previous eight years of doing business. Three years ago, a keg that cost £100 ($127) is now going to cost you £150 so the pubs go ‘No, we’ll skip on that.’ Staffing is hard. Electricity is still pretty expensive.”
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