A surge in the popularity of craft beer has seen trademark registrations for brands increase to the highest level since 2007, new figures show.
Registrations for UK beer brands increased by 19 per cent in the last year, according to London-based law firm RPC.
The number of new trade marks rose from 968 in 2007 to 1,983 in 2016.
The firm said the wave of trademarking came in the wake of craft beer’s increased popularity. Why is this?
There’s a revolution going on. Away from football sponsorship and mainstream media, beer has been reinventing itself. Across the country, small breweries are refreshing, reviving and reinventing beer as we know it.
You’d have to go back 70 years to find as many breweries in the UK as we have now. From genuine Czech-style pilsners and golden ales that pack a pint full of flavour at alcohol levels as low as 3.8% ABV, to zingy India pale ales (IPAs) and mighty export porters and imperial stouts.
The future for the UK’s beer industry wasn’t always this rosy. Once, Britain was the greatest brewing nation on the planet, but there was little evidence of that by the 70s. Traditional British cask ale – respected around the world but less so at home – was dying out in favour of mass-produced keg bitter and low strength ersatz lager.
- The Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) formed in 1971 and saved real ale from oblivion, but saddled it with a socks-and-sandals image problem. With an aim to save an old tradition, the focus was too much on the past to appeal widely to image-conscious drinkers. - http://www.camra.org.uk/home
And then chancellor Gordon Brown did something clever. In 2002, he introduced Progressive Beer Duty, which gave tax breaks to brewers below a certain size. The number of small brewers in the UK began to grow.
“The choice, variety, creativity, innovation and proliferation of styles we’re now enjoying can all be traced back to that single fiscal measure,” says Julian Grocock, chief executive at the Society Of Independent Brewers.
Initially, the independents brewed cask ale, just like the older, more traditional concerns. But then they started hearing about beers from outside the UK – beers that had flavours no one had tasted before, beers that were so strong they were drunk from brandy balloons, beers that were so intense they changed people’s lives
Except it shouldn’t have been a surprise – not really. In the US, three identical beer brands accounted for 80 per cent of the market between them. So craft brewers started digging up forgotten beer styles and reinventing them. West Coast hops created bombs of citrus and resin flavour compared to more traditional British ales.
In the UK, pioneers such as Dark Star in Sussex started importing US hops, and Meantime in Greenwich unearthed original recipes and recreated strong, forgotten beers for the modern bar and dining table. Thornbridge started out in Derbyshire in 2005 with a pair of young brewers (Martin Dickie and Stefano Cossi) who embraced the new global mash-up of ideas and were given freedom to experiment with them.
And when Dickie left in 2007 to start up the brash, punkish BrewDog with James Watt, British craft beer had a full cast of heroes, and headlines.
Demand exploded. There are now more than 800 breweries in the UK – higher than at any time since the Forties with about 80 openings each year. Camra itself has seen membership more than double in the past decade, and its beer festivals now sell out in advance. Even the dimpled pint jug has been re-appropriated by real ale-loving hipsters. Watt, Brew Dog’s ‘Captain’, is in no doubt as to why the change took place:
“We were becoming increasingly disillusioned with what was available, and wanted more than cold fizz and generic big brands.”
Counter-intuitively, the recession lit the touch-paper for this pent-up demand for something better. Emma Cole manages the new Craft Beer Co in Brighton. “People don’t have as much money so they go to the pub less,” she says. “But when they do go out, they want something different and better than the usual. Our clientele is aged 25 to 45, settled down but with a bit of money to spend. They’re the kind of people who think about what they buy, especially when it comes to food and drink.”
Artisan Thinking - the foodie revolution that has swept Britain over the past 20 years is predicated on localism, natural ingredients, bolder flavours and artisanal methods. Small-scale brewing ticks every box.
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