What Breaking the Beer Pub Monopolies Did for Britain

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[timjackson]

One factor that added to the decline of rural pubs not mentioned here was the drink-driving laws. Up to the 1980's driving to a pub was commonplace and pretty much accepted if not actually legal. There followed the introduction of breathalysers, and a public information campaign which successfully changed public perception that drinking and driving was not just a bit of irresponsible fun but a serious crime.

[SimonS]

I was surprised the video didn't mention the meteoric rise during the 80's-00's of weatherspoons - a pub company based upon the premise of a wide choice and very cheap prices, that seemingly targeted the exact market the pub reforms were aimed at.

[YaoiMastah]

Perhaps also look into the history and structure of Heineken. The thing Heineken really kicked off (asides from introducing refrigerated brewing processes from Czechoslovakia and hiring a student of Louis Pasteur to develop a proprietary yeast) was the introduction of a set of complicated financial instruments revolving around the typical Dutch bar (called "Bruin Café" in Dutch), where anyone with a license and a building (let's say, the house next to the windmill as farmers had to wait for a while until their grist was milled) could go to Heineken and not only do they provide the beer and the tap, but also the glasses, the furniture, the bar, the darts right up to the ashtrays. Which of course was a form of lease tied with the sale of beer. Around the time that bars started to run into financial problems (or without someone to take over the bar), Heineken again stepped up and bought the buildings as well. Eventually, Heineken became a large real estate owner and bar or club owners are merely the tenants who has to lease the building, the license and buy a minimum amount of beer and other beverages.

[GregFerro]

Imagine my surprise when my local pub appears in the first two minutes. I’m in shock.

[sr]

One thing not mentioned- CAMRA (The Campaign for Real ale. They took on the+big breweries who were brewing bland beers. The big pub chains sell beer mainly from the international breweries. Hundreds of local bars are popping up, selling real ale and craft beers. The quality is so much better than the offerings at big chains.

[pugvsgames]

As Brit great video! Everyone always goes on about the death of the pub here, with many blaming higher prices which seems to be true. The issue it seems with breaking the monopoly was that it allowed foreign competitors to fill the market not allowing time for domestic build-up. You forgot to mention that pubs pay a higher tax selling beer than shops do which has contributed to higher prices for the consumer. Would love to see you talk about building societies in the UK! Though it might be outside your realm of knowledge (never expected pubs to be included in that though lol)

[johnstirling]

When I went to the UK in 1984 I did not understand what was meant by the "free house" sign above some pub doors. After a while it was explained to me that it indicates a pub that is not tied to a brewery chain.

[anthonysullivan]

I was employed in the brewery industry from 1979 to 2020 and was a free trade area manager from 1984 to 1988 and a tenancy area manager from 1988 to 2020. It was a rollercoaster after the beer orders were introduced. The big 4 generally looked after their tenants with affordable rents and generally reasonable support and repair spend. Post beer orders the pub cos took over and things became really difficult. Rents went up and repair spend generally went down and as a result the pubs declined and eventually many were sold for alternative use. The beer orders basically turned a well run industry into the wild west. Sad

[TheCho-km]

This was not what I expected from Asianometry but I bloody love it, a topic close to my heart! Well done for covering such a broad range of topics, it really does make your channel a bit special. :)

[christopherwaller]

Another factor was that the options available in tied pubs was limited, often consisting of bland keg bitters, and this led to the rise of CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale). Nowadays real ale in various forms is more widely available, and so their focus has expanded to other beer and pub related campaigns, such as cataloguing pubs, especially pub interiors, of historic interest.

[AaronOfMpls]

Tied houses were a thing here in the US as well. In the 19th and early 20th century, a large percentage of bars were similarly owned outright by a local brewery, or controlled via loans or lease deals.

But Prohibition in the 1910s-30s* was the big wrench in the works. Brewers either closed down altogether, risked continuing illegally (especially under organized crime, with its own tied-house speakeasies), or turned to other businesses like soft drinks and malted milk. Bars either closed down, became illegal speakeasies, or converted to restaurants or cafés (which were sometimes tied houses to soda pop bottlers 🙂).

After national Prohibition was repealed in 1933, regulations changed. All the states that re-legalized alcohol** ended the tied-house system: they mostly banned brewers from selling directly to the public, instead requiring a middleman distributor who'd resell to bars, restaurants, and liquor stores. Prohibition had led to a ton of brewer consolidation -- the bigger brewers tended to have more capital to change businesses until repeal -- but since bars had been illegal in the interim, it didn't consolidate bar ownership by any real stretch.

Since then, the US had a ton more brewer consolidation in the 1950s-80s, as refrigeration, TV ads, and interstate highways led to national brewers growing and crowding out most of the remaining local and regional brewers. But countering this was the rise of craft brews from the 1970s on. Since bars weren't tied to specific brewers, they were free to carry as many of these new brews as they thought would sell. And states eventually started allowing breweries to sell to the public on-premises (as brewpubs and such).

Meanwhile, bars have had much more limited consolidation. Locally-owned bars and restaurant-and-bars are common. There are a few big sports bar and restaurant-and-bar chains, but they don't really dominate beyond outer-suburb strip malls.

And as for soft drinks, tied houses of a sort remain. Most restaurants -- chain _or_ independent -- carry mainly Coca-Cola products. Though some carry Pepsi products instead, and the occasional oddball carries RC Cola products. Even so, some regional sodas (like Moxie, or 1919 Draft Root Beer) and bottled craft sodas find their way into restaurants too.

Whew, that came out longer than I planned! 😅



* Quite a few individual states banned alcohol during WW1, _before_ the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution started the national ban in 1920.
** eventually all 50, though a few like Alabama and Mississippi held out as late as the 1960s. And plenty of states still allow "dry counties" and "dry municipalities" where alcohol sales are prohibited.

[ledeyabaklykova]

This video stands to be THE definitive YT treatment of the topic for years to come. Detailed, rich in facts and necessary minutiae, and easy to follow. I was born ten yrs after this Beer Order. I will think of this each time now I step into my fave pub in North London, The Garden Gate .

[briskyoungploughboy]

I grew up in an English village. The pub was predominantly the domain of the working people, whose homes might have been less well suited for dinner parties and socialising than the upper and middle class homes were. For the last forty years, the worker share of productivity has been falling, with workers' wages barely keeping up with inflation. Meanwhile, rents and mortgage payments have increased exponentially. This all adds up to lower discretionary spending power, and TV / home entertainment have taken the place of pubs, not as a matter of cultural shift, but of economic necessity.
Thus, neoliberal economics has done far more damage to 'pub culture' than brewers' monopolies, or government's ham-fisted attempts at breaking those monopolies ever did.

[grahamrice]

As an electronic engineer I already loved this channel but as an Englishman who loves the pub this is easily your best content 😁

[fosterb]

I'm a kid from Manchester and my parents ran a tied Pub in Middleton owned by Boddingtons in the 1970's. Opening hours also had an impact as the pub would open at 11:00 close at 15:00 then re-open 17:30 and close at 23:00. You could lose your licence and livelihood if found to be serving beer outside of these hours. It was legacy from laws passed during the war years to stop folk drinking and get them into the factories. This story is too big to tell in 20 mintues... But Thanks 🤓

[sudonum]

Another factor that lead to a drop in beer consumption in the 1800’s was the the roll out of widely available clean drinking water.

[stevenrose]

I live in Burton on Trent and there are a few instances of pubs in close proximity to each other, away from the town centre. It's down to the tied houses and the fact Bass, Marston's and Allied would all have there own pub for the area.

In my small suburb of around 8000 people, there were still 7 pubs when I started drinking legally in 2004. We are now down to 4 :(

[stevo]

A major competitor to the traditional pub were all the political party, trade union and charity social clubs. And many work places had their own on site social club selling beer. The American bank I worked at in the 1980's had it's own social club on the 3rd floor. The bar was open at 10 minutes past 5 o'clock Monday to Friday. My local government building had it's own pub for staff. Hotels also have bars open to the public. Beer wasn't sold in supermarkets. The Off Licence was the only shop able to sell alcohol.

[peterfmodel]

I do remember back in 1999, in Camberley, if I went on a pub crawl with my work mates we could drop in to half a dozen small pubs with very little walking required. Perhaps no more than 500 metres of walking would allow me to cover half a dozen small pubs. In 2010, about 10 years later, there was only two pubs I could go to. I have to admit the remaining pubs were larger and had reasonable dinning with very good bangers and mash. A pub crawl in 2010 consisted of only two pubs, unless I wanted to get in a car and drive around. It was a rather large social change which in retrospect I find rather amazing.

[sdesigan]

Literally one of the best channels on this hellsite. I'd love to see you do a video on Indian snack giants like Haldiram's, Parle & now Balaji. It's a fascinating sector and your approach would clarify so many unanswered questions. I absolutely LOVED your vid on the Indian computing industry.