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From the earliest times, beer brewing in the United Kingdom was a traditional, largely rural industry relying on a number of small breweries where barley and hops could come together with minimal logistical difficulty in order to brew the ale that quenched the thirsts of the farm workers and labourers whose efforts helped in its manufacture. You could almost call that a circular' industry. These days, HR gurus might speak of the brewers and consumers being in a win win' situation. Then came the rise and rise of Western capitalism.

The introduction of the canal system and then the railways meant that the breweries could deliver their produce over a much wider area. Inevitably the strongest started to overcome the weakest, and the number of breweries was in decline even before the advent of the Twentieth Century.

But the biggest sea change in the British brewing industry came with the introduction of lager beers. Although the first British lager was produced as long ago as 1882 by German immigrants who founded Wrexham Lager (later Skol) in Wales it was not until well into the mid 20th Century that lager sales came anywhere close to those of the traditional British bitter beers. Lager was more expensive, and viewed as more of an occasional drink until the advent of the Swinging Sixties, when scenes such as the Beatles quaffing lager and lime in "A Hard Day's Night" really galvanised the drink's popularity.

It would be a little snobbish to suggest that lager was inferior to British ale, but it was certainly easier to mass produce, and mass production, cheaper and better transportation and lager beer's ever-increasing popularity led to the decline of many famous British breweries such as Benskins of Watford and Brickwoods of Portsmouth to name but two.

Today there is something of a revival in the small brewery (sometimes now referred to as the micro-brewery) producing traditional ales, or modern versions of them. Globalisation though, has seen the merging and takeover of some of the largest British breweries, and the diversification of the leisure and drinks sectors. Whitbread, perhaps Britain's largest single brewery, which had taken over scores of smaller businesses then decided to concentrate its efforts on the hotel business and withdraw completely from brewing. Ind Coope and Watneys have been other famous names to disappear over the years.

Brewing giants such as Heineken, Baltic Beverage Holdings (a conglomerate comprising the former Scottish & Newcastle brewery and Carlsberg) and Interbrew-Ambev (a merging of the largest Belgian and Brazilian brewers) are truly global players. Britain may consider itself one of the natural homes of beer, but today's brewing industry presents new and different challenges in the retention of British influence in the world's beer market.

Learn more about this author, Colin Morley.
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