There's always been a war between the big breweries and craft beers.
The big alcohol companies, they're just snapping them up.
An independently brewed beer is gonna have a lot more love and is gonna be a better product
What is craft beer?
Who’s independent?
I don't think consumers actually care.
I shouldn’t be so grotesque but it’s the f*cking truth right.
Every business is for sale.
Punters care more about what they're drinking
in the past 20 years than they ever have.
Peter Lalor knows a thing or two about beer.
He’s been a beer critic for the past 20 years
This is a mass produced beer,
this is a craft beer.
You can see I’m already half way through that one and that's the one that I prefer.
I reckon not only is there a new beer every day,
I reckon there’s a new brewery every week, opening in Australia.
The growth is phenomenal.
You wonder where it’s going to stop.
Right now there are more than 400 independent breweries around Australia
and their success is attracting the attention of the big global players.
The big alcohol companies,
AB InBev and Tooheys,
see real value in some of the larger players in the independent marketplace
and therefore they’re just snapping them up.
Pat McInerney runs Willie the Boatman,
a small independent craft brewer in Sydney.
About 8 years ago,
Nick Newey my business partner and I were mad fisherman
and also we loved to dabble in a bit of backyard brewing.
About 2 years into the process we decided our product was pretty good.
We started testing it on a lot of our mates.
And all of a sudden we decided to back ourselves in
and Willie the Boatman was born.
Pale ale,
Llager,
Albo,
black beer
and hop storm.
Beautiful.
All of our clients are quite small,
little local community pubs,
bottle shops,
predominantly independent bottle shops
and really just the local community.
Craft beers is something that’s made with love.
We can tell you almost every ingredient, the batch numbers on the grain, we can tell you about the hop.
Almost everything that we make here is touched by our hands and it’s really cared for.
It's old school.
It’s certainly nothing like any of the beer made at the big breweries.
But increasingly
the big breweries are buying up craft beer labels and making them themselves.
You look at Mountain Goat that was sold a couple of years ago,
now I don’t know what it was sold for but I’ve heard rumours of up to $80 million.
And then there’s products like Steamrail.
Now that is a beer that looks like it's made by a craft brewer,
but it’s actually owned and produced by Liquorland.
There is something happening in the market at the moment with the multinationals.
They’re bringing out a lot of faux beer brands.
They’re really trying to confuse consumers about what the legitimate independent idea of craft beer is.
And now the independent brewers are fighting back.
They’ve launched the “seal of independence”,
it's a label for consumers to know whether what they’re buying is the real deal.
Sometimes I stick my head into the bottle shop at the supermarkets and stuff and I
I see a new beer here and a new beer there and I have a little look at it
this is just some mass produced stuff passing itself off as a craft beer.
I think in some cases the punters are being slightly conned.
Peter says the stoush over what is and is not craft beer is just the latest salvo in a long-running battle.
In the old days, the big breweries did all that they could to stamp out craft beers.
They thought they were a noxious weed.
They wanted to own the whole market.
They would walk into a pub and say what’s that doing there?
I’ll give you three free kegs of my mass produced beer.
Get that off.
Tap contracts in Australia are generally restricted to
one, two or three of the major breweries.
Liam O’Keefe runs the Welcome Hotel in Sydney’s inner west
and he argues that tap contracts are a just one of the ways the big brewers
try and lock the smaller players out of the market.
Doing everything from offering to refurbish the bar
to giving hefty rebates to keep their labels stocked.
So obviously the more volume of beers you have
the more rebate you’re going to receive from the major breweries
to have their beer on tap for every item that you sell.
But Liam is bucking the trend, he almost exclusively stocks independent brewers.
An independently brewed beer is going to have a lot more attention to it,
a lot more love and generally at the end of the day it’s going to be a better product.
The esoteric semantics about what is craft beer,
who’s independent, who isn’t, I don't think consumers actually care.
Brent Heffernan is from the Brewers Association of Australia
and he represents the countries biggest brewers.
The small independent brewers in this country represent 3.5 or actually less than 3.5% of the market.
So the idea that they are at war with the major brewers is a bit silly.
What consumers are after are beers that they love, beers that they know and love.
And they want them at affordable prices.
This whole faux concocted argument about
what is independent seems to be more about a marketing pitch from the small players,
rather than any serious concern as far as consumers are concerned.
There is a large percentage of Australians,
who will only ever look for a cheap lawnmower beer that they can bang down on weekends or at footy matches.
And good luck to em'.
There's room for everyone in that.
The craft beer market is not going anywhere.
The thing is they can’t make craft beer because
craft beer is actually made by people who absolutely love their product.
Now that's not to say that Pat doesn't have a price if the big brewers do come knocking.
If I was offered a big whack of cash,
it would hurt, internally it would really hurt me,
but it would probably be the brain over the heart that would win.
I shouldn’t be so grotesque but it’s the f*cking truth right?
Every business is for sale.