Pivovar, the craft beer bar operator and beer importer, is to open a microbrewery at his Sheffield Tap pub and is also looking to add breweries to sites in Leeds and Birmingham.
Company owner Jamie Hawksworth revealed the news during a discussion panel on craft beer bars at M&C Report’s Pub Retail Summit.
Hawksworth said £250,000 is being spent on a 700-litre brewery at the Sheffield Tap. “[We have] two more sites coming on in Leeds and Birmingham, which will be brewpubs. I think it’s the future of our industry.”
Panelists predicted that the craft-beer revolution will continue apace as more consumers turn to drinking quality beer. Draft House managing director Charlie McVeigh said that while good quality wine was “insanely expensive”, almost everyone could afford to drink the best beer.
Leading beer writer Pete Brown likened the current popularity of craft beer to when consumers started to wake up to the availability of better quality wine at the start of the 1990s. “If you look at what happened 20 years ago, people started to discover and drink good wine,” he said. “They didn’t suddenly then wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to start drinking bad wine again.’”
The biggest threat to craft beer’s popularity is a drop in quality as more microbrewers come on the scene and look to push their products to market, the panellists warned. And big global brewers hijacking the term ‘craft beer’ leading to its denigration was also a danger, Brown added.
