Analysis: There’s no corporate conspiracy – the West End Brewery is a hangover from another time
It’s last drinks for the West End Brewery – and several factors piled up to make it unviable, despite an apparent valiant attempt to save it.
SA Business
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In the 1980s your beer was like your footy team. If you lived in South Australia, you drank West End, Southwark, or for what was then still a small minority, maybe a Coopers.
If you lived in the eastern states it was a VB or XXXX, in the west it was a Swan. You get the picture.
The market hold of the majors – largely due to historical factors around who could sell beer in pubs and own them – was phenomenal, with one in three beers sold in Australia being a VB in the 1980s, and even as recently as the early 2000s it was one in four.
How times have changed.
Australians are drinking less beer than they have since the 1960s on a per capita basis.
And to adopt some jargon from the industry, those who do enjoy a beer are drinking a “portfolio” of different beers, with about 700 craft brewers now operating in Australia alone.
Every Pirate Life (now foreign-owned also), Mismatch or Little Bang we drink is a mainstream beer that’s not being sold.
So beer drinkers are drinking less, and they’re less loyal to the brands to which they used to be welded.
Add in increases in costs from labour and raw materials, the big hit to hospitality venues from the COVID-19 epidemic, and the sweetener of a big chunk of money from a land sale at the Thebarton brewery site, and something had to give.
It’s understandable, given that West End is now owned by Japanese-owned Lion, that the finger gets pointed at ruthless corporate bean counters.
But it’s hard to argue against their argument that they’ve worked pretty hard over the years to keep Thebarton going.
They’ve at times brought in production of other products to keep the site ticking over, and in 2013 announced an investment of more than $70 million to modernise the brewery.
What about the role of the government, you might ask? Well they didn’t have much to do with the creation of the more-than 70 craft beer producers in South Australia, the large number of new spirits producers, or with our collective decision to drink less beer and different kinds of the amber stuff.
Lion should be quietly applauded for not sticking their hand out for a bailout that they would know have only been a band-aid solution for the next couple of years.
West End is a victim of changing tastes, pure and simple. When the doors close at the end of June next year it will be a sad day for all South Australians. We should raise a glass to the workers and the rich history they’ve carried on.
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Do you have memories of West End to share? Contact Business Editor Cameron England here.