Cash-strapped drinkers are taking matters into their own hands, with new accounts showing that sales of home brew kits climbed 8 per cent at the country’s largest family-owned beer company, Coopers Brewery.

The brewery’s managing director Tim Cooper said higher mortgage payments, rents and grocery prices was accelerating a decline in overall spending on beer as customers cut back. Increases in government taxes had also increased beer prices, at the same time as younger drinkers gravitated toward different products like spirits and alcoholic seltzers.