The West End Brewery has long served as a focal point for community life. The site, with its tall chimneys overlooking the Torrens River, has been making beer deeply associated with a South Australian and working-class identity.
The business had endured for 160 years until parent company Lion Nathan announced last month that it was shuttering the operation and shifting production east.
Having started up in 1859 on Hindley Street on Adelaide’s west edge, the brewery grew in a series of mergers until 1983 when it moved from the city to its current premises in Thebarton where it made West End draught and Southwark stout.
Speaking to reporters, Lion Australia managing director James Brindley blamed the decision to close on “long-term trends and the ongoing viability of the brewery”.
“Over the last few decades consumer preferences have changed, the beer market en masse continues to decline and is now at its lowest per capita consumption ever recorded in Australia, while 700 new craft breweries have sprung up so competition is intense … and the cost base continues to increase,” Brindley said.
Market research company Roy Morgan’s work in this area appears to back Lion Nathan’s view, in part. Work from earlier this year found Australians were actually drinking less alcohol overall during the pandemic – with older people more likely to drink at home.
For her part Jade Flavell, the publican of the Wheatsheaf Hotel, a microbrewery, live music venue and pub that operates in Thebarton, says pinning the closure of the brewery on craft beer is “convenient” cover for deeper issues.
“That’s a cute line from Lion Nathan. I’m sure craft beer would love to have West End as a scalp,” she says. “What’s happened is quite sad. A lot of the people who work there pop in for a beer and a chat. In a broader sense it’s equally as sad, if not more so, that the [company] sold out in the 90s.”
She says the closure is what happens when an international conglomerate swoops in to snap up local brands. An ACCC assessment in May 2020 found that two companies, Lion and CUB, account for 80% of Australia’s beer market. In June 2020, CUB was acquired by Asahi Holdings Group.
“Yes, the beer’s been brewed in Thebarton, but it’s also a brand owned by a global company,” Flavell says. “Once that happens it’s a bigger creature and they’re not so concerned with local communities. Making money takes priority, not us.”
That sentiment is shared by Mark Whenan, United Workers Union SA coordinator of food and beverages, who says the decision was more about achieving economies of scale, which meant the 94 people thrown out of work just didn’t factor.
Over the years the workforce watched Lion Nathan – owned by Japanese beverage company Kirin Brewery Company – close the Swan Brewery’s Canning Vale operation in Western Australia and shift production of the Swan and Emu brands to South Australia. Later, the company again shifted this production to the east coast, further reducing volume.
“As soon as the decision to close West End was announced, the company were already asking workers in their plants in Victoria to pick up overtime shifts,” Whenan said. “They’ve been running down the plant for a while now. The company has made deliberate decisions to expand production at Tooheys and XXXX.”
Whenan said the union wasn’t given notice of the decision until it was about to happen and some in the workforce were left to find out from the media.
Lion Nathan told Guardian Australia they would not comment further on the closure, but said, via media release, that they would “be consulting with each and every team member to support them through this proposed change”.
Billy Ryan, category manager for craft and local beer at Endeavour Group, which supplies Dan Murphy’s and BWS, says it is true consumer tastes are changing.
“When I started there were 200, 300 breweries in the country and that number has grown phenomenally since,” Ryan said. “Our range has grown with it, though we only stock 140 to 150 different products in store.”
With brewers and alcohol merchants looking to the US for the next trend, many have picked up a growing thirst for pre-mixed drinks such as hard seltzer – a mix of sparkling water and spirit – that saw massive growth in July when sales jumped 255% in one week. Hard seltzer now accounts for more than 10% of the US beer market.
The question is whether Australians will also pick it up.
Major brands such Lion Nathan have already cast their bet. In May the company locked down the rights to sell Australians White Claw, the top-selling hard seltzer brand in the US that has captured 60% of the market.
Meanwhile, hundreds of smaller breweries across Australia have launched their own hard seltzer product in time for summer – partly in response to the pandemic.
“When Covid hit a lot of the smaller breweries, many took a bit of a pause and took some time to reassess their portfolios,” says Danielle Allen, the co-owner of Two Birds, which claims the title of Australia’s first female-owned brewery. “Everybody’s done one. In some shape or form.”
When Allen’s business partner, Jayne Lewis, caught the trend for hard seltzer 18 months out, they released their first grapefruit-flavoured drink a year ago and have now followed it up with a watermelon flavour.
The women say that while the lockdown kept them from running their tap rooms in inner-city Melbourne, it has brought them closer to their customers, who have made a point to support them.
“Every state is unique in climate, culture and heritage,” Allen says. “Every single state has its own unique beer that people drink and support. More and more that’s going to become a local brewer, as opposed to one beer drunk across a state.
“It’s hard to be unique these days. But you know, hard seltzer is only part of the future ... Beer is timeless. Beer is king. Or queen. Whichever way you look at it.”
With the average person now able to choose between 150 different kinds of beer, it’s possible that choice now carries more weight than ever – especially in a pandemic. Mass market or craft, local or global, what people drink and where they drink it ends up shaping more than just a night out.
This article was amended on 9 November 2020 because an earlier version misspelled Jade Flavell’s name as Jade Favell.
