March update: Futures thinking
Where will beer and pubs be in 2033?
A change of scene
First up, you’ll notice that this email is being delivered via Substack.
Last month, MailChimp told us that we had too many subscribers to stay on a free plan – and the not-free plan was very much not free.
So, we defected, or migrated, over here, and brought all of you with us.
We hope that’s OK, but you know what to do if not.
Now, onto the main event — a fairly chunky bit of newsletter-exclusive writing about ‘futures thinking’.
Weak signals from the future
What might be happening in beer and pubs a decade from now? We thought we might have a go at envisioning some possible futures.
We got into this because a colleague of Ray’s is a passionate advocate of ‘futures thinking’.
Futures thinking is a way of reflecting on what might or could happen. It’s not about trying to predict the future but, rather, accepting uncertainty and considering multiple possible outcomes.
Because it is creative and open-minded it encourages people to explore possibilities that, right now, might seem far-fetched.
It’s not a fringe practice: the UK Government uses it and the Government Office for Science (GOS) recently published guidance on how to practice it.
It’s different from trend analysis because trends are what’s gaining momentum right now.
Anyone can say “AI-generated imagery is on the rise” when it’s already all over social media and even being used in Coca-Cola ads.
But a future thinker would have spotted chatter around the potential of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in the mid-2010s and envisioned where we might be in 2023. They would, in other words, have picked up on ‘weak signals’.
As that GOS guidance puts it “weak signals… start off as background noise, or are new and surprising, but may become part of a significant pattern if connected with other information or viewed through a different lens”.
Wait, this is supposed to be about beer… let’s talk about potentially significant outliers in that context.
What’s going on at the fringes?
When we wrote Brew Britannia back in 2012-2013 we included a chapter near the end which we titled ‘The Outer Limits’.
It included profiles of the then bizarre experimentation of Moor Brewing (hazy beer without finings) and the Wild Beer Co (sour beer-cider-wine hybrids).
We can’t claim to have thought these pointed to where we’re at today, with hazy beers in chain pubs, and the existence of multiple highly-regarded breweries whose entire raison d'être is the production of sour fruit beers.
In fact we suggested these were interesting niches, implying they were unlikely ever to become more than that.
What’s the equivalent today? There are certainly breweries doing things that make most of us think, “Interesting, but it’ll never catch on.”
For example, there’s been a slow but steady trickle of beers using waste products, such as Toast Ale, made with surplus bread, and Singapore’s NewBrew which is made with recycled sewer water.
These can feel like gimmicks but with consumers (or, at least, a certain type of consumer) increasingly choosing products based on their green credentials, could we see more of this in years to come?
Especially if incentives (carrot) and regulations (stick) come into play as governments strive toward Net Zero.
And in terms of technology, what about the recent announcement by Neuzeller Klosterbräu that it had perfected powdered beer? Just add water, they say, for a pint with both condition and a head. (The Times, paywalled.)
This is the kind of story that pops up every few years and rarely comes to anything but this time they seem very confident, and it does chime with the general drive towards sustainability: transporting powder is less carbon intensive than moving water and glass.
As for pubs, we think we can claim to have spotted something significant when we were researching 20th Century Pub back in 2015-16: the return of the wet-led boozer.
Back then, we were struck by the buzz around the growing micropub movement, plus taprooms, plus craft beer bars.
Meanwhile, we noticed, the gastropub, which became mainstream in the noughties, had started to disappear.
Then this year the BBC published an article suggesting that, yes, something is going on with pubs closing their kitchens.
Alongside this we’ve also got a fundamental change in how towns and cities are planned. Bristol, for example, is seeing a ring of new apartment blocks appear just outside the city centre on what has been industrial land for the past hundred plus years.
The city centre itself is losing retail businesses while its pubs and bars seem to be thriving. Those retail businesses, meanwhile, are popping up in the suburbs. Those 15-minute neighbourhoods seem to be happening organically.
It’s also becoming harder to demolish or repurpose pubs. The Rhubarb near us has still not been turned into flats, for example, despite the developer’s best efforts.
We suspect it probably will happen, eventually, but the longer the owners are stymied by planning appeals and community pressure, the more likely it becomes that they’ll just give in and let someone take it on as a pub.
By which time, there’ll be about 400 new flats just up the lane, within five minutes’ walk.
Larger corporate developers are also increasingly under pressure from both local authorities and potential buyers to include social amenities in their plans – to make new estates pleasant places to be.
Finally, it’s worth thinking about what’s happening in society more generally.
Birth rates are down and increasing numbers of people are choosing not to have children. How will they stay connected with others as they enter middle age, and old age? The pub could certainly have a role to play.
But who will drink in it? As well as their being fewer young people around those we do have are increasingly ‘sober curious’. A few years ago, most British people either drank (probably quite a lot) or they didn’t (they were teetotal). But as with ‘flexitarianism’ more people seem to be exploring the option to drink less, and to drink low alcohol beer out of choice, depending on the occasion.
Where are we in the cycle? It feels, per Jeff Alworth, and with Untappd dads in mind, that beer might be at a low ebb in terms of coolness. But in a few more years, there might well be a bunch of kids who embrace it because it’s old skool and cool – the hipster choice.
Right, so let’s try to put some of this together.
Wednesday 16 March 2033, 18:47 pm, Southfields Residential Village
The developers who built Coronation Square were obliged to include spaces for retail, and a pub to replace the 1960s one they were permitted to demolish.
It took a while to find a tenant because they wanted to charge too high a rent but the council had included a clause in the contract which said if it wasn’t leased within three years they had to take the best offer on the table.
It ended up being run by a group of friends who’d moved to Southfields together in their late forties. Without children, they’d wanted to be near enough to each other to stay in close contact.
The developers, keen to meet strict new environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards built the pub using entirely recycled materials, with large insulated windows to gather natural light.
Leaning into this, the new tenants set strict targets for the carbon footprint of the products they chose to sell.
Customers were happy drinking ‘foreign’ beer brewed in the UK and this had, in fact, become a selling point. All of the ale was brewed within a short distance of the pub, using solar power, recycled water and food waste. It was, of course, delivered by transport bike.
It was mostly lower alcohol, in line with present trends, though there were hybrid paper-plastic bottles of stronger beer behind the bar for those who wanted it.
The wine was English, too, produced in the new grape-growing regions in the South East of England.
Sometimes, people grumbled that the beer didn’t taste as good as the stuff they remembered from their youth. The management would privately agree. Everything had become a bit plainer and more austere, though; it was just a fact of life.
And, anyway, it wasn’t really about the beer, was it? It was conversation and community that mattered.
On this particular midweek evening there is a group of elderly men who met online years before and still gather regularly to drink in mostly companionable silence. As a designated digital-free space, there are no screens or smartphones on display.
Nobody in the pub is younger than 30, which is a shame. The managers worry sometimes about how they’ll keep the pub going without a supply of new drinkers. But that’s a problem for tomorrow.
What signals are you picking up?
Well, that was a bit of fun. Again, to underline, we’re not saying that’s a prediction. Maybe there’s some wishful thinking there, maybe some unwarranted pessimism. But it’s worth playing the game. Have a go yourself. And let us know what stories you come up with.
On the blog
We’ve kept up a trickle of blog posts between family business, work and, frankly, stretches of low mood.
We dissected an article from an old gentleman’s magazine from 1949 about conmen who preyed on pubs. We always find this subject fascinating. Layer on some post-war grot and there’s plenty to enjoy.
Tasted the Thornbridge-brewed variant of Kelham Island Pale Rider, and enjoying it a lot, we wondered if it is, in a meaningful sense, the same beer?
Another old book, My Discovery of England from 1922, provided a perspective on prohibition with some arch commentary on British drinking habits: “The bars open and shut at intervals like daisies blinking at the sun. And, like the flowers at evening, they close their petals with the darkness…”
We spent a bit of time trying to work out exactly why The Kings Head in Bristol, wonderful as it is, is not our answer to Whitelocks in Leeds. Some people disagreed with us, others thought we were right, and we were generally very pleased to have got everyone talking about pubs.
We also put together several news round-ups crammed with good reading from other bloggers and writers.
And there were some exclusive bits on Patreon, too, including a note on someone who has never been to a Wetherspoon pub and a follow-up to our Kings Head piece focusing on another historic Bristol boozer, The Shakespeare.
Well, that’s it for another month. See ya!
Jess & Ray