The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #97879 Message #1937328
Posted By: Scrump
15-Jan-07 - 11:35 AM
Thread Name: BS: Pub Names
Subject: RE: BS: Pub Names
The "Beer Orders" which forced breweries to allow their managers or tenants to sell a guest beer from another brewery, and restricted the number of pubs that could be owned by a single brewery, were rescinded a few years ago. But when they were introduced, the large breweries at the time simply did deals with one another, where one would swap their brewing operation for the other's pubs, so instead of two big breweries each owning large numbers of pubs, there was one mega brewery company and another mega pub chain.
Greene King is rapidly becoming as bad as the original large pub-owning breweries were in the 1970s, taking over other breweries and closing them down. They are not the only ones - Marston's (formerly Wolverhampton & Dudley) and Fullers seem to be following their example.
Quite how sending large tankers and truckloads of beer all over the country, instead of brewing it locally, helps the environment I've yet to discover. Maybe there should be a mileage tax on beer.