Britain goes pop… with a fruit-flavoured beer boom!
By: JimOldfield
August 30th, 2012
It may leave a nasty taste in the mouth of seasoned real ale drinkers to learn that Britain’s biggest boom in alcoholic drinks is coming from the FLAVOURED beers sector.
Strawberry, raspberry and even cherry beers have become so popular that sales rocketed up by 80 per cent last year.
According to market research group AC Nielsen, this makes them the fastest-growing area of the UK beer market.
And Nielsen predicts the market will expand even faster over the next few years as breweries factor in flavoured ales to respond to rising demand.
Currently, flavoured ales account for only 12 per cent of the £470m premium bottled ale market, which has traditionally been dominated by continental imports – notably Belgian fruit beers.
But with the growth of food-matching, flavoured ales are in the ascendancy and supermarkets in particular are looking to increase the range on offer.
Tesco now sells four times the number of fruit beers that it stocked two years ago – and sales have trebled.
All this provides a new market for many aspiring microbreweries.
As reported on Hand-Pumped, Wychwood Brewery recently launched two 4.2 per cent flavoured beers – Snake’s Bite, made with cider apples and Forest Fruits made with berries – following on from a number of other breweries, such as Edinburgh’s Innis and Gunn, which launched its Melvilles range of strawberry and raspberry beers some time ago.
