Brexit crushing small business while leaving the larger businesses relatively unscathed was part of the plan all along, not just in regards to beer. The big players always knew they could deal with added fees and paperwork by passing on the cost to the consumer because they were already part of big pub chain and franchise monopolies.

Many pubs go though a hight turnover of landlords as they are all run as franchises now, with landlords forced to buy from the owning brewery while also paying rent to them, but with margins so thin and brewerys setting the prices they can't survive unless the place is always busy. So they quit and then in then another hopeful steps in to repeat the process. The brewery don't care, they still get thier money.

The Independent ones that were quick to react stopped selling to pubs and started selling to supermarkets where margins were better. Either that or they caved in and sold the brand.

Now the multinationals have successfully crushed craft beer, the threat to thier profits that was showing people you don't have to drink washed out larger that they keep putting a new name on every year to make it sound better.

The new tax rules coming out that penalize higher alcohol content is a further step towards the dominance of cheap, mass produced, piss water. More work being done by the conservatives on behalf of thier corporate paymasters.

Wait. So they opened an export-focussed company a year after the Brexit vote? I mean it sucks and all, for them, but it doesn’t sound too bright either.

More small businesses fucked over. Whatever you say from an armchair about whether in hindsight it was wise for them to do this or not, I always find it hard to read stories where people have tried and failed to strike out in their own.

A lot of the time it's because people are lied to in capitalist countries that we should all aspire to striking out on our own, running our own businesses, being entrepreneurs blah blah blah.

Feel sad for them

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Kimi Karjalainen and his brother Marko poured their life savings into Bone Machine Brewing Co when it opened in Pocklington, East Yorkshire, in 2017 before moving to Hull, as part of the craft beer revolution that swept Britain.

Post-Brexit trading arrangements with European Union countries meant that Bone Machine’s craft beers needed to be accompanied by expensive and time-consuming paperwork.

Bone Machine is one of more than 100 small brewers that have been forced out of business in the past 18 months, hit by a combination of Brexit, the pandemic and the cost of living crisis and now threatened by changes to beer duty laws.

So while people were getting worse off, the multinational brewers were going to pubs, to free houses, and saying ‘we’ll give you cheap kegs, but we want control of all your lines’.”

Other issues affecting the industry have been the shortage of carbon dioxide following the early stages of the energy crisis, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine which raised the cost of barley and hops.

Larger companies have been doing well, including Brewdog, the Camden Town Brewery and Beavertown, which the Grocer reported had seen supermarket sales rise by more than a quarter.

The original article contains 958 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

People are focussing pretty heavily on the "Brexit" part despite the article going in to way more detail on other contributing factors. Throwing Brexit in the title line as if it is the sole reason was purely for effect here and to get you to click it.

That's a crazy number

I'm a bit skeptical of Brexit being significant here. Craft beer from small breweries generally isn't exported, and often it doesn't go that far from the area in which it's brewed.

All the other reasons listed (pandemic, cost of living crisis, tax rules etc) are plausible though.