Wave One: Small Brewery Duty Relief

When the UK government introduced Small Breweries' Relief (SBR) in 2002, it was a game-changer. Suddenly, small breweries producing under a certain volume paid significantly less duty. The economics of opening a tiny brewery shifted overnight from borderline impossible to genuinely viable.

The result was predictable: a surge of small real ale breweries across the country. Many were passion projects — homebrewers who could finally make the numbers work, redundant workers investing their payoffs, early retirees chasing a dream. And for a while, it worked. The market had room. Pubs were hungry for local ales. CAMRA was championing cask beer. It felt like a golden age.

But every golden age plants the seeds of its own decline. Each new brewery was another competitor chasing the same pub accounts, the same festival slots, the same shelf space.