Louis Cooke
Workers at the Boddingtons brewery in Manchester, England, spent several days on the picket lines to protest the decisions of the beer's parent company.

In Defense of Boddingtons
by Louis Cooke

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND — Beyond the Victoria railway station in an area of the city known for its prison and associations with a Smiths' album, a tall brick chimney pokes up at the gray sky.

The smell of hops lingers in the air. Yellow-gold letters tumble down one of the chimney's faces, spelling out one of Manchester's most famous exports: Boddingtons.

The smooth, creamy ale has been brewed on its current Strangeways site since 1778. The water used in the brewing process is drawn from the Ardwick fault, 200 feet below the brewery; the chimney was built in 1881. But under proposals by InBev, the beer's parent company, the brewery will close, most production will move outside the city and 55 staff will lose their jobs.

InBev's plan, which it says is necessary financially, is not popular. A campaign to save the brewery from closure has been galvanized by support from a number of official groups and members of the public. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and the Trade and General Workers Union, which represents the brewery workers, have resurrected their joint "Save the Cream" campaign, formed to fight a similar attempted closure two years ago.

There has been strong street-level support, too. During recent strikes, traffic passing the picket lines hooted in support and prisoners being transported in and out of Strangeways banged on the van windows.

Branding

InBev — formed when European brewing giant Interbrew merged with its Brazilian counterpart AmBev earlier this year — announced its plans to close the Strangeways brewery in September, citing a 14.5 percent drop in sales of Boddingtons over the last two years.

Under the plans, Boddingtons will be brewed at more modern Interbrew breweries. A small percentage of production will remain in Manchester, but at a different brewery.

Steve Cahillane, Interbrew UK chief executive, said it was "not logical" to keep the Strangeways brewery open: "In a highly competitive environment, it is just not sustainable to continue brewing keg ales at Boddingtons and then transport them to our other brewery sites for packaging."

But critics of InBev's plans say moving the beer from Manchester will damage the brand. Boddingtons is known as the "Cream of Manchester" and has a history and an image closely linked to its city. The company's barrel-and-bees logo echoes the Manchester coat of arms, with the bees symbolizing the hive of industry that was Manchester during the Industrial Revolution. In the 1990s, an award-winning series of ads that parodied pretentious perfume, underwear and ice-cream adverts raised the beer's profile — one featured a glamorous actress supping a pint while traveling on a gondola along a dilapidated section of the Rochdale Canal. The brand's image was also boosted internationally when Manchester hosted the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

Franny Joyce, northwest regional organizer of TGWU, told the Manchester Evening News that InBev's decision to keep a small portion of production in Manchester was a mere marketing trick. "It's a public damage-limitation exercise and it's a completely empty gesture," he said. "They want to pretend there will still be a Manchester link, but they're not remotely interested in that. It's all about corporate greed."

InBev is the world's largest brewery company — larger even than Anheuser-Busch. It calls itself "the world's local brewer," but the plight of Boddingtons is another case study in a trend of international businesses squeezing profits by pinching where it hurts most: at a local level. Wisconsinites have felt a similar bite with the closure of Heilemans in La Crosse, and several of Milwaukee's large, traditional breweries.

In this instance, though, there are more than just jobs at stake. "If they pull out of Manchester, the brand will die," said Joyce. "It won't be the cream of Manchester, it will become the sour grapes of South Wales."

Betrayal and changing tastes

Two years ago, similar plans to close the Strangeways brewery were overturned after pressure from the unions, the public and politicians. The Manchester Evening News joined union officials to hand in a petition at Interbrew's Leuven headquarters in Brussels and brewery workers agreed to staff cuts and other efficiency measures, while maintaining the same level of production.

This time, InBev officials say they gave it their "best shot" at keeping the brewery open, but it simply was not viable. "It would have been easier for us to go through with the closure two years ago, having taken the bad publicity," said Steve Cahillane, "but we thought this was something worth doing.

"We considered selling Boddingtons and the brewery to somebody else, but it is a brand we believe in and an important part of our business. We thought about moving other brands into the facility but there is over-capacity in the industry. Now we are working very hard to keep part of the brand in Manchester itself or certainly in its heartland."

Union representatives, though, accuse InBev of betraying the Boddingtons workers. Joyce said its actions were "like a knife in the back" and dismissed claims of trying its best as lip service. "It is the workforce who have developed this brand and the success of this brewery and they now face their jobs being taken away while the owners cry crocodile tears."

InBev's evidence has also been hotly disputed: Rather than a 14.5 percent decline in sales, the Save the Cream committee says the Boddingtons brand has grown in the past year by 4 percent to 16.5 million pounds profits — a large contribution to InBev's success. And according to a study by trade magazine Off Licence News, sales of Boddingtons are in the top 20 of all beers, ahead of other household names such as Guinness. The Cream of Manchester is the second-most popular bitter, after John Smiths.

The beer that topped the poll, with a huge £591.8m take-home sales (to Boddingtons' £37m), is the Belgian lager Stella Artois ... and Boddingtons supporters believe Stella Artois has a role in many of their beloved ale's problems. InBev owns both beers, and there is a belief that it concentrates too heavily on Stella — its major global brand — despite Boddingtons being profitable.

In a report exposing InBev's "World Tour of Destruction," the Save the Cream committee revealed how Interbrew UK almost doubled spending on advertising for Stella Artois, between 1999 and 2002 while funds for Boddingtons fell from around £6m in 2000 to £4m in 2002.

Boddingtons workers and drinkers also protested at this year's Stella Artois World Draught Master Competition in Brussels, where there was a faint whiff of disgust at big brewing's preference for lager over bitter. Discerning ale drinkers find themselves in a minority in Britain these days, after a slow decline in the market. Twenty years ago, seven out of ten pints sold were ale; now, the figure is only three out of ten. Binge drinking punters prefer swilling happy-hour gassy lager by the gallon to nursing pints of Mild or Best.

Hardcore ale aficionados approach their drink with the zeal of wine experts or whiskey nuts — and probably with good reason, as small breweries often manufacture several variants of their ale, each with its own subtle differences in taste and potency. Location is important — Guinness brewed in Ireland tastes different from that brewed elsewhere — and the big fear about Boddingtons seems inevitable: According to informal tests, samples brewed outside Manchester just don't taste the same. They don't have the water from the Ardwick fault.

For the average ale drinker there is still something in watching a pint of Boddingtons settle and reflecting on the knowledge that every drop has been brewed in Manchester by people who have been practising their trade for years and come from generations of brewery workers. It's something a lager such as Fosters — which promotes itself as Australian but is brewed under license in Scotland — often cannot offer.

CAMRA chief executive Mike Benner summed up the mood of the faithful: "The obsessive promotion of Stella, while planning to close the Boddingtons brewery, is insulting to British beer drinkers." The message those British beer drinkers desperately want InBev to hear is that a brewery and its ale are more than a factory and a product.

Last orders?

Despite repeated strike action, leafleting campaigns and soap star Bruce Jones from "Coronation Street" calling on Mancunians to boycott Boddingtons, InBev has made no indication to change its plans. Its public relations director told the media — before telling the brewery staff — that the consultation process had been completed and that InBev "never had any thought of reversing the decision."

Boddingtons workers and drinkers continue to fight, though. TGWU has applied to the European Union for "geographical brand protection," which would tie Boddingtons to Manchester and make it harder for production to be moved. The power has been used before to give only wine producers in the Chamapagne region of France the legitimate right to use the name.

Nonetheless, the struggle is becoming increasingly desperate. But inspiration comes from the price of losing, which is big business effacing another genuine, rooted identity in the name of faceless profit and a city losing some of the blood that pumps through its veins.

E-mail Louis Cooke at louis at mintcake dot com.