Challenges Faced by Micro Breweries

A new favourite weekend and after-office drink these days is Craft Beer in London and elsewhere around the world. It is a flavoursome and highly aromatic beer that comes in a range of types, and is truly a handcrafted artisan beverage, created by small independent local breweries called microbreweries.

Owners of these microbreweries are driven by a passion and a love for their product, and focus their attention on creating a high-quality product rather than on profits and therefore are only able to produce a limited quantity of output per year. In light of this, there is no doubt that there are many challenges that these microbreweries are facing every day, such as:

• Less room for error – With so many craft breweries releasing their products to the market, there is certainly a good choice in brands for lovers of craft beer in London, and there is very little margin for error. If they don’t like a certain brand, consumers will simply switch to a different one, hence brewers need to ensure that every batch of beer they produce is of a consistently high quality.
• High costs – Craft brewers source their ingredients locally and they need high quality ingredients to create their artisan beers. In addition, most of them use larger quantities of certain ingredients in their brewing process. This means that their ingredient cost is high, and since they are small operations, usually run by a family or small group of friends, they don’t really have the benefit of economies of scale.
• Expansion difficulties – Since the operations are rather small, and funds are also limited to a certain extent, microbreweries find expansion a little difficult since it will mean additional investments and costs.
• Marketing and PR activities – Craft brewers have very limited access to marketing and public relations activities since their budgets are quite limited. One of the ways they work through this difficulty is by creating some very appealing and creative labelling etc, but that is pretty much it.