Yorkshire Beer Bible: Simon Jenkins on how the brewing industry has changed since the pandemic

Nobody knows this better than Leeds man Simon Jenkins, who has written about beer for decades and has seen huge changes in the industry over the years.

His latest book is the third edition of Yorkshire Beer Bible, for 2023/24, a comprehensive exploration of the region’s finest tipples.

The last edition, in 2019, won him the Adnams Award for Best Beer Writer in the Regional Media.

At the time, Yorkshire breweries was in a healthy place, with “more than there had ever been,” says Simon.

Of course, a year on, everything changed.

“Obviously we then had the incredible upheaval, not just to our lives, but for the hospitality industry - a kind of existential threat to the industry because of the pandemic,” says Simon, 60. “And although I knew breweries that opened once the pandemic ended and once we started getting our lives back together, I was very aware that a lot had closed. So I kind of wanted to kind of take the pulse of where Yorkshire brewing had got to in the subsequent four years, and it's quite an interesting, mixed picture.”

Of the 200 or so Yorkshire brewers featured in the 2019 edition, only 150 were still trading four years later.

However, at the same time numerous innovative start-ups have come up too, adding to the variety of brewing talent in the region.

Consequently, more than 30 breweries are making their first appearance in the book.

One beer maker explained to Simon that breweries which started in the pandemic didn't have the same challenges that the existing businesses did. No big contracts to fulfil, no sales projections looming over them.

“If you'd made sales projections for 2020 based on what you'd done in the previous 12 months, you'd expect the business to be flying and suddenly you would have had to really change your business model,” he says.

“But breweries that started within the pandemic weren’t burdened with those kinds of expectations, and could start slowly from the ground upwards without having those kinds of constraints, and it wasn't a shock to their business in the way that it was to existing breweries.”

The book looks at traditional brewers producing time-honoured beers in slate Yorkshire squares, to the new-wave craft brewers embracing a dizzying variety of imported hops; from an ancient brewer hemmed in by a tight knot of cobbled streets to the venture founded in a garden shed as a lockdown project.

A couple of examples which come to mind for Simon include DMC Brewery in Wakefield, which specialises in creating alcoholic ginger beer with organic ingredients, and Belschnickel Brewery in Hull, which he says make “amazing, interesting crafted ale”.

Simon’s journey around the region lists every brewery he could find – more than 180 – and chronicles the resilience they showed when faced with the pandemic and pressures on the hospitality industry, as price rises force businesses into tough decisions.

Even Russia’s war with Ukraine has been a predicament for beer makers. Ilkley Brewery, at the time of Putin’s invasion, actually had more permanent beer lines in Moscow than it did in Leeds but pulled out of the country, saying at the time that “we simply do not feel comfortable doing business in Russia”.

Simon, though, has won awards from the British Guild of Beer Writers, including in 2010, its highest accolade, British Beer Writer of the Year. His weekly column, Taverner, appeared in the Yorkshire Evening Post from 1992 to 2019.

And over the years, he has seen massive changes.

“I don’t want to sound like a crusty old git but when I started writing about beer, practically every pub in Leeds sold Tetley Bitter.

“It was certainly by far and away the biggest brewery in Leeds and, wherever you went in Yorkshire, your choice was limited.

“I mean, some of that choice was good - you would get Theakston, you would get Timothy Taylor’s, you would get Tetley’s and in places you would get John Smith’s and whatever else - but the market was very much dominated by these huge, gargantuan brewing operations.

“Gradually over the course of that time the market has opened up to people doing different, interesting things and the Campaign for Real Ale has played a huge part in that. They have turned people on to the fact that beer is an important part of our culture, it's not just some fairly bland, refreshing product. Actually, there's a whole world of beer to be enjoyed and that expansion in the range of beers that we have available, even with the pandemic, shows no real sign of slowing down.”

The Tetley brewery in Leeds shut in 2011 and was demolished the year after, as production was contracted out to other UK sites run by Carlsberg, which had taken over in 1998.

Afterwards, while it was clearly a blow for Yorkshire, the flipside was that it gave those innovative producers the space to do something different outside the shadow of perhaps region’s most famous tipple.

Simon says: “The beer was still available in Leeds but it was a tainted product in many people's eyes because it was no longer being brewed in Hunslet, it was being brewed in Wolverhampton and that changed people's perception of it - the beer was actually still pretty good, but the public perception of it changed because of what had happened.”

Quite simply, the market – particularly in the West Yorkshire city - opened up for newer producers like Leeds Brewery, Kirkstall Brewery, Wilde Child, North Brewing Co and Northern Monk to make their mark.

Speaking about the breweries featured in his new edition, Simon says: “It's just something they're really passionate about and the question of whether or not they make lots of money is definitely secondary, for a lot of people. Obviously, they want their businesses to succeed, and many of them do, but they do it because they love beer, and they want to share that passion with customers. They want to sell beer they like drinking themselves, you know, and they want to share that with other people.”

Simon shares his own love for beer through his business itsthebeertalking.co.uk which offers tutored beer tastings and regular pub and heritage walks visiting many of his favourite haunts. The third edition of the Yorkshire Beer Bible, published by Great Northern Books, is out now.