EP-166 Mike Benner of the Society of Independent Brewers

This week’s guest is Mike Benner, Chief Executive of the Society of
Independent Brewers, or SIBA for short. SIBA is the largest UK trade body
representing the independent arm of the British brewing industry. Founded
in 1980 as the Small Independent Brewers Association, SIBA currently
represents around 830 brewer members as well as around 300 or so
non-brewing supplier associates. Its equivalent in the US would be the
Brewers Association, and Benner’s equivalent at the BA would be its CEO and
President, Bob Pease.

I recently attended the SIBA annual conference and trade show, BeerX, which
also serves as its members Annual General Meeting. The meeting itself was
full of fired up statements from some of the association’s smallest
members. Folks who are feeling somewhat disenfranchised from an
organization they feel should be helping them claw out some market share in
an ever more competitive field but not delivering.

At BeerX a motion was proposed by SIBA to raise its threshold for
membership from 200,000hl a year (just over 170,000 US barrels) to a figure
that reflects 1% of current total UK beer production—just short of
440,000hl (or 375,000bbl). The motion was rejected by a slim majority,
mostly due to the ire presented by the smaller members in attendance at the
meeting. Had it passed it would have allowed two of the UK’s largest
independent breweries, Fullers and St. Austell, to rejoin, after loosing
their associate status, when this was scrapped in a similar vote in 2017.

This is one of many challenges Benner and his team at SIBA has to grapple
with as it tries to meet the needs of its various members. Perhaps its
greatest challenge is how these needs differ between its smallest and
larger members. There just isn’t a one size fits all solution—and as SIBA
attempts to evolve in a beer market that shows no signs of slowing
down—trying to meet these varying needs becomes seemingly ever more
difficult.

But if it wasn’t for SIBA, some of these very small brewers might not have
had the opportunity to break into the industry in the first place. The
actions of the association were key in the introduction of progressive beer
duty or PBD—sometimes referred to as small brewers duty relief—in 2002. PBD
meant that brewers producing less than 5000hl a year were eligible for a
50% tax discount on the beer they were producing. Once production is over
5000hl, the amount of relief is tapered until it hits 60,000hl, when a
brewer will pay the full rate of tax on the beer they produce.

As well as its trade association, SIBA also operates a commercial arm with.
It launched a direct delivery service, now called BeerFlex, in 2002. This
scheme allowed small breweries to sell to larger pub companies through
SIBA. Recently, this scheme has been surrounded by controversy, as the pub
companies continue push their prices ever lower, despite market conditions
ensuring that the cost of beer production is rising. To compound these
difficulties, SIBA recently acquired a distributor, Flying Firkin, to
bolster its commercial wing, much to the ire of some SIBA members.

Finding a balance between its trade association and commercial arms is a
challenge that’s been made all the greater by the emergence of hundreds of
new brewers within the last decade—many of which feel that the association
doesn’t represent them, and choosing not to become members. However,
despite all of this relative uncertainty, Benner himself still seems
positively upbeat. In fact he almost appeared to relish these new
challenges as we sat down for this chat on the trade floor at BeerX a
couple of weeks ago.