mmmm beer.
Kimi Karjalainen and his brother Marko poured their life savings into Bone Machine Brewing Co when it opened in Pocklington, East Yorkshire, in 2017 before moving to Hull, as part of the
craft beer revolution that swept Britain.
“The entire investment, not including time and labour that we gave for free, was about £70,000,” Karjalainen said. Four weeks ago, it was gone. “That was my parents’ retirement.”
“It just got too much –
Brexit,” Karjalainen said. “We were heavily geared for export. We’d be selling to Finland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Netherlands, Italy, Spain. We had Hungary in the pipeline. And it all disappeared with Brexit.”
Steve Dunkley, founder of the Manchester brewery and taproom Beer Nouveau, which shut last year, has been charting the closure of breweries since 2022
and identified 83 last year which had closed down, with a further 33 so far this year and four more under threat.
More than a hundred breweries have shut in the past two years as new trade barriers were compounded by Covid and tax changes
www.theguardian.com