UncleEbenezer wrote:JMN2 wrote:Punk IPA. Did my weekend shopping at Sainsburys, and almost asked to see the manager to complain about the ale selection and demand, as a shareholder,.
Just avoid. The worst beer deal of any of the majors except the Coop (which I suspect varies more between stores and regions).
From memory, the half-litre bottles I buy:
Sainsburys: three bottles for a fiver, very limited selection, keeps changing.
Morrisons and Tescos: four bottles for £6, better selection. Though some nasty Gotchas, including at Morrison mislabelling that wasn't fixed when I pointed it out.
Asda: four bottles for a fiver, excellent selection, no gotchas.
Lidl & Aldi: good prices but very limited selection, not much that I'd like
Hmm. Personally I'm not so sure there's much to distinguish between Sainsburys, Morries and Asda - a lot depends on how they segment your local store. For instance, the Asda I go to most often is definitely on the bottom rung and the beer selection is pretty terrible (although they still have Guinness FES), whereas my usual Sainsburys obviously got upgraded from rung 2 to rung 3 a while back and all sorts of things I'd got used to at a previous Sainsburys suddenly appeared on the shelves, both food and drink. Their selection is very southern biased, it's heavy on Fullers, Sheps and Sharps with the likes of Bath as their token micros, but they do seem to go more for heavies than others, you see things like Old Tom and ESB there. If you look at MySupermarket :
http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/Shopping ... And_Bitter most of the main supermarkets have around 150 lines in the Ale & Bitter category, but Morrisons is up at 200 - most of that is because they're heavily in bed with Marstons so have lots of subbrands to play with.
Tesco is interesting as they've just ditched a lot of samey lagers in order to put a big bet on "craft". I suspect that means they will be having a great bin-end sale in a few months, but it will be interesting to see how it goes. I'm sure all the other supermarkets are watching closely. Seems to be pretty heavy on Diageo and some of the big brands, but they have got a handful of the smaller guys too like Fourpure.
And obviously none of them come remotely close to Booths for beer.
It's interesting watching to see how this all shakes out - we've definitely reached a new era for "craft" beer, as it gets into supermarkets with all the pressures and compromises that entails. I find it interesting how differently people shop in supermarkets - in the pub the people who might be agonising over how local and micro their beer is, will go to the supermarket and go into a frenzy at the sight of 4-for-£5 deals. But it's almost impossible for the interesting breweries to compete at that level - I know one who sent off a pallet at a profit of £1 - for the pallet. So if you support the x-for-£y deals, you're encouraging beer made with cheap ingredients from macrobrewers like Marstons and Greene King - personally I'm not so sure that's a Good Thing.
So today's starter beer effectively selected itself.
[those are my beer goggles hehe]