Scotland’s most valuable off-trade beer brands

Beer holds up

DOES beer form the bedrock of Scottish off-trade sales? It did at one time but those days have gone. Last year wasn’t bad for beer sales in Scottish take-home. The combined Nielsen ScanTrack figures for the three sub-categories of lager, ale and stout showed sales of around £330m – roughly a third of a billion pounds.
That’s almost as much as vodka and blended and malt Scotch whisky combined. It’s a good bit more than three times the amount of cider sales.
But it’s well short of the £491m that Scotland’s shoppers spend on wine.
Nevertheless, while wine sales slipped back a little over 2014 the beer categories held their own.
Lager, by a huge distance the biggest beer sub-category, saw sales rise by 1%, which was also true in 2013. So, in a difficult and extremely competitive market, sales, overall, of the main beer brands have held pretty steady.
Ales are actually up quite substantially, but more of that in a little while. And stouts are effectively even, with sales neither up nor down. It’s a sub-category that’s heavily dominated by one major brand but there are some interesting things happening there too and again we’ll look at those shortly.
But who’s done best out of the big boys?
In a word, Budweiser. It’s the one major brand to show considerable sales growth.
But, as a massive brand leader in lager, Glasgow-produced Tennent’s Lager also had a pretty good year.
Nielsen measured its Scottish take-home sales at just under £57m and 1% up year on year, just in line with the market.
The brand was fairly busy last year, tweaking a number of its packs in take-home and using those changes and a number of other advertising, events and social media channels to play on its cheeky Scottish (perhaps cheeky Glaswegian) character.
However, as mentioned, in a year when some major brands did better than others Budweiser scored very well in the Nielsen figures, up 12%.
It means that Bud, still well behind Tennent’s in total sales, effectively narrowed the gap by £4m.
Interestingly, a second beer of US heritage, Coors Light, was another lager in the top 15 to do well.
Like Bud, but from a much lower sales base, it rose 12% at a time when the market was up by just 1%.
Lagers with European backgrounds delivered mixed results.
Significantly ahead of the market was Heineken, which showed sales growth of 27%.
And Italian beer Peroni Nastro Azzurro was also up, by 4% against the previous year.
But other European-heritage lagers and those that originated in Australia and Mexico were behind the market.
Stella Artois was only very marginally up year on year.
Kronenbourg 1664 celebrated its 350th anniversary but saw sales drop by 4%. Carlsberg was down by 19%.

Scotland’s top off-trade lagers by sales value :

• Ales sales are much smaller than those of lagers, of course but there are some very interesting trends to be aware of. Overall, ale sales are up by 4%. But the four biggest-selling brands actually saw sales fall.
That suggests that the growth is being made up by significant increases from a number of specialist ales, traditional beers in bottles and craft beers – including some in the ales top 15 but also many others outside of the list.
McEwan’s Export is by far the biggest-selling ale brand. Sales are down but they still amount to £7.2m ( higher than some significant lagers such as Corona, Coors Light and Kronenbourg 1664) and the owner of the brand Wells and Young’s has been busy both refreshing the main product and its bottled ale McEwan’s Champion (up 9%), and extending the McEwan’s ales range.
But below the biggest brands, Newcastle Brown Ale and bottled ales such as Innis & Gunn Original (up 53% on the year), Deuchars IPA and Old Speckled Hen did well in 2014 and each now accounts for sales of somewhere between £1m and £1.2m.
Old Speckled Hen, from Belhaven owner Greene King, has been very active in recent times and has been extending the Hen range to include beers like Old Crafty Hen, Old Golden Hen, and Old Hoppy Hen.
Once we go below £1m sales over the year, there are a number of brands that Nielsen records as showing significant growth including Hobgoblin (up 39%), Brewdog’s Punk IPA (up 46%), Orkney Dark
Island (up a very substantial 83%), and Bitter and Twisted (up by 43%).
Many bottled traditional and craft ale sales probably go through specialists, supermarkets and discounters at present. But increasing numbers of the ales are beginning to show in c-stores too.
While some areas may still be very lager-led the developing consumer enthusiasm for traditional ale and craft beer shouldn’t be ignored.

Scotland’s top off-trade ales by sales value :

• Stout is dominated by Guinness, of course. The brand currently has four products in the top 15 stouts with its biggest-selling line Guinness Draught doing best and performing ahead of the market with sales up 2% in 2014.
Scottish stout brands Tennent’s Sweetheart Stout and Belhaven Black both had a good year and beat the market.
Belhaven Black with growth of 22% was one of the best performing stouts in the top 15 best-selling examples of the black stuff.
However the top 15 stout with the highest growth was Cairngorm Black Gold.
Though we are talking about growth from a relatively low base, its 76% sales increase moved it into sixth position in its category and above two Guinness lines, Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and its lower-than-normal ABV line Guinness Mid-Strength.
Guinness Original is still worth more than £1m in Scottish off-sales but sales were down 8% and Murphy’s was also down substantially.

Scotland’s top off-trade stouts by sales value :