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Or would they do the sneaky trick of making them but not promoting them etc so that they lose market share. As in could they replace Miller with Amstel by ignoring Miller to death? Eventually they would lose the licence but by then Miller could be completely unknown.

Of course this might for all I know be illegal which means they would not do this, I am not suggesting they would do anything illegal.

Pointless winding up the Beamish brand, especially since last time I checked they seemed to be trying to market Murphy's as the "upmarket" stout. If they keep Beamish they'll have a stout competing on price too. In which case they'll be trying to chip away market share from Guinness from two angles.

Anyway, there's no guarantee that Beamish drinkers won't switch to Guinness if they wind up Beamish.

They'll also be ensuring that no one else tries to encroach on the market by ensuring they're competing against 3 other brands and not just two.

For those reasons I can't see Beamish going, wouldn't bet against the production moving though.

"Poc":z8b6u03u wrote: Anyway, there's no guarantee that Beamish drinkers won't switch to Guinness if they wind up Beamish.[/quote:z8b6u03u]That's a very good point. Sure no sane person can tell the difference in Beamish and Guinness anyway...

Chipping away at Guinness from the two angles seems like quite a smart strategy. I've seen the new stemmed Murphy's pint glass in more and more places in Dublin. CafeBarDeli are using them now.

The full 114 page report of the Competition Authority is now online[/url:2eqf2xb1]. It has lots of interesting data about the general beer trade in Ireland, as well as views into the private workings of Heineken and Beamish & Crawford.

"Heineken":2eqf2xb1 wrote: many Cork drinkers also believe that Murphy's actually has a nicer taste than Guinness…[/quote:2eqf2xb1]That "believe" suggests that the suits in Lady's Well don't really think this is the case. They must've been watching too many "Alive Inside" ads on TV.

They also haven't been doing much blind tasting:

"TCA":2eqf2xb1 wrote: Heineken submits that Murphy’s is much closer to Guinness than it is to Beamish[/quote:2eqf2xb1]

"TCA":2eqf2xb1 wrote: B&C submits that Beamish is closer to Guinness than to Murphy’s[/quote:2eqf2xb1]So both are sort-of like Guinness, but not at all like each other. Riiiight. The Authority ruled:

"TCA":2eqf2xb1 wrote: In terms of closeness in taste the evidence is ambiguous and no firm conclusions can be drawn[/quote:2eqf2xb1]Which happily is also ICB's policy.

The market analysis in the report really is thorough. They noticed an odd blip in their figures on the 2006 market share for stout, where 1.4% was not accounted for by the Big Three. So they send their élite reseachers out, and they reported back

&amp;quot;TCA&amp;quot;:2eqf2xb1 wrote: A number of suppliers including Coopers, Darcys, Finians, Sierra and O’Haras provide alternative stout brands to the off-trade[/quote:2eqf2xb1]Expertly researched, that. Mine's a bottle of Sierra, please <!-- s:roll: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_rolleyes.gif" alt="" title="Rolling Eyes" /><!-- s:roll: -->

While Heineken had wanted them to take a wide of view the market -- as "long drinks" rather than beer -- they did the opposite: regarding lager, stout, ale and cider -- on and off trade -- as eight separate markets, and determined that there was no risk to competition by removing one of the players. Obviously, cider wasn't relevant to the equation, and they ruled ale out too, saying [quote:2eqf2xb1]A lack of any real innovation and absence of a "real ale" culture has limited development in ale.[/quote:2eqf2xb1]So the ale market in Ireland is, commercially speaking, an irrelevance.

A lot of the discussion centred on whether Beamish & Crawford is a "maverick" -- pursuing non-standard pricing policies and creating competition by doing so. On the lager side they said no: Miller is often more expensive than Carlsberg or Heineken. And on stout the smoking gun comes on pages 103 and following, where they reprint a series of e-mails sent round by B&C's Commercial Director in 2004 and 2005 saying they had every intention of following Diageo's price rises as soon as the bad publicity died down, and demonstrating that Beamish never deliberately made itself the cheap stout; it just happened by default against the management's wishes.

Be careful of those old e-mails: they could cost you your brewery.

I just heard on the news that the Beamish and Crawford brewery is to close.

[url:1k2vzqzj]http://www.flex-news-food.com/pages/20837/Heineken/heineken-integrate-irish-operations-close-beamish-crawford-brewery.html[/url:1k2vzqzj]

Just heard this on this news. Serious slashing of the work force planned. Bloody awful coming at this time of year. What of the stout itself? I suppose it is sufficiently different to Murphy's for them to brew both on the one site as separate products.