Brewery must be kept in Czech
The state-owned brewer of Budweiser Budvar should not be allowed to fall into the hands of the private sector just look what happened to Bass, says Andrew Jefford It's odd on the surface, anyway. You expect governments to own an army, a health service, and maybe (in really progressive countries) a railway network but a brewery? What do people in the health service think about that? Especially in a nation that has the highest per capita beer consumption in the world (159 litres, a comfortable lead on runners-up Ireland with 125 litres and Germany with 123 litres). I'm talking, of course, about the Czech Republic and about Czesky Budejovicky, the brewer of the original Budweiser Budvar. Isn't the fact that the Czech Government is still brewing merely a rusting relic of state socialism? Shouldn't Budweiser Budvar follow Pilsner Urquell and Staropramen into private ownership as swiftly as possible? We, in Britain, are entitled to a view on this. We have just experienced two decades of relentless privatisation ourselves. It all started off with sensible privatisations (such as British Airways), then we switched to easy, money-making though artificial ones (such as the utility companies), and after that we ended up with barmy and potentially catastrophic privatisations, such as the railway network, air-traffic control and the running of detention centres for asylum seekers. There are obviously benefits in all of these privatisations, of course: to lucky shareholders, to lucky lawyers and to lucky advertising companies. Consumers, though, tend to end up paying more for a less efficient service as we discover when we look at our ever-rising utility bills, or gulp with horror when told the price of tickets for standing in one of our Third World trains. Consider, moreover, the performance of the celebrated private sector when it is given a brewery to run. There are gleaming examples among surviving regional brewers, to be sure, but for several decades Britain's large breweries seem to have been run with no interest in mind other than the short-term concerns of shareholders. If Britain has a beer equivalent of Budweiser Budvar, it is probably Bass. We all know how well the private sector protected and nurtured that great beer. It is no longer brewed in the traditional Union sets, no longer brewed by a British company (it's American), no longer sold by a British company (it's Belgian), and may, in the end, be evicted from the very place (Burton-upon-Trent) whose gypsum-filtered water supply made it such a great beer in the first place. There are counter-examples, too, of how well state ownership of drink production facilities can work. In Federal Germany, for example, a number of leading wineries are publicly owned by the states in which they are found (like Rheinland-Pfalz). Much depends on the director, but the State Wine Domain (Staatliche Weinbaudomänen) in the Nahe region was one of the best in Germany under Karl-Heinz Sattelmayer, and that in little Hessische Bergstrasse is unquestionably the best of its region. State ownership needn't mean a ponderous, old-fashioned approach, either: there aren't many flies on Absolut vodka, owned by Sweden's former wine and spirit monopoly and the envy of many a private-sector brand-builder. Consider, too, Budweiser Budvar's special position in the beer world both enviable and unenviable. Enviable in that it has a flawless reputation for brewing one of the world's greatest lagers with none of the compromises on quality made by its main foreign rivals. Unenviable, in that it is a brewer that is constantly persecuted and harried through thelaw courts by the Goliath-like Anheuser-Busch, lusting after the rights to its trade mark. Also consider the fate that befell sister Czech breweries like Staropramen or Pilsner Urquell when they were privatised. Neither is Czech-owned any more (Staropramen is Belgian-owned Interbrew and Pilsner Urquell is now South African-owned SABMiller) and both have made the ultimate quality concession in that they are now licence-brewed elsewhere (a glaring nonsense in particular for Urquell, since its very name means "original source" or "original spring"). Just how long would it take for the biggest brewer in the world to find a way of snapping up a privatised minnow like Czesky Bude-jovicky? And how safe would Budweiser Budvar be in its arms? About as safe, I would suspect, as a mouse in the jaws of the street's biggest Tom. All of which is why I hope Budweiser Budvar carries on being brewed by the Czech Government for many years to come. Breweries, after all, can be national assets in exactly the same way as stately homes, capital theatres or national art collections: they are places where the great creations of the past are safely preserved for the pleasure of the present and of future generations. Set beside the importance of that, a bit of extra profit here or there is meaningless.
