Cains: The first big casualty of the credit crunch?

Ah, the 'Glorious Twelfth'. Hundreds of be-tweeded gents will this week be traipsing across the nation's moors, blasting assorted wildfowl from the sky with shotguns and gusto. The poor things. But I feel sorry for the birds as well, obviously.

Meanwhile, in the less rural environs of Liverpool L8, August 12 may well be not-quite-so-glorious for the 1,000-odd workers putting their all into the business that is Cains Beer Company, now that the business is in the hands of the administrators.

I expect there will be a number of old hands in the trade who will be shaking their heads and saying 'I told you so' as the group fights for survival.

The enthusiasm - some may say naïveté - of the Dusanj brothers, lauded as saviours of Cains some five years ago, would never be enough to win over certain figures in the brewing game who either could not see past the colour of the pair's skin or their rise from 'lowly' chip shop operators in Kent to family brewer status.

More ominously they have never quite shaken off mutterings - wholly unsubstantiated - concerning questionable business practices in previous enterprises.

With hindsight it is easy to say Cains should have steered well clear of piling into an estate of pubs at precisely the moment the industry went into freefall. Perhaps their enthusiasm got the better of their own judgement and that of their advisers.

But pile in they did, and invested thereafter, and now there's not enough in the kitty to pay the taxman. One wonders why they did not put enough cash aside to fulfil some or all of their obligation in this department earlier. Or, if they did, what went wrong subsequently?

If the group had steered clear of fulfilling its retail ambitions maybe, just maybe, it could have survived, as a pure brewing arm with a handful of pubs left over from the old days. As it stands now, well, I guess it barely stands at all. And one wonders where all those regional brewers are going to get their beer canned now?

Many people I spoke to at last week's Great British Beer Festival appeared genuinely sorry to see Cains in trouble. Meanwhile, there remained the unanswered question: 'Who will be next?'