Family brewers prepare for a fight: Ale producers band together to do battle with Westminster and Brussels

THREE steam lorries, 13 horse-drawn drays and three 1940s trucks added a nostalgic touch to yesterday's launch of the Independent Family Brewers of Britain trade body, writes John Shepherd.

And for the real ale buffs there were barrels of Tangle Foot and Hardy County to quaff down during the launch at the Brewers' Hall in Aldermanbury Square in the City of London.

The IFBB represents 36 brewing companies and will work alongside the Brewers' Society, the industry's umbrella body. There was a sense of self-preservation at yesterday's gathering of the brewing clans, severely depleted since the turn of the century, when there were 6,477 commercial breweries in the UK.

Brewers that have joined the IFBB include Fuller Smith & Turner, McMullen & Sons, Shepherd Neame, Daniel Thwaites, Eldridge Pope, and Young's.

Anthony Fuller, chairman of the IFBB and Fullers, the London-based brewer, said: 'The formation of such a body is long overdue. We aim to become a persistent force with a clear voice to legislators.

'We are brewers which the legislators in Westminster and Brussels cannot leave alone,' he said, with specific reference to taxes on beers and the pending EC threat to dismantle the tied relationship between brewers and pubs.

'The tied system has been built up over generations and is a form of franchise. The EC criticises it as anti-competitive and we find ourselves looking down a barrel - not a barrel of beer but a gun barrel.'

Brewers in the UK are currently unaffected by EC legislation on the tie, but the industry's block exemption from the law is due to be reviewed in 1997.

If the UK is brought into line with the rest of Europe, brewers producing more than 115,000 barrels of beer a year would be allowed to own only about 400 pubs.

That would not only force a mass sell-off of pubs by the big companies such as Whitbread, Carlsberg-Tetley and Bass, but would also hit many regional brewers.

'The system is fine for the Germans,' Mr Fuller said. Germany has 1,200 breweries, 800 of which produce less than 115,000 barrels a year.

(Photograph omitted)