I was in my local Spoons the other day (don’t judge), nursing a pint of Thornbridge Jaipur that cost me £2.55. Two pounds fifty-five. For a 5.9% craft IPA that would set you back six quid in Shoreditch.

And as I sat there, surrounded by the usual Tuesday afternoon crowd of students, pensioners, and blokes who definitely should be at work, I had a thought that would probably get me kicked out of most craft beer WhatsApp groups:

What if Wetherspoons is actually.. good for craft beer?

Bear with me here.

The Numbers That Make No Sense

Let’s talk about that Jaipur for a second. This is a proper craft beer, yeah? Won awards, made by an independent brewery in Derbyshire, uses Chinook and Centennial hops. The sort of beer that beer nerds actually rate. And Spoons is flogging it for less than the price of a coffee in most places.

Wetherspoon works with over 350 UK brewers, which is mad when you think about it. That’s more independent breweries than most bottle shops stock. They’re shifting millions of pints of craft beer to people who’d never set foot in a railway arch taproom.

During a 12-day festival, JD Wetherspoon will feature 30 brewers from the UK and international markets. That’s not just volume.. that’s exposure.

The economics shouldn’t work. How can they sell beer this cheap without completely shafting the breweries? Well, here’s where it gets interesting.

Following the Money (Or: How Tim Martin Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Real Ale)

Tim’s passion for beer began back in the 1970s when he was at uni and couldn’t find decent beer north of the river. Imagine that.. a law student so annoyed by rubbish beer that he starts a pub empire. That’s either dedication or madness. Probably both.

But here’s the thing: The ‘normal’ price, which applies at 625 pubs, is £1.69 versus a price for SIBA members’ beers of about £2.15. So yeah, they’re making money on every pint, but not much. The model works because of scale. Pure, terrifying scale.

Think about it like Amazon for beer. (Actually, don’t think about it like that, it’s depressing.)

The Quality Question Nobody Wants to Ask

Now, before the CAMRA lot pile in, let’s address the elephant in the room: quality control. Everyone’s got a story about getting a dodgy pint in Spoons. Fair enough. But Wetherspoons have introduced a new minimum quality control standard for all of their cask ‘real ale’.. any brewery supplying real ale to Wetherspoons must have the quality standard in place.

“Virtually 100 per cent of our pubs have Cask Marque approval and I believe we have a higher percentage of our pubs in the Good Beer Guide than any other company”, Tim Martin claims. Which is like Jeff Bezos saying Amazon has great working conditions, but still. The numbers are there.

They’re actually making small breweries up their game. Mental.

The Snobbery Factor (Or: Why Your Craft Beer Mate Won’t Admit He Goes to Spoons)

Pete Brown wrote: “Some of the negative attitude about ‘Spoons drinkers is snobbery, pure and simple”. And he’s absolutely right. There’s this weird thing in craft beer culture where we pretend that paying a tenner for a third of triple-fruited pastry sour makes us sophisticated, while the bloke drinking the same brewery’s session IPA for £2.50 in Spoons is somehow letting the side down.

I’ve been to brewery taprooms where they’re selling their beer for three times what Spoons charges for the exact same liquid. Same beer. Same brewery. Different postcode, different punters, different price.

It’s like gentrification in a glass.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Market Access

Here’s what nobody wants to admit: most people can’t afford craft beer at craft beer prices. That £6.50 pint of Gamma Ray in Stoke Newington? That’s half of someone’s hourly wage. Spoons makes craft beer accessible to normal people. Revolutionary concept, I know.

These are all great value-for-money beers.. with tasting notes on all of them available in the pubs. They’re literally educating punters about beer. Your nan’s learning about hop varieties while she has her Tuesday gin. Mad.

And the festivals! The nationwide festival.. will bring 30 new beers to Wetherspoon pubs, including five international beers which were all brewed by women. They’re doing more for diversity in brewing than most indie bottle shops, and they’re doing it at scale.

The Competition Conundrum

A brewer friend from Ramsgate told me the ‘Spoons took 35% of the town’s beer trade and five pubs have shut since it opened. That’s grim. Proper grim. But.. and this is the uncomfortable bit.. were those pubs any good? Were they selling interesting beer at fair prices? Or were they coasting on being the only option?

Is the ‘Spoons stealing all the local trade, or picking up customers who would never have visited the other pubs anyway? That’s the question, innit? Because from what I’ve seen, Spoons creates drinkers. Students who start on £2 pints graduate to seeking out the breweries.

It’s a gateway drug, but legal and with better toilets.

Why This Actually Matters

Look, I’m not saying Wetherspoons is perfect. Tim Martin’s politics are.. well, let’s not go there. The food is what it is. The carpets remain inexplicable. But when more than 3.2 million pints of beer were sold in Wetherspoons pubs during a recent festival, that’s 3.2 million times someone chose craft beer over Carling.

That’s millions of pounds going to independent breweries. That’s thousands of people trying beer they’d never otherwise taste. That’s market access that most small breweries could never achieve on their own.

The Bottom Line (Or: What I’m Actually On About)

Wetherspoons might be the most important thing to happen to British craft beer since CAMRA, and nobody wants to admit it because it’s not cool. It’s not Instagram-friendly. It doesn’t fit the narrative of bearded blokes in checked shirts revolutionising brewing from their railway arches.

But it works. It gets good beer to normal people at prices they can afford. It supports hundreds of independent breweries. It’s teaching a generation of drinkers that beer can be more than just fizzy yellow stuff.

Is it perfect? Course not. Does it put pressure on prices? Yeah. Does it sometimes feel like the Tesco of pubs? Absolutely. But maybe.. just maybe.. democratising access to decent beer is more important than maintaining craft beer’s boutique status.

Next time you’re walking past a Spoons, maybe pop in. Get a pint of something local for less than three quid. Look around at the actual, real people drinking actual, real craft beer. Then ask yourself: is this really the enemy?

(Just don’t tell anyone I sent you. I’ve got a reputation to maintain.)

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The author can neither confirm nor deny being spotted in the Wetherspoons last Tuesday, definitely not enjoying a very reasonably priced pint of Jaipur while writing this piece on his laptop like some sort of digital nomad cliché.

What’s your take? Am I talking sense or complete bollocks? Have you had a genuinely good pint in Spoons, or is this all wishful thinking? Drop me a line at casktheoryblog@gmail.com..