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The spring 2025 meeting of the European Beer Consumers Union took place in Brussels last weekend. Reuben and I attended as Beoir’s delegates.
This year, they decided to combine the meeting with two other events. First, on Thursday, there was a seminar with the title “Rising Costs, Rising Expectations: Beer Consumer Trends 2025 – Environment, Transparency, and Well-being”. Bit of a broad one, covering everything EBCU does. It was hosted by the Italian Farmers’ Association at their Brussels office and one of their representatives spoke, as well as one from the Brewers of Europe (big brewery org), one from the Dutch craft brewers’ association and the EBCU chairman. It was all a bit introductory and I think most of what it did is put EBCU on these organisations’ radar as an activist group with aims in common.
This was followed by the reception to which MEPs, Commission staff, representatives of member states and the media were invited. As usual, it was pretty poorly attended, with only a few parliamentary assistants showing up. Member organisations were asked to bring beer from their countries and we brought Rye River Nocturne, which seemed to go down well.
On Friday and Saturday there was the main business meeting. The financial picture seems to have improved since the last one, though it’s still a concern. Counter-intuitively, they’re also looking a setting up a financial help scheme for member organisations. They’re still looking to get new member organisations, and come up with ideas that might attract new members and/or raise revenue.
There’s been some preliminary work done on comparing how the European packaging waste regulation (which gave us Re-Turn) is being implemented across the member countries, and what the effects are. That will be an ongoing topic.
One of the Executives had made contact with an international organisation called the Institute for Rational Addiction Policies, which looks like it might be a useful ally on the health front.
There was a guest speaker in from the Brussels Beer Challenge beer competition, to talk about competitions in general. I think I got a lead from the German delegate on how we might revive ours. They seem to have a combined popular-vote/judged-final system, so I’m going to see if I can get more details out of them on how it works.
And the results of the survey on beer in airports and railway stations was announced. Copenhagen and Sheffield came tops, respectively, to no great surprise. I stuck the press release here.
I don’t think there was much else of note, unless Reuben wants to add anything. The next meeting will be in Warsaw in October.
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