Europe's beer brewers fear a bitter summer as lockdowns drag on

Shuttered bars, cancelled concerts and no sporting matches: European beer brewers large and small are bracing for a catastrophic summer as demand dries up during the lockdowns imposed to curtail the coronavirus outbreak.

"When it's nice out, that's when you sell beer," said Maxime Costilhes, head of the French brewers' association, noting that many have little money left in the bank to cushion the blow after building up stocks over the winter.

France may be known for its wine, but beer sales had been soaring in recent years, spurred on in part by the craft brewing trend imported from the United States.

Even Europe's dominant brewers are facing big hits from the absence of restaurant and bar sales, and the wave of scotched summer festivals, concert series and other events in the coming months.

"The impact is expected to worsen in the second quarter," said Dutch giant Heineken, which already forecasts a two-percent drop by volume for the first three months of this year among its 165 breweries in some 70 countries.

Germany's biggest brewer Radeberger, famed for its crisp pilsner, warned that supermarket purchases by people cooped up at home would not come close to compensating for the evaporation of bulk orders from professionals.

"We're assuming that the situation won't show any real improvement in the coming weeks," a spokeswoman told AFP.

German officials are even considering calling off the biggest beer celebration of all, Munich's annual Oktoberfest, which attracts millions of people from around the world.

Clemens Baumgartner, the party's organiser, said a decision would be made by June on whether to open as planned this year on September 19.

For Bruno Torres, who founded his microbrewery La Baleine in a gritty corner of northeast Paris a few years ago, the coronavirus crisis is nothing short of a "disaster".

His stainless steel fermenting vats, which normally produce around 560 hectolitres (near 15,000 US gallons) a year, have been sitting empty, and nobody is buying his bottles or kegs.

"Even some smaller supermarkets don't want to open because of the health scare," Torres said.

Overall, French beer sales are expected to be flat for the year as a whole, Costilhes said, after years of rapid growth.

"We had the equivalent of 7,750 full-time jobs as of January 1, an increase of nine percent on the year, so nearly 700 more jobs compared to 2019. But that was before all this," he said.

He did not want to speculate on how many brewers might be facing bankruptcy, but "notwithstanding what some have said, it's not certain that alcohol consumption is going up during the lockdown."