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Bottled English Ales in France


Matt E
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I found one similar question from back in 2011 and have asked for an update, but not sure the poster is still active, so here's my question...

Our plan is to move to the Charente/Gironde area to run a gite or two.

Realising that this will generate a limited income and that actual job prospects for Brits are pretty much non-existent, my plan is to import a good range of English ales to sell online, via wholesale to bars and restaurants, and/or on a market stall.

The range of beers includes good standard session bitters, stronger ales, golden varieties and a stout.

Would there be a demand from either expats or French nationals and what would you expect to pay for a 500ml bottle?

During a trip in September, I saw Marstons Pedigree in a bar, priced at €5 - presumably retail would need to be slightly below this and carriage costs for online sales would need to be offset.

I'd appreciate any feedback and look forward to hearing from you.

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I know nothing about the demand, but unless they've subsequently folded (which may also answer the question regarding demand) there used to be a similar operation already in existence in the Deux Sevres area of Poitou Charentes. It's a bit off my patch as we are in Charente Maritime, but worth seeing if you can find them.

My gut reaction is that it's probably a legislative minefield, as I can imagine it would be anywhere, what with the thorny additional issues of excise duty etc.

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Thanks "Betty"

I'll have a search.

I appreciate the beurocracy will be an issue, but I do have family with experience of the UK to EU drinks distribution scene (whisky), so advice is at hand on that side of things.

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Does your family have experience of running a French business, or is their distribution business based in the UK?

If you live in France you would need to set up a French business structure, AE would be no good for this. You need to work out what your business taxes and social charges and other overheads would be, and see if you would be able to undercut 5€ a bottle and still make a profit. I don't know but I suspect that if you as a French company are competing with UK companies who ship beers to France, you're going to be at a disadvantage to start with. You'll have no doubt read in the papers all about how France's economy is struggling because small businesses are stifled and prevented from being competitive, well this is exactly the culture that you would be up against.

I imagine in some areas of France demand would be practically non-existent, in other areas there would be a pretty good demand provided you have the French marketing skills to exploit it.

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Thanks for the input.

It is indeed the taxes and social charges that will be the potential killer and as you rightly say, I need to find out what those would be in detail - any suggestions as to information sources?

Heat, light and broadband will also have an impact.

The actual costings for the goods including VAT, duty and freight indicate that I can make a decent margin before overheads, so I'm encouraged to put the time into finding out about the rest.

My brother is in the Scottish whisky trade, but cut his teeth in Europe, so will have a fairly good grasp - enough to help me with the bureaucracy anyway.

Thanks again - I'll proceed with caution!

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If you seriously want to do this I would suggest you discuss it with a business adviser at your chambre de commerce.

Other posters will no doubt come along and say No No No French business advisers are rubbish - but in my experience, they are brilliant. You can read up on all the rules and regulations until your head spins but they understand how it works in practice. They know immediately what the tipping factors are going to be for your business, what you have to focus on and what you don't need to even waste your time considering.

Bonne chance.
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I'll have to get the advice whilst still here in UK, as the move depends on the viability of the overall project.

The wife will be reluctant to move without a concrete plan for an income over and above any gite rental activity, as should I.

Meanwhile, anyone out there with insight on the potential demand?

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But that's the crux of starting a business, isn't it - how good are you at creating and stimulating demand? There's never any upfront guarantee that a business is going to work, it's all down to luck, but funnily enough you usually find that it's the people who work hardest and understand how to market and sell their products that have all the luck. Some people can sell ice to Eskimos and some people would struggle to sell them a fur coat (I'm one - I'm not a salesperson and I know it).

You might want to focus your range a bit more sharply. That's a lot of different products to whip up an interest in.
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Unfortunately, I can't answer your first question, as I'm not a salesman either.  Maybe naive, but I'm trusting my enthusiasm for the product and a well-designed web site to create and sustain demand, coupled with social networking (along with a well-targeted advertising budget of course).

It may sound like a lot of products from the way I described it, but it's only 8 varieties.  A couple of them could be brought in at a later stage and two are seasonal, so maybe a core range of 4.

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So, I typed an answer to this and then went out, only to come back and find that it disappeared into the ether.

In a nutshell, and I mean this constructively, I think you're probably barking a bit up the wrong tree asking on a forum such as this. I would not think that anyone here is going to provide you with the information to replace some solid and pretty extensive market research. Maybe your family connections with the trade and with France will be more helpful on that score, or, if your French is good, then websites such as this might be able to help? [url]http://www.happybeertime.com/daily-beertime/[/url].

I don't know much about your target market, or should I say it seems unclear who you're hoping to target. A few years back, there were probably enough Brits around to stimulate the owners of various bars and hotels to give your wares a punt, but from reading a number of these sorts of forum over the years, the average Brit seems to wax far more lyrical about the availability of cheap plonk (and a fair number wax even more lyrical about their seeming mission to single handedly create a European Wine Drought ) whereas I've no recollection of reading among the many posts over the years asking "what do you miss from the UK" any mention of beer among the wistful ramblings about baked beans, cheddar and Marmite. There have been many successful (and indeed unsuccessful) business ventures shipping over people's weekly groceries from Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's, and I have no idea whether these have included, or been able to include a few bottles of much-missed beer, but if they have, then you could have some competition right there. If you're targeting the French, never underestimate the power of prejudice. {articularly of the "not from round here" variety. Try getting a Frenchman to admit to enjoying a New World wine.

Another issue to address might be that if you can find enough people who are real beer buffs, then you will have to convince them that the particular tipple you're proposing will meet their expectations....from what little I know of beer bores, they can be a very fickle breed, and if they are keen on Old Theakston's Incredibly Peculiar Brew, you might not convince them to change to Speckled Thrush Partially Peculiar Pale

Ale..

What I would also say, in conclusion, is that if I were starting, or thinking of starting a business, I would be very wary of taking notice of anything that I had to say, or of basing my business plan on the ramblings of a couple of strangers on a forum.[:D]

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I realise that during all those years I spent in France almost never seem to mirror other poster's experiences, but I shall tell you mine.

I am not really a drinker and never was and the older I get the more the idea of it displeases me, but that is me.

My husband however does like a drink and always has.  He used to a like a good session beer and our local in England used to sell Theakstones Bitter which he always enjoyed, he does like 'real' ales. When we moved to France, he started drinking french beers and some wine. He would enjoy his evenings out in the pub when we were home on holiday, but initially that was just about every two years. When friends came to visit us, we would ask for baked beans and I would ask for Fry's Turkish Delight and custard powder, but sometimes could get that in France, but never did he mention bringing over beer, even once the widget was invented, as we had moved to France donkey's years before it was in general use.

If we saw some english beer, because eventually we did from time to time, he may have bought 2 or four cans, but they were expensive and duly treat as a treat. In comparison to french or beligan beer was very expensive. And a bottle of half decent french wine could have been bought for the same price.  Paying prices like that for a session beer, no, our budget would never have been up to it.

You will have to find out exactly how to register where and when you could sell beer. The social security payments could well initially look like Mickey Mouse figures, but will probably be right, because for the self employed, social charges are usually very high. Simply they are high in France, this is how I look at it........workers pay quite a lot and the employer's payments are also high and so a self employed person more or less cops for both parts, being the employer and employee of themselves....

Learn french if you are thinking about running any sort of business. I doubt that your family could help you with how much it would cost to run a business in France. And personally, I have my doubts that it would work enough to make a decent living. I'm not even sure that gites would to be honest, but I just watch french news on french tv regularly and know that a lot of people are struggling in all sectors.  That would be a question to ask on here, how did gites do in your proposed area in 2013, there again, every place is different and it would depend on what you were offering and for how much, wouldn't it!

Basically things are hard in France at the moment.

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I'm appreciating the frank responses - many thanks.

Don't worry, if this was to be my main research, I wouldn't have any right even considering a business.

However, it does give me a flavour of the climate from people actually living there and I will take all of your comments on board.

My French is pretty good - a bit rusty on the vocab at the moment from lack of use, but close to fluent when I've been immersed for a while.

I'll mull it all over during my drive home on this particularly wet and murky evening and continue dreaming.

Thanks again folks.

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Thank goodness for common sense. Please excuse me (and I can probably speak on behalf of a fair few people on here) if anything I wrote earlier sounded even vaguely patronising, which was far from my intent, but if you were to stick around here or any other Francophile forum for longer than a couple of weeks, you would swiftly appreciate that some of the older hands have seen many, many posts over time from people starting out on the journey to their French idyll, starting from "I'd like to move to France, whereabouts do you recommend" and progressing through various stages of  similar naivete.

Obviously, if your French is competent, you're already far better placed than many.

The link I provided earlier was one thrown up by going to Google.fr (which I recommend rather than using Google.uk) and typing in "demande pour bieres anglaises en France" or some permutation thereof. Another link this threw up was this one: [url]http://www.alesinfrance.com/products.php?lang=fr&display=aisle&aisle=1[/url] which may be of some use. There's even another link to a dissertation that someone's done on the topic....

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I would like to point out that we can buy English bottled beer from our local L' Eclerc. Bishops Finger, Abbots, IPA, XXX (I think Batemans), Bombadier, HobGobblin, Spitfire and St Peters Porter (my favourite at the moment) amongst some others. They range in price from €1,85 to €2,80. So reasonable in my view.

Those French friends who do drink beer, and they're not many of them that do, like the wheat ales, normally Belgian.

You might do well close to one of the big cities, but then you would probably come up against the Frog and Rosbif chain of pubs that brew their own beer.

And I would like to reiterate what other posters have said, you won't make a lot of money and the bureaucracy will do your head in. But if you want to do it for fun, then why not ? Life's too short.

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That pricing info is very interesting - I'd have a job competing with the €1,85 and could just about manage €2,80 for the occasional promotion on a 500ml bottle.

I'd been basing my figures on sites like Ales in France, which typically sell at €3,45 to €3,85 plus delivery, so this is precisely the type of local knowledge i was hoping to find.

More food for thought - perhaps I need to look at a different product line, but will take the earlier advice of consulting a Chambre de Commerce.

Thanks everyone.
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Matt your enthusiasm is great but the French system will soon beat that out of you and so I wish you success but doubt youll actually find and from your post about prices I now really doubt it. 

If you want a business in france, open a pharmacy, the French are paranoid about health and pop pills for everything, You don't see many pharmacies closing compared just about any other business in france.  keep the beer for your own enjoyment.

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Hi

It could be worth contacting these folk for info. Their beer is good, very very good especially when you've not had any 'proper' beer for a while. If I remember correctly what they told us when we visited them about 10 years ago they started off making cider but lost most of their apple trees during a bad storm and wondering how to carry on someone gave them the idea of making beer using their existing equipment. It has worked for them, there are several english pubs in the Normandy area which do well and which sell their beer and the beer can also be found on sale at some of the food fairs. Maybe you could incorporate selling their beer as it's brewed in france alongside imported beers.

Sorry to have prattled on a bit, hope the info is of use.

http://www.le-brewery.com/fr/beers
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[quote user="plod"]Very true; I heard a Frenchman the other day saying that most villages and small towns used to have bars and cafes but that now they had closed and there were pharmacies in their place![/quote]

That seems to be the case  these days ...............cant say I am surprised .The one thing I have noticed is more and more people  with a bottle of tap water on their tables when eating now .

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My husband likes English beer and I have heard several people on TV property progs who, when asked what they miss, say 'Real ale'. However, many supermarkets have Brit sections with beer, not always cheap, one local bar sometimes has it and it is very popular. Another bar in our village has a French ale which is not bad.

Also home beer making kits are not at all bad these days!
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