Britain: Tapping Profits

Because beer-quaffing Britons loyally support some 300 breweries, 3,000 brands of suds and 70,000 local pubs, economists have long classed the national beverage as a "depression-proof" staple. This being the case, big brewers have run their businesses with all the imagination of the National Coal Board.

That sort of thing may be changing. For one, Chairman Douglas Peter Grossman, of Watney-Mann, Britain's No. 2 brewery (behind Allied Breweries), argues that the industry is hopelessly "straitjacketed" by outdated production and marketing methods. For himself and his company, Grossman has introduced radical changes...