Jeremy Clarkson’s “Serious Problem” Mid-Flight Turned Out To Be The Best Kind Of Business News
When a video titled “we’ve got a serious problem” starts circulating from Jeremy Clarkson mid-flight, it’s reasonable to brace for genuine bad news, a health scare, a farm emergency, something. What actually unfolded on a British Airways flight to Brindisi this summer was considerably lighter, and honestly, a pretty great problem to have.
Clarkson, flying out to Italy for a summer break with partner Lisa Hogan, filmed himself explaining the crisis directly to camera, deadpan as ever: British Airways had only loaded four cans of Hawkstone, his own British-brewed lager, onto the entire flight, and he’d already claimed two of them for himself. According to Clarkson, cabin crew confirmed the shortage wasn’t a one-off, every single flight was running out, with demand consistently outstripping supply.
“You just don’t want that kind of angst on an aeroplane,” Clarkson noted, with mock seriousness. “You want people calm and happy.” It’s a genuinely funny setup, precisely because the stakes are so deliberately, absurdly low compared to the dramatic framing. But buried inside the joke is a genuinely significant piece of business news for Hawkstone, the brewery Clarkson founded using barley grown on his own Diddly Squat Farm after struggling to find a buyer for his crop.
British Airways has now confirmed it’s serving Hawkstone lager, brewed entirely from British barley by UK farmers, as part of its in-flight offering. For a company that started, as Clarkson has told it, essentially as a solution to an unsold barley problem, landing shelf space on one of the world’s most recognisable airlines represents genuinely impressive commercial growth. It follows Hawkstone’s recognition earlier this year as the fastest-growing private company in the South West of England, with sales climbing to £44.9 million and average annual growth topping 128% over three years.
It’s also a genuinely fitting piece of the wider Diddly Squat story, businesses built directly around supporting British farming keep finding bigger, more mainstream platforms, whether that’s Ocado stocking farm shop products, Ravensburger producing official puzzles, or now British Airways running short on lager because passengers can’t get enough of it. Each new deal chips away, in its own small way, at Clarkson’s original, oft-repeated complaint that it’s become “impossible to make money” simply growing food on British soil, by finding new, more profitable outlets for exactly what that soil produces.
For Clarkson himself, currently enjoying an Italian holiday complete with a Ferrari rental car that Hogan noted brought back memories of his Top Gear and Grand Tour days, the mid-flight beer shortage offered a genuinely funny bit of holiday content. But for Hawkstone as a business, cabin crew running out of stock on every single flight is about as good an unofficial sales report as a company could ask for.
