Burnley beer firm finds right brew for success (From Lancashire Telegraph)

Burnley beer firm finds right brew for success

3:40pm Monday 2nd March 2009 in

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FOR the past 139 years beer has been brewed from a small two-storey building in Moorhouse Street on the edge of Burnley, but all is about to change.

The next 18 months will see the old brewery go the way of many of the surrounding streets when it is torn down to make way for a new brewing complex as part of a £3.5million expansion.

This new state of the art brewery will more than triple Moorhouse’s ouput from 320 barrels-a-week up to a capacity of 1,000-a-week.

And it is this shift in scale that David Grant must now manage if he wants the company’s success to continue. But as he chats in the General Scarlett – one of the brewery’s own pubs in Accrington Road, opposite to the brewery buildings – he seems undaunted by the challenge in an industry that has been in flux for the past few years.

“I'm passionate about pubs,” he said in typically forceful fashion. “There is demand for our existing products and there is an opportunity to put more of it into bottles.”

The aim is to get more bottles into supermarkets on a nationwide basis and keep driving the company forward in the same way he has done for almost a decade.

It is fast approaching nine years since Mr Grant stepped into the breach at Moorhouse’s and the brewery has hardly looked back since.

Last Christmas, for example, the firm saw volumes for the festive period soar by 18 per cent and turnover increase by 20 per cent on the previous year. This meant more than 1,330 barrels – 385,632 pints – dispatched from the Moorhouse Street site to pubs, clubs and shops across the UK.

Considering all the doom and gloom that currently shrouds a trade battered by unprecedented pub closures, It seems that Moorhouse’s is bucking the downward trend.

Its success also comes at a time when other East Lancashire brewing giants have announced major structuring plans, with Blackburn’s Daniel Thwaites announcing job cuts at the start of January and plans to offload its managed pubs, and Samlesbury’s Inbev also revealing a major restructuring of its business.

But Mr Grant believes the growing prominence of the Moorhouse’s brand will continue.

He said: “We had an extremely successful Christmas and one of the reasons for that is we got our customers to keep our beer in stock for a couple of weeks.

“People run out very quickly of our beer and we were able to meet the challenge of keeping them well stocked at a busy time.”

And he is unapologetic over those pubs that are closing, even though the firm itself owns six.

He said: “For our beers I don't think that the credit crunch, smoking ban or economic downturn has had much effect. It has led to some pubs closing that should have shut sooner than they have.

“Those pubs which thrive on competition and offer better products will continue to do well. I believe people will see opportunities to make money from pubs in future.

“It’s like in our pubs, our glass collectors are asking people if they want a drink while they are still sat down. It’s about making it a more service-orientated business, that’s vital.”

He joked that the old image of the landlord, wearily tutting as he drags himself away from the newspaper he was reading to begrudgingly serve a punter must become a thing of the past if the pub is to prosper once again.

And while Mr Grant has a clear vision for the brewery’s future direction and the pub trade as a whole, at one point during our chat he mused briefly on where the business would be if he’d have come in sooner.

As it is, however, the challenges ahead of Moorhouse’s are big enough as it is, especially with staff levels rising from 24 to nearer 50 with the looming expansion and more of the brewery’s five regular beers going into bottles.

“We are in the US already and we have doubled our trade in America this year alone. It is shipped into Baltimore and then distributed to 48 states.

“We have 20 pallets going across at a time (18,000 bottles) and included in that are English Owd Ale, which is a 5.9 per cent beer, and Blonde Bitch – a variation of the Blonde Witch ale which is sold over here.”

The comparative weakness of the pound against the dollar is also helping the company’s export ambitions, and the challenge on the other side of the Atlantic is to get Moorhouse beers a permanent foothold in the market, rather than the seasonal popularity – especially around Hallowe’en – that it currently enjoys.