Wolverhampton & Dudley
Alistair Darby, managing director of W&D Brands, the brewing arm of Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries, took up his position in July 2002 and joined the main board in 2003.
Today W&D Brands brews two of the UK's top 10 standard cask ales Banks's Original and Banks's Bitter and two of the top 10 premium cask ales, Bass (for Interbrew) and Marston's Pedigree. The company brews around 400,000 barrels of cask ale a year, including Marston's Bitter and after the acquisition of Jennings Brothers' brewery earlier this year Jennings Cumberland Ale, giving it on some estimates one pint in seven of the cask-ale market and making it the largest brewer of cask ale in the country. The parent group vies with Greene King for the title of Britain's biggest integrated pub and brewery operator, with around 2,100 pubs.
While the rest of the market is declining, Darby says Wolves' core ale brands are growing by around 4%. 'We're having a good run, he says, and the figures show a committed operator can swim against the tide. At its interim results in May, Wolves revealed that Marston's Pedigree volumes were up by 12.6% on 2004, and premium ale, including Old Empire, up by 13.9%. Though standard ale, including Banks's and Mansfield, was up by just 0.2% (better than the overall market), free-trade turnover rose almost 7% on last year.
The company aspires to grow over the next two to three years, though Darby says: 'I will not quote a figure, in order to avoid becoming a hostage to fortune To grow sales it is investing more than £6m in its annual marketing programmes, which include advertising campaigns, in-pub activity and consumer research, while in April it opened a new £2m brewhouse at the Marston's brewery.
Darby believes cask-ale sales 'will do well to stay flat in the years ahead, but he believes the sector has a good future if it can attract 'those consumers who seek speciality drinks with real provenance and who have 'graduated' from less challenging drinks in their early drinking years. This is, he says: 'a big and growing group. Consumers, he says, 'will cross the road for great cask beer: they'll be prepared to pay for it; and great licensees will have no qualms in charging more. In any case, he says: 'we'll all have to get more value from ale simply because our costs of operation are increasing inexorably.
He is not over-optimistic about the future. In 10 years time, Darby thinks the cask-ale market will be smaller still than today, but of 'higher quality. Big national brands will generally have declined even further, he says, leaving smaller quality brands doing well, 'much as now.