Old Bear brewery acquires Re-Cap

Old Bear Brewery in Keighley has bought the social enterprise bottling company Re-Cap for an undisclosed sum as part of its expansion plans.

Re-Cap, which exclusively uses recycled bottles, was based in Calderdale Business Park, Halifax, but has now moved lock, stock and barrel to the brewery.

The move sees Re-Cap's operations supervisor Nick Howard joining the brewery to overseeing the bottling operation.

"Over the past year we have expanded our range of bottles to cover all our seven cask beers, plus our monthly specials, and this has been helped in a big way logistically by Re-Cap only being about 10 miles away," said Old Bear owner and head brewer Ian Cowling.

"When the opportunity came up to bring it in-house it was too good to a chance to miss and it's already hard at work with our Yorkshire Day Ale, which is the official beer of Yorkshire Day, on 1 August.

"Re-Cap collects empty bottles from numerous pubs and clubs around West Yorkshire, where they are then washed and sterilised before being refilled.

He added: "With Yorkshire Day Ale being a flagship beer we are using bottles with flip tops, similar to Grolsch, and each mayor and mayoresses from the whole of Yorkshire will receive a bottle at the Yorkshire Day luncheon, which is being held in Guisborough."

Old Bear's bottled beers now also come in pint measures as opposed to the metric 500ml. "We still serve pint measures in pubs, so we think that it's appropriate that you should still be able to get an imperial pint bottle of beer."