Barrelling towards big sales

A word of advice to any licensees anxious to appeal to punters and expand beer sales: if you have any empty buildings on site, why not install your own small brewery?

The latest recruit to the ranks of home-brew pubs is the Coach & Horses in Weatheroak in Worcestershire. I arrived on the evening the first pints went on sale and the home-brewed beer had created enormous interest in the village. The first batch of beer had been drunk dry by the locals. The pub was packed to the rafters — and as it dates from 1792 it does have some rather fine beams — and the new Weatheroak Hill beers were disappearing at a rate of knots.

The brewery had opened, fortuitously, on the day of the Pre-Budget Report. Nobody was toasting Chancellor Alistair Darling in the Coach & Horses, but at £2.45 a pint there were no complaints about the price.

The pub is in a fine location, with a stunning half-timbered Tudor house opposite. It stands on the corner of the Roman Icknield Street and is close to Alvechurch and King's Norton. Owner Philip Meads, who runs the Coach & Horses with his wife, Sheila, and son, Gary, says it was once the first coaching inn on the road out of Birmingham.

It has a roaring open fire and quarry-tiled floor in the spacious public bar, a long, narrow lounge and a modern restaurant attached. It's claimed that JRR Tolkien of Lord of the Rings fame used to drink there: you could say that drinking in the Coach & Horses is hobbit-forming.

The Coach & Horses used to be home, in an old stables block, to Weatheroak Brewery. The brewery was opened in 1997 by Dave Smith and he won praise for his hoppy Worcestershire ales. But he has moved to Alvechurch, where his beers can be found in the Weighbridge pub.

Philip Meads was anxious to continue the Coach & Horses tradition of having its own brewery and he persuaded keen home brewer Mark Shepherd to move up a notch and make ale commercially.

Mark told me he'd read all my books, but despite this appalling handicap he makes some excellent beers on a six-barrel plant installed by Porter Brewing Company. He uses Maris Otter malt from Warminster Maltings, locally-grown Pilot hedgerow hops with Northern Brewer from Germany and Styrian Goldings from Slovenia.

The beer had run out in the pub but Mark managed to squeeze a few drop for me to taste from conditioning tanks. He brews a 3.8% IPA — that's Icknield Pale Ale — and a 4.2% Weatheroak Hill Bitter, WHB for short. They are both pale in colour, tangy and full-tasting. The WHB is so intensely bitter and hoppy it would blow the Chancellor's eyebrows off.

Philip Meads told me he was looking for freetrade outlets for the beer. I suspect news of the quality of the ales will spread like a bush fire and there will be no shortage of pubs clamouring to buy them.

It's further proof that pubgoers want to drink quality beers. And the cask ale revival is not confined to the minnow's end of the market. You may have spotted in last week's MA a full-page advert for Greene King IPA complete with a redesigned pump clip. I spoke to the brewery's marketing director Fiona Hope who said the new design, with a brighter "racing green" and a view of Bury St Edmunds's cathedral is unashamedly promoting the brewery's home base in Suffolk.

"We haven't sold the Bury story in the past," she said. "IPA is hard-wired into the town. We're distributing 1,300 new pump clips for the beer and we expect great feedback."

Fiona believes cask beer has a brilliant future. "It is the best-performing draught category," she said. "We feel positive. Cask drinkers are not forsaking pubs — they want fresh beer."

IPA is the best-selling standard cask beer in the country and is making inroads into Scotland following the acquisition of Belhaven Brewery. Fiona Hope said Greene King's "old war horse", Abbot Ale, is unstoppable and Old Speckled Hen is doing well.

The company meets the demand for rotating beers by producing a number of seasonal brews. Fiona said Greene King had been staggered by the success in the autumn of the 4.3% Witchfinder Porter, a dark beer from the now-closed Ridley's Brewery in Essex that sold an impressive 900 barrels. The company has also launched in bottle Old Crafty Hen, a blend of Old Speckled Hen and the famous Old 5X that is matured in oak vats for a year. It's being priced at £2.40 a bottle as Greene King, in common with Fuller's, believes there is a "fine beer" sector among drinkers who treat beer as seriously as wine and are prepared to pay a premium for quality products.

"It's not all doom and gloom," says Fiona Hope. From Bury St Edmunds to Worcestershire, good beer is on the march.