Copper Dragon reports leap in turnover

Growing Yorkshire brewer Copper Dragon's is expected to report a 50% leap in turnover to £4m for this year.

This came after it opened a new £4.5 million brewery and visitor center last November. The 7-year-old brewer, based on Snaygill Industrial Estate in Skipton, has also increased staffing levels 50% to 45 employees.

Copper Dragon managing director Steve Taylor said: "This is supposed to be a slow time in the brewery trade but we are operating at near full capacity with our hand crafted cask ales and sales of our bottled range are going through the roof.

"We are in the enviable position of having to turn away demand from foreign markets but that is an issue we are actively addressing.

"An example of how far the brewery has come is that we turned over £300,000 in our first year and we are now doing more than that every month!"

Approaching half a million pints of Copper Dragon are sold every month in pubs across the UK together with around 25,000 bottles from retail outlets but those numbers are growing rapidly by the month and our ales are now available from Newcastle across to Carlisle down as far as the Midlands.

"There is a lot of doom and gloom around at the moment and it's good to be bucking the trend with a quality team of staff in place and a quality range of ales.

"We service over 100 covers a day at our new bistro, which features a menu of fresh, locally sourced ingredients, crafted by top chef Karl Reader and his team, and this is way beyond what we envisaged.

"Our brewery tours are also proving very popular. On top of that our new conference facilities are attracting a lot of interest with a number of repeat bookings."

Established in 2002, Copper Dragon supplies its hand-crafted Best Bitter, Golden Pippin, Scots 1816, Challenger IPA and Black Gold cask ales to over 2000 pubs across the UK as well as major supermarkets and foreign markets as far afield as Australia and Russia.