Brewing up expansion plans

Woodforde's aims to build business in London and the Home Counties, says Roger Protz.

If you turn your back on a craft brewery for five minutes you find it has doubled in size. The last time I visited Woodforde's in Norfolk, brewing was carried out on a 30-barrel plant. But new 60-barrel kit has been installed and the company, in the hamlet of Woodbastwick, is now producing 18,000 barrels of beer a year.

Managing director Mike Betts and his team of 30 were feeling pretty chipper: their best-selling beer, Wherry, was named Regional Cask Ale in the MA's Great British Pub Suppliers Awards 2010 on 3 November.

Betts said they needed the boost as "2010 has been a tough year". By tough he means growth of between 4 and 5%. That's compared to a staggering 35% in 2008 and 12.5% last year. I suspect many breweries would be content with 5% in these difficult days.

Woodforde's is a major force in eastern England but Betts aims to expand. He has his sights set on London and the northern Home Counties: "We're poorly known there and we have to build our business in that region."

Expansion will be aided by the arrival of Rupert Farquharson as director of sales and marketing. He's very experienced, with time spent at Charrington's in east London, Guinness, and Adnams in Suffolk. As well as the free trade, Farquharson will try to build relations with the national pubcos, who are now more open to cask beer from craft producers as a result of the real ale revival.

"The pubcos were focused on the bottom line but they've been forced to go for local beers," Farquharson says. "They've been taken by surprise by the success of the small brewers." To prove the point, Wherry can now be found in Punch managed houses.

Another new face at Woodforde's is head brewer Neil Bain. In common with Farquharson, he has an impressive track record and worked for several years at the Highgate Brewery in Walsall, West Midlands.

It's all in the ingredients​

Bain has accepted Betts' enthusiasm for local ingredients. He uses only the finest malting barley, Maris Otter, which is grown in East Anglia and malted by local firms Crisp and Simpsons.

Hops are carefully chosen and are mainly English varieties: Boadicea, Challenger and Goldings. American Cascades are used in the golden ale Sundew while hops from Slovenia are imported as "late hops" during the copper boil for their superb

floral aroma.

The beer range includes Mardler's, a dark mild that has a steady sale, Nelson's Revenge, Norfolk Nog, Admiral's Reserve and Headcracker.

The Woodforde's beers have won a shelf-load of awards from the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), and the company has twice won the coveted Champion Beer of Britain prize.

The new brewhouse was built by Briggs of Burton-on-Trent while four 60-barrel fermenters and two 120-barrel vessels were bought from the now-closed Home Brewery in Nottingham. "We didn't think we'd need the 120-barrel fermenters for four years," Betts says, "but they came on stream after just 20 months."

A new cask racking line and heat exchange unit came from another closed brewery, King & Barnes in Horsham, West Sussex. The investment in new and second-hand plant over the past two years comes to £2.25m. That's an amount that stresses great belief in the future of cask beer.

Betts and his team don't rely solely on pubs for sales. They appear every year at such major CAMRA beer festivals as Cambridge, Chelmsford and Peterborough, as well as the flagship Royal Norfolk Show.

The brewery takes a stand at the University of East Anglia's freshers' week, to allow new students to get a taste for local beers, and organises an East Anglia Ale Trail covering 400 pubs in the region. Enterprise and Punch have agreed to support the next Ale Trail in 2011.

Betts and Farquharson are delighted by the support from the two pubcos but it doesn't mean Woodforde's is going soft on prices. "We won't give big discounts," Betts says. "People will pay more for quality. We find once Wherry gets on a bar it tends to stay there."

And it seems a safe bet that Woodforde's, founded in 1981 and on its third site, is also here to stay — and grow.