The Big Interview: Colin Wilde, Castle Rock

Not that Wilde is getting carried away, it’s not in his nature. By his own admission he’s a reserved character, more comfortable supping at the bar than behind it, who was set for a career in accountancy before falling into the trade in the mid 1990s. That’s when he joined pub company Tynemill, as it was called then, to work alongside its founder Chris Holmes, Wilde’s godfather and long-standing family friend.

“I’ve been in Chris’s pubs for as long as I can remember and at that stage the business ran eight successful pubs in the East Midlands and he was thinking about stepping back from the day-to-day,” he says. “So he offered me a live-in job at the Swan in the Rushes in Loughborough. My job title was personal assistant to the MD, which basically covered everything from driving dray lorries to auditing the accounts.”

Up until then, Wilde had being doing various short-term accountancy jobs after graduating from university in Huddersfield. He claims to have been a conscientious stu-dent “but still a good boozer”, brought up on cask ale as it was his father’s choice of drink. “He always said to me, ‘I’ll buy you a beer if it’s cask ale, if you want lager you’re buying it yourself’.”

Although it didn’t take Wilde too long to realise that number-crunching wasn’t for him, he reckons the skills he picked up along the way gave him a good grounding. “It was a great period of learning and invaluable to work for three or four different businesses in a short period of time as I picked up different ways of doing things and different management styles,” he explains.

Expansion​

After joining Tynemill the business started to expand, acquiring at least one pub a year from 1997 until 2003. “It sounds simple, but looking back on it we opened pubs with a slightly different model, concentrating on quality cask ale, and customers flocked through the doors,” he says. “We aimed to treat customers as we would want to be treated ourselves — and still do. Basically, the model worked because our competitors were doing it wrong.”

Openings have slowed in recent times, last year Castle Rock (as the business was renamed in 2007) bought its first pub in four years. “It’s never been a numbers game for us,” says Wilde. “It’s not the way the business is run, we just don’t put a target on the number of pubs.

“We don’t have different brand concepts, we basically open pubs that we’d like to drink in ourselves. If we can find one like that to run, then we’ll do it.”

The company today stands at 20 pubs, the majority of which are managed. A tenancy model was introduced around 2002 as a result of the rising cost of running pubs, but Wilde admits that the move hasn’t been totally successful. “We’ve had some good tenants, but also some that haven’t worked out. Some of our managers transferred to tenancies and weren’t ambitious enough, and thought that because they were now running their own business they could do less. Maybe there was some naivety on our part,” he says.

The company’s brewing interests began in 1997 when it undertook a joint venture with Bramcote Brewery, a micro based just outside Nottingham. “We were their biggest customer and sold a lot of their beer. They had to leave their premises so we took a lease on an empty building next door to the Vat & Fiddle pub and brought their brewing operation across,” Wilde says.

Castle Rock Brewery — the joint venture was named after Nottingham’s famous landmark — ticked along until 2001 when Tynemill bought out the remaining stake with the aim of growing the brewing operation. “We’d always said we’d not get into brewing because we were retailers, and there were plenty of good brewers out there,” Wilde says. “So when we bought the other half it was like, ‘What do we do now? We need to hire a brewer.’”

In hindsight it turned out to be a smart move. An experienced head brewer was recruited and created the recipe for the award-winning Harvest Pale. A few years later Adrian Redgrove was hired as new head brewer and the brewery went from strength to strength.

Champion-making​

Tynemill was renamed Castle Rock in 2007 and two years later completed a £6m refinance to enable expansion of the brewery. And not a moment too soon — in August 2010 the 3.8% ABV golden ale Harvest Pale won Champion Beer of Britain and demand rocketed. “We’d been running at full capacity for a full six months before the award and were basically running out of beer,” Wilde says.

“We didn’t want to stop freetrade and partner pub companies having our beer, so restricted it in our own pubs. All of our pubs were given a ration of Harvest Pale as we halved what they would normally buy.”

Wilde and his fellow directors pledged not to drink Harvest Pale until their customers could access it as before. It took four months, much longer than first anticipated.

Two years on and Wilde has had time to reflect on the importance of the win and the stimulus it gave the business. For the financial year ending March 2012, Harvest Pale volume sales show a 122% increase compared to the same period in 2009/10. Sales of its other beers have risen by 47% in the same years’ comparison, exceeding even the most optimistic of Wilde’s forecasts.

Castle Rock also scored success with its Kiss Me Kate beer brewed to celebrate last year’s royal wedding, selling 100,000 bottles and generating global media coverage. It followed that up this June by producing Diamond Reign to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which also shifted well.

“The challenge remains to grow sales to match our full capacity of 18,000 barrels per annum, even though we’re well on track to do this a lot earlier than we thought possible,” he says.

Eight months into the job and Wilde is ready to move the business forward. However his mentor and former boss Holmes still retains a close interest — and majority shareholding — in the company, despite his supposed “retirement” at the start of the year. “Chris said to me when he left: ‘I’m now your institutional investor and am going to become your biggest nightmare’,” recalls Wilde.

“I would like to think we could go back to buying a pub a year. It’s fair to say we are a little risk averse and where we do invest it has to provide the right return for us. As we stand, we’ve got big opportunities to improve our existing operation.”

Wilde is also optimistic about the future of the trade, despite the ongoing pressures on pubs and brewers in the shape of duty and the prevailing economic climate. “Competition is stronger than ever, which is great for pub-lovers as it drives up standards,” he maintains.

“As human beings we have a desire to socialise with other human beings. The most important thing to us is getting people into pubs, as busy pubs sell more beer,” he says. “That’s what keeps us going.”