The contents of the historic Mortlake Brewery in Richmond, London, are to be sold via private treaty and online auction by auctioneer and valuer Eddisons in association with CBRE, drawing a line under the iconic site’s continuous use as a brewery since 1487.
The Mortlake site, famous as the home of Watney’s Red Barrel and Pale Ale beers until the 1980s, was one of eight huge London breweries still operating in the mid 1970s, which between them generated one in every five pints of beer drunk in Britain.
For the past 20 years the brewery produced vast quantities of Budweiser, with more than 60,000 bottles of lager an hour processed by its bottling line for distribution in the UK and across Europe. The plant’s yearly brewing capacity was 2.35 million hectolitres (235 million litres).
Developer Reselton bought the brewery site in 2015 for £158m. Dartmouth Capital Advisors are currently developing plans for a mixed scheme consisting of residential, community, recreational and commercial use on the site next to the River Thames.
The plant’s Steinecker brewhouse, fermentation block, chip cellar and bottling line, along with grain handling equipment, over a hundred 100-and-200-hectolitre brewing vessels, yeast plant and energy centre, will all be sold by private treaty. Hundreds of lots of ancillary assets will also be sold in an online auction on January 16, with a viewing day on January 11.
Jason Pinder, national head of machinery and business assets at Eddisons, said: “The vast scale of the contents of this iconic brewery is likely to attract the interest of global brewing businesses as well as those in developing countries. This is a rare opportunity to invest in high quality, large capacity brewery plant. We expect high levels of interest in the plant and urge interested parties to contact us sooner rather than later.”
