Greene King is to invest £40m in a new brewhouse in Bury St Edmunds and gear production towards the craft beer market.
The majority of brewing will move away from the Westgate Brewery in the city, where beer has been made for 200 years. Small-batch production is likely to continue there, where brewery tours can be enjoyed.
Greene King says the change is a response to customer trends, with cask sales down, although the brewer is still selling 5 million pints a week. Chief executive Nick Mackenzie insists the brewery won’t be ditching cask and still sees opportunities for the style.
He told The Telegraph: “We know things can change over time. So we’ve tapped into supporting low and no [alcohol], we’ve tapped into some more craft type beers that we historically didn’t do.
“But we’re maintaining a view that cask ales are really high quality with good provenance in terms of the ingredients within those beers. That will tap into a younger generation in time, but that’s gonna take time for us to get there.
“[Cask] will remain pretty important to us, but we’ve then got to adapt over time to make sure we get the right balance between where consumer trends are.”
The new brewery is expected to take three years to come on line.
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