Adnams instructs advisers

The 152-year-old brewer is working with Alvarez & Marsal on a range of options to store up its finances.

These are likely to include an injection of private capital form a high-net-worth investor or family office.

The Southwold-based brewer will also consider selling some of its freehold pubs and inns.

The objective of the plan is to raise capital to pay down bank debt and fund further growth initiatives. 

This comes after data from the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) revealed the number of active breweries at the start of the year had reduced from 2023 levels.

Brewery closures

The UK total number of active brewers now stands at 1815, compared to 1828 in January 2023. The data tracks all new brewery openings and closures to give a quarterly growth or closure rate, and despite a promising third quarter, when numbers rose slightly, the tracker finished the year with a -2 net closure rate in Q4 leading to an overall net closure rate of -13 for 2023.

Last year The Morning Advertiser​ caught up with Adnams production director Fergus Fitzgerald Adnams.

Back in 2004, Adnams was very heavily into making cask beer – in fact the only thing it could package on site was cask – while all the beer for bottling or canning, which at the time was very small, was sent away for packaging.

Production director

The same went for any kegged beer, which was also small in quantities at the time.

“At that time, probably about 85% of what we did was cask beer but that has changed over the years and cask is now about 35% of what we do,” Adnams said. “We’d planned for that so we did lots of investments between 2007 and 2017 to give us the capacity and ability to do other things on site.

“Now we can condition and filter beer, we can keg beer on site and we added lots of other interesting things around de-alcoholisers as well.”