Founder buys back Brulines

The licensed trade's biggest supplier of beer dispense monitoring equipment, Brulines, was in new ownership this week following a management buyout led by company boss, Derrick Collin. Collin, who launched Brulines in 1995, used bank loans andhis own cash to take back the Stockton-on-Tees company which employs 65 people and installs more than 1,000 systems in pubs each year. He said he had acquired Brulines for an undisclosed sum and revealed he was already working on a number of new brands to take the company into a new era. These include plans for the launch of new state-of-the-art monitoring systems and a move to new headquarters in Stockton. "The buy-back will herald a new and exciting era for thecompany with a number of new developments and brand concepts already in the pipeline,"he said. "We are developing ever more sophisticated beer dispense systems which are set to give pub owners and licensees blue chip trading information to help them save money and grow their businesses." Collin entered the beer dispense monitoring business when he used his experience as an engineer in the nuclear industry to develop his first beerflow data analyst system in the mid 1990s. He sold his 33-strong pub company, Thornaby Leisure, to work full time in the dispense sector to build up Brulines as the industry's biggest beer monitor supplier. Collin floated Brulines in 1999 when the company became part of CBS, an AIM-quoted shell company.