Sheps breaks the deadlock
For years Shepherd Neame's Faversham brewery was hampered by the constraints of its town-centre location. Now it has broken free with the help of a £6m investment. Graham Ridout reports
People might be forgiven for thinking that town-centre breweries are an endangered species. You only have to look at what happened to Brakspear, which was squeezed out of its historic Henley-upon-Thames site because the land was worth more for residential and commercial use than as a brewery.
Young's might well go the same way because its famous Ram Brewery sits in the centre of Wandsworth and hungry developers would love to buy the site and relocate the brewery.
For many a year, Shepherd Neame looked as if it was also under threat not from developers but from being able to meet demand at its Faversham brewery. To say the least, production space was at a premium because demand had doubled over the past decade.
That threat has now eased, thanks to a £6.7m investment programme over the past year the largest amount Sheps has committed in a single year. The key element is £3m spent on a new warehouse and distribution centre located at the edge of the town. The new 96,000sq ft centre, which lies on a 61 2-acre site, is a much-needed "luxury", says chief executive Jonathan Neame.
"We have moved all our distribution to the edge of town and that has freed up our town-centre site for further expansion," explains Neame.
"Prior to the move," he says: "Some of our thinking was restricted and we got into the awful cycle of saying should we give up product x or product y and concentrate on other products'."
The distribution centre was officially opened at the end of October, freeing space within the brewery for a new state-of-the art kegging plant. Another £2m has been ploughed into the plant, which is located in a former warehouse and is principally intended for the four lagers that Sheps brews under contract German lager Holsten Export, Dutch Pilsner Oranjeboom, Indian brand Kingfisher and Swiss lager Hurlimann.
The kegging plant came into full production at the beginning of February and is claimed to be the most efficient outside of the UK's national brewers. It can handle 300 kegs per hour and the centrepiece is a robot, nicknamed Frank, that handles pallets of empty kegs, places the kegs on conveyors for cleansing and filling, and then stacks the full containers for subsequent shipment to the new distribution centre.
As well as mechanising the process, the move is estimated to be eliminating 120 heavy-goods vehicle movements per day from the historic town centre. Production and distribution director Ian Dixon says moving the warehousing and distribution functions to the new site has "resulted in efficiency and productivity gains and added 10% to 15% capacity to the brewery site".
225,000 barrels per annum
Dixon says production is currently running at 225,000 barrels per annum, with capacity split almost 50:50 between ales and keg products.
An immediate outcome of the investment programme has been the introduction of a new bottle-conditioned ale 1698. Named after the year the company was founded, the 6.5% abv, triple-hopped ale marks a welcome return by Sheps to the bottle-conditioned ale market after an absence of a decade. Improved production and hygiene standards have made the return possible after worries about infection caused Sheps to stop producing bottle-conditioned Spitfire ale.
Further plans are under way, subject to council approval, to invest in improvements to the visitors' centre. Neame explains: "Currently, we receive 20,000 visitors per year and I think we can double that. If Australian wine producers can attract 100,000 visitors, I don't see why we can't attract 40,000, given our history and the provenance of our beers."
There are also plans to install a microbrewery on the site for one-off or speciality beers that are uneconomic to produce on the main brewery lines, which have a run-length of 100 barrels at a time. Sheps already has two microbrewery plants in storage, which could also be used to give younger brewers their head.
