A good Hyding

Hydes has sped up the family brewer league table in the past few months. Phil Mellows reports.

Amid all the hullaballo surrounding the closure of Manchester's legendary Boddingtons Brewery earlier this year nobody seems to have taken much notice of the dramatic events up the road at Hydes. The family brewer in Moss Side picked up the contract to brew cask Boddies from Inbev, keeping production of the beer in Manchester. That may have been some consolation for drinkers, but for Hydes it is proving to be much more important than that.

Adding Boddingtons - along with keg Flowers IPA, a less publicised part of the deal - has nearly doubled the brewery's volume, which soared from 64,000 barrels a year last November to 120,000 barrels this April. In the league table of family brewers Hydes has gone from 14th largest to sixth.

Remarkably, the company has achieved that leap in the mere 12 weeks it took to install and commission the £1m-worth of new kit it needed.

"Two other brewers Inbev approached already had the capacity but we had to bring in new fermenters, refrigeration plant, cask washers and rackers and a cleaning centre for the brewhouse," says production and distribution director Paul Jeffries. "That in itself was quite a challenge. And then we had to flavour-match the Boddingtons," he adds. "Inbev insisted on an exact match and it took 12 trials. We got it right with only a week to spare."

All cask Boddies has been brewed at Hydes since March and production has already hit a million pints - with little sign that the drinkers of Manchester have noticed any difference.

As part of the expansion Hydes also took on and trained eight new people, including three from Boddies - one of them the quality assurance manager - amounting to a 50 per cent increase in brewhouse staff. But the Boddingtons moment was not the beginning, nor will it be the end, of a period of considerable expansion for a traditional family firm with ambitions.

The next phase will be a £2m development on land which, after protracted negotiations that have taken all of three years, Hydes has bought next door. A new warehouse and office complex will ease congestion at the existing site, giving the company scope for more growth and creating more jobs in a part of Manchester that badly needs them.

There's more to this success story than Boddingtons, though. Hydes already had a relationship with Inbev's previous incarnation Interbrew, brewing keg Trophy for the international giant in a reciprocal deal that puts Stella Artois and Castlemaine XXXX on its pubs' bars.

The origin of Hydes' move into contract brewing goes back even further. At the end of the 1980s it took on production of Harp for Guinness and saw through the brand's relaunch as the reformulated Harp Irish a few years back.

Brewing Harp required state-of-the-art kit and the company invested £1.2m in a lager brewhouse, conditioning and fermenters.

"It was that equipment and the quality assurance needed to comply with Guinness' standards which pointed the way Hydes would go in the future," says Paul. "But after that there was not much development until the late 1990s. When I arrived in 1997 we were brewing only 19,500 barrels a year. All that wonderful kit was being under-used and you could see the potential."

That potential began to be realised around the time Paul joined the company from Carlsberg-Tetley. He brought with him not only the 300 years of experience in brewing the Jeffries family could boast but a certain commercial edge, a way of marrying the modern techniques of big brewers to tradition, the holy grail of the family brewer.

A new forward-looking attitude was distilled in the name given to Hydes' three year expansion strategy - Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG). Thanks to Boddies one of those goals, to increase beer production to 100,000 barrels, has now been achieved early.

With that out of the way, Hydes' managing director Chris Hopkins and his team, with the support of the family, will be able to tackle the other two BHAGs - to join The Times' top 100 employer listing and become one of the North West's three leading pub operators.

Assuming Jennings is absorbed by Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries as predicted, that pubs target - based on The Publican's Industry Report top 100 pubco listing - is now looking more achievable.

Much of Hydes' pub investment over the last couple of years has gone into developing its Heritage Inns concept, a fleet of high class, food-led flagships. But we might expect the company to start going for some Big Hairy Audacious acquisitions in the months ahead.

Pictured top: Paul Jeffries (right) and brewing manager Bjorn Hoogenberg celebrate Hydes' expansion.​

Hydes' brewing plant​

Behind Hydes' quaint panelled, eminently Victorian reception area, hides a high-tech brewing plant squeezed into a site of less than an acre. Now that it's brewing 120,000 barrels a year that possibly makes Hydes the most productive brewer per square foot in the country.

Expansion into the adjoining land, currently home to a community centre, won't come too soon at the plant. Brewing equipment has encroached into more and more of the yard and drays are finding it hard to manouvre - the lumps taken out of the gate posts are evidence of that.

It is not only an intensive operation. It is also very flexible. With Boddingtons on stream, Hydes now brews no fewer than 13 cask beers plus 16 keg lagers and ales. Paul Jeffries believes it is the last brewer in the country to make three different cask milds.

Several beers are brewed for wholesalers and others are designed chiefly for the North West clubs market.

Hydes has its standards, too. When the marketing department called for an IPA Paul refused to make one at less than seven per cent ABV - "that's the strength a proper IPA should be" - and a compromise was reached in HPA.

HPA stands for Highly Prestigious Ale and is being relaunched, at 4.5 per cent, as a dark and malty complement to Hydes' existing premium cask ale Jekyll's Gold, six years into its life and the brand that's beginning to get the company name known outside Manchester.

The line-up on a Hydes bar is also likely to include the latest in the brewer's craft beer programme, which has been producing quirky one-off brews since 1998. The current one, for instance, is Elevation, which commemorates the Manchester Bomber, until now overshadowed by the much more famous Lancaster Bomber - and no doubt there's a slight dig in there at the Thwaites beer of that name.

Harp Irish remains an important part of the portfolio and the volume brewed in Manchester is up by more than 20 per cent on last year, Hydes having taken on SA Brain's share.

Hydes even has its own challenger to Guinness, although the interesting Hydes Black is easier-drinking at 3.5 per cent ABV and is more like a cross between a stout and a mild.