Greene King calls time at 200-year-old brewery in shift beyond cask ales

Chief executive Nick Mackenzie says the new brewery will be designed to allow for changes in customer trends

Greene King is calling time at its 200-year-old Bury St Edmunds brewery as it moves away from traditional cask ales to focus on more modern, fizzy craft beers.

The Old Speckled Hen Brewer is to build a new £40m facility in the town in an attempt to modernise the company and brew more craft beers to reach a younger audience.

Greene King plans to move the majority of its brewing to the new site from its existing Westgate Brewery in the city, where it has produced beers for two centuries.

It comes amid a wider shift away from traditional cask beers by the brewer as demand for the beer style, which is served at cellar temperature, has fallen.

Nick Mackenzie, chief executive officer at Greene King, said: “We’re obviously designing [the new brewery] to allow for changes in customer trends, to allow us to have a significant cask element, but also over time to be able to have an equally significant craft presence with modern beers.”

The firm plans to move the majority of its brewing away from its current Bury St Edmunds site – Tony Buckingham

The Suffolk-based brewer launched its first craft beers in 2022 – Flint Eye, a dry-hopped lager, and Level Head, a session IPA.

Cask ale sales in British pubs, meanwhile, have fallen from more than £1.2bn before the pandemic to £973m in 2023, according to hospitality industry data company CGA.

However, Mr Mackenzie insisted: “Cask is still a very significant part of the market. There’s a lot of negativity around cask and its long term trajectory, but we certainly see there is an opportunity there. We’re still selling five million pints of cask every week.”

The new site is expected to take around three years to complete before Greene King can begin brewing there.

Mr Mackenzie added: “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.”

Greene King’s brands include Old Speckled Hen, Greene King IPA and Abbot Ale

Founded in 1799 by Benjamin Greene, Greene King is one of Britain’s best-known regional brewers. Its brands include Old Speckled Hen, Greene King IPA and Abbot Ale.

As well as brewing beers, it runs around 3,000 pubs across the country, employing about 39,000 people overall.

Previously a public company, it was bought by an investment business run by Hong Kong’s richest family in 2019 for £2.7bn.

Mr Mackenzie said while the brewer plans to stop doing most of its brewing at the Westgate Brewery, it may continue to make small batches of some beers there.

“The likelihood is we will retain some elements of small scale brewing here. We’ve got pubs right next to the brewery and we’ve got a brewery tour, so we will look to retain brewing heritage elements on the site,” he said.

The new brewery will also be designed to be more environmentally friendly as Greene King pushes to reach Net Zero by 2040 and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50pc by 2030.

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