Alcohol-free beer raises a glass to £3.5m
LUCKY Saint, the alcohol-free beer, has pulled in £3.5 million from investors to fund its ambition to get its drinkers to buy more on draught in pubs.
Backers include Jonathan Warburton, chairman of bread dynasty Warburtons, who said founder Luke Boase impressed with his ‘absolute conviction’ and ‘exceptionally good quality product’.
He added: ‘It’s a very clean drink. I ordered 96 bottles on Boxing Day, thinking it was going to last me weeks. But my wife, who has never touched beer in her life, decided this was going to be her drink of choice and my stockpile has run down very quickly.’
Its sales collapsed as pubs shut at the start of the pandemic, but then grew 300 per cent as online demand rose sixfold and Boase sold more in Tesco and Sainsbury’s.
Boase said: ‘There has been a huge change in attitude to health. We already have the widest distribution of proper draught non-alcoholic beer and we are still tiny. The opportunity is huge.’
BRITISH workers on South American oil rigs are lobbying the Government for an exemption from the new hotel quarantine rules because they will create ‘unacceptable’ working conditions.
Stena Drilling, an Aberdeen-based drilling firm, has employees working on two drillships off the coast of Suriname and Guyana. Both are on the Government’s red list of 33 high-risk Covid-19 countries, meaning from Monday the oil and gas workers must quarantine for ten days in a Government-approved hotel when they return to the UK.
But Stena Drilling said its safety procedures are the industry’s ‘gold standard’ and that if employees have to isolate for ten days in a hotel after spending ten weeks on a rig, they will only have two weeks’ leave to spend with their families.
The firm’s HR director Trish Craig has written to Business Minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan asking her to add oil and gas workers to the list of exemptions from hotel quarantine to allow offshore crews to return directly home on arrival in the UK.
She said: ‘Having only two weeks at home in such a safety-critical industry will be unacceptable and will force us to close the operation down, which will put hundreds of jobs in jeopardy.’
Stena Drilling has not had a single case of Covid on its rigs because its workers isolate for 14 days in a company-run quarantine at the Marriott Hotel at Heathrow before flying to South America, and take two PCR Covid tests before departure. Further strict procedures are in place for transport to and from the rigs on sanitised charter jets.
Stena manager Nick Anders added: ‘Sadly, these measures have resulted in our crews spending further time away from their home and families. We are deeply concerned that, if they have to spend even more time away, their mental health and wellbeing will suffer.’ The oil and gas industry has been hit by a double whammy of low oil prices and a slump in demand due to Covid-19 lockdowns.
Stena Drilling warned ongoing quarantine restrictions could lead to production shortages.
The Government’s list of exemptions includes lorry drivers travelling from Portugal, government contractors, border officials and foreign police extraditing people from Britain.