Greene King calls time at 200-year-old Bury brewery

GREENE KING is calling time at its 200-year-old Bury St Edmunds brewery as it opens a new site that will produce more modern, fizzy craft beers alongside traditional cask ales.

The Old Speckled Hen brewer is to build a new £40m facility in the Suffolk 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, 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, which is served at cellar temperature, has fallen.

Nick Mackenzie, chief executive 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.”

Cask ale sales in 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 5m pints of cask every week.”

Mr Mackenzie added: “We know things can change over time. So we’ve tapped into supporting low and no [alcohol], [and] 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.”

Greene King also runs around 3,000 pubs across the country, employing about 39,000 people overall.

Mr Mackenzie said the brewer may continue to make some beers at Westgate. “The likelihood is we will retain some elements of small-scale brewing here. We’ve got pubs 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.