Investment plans at brewery bucking the trend during tough times

A brewery has unveiled investment plans to boost productivity – and revealed it is to open a new café-bar.

Titanic Brewery is installing a new £72,000 grain silo at its site in Stoke-on-Trent, which it hopes will also help with soaring prices and have an environmental impact.

And whilst many companies in the manufacturing and hospitality sectors struggle with challenges from rising costs, the company is planning to further expand its business with a new café-bar in later this year.

A new bod café-bar – creating 20 to 30 jobs – will open in Staffordshire, with the exact location set to be announced next month.

Marketing Manager David Glenwright said: “There are a lot of challenges in the hospitality sector at the moment, as well as for breweries with the rising costs of materials to produce beer and energy prices.

“Fortunately, we have invested in a lot of technology over the years to keep these costs to a minimum. This also helps us to keep the cost of our products down – whether that’s for drinkers at home or licensees.

“March marks the fifth anniversary of our first bod café-bar – in Stafford – and we plan to make an exciting announcement then.

“Meanwhile, we’re looking forward to the installation of the new silo.”

Titanic Brewery’s Burslem base currently produces just under four million pints of beer a year. The company employs 250 people between brewery, eight pubs and seven café-bars across Staffordshire but also further afield.

Previous investments include solar panels at the brewery and a heat exchange system, which uses residual heat waste heat from brewing to warm up water ready for the next brew.

The new silo will have a capacity of 32 tons of grain. It will cut the need for deliveries in plastic sacks – meaning less deliveries are needed, a cost-saving can be made from buying in bulk, a significant reduction in the use of plastic and more efficient use of the brewery team’s time and resources.

But the biggest benefit is that the silo will allow Titanic to better mill the grain, which in turn will allow the team to extract more from the grain and get a higher yield per ton.

David added: “This benefit, alongside the economic and environmental benefits of switching from sack deliveries to silo will have not only an immediate positive impact on brewing operations, but will also serve as a crucial step in supporting any future investments and expansions.”

Daily Focus reported in December that two breweries – Slaters Ales in Stafford and Burton Town Brewery in Burton upon Trent – were to close due to difficult trading conditions. However, pub group Marstons, which has its brewery in Burton upon Trent, said last month that it is hoping to achieve £1 billion in sales this year after a strong festive period.