Craft brewery The Wild Beer Co, which describes Bristol as its spiritual home, has invested more than £500,000 in a state-of-the-art canning line as it prepares move to a new ‘destination brewery’.
The new equipment has coincided with a branding overhaul for its cans to bring them into line with its bottled beers. It also comes hot on the heels of it tasting success in the ‘Best Drinks Producer’ category of the prestigious BBC Food & Farming Awards. 
The brewery – best known for its unusual approach to brewing and the quirky-flavoured beers that comes from it – said the new canning line marked a milestone in its development as it would raise the quality of its products to hit its targets of freshness and consistency.
The risk of oxidisation has been severely reduced, with ‘sell-by’ dates increased from six months to none months, meaning that it can sell its beers further afield both domestically and globally. Packaging time has also been drastically increased allowing it to increase production from 1,500 to 6,000 cans per hour.
The equipment has been bought in advance of Wild Beer’s proposed move from its current site on a dairy farm at Westcombe, near Shepton Mallet, to a new brewery and restaurant complex on the Bath & West Showground site three miles away.
Planning permission has been granted from Mendip Council for the development, which will include a taproom, restaurant, private dining and corporate hosting facilities with gardens growing fruit and veg for the beers and kitchen.
This unique brewery will have the capacity to make more than 12m litres of beer a year – around 10 times larger than Wild Beer’s current brewery.
The brewery, with its strapline ‘Drink Wildly Different’, was set up by Andrew Cooper and Brett Ellis in 2012. Since then it has grown rapidly through its creative take on brewing with its beers fermented by wild yeasts and barrel-aged. It has produced around 100 different varieties of beers, many conceived specifically to accompany food.
The company describes these as ‘slow beers’, with the flavours that take longer to develop, producing results that are more complex, layered and refined.
It also exports to 22 countries – including the US, Australia, Russia and Japan – and has opened two venues – at Bristol’s Wapping Wharf indie food-and-drink hub and Jessop House in Cheltenham.
The new branding for its cans brings them into line with its waxed 750ml bottles.
Three canned beers are immediately going into production including Bibble, a 4.2% pale ale,; Fresh, a 5.5% extra pale ale with citrus hops; and Pogo, a 4.1% pale ale with passion fruit, orange and guava. Two new cans – Yokai and a New England cloudy pale ale – are also slated for release this winter after successful road testing in kegs.
