A craft brewery which describes Bristol as its spiritual home has raised almost twice its initial £1m crowdfunding target towards its new brewery and restaurant complex.
Rapidly-expanding The Wild Beer Co, which opened Hook at Bristol’s Wapping Wharf indie food-and-drink hub last year – has outgrown its current brewery on a dairy farm at Westcombe, near Shepton Mallet, and plans to develop a new, much-larger operation on the high-profile Bath & West Showground three miles away. 
It originally planned to raise around £9m from a mixture of bank funding and asset-backed finance with the remainder for the £10m scheme coming via a campaign through Crowdcube.
But that has already brought in £1.8m from more than £2,000 investors for the company – best known for its unusual approach to brewing and the quirky-flavoured beers that comes from it.
The brewery, with its strapline ‘Drink Wildly Different’, was set up by Andrew Cooper and Brett Ellis on a farm near Evercreech in Somerset in 2012.
Since then it has grown rapidly through its creative take brewing and has so far produced nearly 100 different varieties of beers, many conceived specifically to accompany food. It also exports to 22 countries – including the US, Australia, Russia and Japan – and has opened two venues – Hook in Bristol and Jessop House in Cheltenham.
It bottles and cans its own beer on site at Westcombe.
Its ambitious plans include transforming the current brewery into a barrel ageing specialist site and developing the new brewery at the Bath & West Showground, 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 brew more than 12m litres a year – around 10 times larger than its current brewery.
Brett Ellis said: “The brewery was started with a passion for the flavours of barrel-aged wild and sour beers. Our base in Somerset was the perfect backdrop that provided the inspiration and ingredients to begin that dream.”
The brewery has led the evolution of the wild beer market in the UK, which now has around 1,500 breweries – many of them opened in the past few years to coincide with the spiralling taste for craft beers.
But unlike the vast majority of these, The Wild Beer Co’s beers are fermented by wild yeasts, are often sour and/or funky, and are regularly be barrel-aged.
The company describes them as ‘slow beers’, with the flavours that take longer to develop, producing a results that are more complex, layered and refined.
Its Ninkasi, named after the Greek goddess of beer, is sold in 750ml bottles – the same size as a normal wine bottle – and is made with apple juice, wild yeasts, and New Zealand hops and fermented using the champagne method.
The firm said the Bath & West Showground, with an annual visitor footfall of nearly 1m and good road and rail links, was the perfect location for the new brewery.
Bath & West Society CEO Rupert Cox said:“To have such an ambitious and growing food and drink business here will help us add value to the offering for our on-site visitors, as well as demonstrate the Society’s commitment to support local companies in the sector.
“Ambitious and dedicated entrepreneurs producing top quality beer products in the heart of Somerset – what’s not to like?”
The Wild Beer Co is running its crowdfunding campaign through information Crowd Cube – for more information click here
