Tiger in the tank (Everards)

Everards is a family brewery with lots of plans. Dominic Roskrow paid it a visit

First impressions can be deceptive.

Drive up to the Everards Castle Acre Brewery in Leicester and you’re not exactly writing missives back to your family.

It sits on the edge of the city’s newest and biggest retail park, just after a busy motorway intersection. It is neighboured on one side by a supermarket covering more space than the average football stadium, and on the other there is a furniture store with more room lay-outs than most housing estates.

Everard’s is, in a word, modern – as far removed from the bubbling brooks and idyllic green fields so often associated with English cask ale as you can get. And the company acknowledges as much.

“We use city water here,” says brand manager Erika Hardy. “We could hardly use anything else. It would be hard to claim we drew it from a spring under the shops.”

Don’t be fooled though. Beyond the big wine retailing operation, the mass of branded lorries and the mountains of metal kegs is a brewery with its roots planted firmly in tradition. Everards is first and foremost a brewery about cask-conditioned ale; and its future is being moulded around its core cask brands.

Let’s take a look at the location first. Things aren’t quite what they seem. Everard’s moved here some 20 years ago, when Fosse Park (as it is known) was little more than a pound sign in a property developer’s eye. Back then it was farmland, so rather than the brewery going to the retail park, it was the other way round.

Search beyond the dark brick and green p.....

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By Dominic Roskrow

Section : Brewery Focus

Page number : 24