Still very much Saint’s alive
St Peter’s Brewery is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary but it’s up for sale. What’s going on? Dominic Roskrow reports
It’s a success story with the buttons stuck in fast forward mode. From nought to the end of the 90s in record time, picking up awards on the way, St Peter’s Brewery has been on a white knuckle ride from the off.
Where did the time go? Is it really 10 years since the words ‘St Peter’s Brewery’ first passed our lips, followed promptly by its stimulating ales? And at the same time, were those adorable bottles just a twinkle in the marketing man’s eye as little as a decade ago?
As we roll in to 2006 it looks like that is indeed the case. The Suffolk brewery has, it seems, lived life in the fast lane, achieving as much since the mid 1990s as some breweries have since the mid 1880s.
And, being St Peter’s, the story’s in the process of taking another significant twist: the brewery’s up for sale, and not even the management are quite sure what that might mean for it.
Picture a real ale brewery and you conjure up a romantic idyll of rolling fields, peaceful ponds and perhaps babbling brooks. Throw in a church and you’ve just created St Peter’s, the sort of place that inspired Constable. It is, indeed, an old church nestling in the middle of the prettiest nowhere imaginable, warm and welcoming in summer, bleak and a tad foreboding as winter rolls in.
And it’s compact: in one building, the walkthrough brewery which allows you to follow the process from start to finish in logical order; the bottling, labelling and packaging plant, and the delivery and collection store room, built un.....
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By Dominic Roskrow
Section : Spotlight
Page number : 51
