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Brewer By the Horns has entered liquidation, with owners citing bad debtors, the economy and rent hikes as some of the reasons.
The company, founded in 2011 by Alex Bull and Chris Mills, started with a 5.5-barrel kit in Summerstown, South-East London before moving production out to a new site with the potential to produce 12,000hl, in Salfords, Surrey, in 2021 and was confident about its trading future. However, circumstances of the last year led to its demise.
Bull said: “During Covid we were okay, we did a lot of online business and when the leases were up at our old site, we saw the opportunity to build a production unit, and it was all working.
“Then 2023 hit and so did a lot of turmoil. We decided to take the lease next door in a calculated gamble to push volume up and we had good sales, but then every kind of cost soared and pinned us back because we couldn’t pass it all on to our customers.”
“Two companies we worked closely with crashed, Flavorly and Bier Nuts, owing us £50,000 between them, Sainsbury’s took us off the shelves despite being a top 10 seller because another large beer company wanted double the shelf space, our volume dropped to 6,000hl and we got a rent review on the second unit which pushed that up by 30 per cent.”
