Scottish craft beer maker Innis & Gunn today announced the $3.5 million purchase of the Perth, Scotland-based Inveralmond Brewery.
Financed entirely with capital raised via the company’s crowd-funded “Innis & Gunn BeerBond” program last year, the acquisition of Inveralmond gives Innis & Gunn access to a brick & mortar brewing facility, which it lacked, as well as control of more than a dozen labels currently produced and marketed by Inveralmond.
“It gives us a home where we can innovate and experiment with some of the new brewing processes we’ve been dreaming up,” Innis & Gunn founder Dougal Sharp said via a press release. “This is more than an Innis & Gunn brewery; we’re building a totem for innovation and a launch pad for our continued expansion at home and abroad.”
Innis & Gunn currently produces its beer under contract with Wellpark Brewery and Girvan Distillery, and sells in more than 20 countries, according to its website.
In a press statement, the company said it plans to “embark on significant investment in the Perth facility,” improving manufacturing capabilities to “support its innovative brewing processes.” It also plans to install additional fermentation tanks and expand capacity.
“Taking over an already fantastic brewery gives us a rolling start in the development of our new state-of-the-art equipment and processes, meaning we can grow much faster than if we started from scratch,” Sharp said in the release. “It means we’ve avoided a lot of the red tape and planning issues around building a site from the ground up and we can concentrate on what we do best – brewing beer.”
Innis & Gunn, which is famous for its oak-infused products, said it plans to build a new oak barrel maturation warehouse and install its “unique proprietary infusion equipment” inside the new brewery. It also hopes to install a small bottling line in 2017.
“As we searched for a site for our new brewery, it became clear there was an opportunity to combine the strengths of both businesses and for us to acquire their brewery and brands,” Sharp said in the release.
The Inveralmond brewing team will be “unaffected by the acquisition,” the company said.
“To me this feels like a real win-win,” Inveralmond founder and managing director Fergus Clark said in the release. “Our Inveralmond beers will gain access to a sales and distribution infrastructure that will massively accelerate the growth of our beers both at home and Internationally, while at the same time Innis & Gunn gets the brewery they want 18 months earlier than if they had to build it themselves.”
Founded in 2003, Innis & Gunn generated more than $13.5 million in revenue in 2014, according to a press statement. The company, which sold 85,000 hectoliters of craft beer in 2015, generated about 65 percent of its annual revenues from export business. The smaller Inveralmond produced 10,000 hectoliters in 2015.