Camden Town Brewery, a wholly owned subsidiary of AB InBev, officially opened a new £30 million ($39m) facility at Navigation Park, an industrial area in Enfield Town, one of the major centers in the north of Greater London/UK. The largest investment in London’s brewing industry for 30 years has around 50,000 sq ft (4,645 square meters) in size and can produce up to 400,000 hectoliter (341,000 barrels) annually.
Camden Town Brewery, which was founded by Jasper Cuppaidge, the owner of The Horseshoe pub in Hampstead in 2010. At the end of 2015, when the brewery was sold to AB InBev for about £85m (about $110m), the brewery marketed about 57,000 hectoliters of its products and the beer was available in over 1000 pubs, bars, restaurants and retailers around the UK, as well as in Australia, Sweden and Japan.
Major reason of the heavily criticized decision of Cuppaidge to sell the brewery was the need to raise additional money for a second brewery. “AB InBev are investing to build a new brewery to our exact standards, so I can continue to make great beer. They’re not making a beer for us. To stay at the forefront of this movement and secure our future success, we have to build a bigger brewery, employ more people and gain access to an international distribution network. We can’t do this on our own,” Cuppaidge said at that time.
The new brewing site will be added to the existing brewery in Kentish Town, just 9 miles (14 km) south-west of Navigation Park, which will be renovated to become a pilot brewery.
According to his Wikipedia entry Jasper Cuppaidge (born 1975) is the grandson of Laurie McLaughlin, who ran McLaughlin’s Brewery in Rockhampton, Australia from 1910-1960, along with an estate of 60 pubs. During the mid-1990s, Cuppaidge missed his flight back home to Australia and consequently remained in England, collecting glasses in a London pub. Ten years later, he purchased a dilapidated Hampstead pub and reopened it in 2006 as The Horseshoe, serving food, wine, and beer.
Cuppaidge brewed his first batch of beer, named Mac's Beer in honour of his grandfather, at The Horseshoe in 2007 as a birthday present for his mother, Patricia. Based on one of McLaughlin's old recipes, the beer proved successful with the pub's customers, and Cuppaidge began to sell it to his pub-owner friends. In 2009, he began to pursue a full-time business in brewing lager. Shortly after, Cuppaidge rented five Victorian railway arches underneath Kentish Town West Station, where Camden Town Brewery officially started brewing in fall 2010.
