Brewery of the Day: Robinsons
How do you take nearly 200 years of brewing history and get it ready for the next 200? Robinsons has just had a pretty good go at answering that. After 187 years of brewing in the heart of Stockport, this much-loved family brewery has made one of the biggest moves in its history – literally – moving brewing from its historic Hillgate home into a fantastic new £8.4 million brewhouse at Bredbury. It’s a bold new chapter for a brewery that began life at the Unicorn Inn in 1838 and is now in its sixth generation of family ownership, with around 250 pubs across the North West and North Wales.
For beer drinkers, the really exciting bit is what’s happening inside. The new brewery brings brewing and packaging together under one roof, with brilliant new technology sitting alongside generations of brewing know-how. It’s more efficient, more sustainable and built for the future – and cask is very much part of that future. In fact, cask makes up an impressive 28% of beer sold in Robinsons pubs, around five times the on-trade average, and its cask volumes grew by around 5% in the latest reported year. Earlier this year, Cask Marque founder Paul Nunny and the Cask Marque board went for a look behind the scenes and came away seriously impressed, with Paul describing the scale of the investment and innovation as “genuinely impressive”. We suspect there may have been a few envious brewers peering at the new kit too.
And that’s why we’re so excited to make Robinsons our Brewery of the Day. Moving a brewery with this much history could have been all about protecting the past. Instead, Robinsons has made it about what comes next. There’s new kit, new possibilities and a whole new chapter being written – while the family, the pubs and that commitment to a properly kept pint of cask remain firmly at the heart of it. Nearly two centuries in, Robinsons isn’t slowing down. It’s just fired up a brand-new brewery. Now that really is something worth raising a pint to.
Discover more: Visit the Robinsons Brewery website and take a look at Paul Nunny and Cask Marque’s visit to the new brewery on LinkedIn.