St Andrews Brewing Co. raises £400k in five days

Scotland’s St Andrews Brewing Co. raised £400,000 through crowdfunding in just five days as the brewer plans to increase production five-fold to one million pints by 2019.

Founded in 2013, the brewery is the first in the town since 1905 and currently boasts a brew pub in St Andrews as well as two sites in Edinburgh. It plans to open a fourth site in the Caird Hall in Dundee while it announced plans last week to take over St Andrews bar Rascals, which fellow Scottish brewer BrewDog had also been in talks with.

The Fife-based brewery has now entered overfunding with a total of £413,170 raised to-date from 310 investors for a total of 5.22% equity.

With the investment, St Andrews Brew Co. hopes to raise production to 1,000,000 pints by 2019, install its own bottling and canning lines and also add an on-site taproom and bottle shop.

The company has been valued at £7.5 million and currently supplies 60,000 bottles of its beer a year to supermarkets including Sainsbury’s, Asda and Aldi. It is also planning to start bottling beer which has been aged for over four months in whisky casks from Edrington’s Glenturret distillery.

With plans to open a new venue each year until 2021, with at least one to be opened overseas, the brewery will also be launching a recruitment drive as well as retaining all existing members of staff at Rascals bar.

In addition to crowdfunding, the brewer aims to raise a total of £1.5 million over the next three years with support from banks, asset finance and general revenue.

Hiring has already begun with Rascals’ owner Colin Donaldson joining the brewery in a senior role.

Speaking to the Courier, managing director of St Andrews Brewing Co., Philip Mackey, said: “We had detailed negotiations with Colin which led to us confirming the arrangements for bringing Rascals into the Brewing Company family.

“As an added bonus, Colin was keen to join the St Andrews Brewing Company as part of the deal in a key senior role to help develop our overseas exports. His appointment has already delivered significant benefit.

“We are very excited about what Rascals can bring to St Andrews Brewing Company particularly the potential it offers to create another exceptional and individual venue in our iconic hometown.

“We will be making some subtle changes and improvements during the summer with a full shut down planned for early September to allow us to undertake a full refurbishment”.