Northern Irish craft brewery plans for faster growth
Bullhouse Brewing Company in Northern Ireland has launched a Crowdfunding campaign to raise finance to support its expansion plans which include growing business in Britain and the Republic of Ireland.
The craft brewery, based in a former bull pen on a family farm near Newtownards in county Down, is aiming to raise £10,000 to enable it to increase capacity of its existing and planned portfolio of beers. The brewery is the only one in Northern Ireland to produce all its products in cans.
William Mayne, who founded the small brewery in 2016, says: "We are on a mission to change the way Northern Ireland drinks. We have begun but now we need to expand, we need more capacity to make more beer!"
He started on a very small scale, producing 400 litres of beer per batch, bottling and labelling by hand and selling everything out of the back of his car. Demand soon began to outpace supply, so he enlisted the help of a local distributor and hasn't looked back since.
In September 2017, he decided to give up the day job and concentrate on the brewery full-time. To celebrate the occasion, he brewed a Pale Ale and called it P45!
So far, alongside the core range of lager, pale ale, session IPA and IPA he has brought to market a Potato Saison, a Maple and Bacon Porter, a Lemon and Strawberry Berliner Weisse, a Toasted Coconut Porter and a Barrel Aged Imperial Milk Stout.
Deciding to learn some plumbing, electrical and welding skills he has now upgraded to a custom built brewhouse, with current fermentation capacity at 25,000 litres per year.
"I believe Bullhouse is offering something unique and diverse to the Northern Irish market, and we are breaking away from the traditional styles and the 500ml bottles to package our entire core range in cans, the only Northern Ireland brewery to do so. This will also make exporting our beers to Britain and the Irish Republic much easier. Our main aim is producing forward thinking flavourful beers without compromising on their drinkability," he adds.
The brewery has a core range of beers including:
Small Axe 4.3% Session IPA - Named after the iconic Bob Marley song of the same name. 'If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.'
P45 4.8% Pale Ale - Name is pretty self explanatory!
Brainwashed 4% Unfiltered Lager - Named in honour of the monopolised, commoditised market we operate in here in Northern Ireland, where the large multinational brewers control the vast majority of the on-trade.
The Dankness - 5.5% IPA - New England style groovy IPA, low bitterness, pure tropical fruit.
"To progress and expand, we need to have the ability to make more beer, more frequently and also the ability to package our beer on-site. We currently only have the capacity to brew once a week at the most, and we are also sending our beer to England to be canned. We really need to be brewing twice a week and packaging all our beer on site here in Northern Ireland," he continues.