Thwaites deal favours Marston's

The scale of Marston’s £25 million takeover of Thwaites is becoming clear and it adds up to a deal that will see Marston’s brands flooding the 320 pubs owned by the Blackburn company plus Thwaites’ 1,200 free trade accounts.

Thwaites’ beer production adds up to a sizeable 100,000 barrels a year, a nice piece of business for Marston’s, which already owns Banks’s, Brakspear, Jennings, Ringwood and Wychwood. The beers include the best-selling Lancaster Bomber and Wainwright’s, which will also be made available to Marston’s licensees.

All the dice seem to be firmly on Marston’s side of the table. Thwaites’ business plan has been odd, to say the least. In 2014, it closed its Blackburn brewery, opened in 1807 by founder Daniel Thwaites, and said it would build a new plant on a green field site. You might consider it sensible to open a new brewing facility before closing the old one but, shorn of a brewery, Thwaites’ beers have been brewed by Marston’s at its Wolverhampton plant since February last year.

Thwaites’ chief executive Richard Bailey says it’s still his intention to build a new brewery at Mellor at a cost of £10 million but as he has agreed a 10-year supply deal with Marston’s you have to wonder what would be produced at the new plant. He is keeping control of his Crafty Dan micro-brewing plant but this produces short-run, specialist beers in cask, keg and bottled form. A spokesman for Thwaites said on 2 April that a new brewery at Mellor “was still an option” but options are not quite the same as firm commitments.

The £25 million Thwaites will get from Marston’s will be invested, Bailey, says, in buying new pubs and improving the existing estate. It’s safe to say that we can bid goodbye to Thwaites as an old and revered family brewer and see it become a pub company.

Marston’s is likely to take the opportunity to push its main brands – Pedigree and Hobgoblin – to Thwaites’ tied and free trade pubs. The Jennings’ beer from Cumbria could also be an attractive proposition for publicans and drinkers in the North-west.

But there must be fears for the future of some of the Thwaites’ brands, such as Nutty Black mild and Original bitter that could be under threat from the likes of Banks’s Mild and Marston’s Burton Bitter.

Richard Westwood, managing director of Marston’s Beer Company, will also take control of the distribution of Kaltenberg and Warsteiner German beers that Thwaites currently sells and he says the deal with Thwaites will not the last that Marston’s will make.

“This is an indication of how ambitious we are, how aspirational we are,” he adds.

Family brewers beware.