Spanish craft brewer Garage Barcelona has launched a €200,000 (£176k) equity crowdfunding campaign to support a push into UK grocery.
The brewery, founded in 2015 by James Welsh and Alberto Zamborlin, is raising via Crowdcube at a valuation of €22.9m. The campaign will open to UK investment this week, with more than three-quarters of its initial target already raised from EU investors.
It is the second time Garage has turned to crowdfunding, having previously raised €500k in 2016 to build its current brewhouse.
Funds from the latest round will be used to improve the efficiency of brewing operations and increase cold storage capacity in order to facilitate a greater push into the UK market. The brewery also plans to open a third taproom in Barcelona.
Presently, Garage exports around 10% of its beer to the market via distributor Cave Direct.
There was a “clear thirst” for Spanish craft beer from UK consumers, Welsh told The Grocer.
“The UK is our biggest export market – it’s at 10% now but in we have exported as much as 500hl pre-Covid and pre-Brexit,” he said. “We’ve seen a 250% uplift in UK visitors to our website in the last year, and around 15% of our total followers on Instagram are from the UK.
“That really demonstrates how much demand there is for our beer in the UK that we can’t service because we can’t get it into the market produced efficiently enough.”
Garage was approached by a major multiple this summer about launching its beers into UK grocery, Welsh revealed.
“It was a premium account so not one of the discounters but still we were not able to get it over on terms that would have worked for us,” he said.
Launching in UK grocery was “something we want to do a proper job of”, Welsh said. “We don’t want to be decreasing the quality of our product but with the investment in efficiency it might be feasible for us to do it.”
No comments yet