Beavertown founder on £40m Heineken deal and keeping brand integrity

CEO Logan Plant tells Samuel Fishwick how he plans to keep his hops hip
Logan Plant, the owner of Beavertown Brewery in Tottenham
Daniel Hambury

Look, we’ve got a dream to build,” says Logan Plant, 39, CEO and co-founder of Beavertown Brewery, where right now everything seems glass half-full.

Birds are chirping and the sun is shining in Tottenham Hale, where his Beavertown brewery is sited. Last week Plant sealed a £40 million cash injection from Heineken, which will help build ‘Beaverworld’, a new brewery and visitor site.

But not everyone’s happy. A number of businesses have pledged to boycott Beavertown and its upcoming festival, Beavertown Extravaganza, accusing the independent business of selling out.

Hop Burns & Black in Peckham Rye announced it would no longer sell Beavertown stock and declared itself “f***ing gutted”.

Logan Plant pictured in their north east London brewery
Daniel Hambury

“I understand what a big brewer brings, and perhaps how they can be perceived,” says Plant. “But this is an arms-length deal. My wife and I remain in full control of the company. We’ve been very lucky — Heineken said to us, ‘Here’s £40 million, build this dream, and if you need us, we’re here’.”

This is a family business, he says. There’s no Rolex, yacht or pay rise in the pipeline for Plant or his wife Bridget. “I don’t like watches and I don’t like the sea,” he says.

Beavertown is known for its wildly popular Gamma Ray American Pale Ale and cartoon cans, so jazzy that they practically trigger a dopamine rush on sight. At weekends, the brewery hosts up to 600 people in its courtyard, with off-trade beer priced from £3. “It’s beer for the many, not the few,” says Plant.

Isn’t that someone else’s line? “Who’s? Oh, sorry Jeremy. But yes, it is a bit like a socialist beer community.”

Nevertheless, craft beer has become big business, making people like Plant very rich. Camden Town Brewery was sold in 2015 in an £85 million deal with AB InBev, the drinks giant that owns Budweiser. London’s Brixton Brewery sold a minority stake to Heineken last year, while BrewDog sold 22 per cent of its shares to San Francisco-based TSG Consumer Partners in a deal worth £213 million. And Beavertown simply ran out of room. The new site should add 150 jobs to its 83 staff.

But Plant says his company’s independence is both the key to its popularity and necessary to its survival. “People are power. People have to feel a connection to it. That’s why it has snowballed. Because a hell of a lot of us are putting in a hell of a lot of energy. And Bridget and myself put in everything that we had. Every ounce of cash we had personally; our house was on the line. You go all in, and you roll the dice. We were lucky to break through.”

Raising the cash was “the hardest thing”. “2011 was when we started going to the banks, in the middle of the recession. They were like, this is the last thing we want to invest in. Who wants to go out and enjoy themselves in a recession? But actually, out of darkness cometh light, and out of adversity comes great things. That typifies what’s happened in London, if you look at that year, so many things started for something, like a little lily pad in the pond.”

Logan with his father Robert, the former Led Zeppelin frontman, and sister Carmen Jane, as Robert collects his CBE in 2009 (PA )
PA

If that sounds a bit, well, lyrical, it should be noted that Plant’s dad is former Led Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant. Epic thinking runs in the family. “My dad was taking me to the pub, oh God, probably before I could open my eyes. The beer is an extension of your house in the Midlands. It’s an extension of your front room. You go there to laugh, cry, fart, marry, divorce.” Didn’t they get mobbed by band fans?

“The mindset is brilliant up there. It’s so open. It’s more like taking the piss, like, ‘Y’all right Planty, how you doing, you still doing a bit?’ And my dad would sheepishly say, ‘Yeah, just another album and been on tour for three months’. They don’t care. It’s all about banter. It’s a complete leveller. Nobody’s above or beyond anyone else.”

Another leveller — the England team — is on his mind. “When have we seen England be this dominant? The country has to go mad, throw beer around, go crazy and hug. It’s the most important thing.” In one warehouse, a poster of captain Harry Kane has Beavertown stickers on it, and there are footballs behind the door (the company will have a tap room at Tottenham Hotspur’s new ground when it opens in September).

“I just hope we have enough beer to fulfil that journey,” says Plant. Enough beer? There’s a drought on, and refreshments are in short supply. The shortage has been caused by factories in Europe that produce CO2, needed in the fermentation process, scaling back production for maintenance works at the same time.

“It’s a perfect storm. We haven’t seen anything like this for decades. The NHS is struggling. Food manufacturers are struggling. Nuclear reactors are struggling. Down the line, brewers are struggling. So there’s a serious side to this story that England fans are drinking the bars dry. But it’s all coming back online. We’d like to save the nation from hop deprivation. It’s serious. We’ve had to pull production back by 50 per cent.”

Beavertown is now London's largest independent brewer
Beavertown

Now, Plant lives in Queensbridge. He and Bridget met when Plant “was four”. “We were at Steiner school in Stourbridge, in the same class together for two years.” She left the school, then they met at a Boxing Day party when they were 15. “She’s 50 per cent owner. We absolutely have equal shares, equal pay. She’s half of everything. It means the heart of everything you do for the business is in the right place. You do look at [the business] like it’s your family.”

Beer may have been his first love, but he was committed to music in his twenties, singing in two bands. “We played every bathroom and toilet around the country until I was 30 to one man and his dog, or often nobody but the sound guy,” he says. “It’s great when you play a local pub and 200 people turn up. You’d feel like a true rock star. But it’s hard. The music industry is so difficult to get into.” Even with a famous father? “We never got signed. The sacrifices you have to put into place with your family are huge.”

He married Bridget at 25, his son Harland was born when Plant was 26, and he had daughter Tallulah when he was 28. “You don’t see your kids. You’re not really facilitating for them monetarily. I didn’t allow myself to drink alcohol as it affects your voice. Sometimes I wouldn’t talk. And I love talking. It got me down towards the end.”

So at 32, he pivoted towards food and drink after stumbling upon America’s craft ale boom at a barbecue in Brooklyn, New York — “an epiphany”, he says. In the UK, he opened Duke’s Brew & Que in De Beauvoir, an American-style barbecue restaurant, and started brewing in the basement. “I’d been in music for eight years”, he says. “I had so much energy to put into something — anything.” And that’s the secret to good beer. Energy. You never want it to go flat.

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