Cain is more than able

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Cain is more than able
Me & My Factory Ajmail Dusanj. Joint md, Robert Cain brewery

Can this be renamed Us and Our Factory? I run Cains with my brother Sudarghara and we really do work very closely together. Our offices are side by side and we're constantly throwing problems and ideas at each other. We even live next door to each other.

Sudarghara takes care of sales and marketing, I look after operations. He's the ideas man � new beers, designs, the creative side � and handles everything �outside� the brewery. I look after everything �inside�.We've always split it like that. When we had our first business, a fish and chip shop, it was just the same: he served, I cooked!

We've had some great interest since we bought Robert Cain Brewery three years ago. I think the takeover appealed to the media because we were so new. Clearly, we didn't come from generations of brewers � in fact, we were total outsiders. The family started with fish and chip shops in Kent, then expanded into corner stores. Our original shop in Chatham is still owned by our uncle.

Beer has been brewed on this site since 1780 and Robert Cain built this brewery in 1887. We call it the �terracotta palace�. It's a huge, red brick Victorian building on a 10-acre (four hectare) site in central Liverpool.

Originally it was designed as a �tower brewery�. Raw materials were hoisted up to the top floor and worked their way down until casks of beer came out at the bottom. Now, all the brewing operations are housed in a purpose-built brewhouse and canning hall attached to the original building. There's a lot of unused space in the original structure although we still keep some storage vessels in there. Friends laugh when I say there are still parts of the brewery I've never seen.

It's a listed building, which obviously restricts what we can do with it. But we see it as a key asset which is steeped in history and tradition. It's already an important tourist attraction and we'd like to grow that.

It's actually very large for a regional brewery. It was only doing 100,000 barrels a year when we took over, but we're getting close to 250,000 this year and capacity is nearer 380,000. In the early 1900s this was one of the top 50 UK businesses � equivalent to being in the FTSE 100 today � and had 300 pubs including the Philharmonic in Liverpool. John Lennon said the worst thing about being famous was not being able to have a pint at the Phil when he was travelling the world.

But at some point most of the pubs got sold off. Now, we've just got two managed and nine tenanted pubs, designed to showcase what we're doing with the Cains brand. We need to build the estate up again.

We bought Cains from the Danish Brewing Group (DBG) in July 2002. I think they intended to use it to launch Faxe, a big brand in Europe, on to the UK market, but it never really took off. The brewery was losing about £2m a year and there was a good chance it could have closed down.

We were lucky DBG sold Cains to us because they could probably have got more value by selling it off in parts. The fact they kept it all together means they came out of Liverpool with a good name.

They've left us with some very good equipment. The brewhouse kit is all Huppmann, which is the Rolls-Royce of this industry. A lot of traditional, regional brewers are using equipment that's 100 years old.

In 2002 the brewery was mainly producing Cains beers and doing a bit of own-label. But we decided to split the business into three trading divisions, each with a clear focus. We've got the Cains brand division; we've got a retail division, which includes our pubs estate and our brewery tours; and we've got our contracts division, which brews and packs for third parties.

The third party business has really grown fast. We're now the biggest independent, own-label beer canner in the UK. Out of a turnover of around £35m, £28m is third-party business. In our first year we filled about 24m cans. This year we'll hit 120m.

We brew bitter, mild, stout and lager for five of the biggest multiple grocers. We also contract-pack beer into cans for a lot of regional breweries � there aren't many canners left in the UK now � and we do some ad hoc packaging for the big multinational brands. We've got tankers turning up here from other breweries all day long.

We fill casks and cans but we don't bottle our own beers � they all go out to contract bottlers. At the moment we can't fill kegs either, just casks. But only three in every 10 pubs wants to take traditional cask ales these days so we're now getting kegs filled outside too.

In volume terms the Cains brand is a small part of our business, but it's something we're working hard to develop because the margins are obviously much better. We're listed nationally with the Spirit Group, we've got regional listings with JD Wetherspoons, Mitchells & Butlers and national pub groups, and we go into a lot of pubs as a �guest� beer.

As a small brewer we have to be innovative. Last year we launched Raisin Beer, a fruit ale with Californian raisins, which won a blind tasting of 100 UK beers by Tesco and got us a guaranteed six-month listing. We've also launched a premium lager, which we age, or �lager�, for three months. Most British lagers are lucky if they're aged for a fortnight. That's just been named Best English Beer at the Campaign for Real Ale's Scottish festival.

Cain was always known for its award winning ales. So the quality was good, but we've worked hard on achieving consistency too. Earlier this year we switched to using Maris Otter malt from Norfolk for our Cains branded beers. It's recognised as the best malt in the world. It's a lot dearer than standard malts but does give far more consistency to our base beers.

When we took over, we brought in a new head brewer, David Nijs, who came from Banks's. Steven Paris, our company accountant, and David are the key people on our senior management team.

Turning round a business that was losing £2m meant our people had to go through a lot of change. The first priority was to streamline the operation, and our first major cut was middle management. There were unnecessary tiers of people reporting in to each other. Sorting that out first earned us a lot of respect from the rest of the employees because, over the years, any cuts had always started on the shop floor. By the time we took our review down to shop floor level they had already accepted what we had to do. We lost about 15 managers and there were probably 20 redundancies on the shop floor. Since then, though, we've got back up past the original figure.

Personal

Name​: Ajmail Dusanj

Age​: 38

Career highlights​: Started in the family fish and chip shop in Chatham, Kent, with brother Sudarghara, then moved into convenience stores and off-licences. The pair acquired West Midlands soft drinks producer and wholesaler Gardner-Shaw from the receivers in 1992, running it until the acquisition of Cains in 2002

Domestics​: Married to Narinder (office manager at Cains) with four children. Lives just outside Liverpool, where his brother and father are neighbours

Outside work​: "We do spend a lot of time here, so it's either work or family - whatever the kids want to do. I don't have time for hobbies."

Factory Facts

Location​: The Robert Cain Brewery, Stanhope St, Liverpool L8 5XJ.

Tel​: 0151 709 8734

Website​: http://www.cains.co.uk

Main products​: Bitter, mild and lager under Cains brand and supermarket own label. Also a major contract canner of regional and national beers

Factory size​: four hectares

Number of employees​: 95

Current throughput​: 250,000 barrels/year

Capacity​: 380,000 barrels/year

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