Keeping family breweries going

The BBC profiles Bateman’s Brewery, one of the UK’s (relatively) few remaining independent family brewers.

George Bateman, 78, the grandson of the brewery’s founder, gets right to the point.

So why was it so important to keep the brewery as a family concern?

“This is back to the intangible of being a community,” he says.

“In a small town – you might say village – there was a consciousness through the years that I and my father before me and my grandfather before that had depended on the strength of local people.”

The good news is that his grandchildren are already getting involved in the brewery.