Petra Wetzel brings German style Beer to Glasgow
The founder and managing director of West has brought German-style beer to Glasgow and is opening her second brewery in the city
She’s a German with a Glaswegian accent working in the brewing industry. It’s a strange mix, admits Petra Wetzel, but it works. The £1m brewery, bar and restaurant has been so successful since opening in 2006 that another brewery “20 times the size of the current one” is opening in Glasgow later this year. “I’m not a beer anorak, I’m a trained lawyer,” says Wetzel. “But if you give it enough razzmatazz you can make almost anything work.
So what makes West different to other microbreweries in Scotland? Apart from “never cutting corners” and keeping the message to customers simple, Wetzel says her heritage has been influential. With a blend of passion, ingenuity and innovative engineering, she describes the company as having a Glaswegian heart and a German head.
West is the first UK brewery to produce its lagers and wheat beers in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot, or German Purity Law. This means it uses only water, malt, hops and yeast to brew beer. “We have brewing equipment here that is different to anything else in the UK,” Wetzel says. “We’re modelling this on what the Germans do. I’m very efficient—that’s a German thing. My team sometimes call me the Kaiser.”
The current brewery makes 250,000 litres of beer a year. With the new brewery capacity, output and turnover will jump “dramatically”, says Wetzel. And West could start exporting to the US. “Mark Calcavecchia [US golfer] said he’d like to import our house lager,” she adds.
Article taken from www.director.co.uk
To keep up to date with this story, make sure you subscribe to the Siba RSS feed!