Black Hole Brewery
Little Eaton is blessed with not one, but two, microbreweries – very unusual for a village of its size.
Black Hole Brewery is actually older than Shiny Brewery, but its presence in Little Eaton didn’t happen until 2017, some ten years after it had first started brewing. Its origins stem from a small two-man brewery set up in Burton-on-Trent in January 2007. The first plant was located in one of the units on the site (ironically) of the old Ind Coope Brewery Bottling Stores, which had by then become the IMEX Business Park.
The first beer brewed was called Red Dwarf, the first of many that have continued the Deep Space theme. Around 2012 the company was purchased by Kammac and about the same time started contract brewing beers for the Derby pub, Mr Grundy’s. In 2014 Kammac decided to sell the business and the owner of Mr Grundy’s decided to buy the brewery which continued to supply the pub with beers under the Mr Grundy’s name, as well as brewing cask beers under the Black Hole Brewery name to supply to the trade in general.
In October 2017 the occupants of all of the IMEX units were served notice that the site had been sold to create a £3 million home building scheme and all units had to be vacated within four months. Many of the businesses decided to look for new premises in and around the Burton area, but Mr Grundy’s reasoned that as much of their business was in the Derby area they could look somewhere else and found a vacant unit in the Old Hall Mill Business Park, just a few doors away from Shiny Brewery. They moved in at the end of 2017 and have been there ever since.
Unlike Shiny Brewery, the Black Hole Brewery restricts their brewing to cask beers. Under the control of their Brewer, Andy Spencer, they still contract brew under the Mr Grundy’s name and also brew beers using the Black Hole Brewery name, usually with that Deep Space theme in the names used.
Both sets of beers are sold directly to pubs and also through wholesalers throughout the Midlands and now in the North East. More recently Black Hole Brewery have taken on board contract brewing for a couple of wholesalers, producing a standard bitter, which the wholesaler can then offer to local pubs under their own name.
Black Hole Brewery beers are also to be found regularly in many Wetherspoon’s pubs throughout the Midlands and have gained a number of successes at CAMRA regional and national festivals, their most recent success being a silver medal for Speciality Beers at the Winter Beer of Britain Awards at the 2023 Festival with Milky Way, a pale wheat beer.
