Crowdfunding campaign to renovate Robinsons Brewery pub exceeds £50,000 target

Stockport-based Robinsons Brewery and partners Forest Distillery have exceeded their crowdfunding target to begin refurbishing the Cat and Fiddle pub.

Donations and bookings of distillery tours before the pub reopens, totalled almost £55,000 in 42 days, allowing work to get started.

Robinsons Brewery will work with Forest Distillery to transform the pub, which closed in 2016, bringing eating facilities as well as the UK’s highest altitude distillery.  Forest will use the pub’s cellars for producing English whisky, while gin production would remain at their current Macclesfield site. 

The pub has been closed since 2016 as its remote location made the site economically unviable, particularly during the winter months.  As a result, the pub needs considerable investment to bring it back into use, including roof repairs.  Robinsons Brewery had identified that a traditional pub model would be insufficient to reopen the isolated venue, needing a different business plan to attract custom.

William Robinson, Managing Director (Pub Division) of Robinsons Brewery said of the project:

Forest Distillery are a wonderful local family business and exactly the right people to take The Cat and Fiddle into its next chapter. Their vision to create a local, authentic Whisky Distillery with an on-site shop, tours and a pub has real potential and would transform The Cat and Fiddle into a destination venue the whole community could be proud of.”

Forest Gin owners, Karl and Lindsay Bond, will benefit from the space to grow the business through the partnership with Robinsons Brewery.  Karl said:

We’ve been absolutely blown away at the support.  The pub is important to people – their grandparents got married here, or they were proposed to here, it is filled with these lovely community stories, and I think that is why so many people have got behind the relaunch.

“The crowd-funder did better than we imagined. We offered corporate days out, tours with drinks included, plaques on the wall, a number of things and that is where the money has come from – people are getting something for the money they’ve put into the Cat & Fiddle.

“We’ve started the work but we are at ground-zero, there is so much to do. Fingers crossed, phase two, all the exciting decorating and installing the bar, will begin next year.”

The pub will be run by Forest Distillery on a long-term lease from family-run Robinsons Brewery. The distillery aims to reopen the Cat and Fiddle pub by late Summer 2020. Tours bought through the crowdfunding campaign should take place from April.