How to Find and Evaluate Niche Companies on Beauhurst

How we made our up-and-coming brewers list and how you can use the Beauhurst platform to create your own lists.

Last week, we brought you the UK’s up-and-coming brewers. From Local’s low calorie session pale ale to The Spirit Beer Company that produces beers based on spirits and liqueurs, we explored what modern breweries are bringing to the market.

Now, we’re taking you behind the scenes, to see how we found the UK’s emerging brewers. Discover how you can map niche industries like brewing, and see how we used that data to get better insights into gender disparity, regional trends, and which companies have gained recent investment.

The brewing landscape as a whole

First things first, we needed to look at the UK brewing industry as a whole. Here’s how we used the Beauhurst platform to do this.

Step-by-step guide to mapping the brewing industry

Looking into the brewing industry couldn’t be easier. There’s just a couple of steps to include in your Advanced Search.

From the find companies function, you’ll need to:

• Add in the industries and buzzwords to include ‘Alcoholic beverages’
• Set the Companies House status as ‘Active’, to ensure you don’t get dissolved companies in your results
• Add the head office location as the United Kingdom
• And then to ensure you’re specifically looking at brewers (brewer meaning someone who brews beer), add that in the company description it contains words like ‘beer’

You might notice that the advanced search description option says ‘these words (near match)’. This means that you’ll get not just companies with ‘beer’ in their description, but also those with words similar in meaning to ‘beer’ (such as ‘beers’, ‘ale’, and ‘lager’). This means you won’t miss out on relevant companies with slightly different descriptions.

This search shows us 1,623 active brewing companies. So how did we break that down into data we can use?

Analysing by region

Analysing by region couldn’t be easier with our ‘Map’ section.

Once you have your search loaded, simply click on the ‘Map’ tab seen below.

From here you can explore companies by:

• Region
• Country
• Local authority
• Or LEP

You can even download this map as an image so you can use that in any reporting documents.

Analysing by gender

We also looked into the gender disparity of founders/directors in breweries. To get this information, we used the tools on the platform itself.

Once you’ve run your search, you’ll see there’s an option to look at ‘Statistics’.

You can use this tab to find further insights into these companies. This tab is also where we found analysis on funding into breweries but we’ll go into more detail on that further down.

From here, under the ‘People’ section, you can find information on gender and gender disparity — as well as find information on the directors’ ages over time.

Further up, you’ll find some more general information on how many active companies there are in the specified search you’ve run. That’s where we found the trend of active brewing companies over time. You can also download this information as either a PNG or as a CVS to upload to a spreadsheet or data visualisation tool of your choice.

Analysing fundraisings across the brewing industry

To dig further into this data, you can change the statistics from ‘Companies’ to ‘Fundraisings’.

In this section, you’ll see a breakdown of all of the investment that’s gone into these breweries since 2009. There’s also information on:

• The breakdown of companies by stage of evolution at the time of receiving funding
• Top funders by number of fundraisings
• Top funders by total value of fundraisings

This is a lot of information to take on board, but if you’re a subscriber, we’ve included the handy button below so you can automatically run this search (we’ve done the hard work for you!).

The zero-alcohol ‘alcohol’ landscape

As part of our article, we also looked into companies producing non-alcoholic beers.

Step-by-step guide to discovering zero alcohol companies

This search is relatively straightforward as there is also a ‘Non-alcoholic beverages’ industry on our platform. We ran the same search as before but changed ‘Alcoholic beverages’ to ‘Non-alcoholic beverages’.

Already a subscriber, and want to discover the companies producing non-alcoholic beers? Just click the button below.

Up-and-coming brewers

Ultimately our article was about the breweries emerging onto the UK’s landscape, and this is when we needed to hone our search to something more specific.

Step-by-step guide to discovering zero alcohol companies

To find our up-and-coming brewers, we needed to add on a couple of extra steps to our existing search to find companies that had recently received equity funding.

We did this by:

• Adding fundraising data
• Included ‘form of funding’ as ‘Equity’
• Then added that the date of fundraising happened since the beginning of 2024 so we could see companies that had received recent funding only

Then we ranked these companies by how much they’d raised in their most recent round. You can do this by downloading the data to a spreadsheet. From ‘Activity’, you will need to include:

• Amount received by the company in its latest fundraising (GBP)
• Date of the company’s latest fundraising

These options live under ‘Fundraisings’.

You can include more options if you want a more detailed picture. For example, by including the ‘Total amount received by the company through fundraisings’, you can also rank companies by their overall investment.

If you’re a Beauhurst subscriber, you can discover up-and-coming brewing companies by clicking the button below. The platform search will automatically populate for you.