'Time to raise our glass to city's craft beer hub'

FROM its humble Burslem beginnings as a microbrewery in 1985, the multiple award-winning Titanic Brewery now produces more than four million pints of its distinctive range of ales a year which are 'proudly brewed and shipped from the Potteries'.

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Founded with just one goal - to produce great, quaffable beer, and firmly rooted in the industrial heart of Stoke-on-Trent for all of its 40 years, Titanic's strong place attachment plays a pivotal role in the brewery's identity and success.

Born and bred in Staffordshire, Titanic's beer-loving owners Keith and Dave Bott are ordinarily local and entrepreneurial, and connected to both the beers they brew and to the customers who drink them.

With research showing that the craft beer industry has 'leveraged place-based identities, reconfigured tourism geographies, and transformed the beer-scape,' Titanic's carefully crafted neo-localism strategy has enabled its brewery and pub operations to be recognised as an authentic cultural phenomenon.

From its early origins in the year when worldwide interest in the White Star liner, the largest ship ever launched, was reignited as news broke that the wreck of the Titanic had finally been discovered, the inspiration for the naming of the new brewery may have been serendipitous.