A career that has taken him from Birmingham to Bedford, via Dublin, Kent and more besides, Chris Reid is now the head brewer at Damm’s Eagle Brewery in Bedford. The Spanish business’s first brewery outside the Iberian Peninsula is capable of producing nearly two million HL a year with more than £70m invested during the last three years. And on the group’s 150th anniversary, that impressive growth is only set to continue with a doubling of revenues targeted by 2030.

“To have a career in brewing is a full-time learning experience. Every day is a school day. That’s the way it should be.”

And in helping oversee a team of nearly 100 production colleagues on a daily basis, Chris Reid isn’t prone to exaggeration. The head brewer at Damm’s Eagle Brewery in Bedford, Reid has gone from being “head brewer in a brewing team of two” at the Firkin microbrewery chain in Birmingham,  to creating award-winning Hefeweizen’s in Dublin before joining Shepherd Neame in Kent for production brewery experience.

The opportunity for personal development as a technical brewer would then lead him to Charles Wells in Bedford before a change of ownership at the facility would lead Reid to managing a contract brewing operation, NPD and brewery operations on beers like Kirin Ichiban for Marston’s.

Fast-forward several years and the Bedford site would be home of the newly-created Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company. But that, they say, is all in the past. And for the last three years, Reid is the proud head brewer at Damm Brewery after the Spanish business acquired the Bedfordshire facility at the end of 2022 before inaugurating it last October.

In 2026 the numbers speak for themselves. The company recently recorded a 19% increase in sales in the UK and group revenues of €2.01 billion (£1.73 billion) along with a net profit of £133 million during 2025. The figures were released at the company’s recent AGM where international growth was described a key driver at the business with Damm presence in more than 130 countries.

During 2025, Damm sold 22 million hectolitres of beverages across its beer, water and soft drinks portfolio with Damm UK accounting for 578,000 hectolitres of that – 19% more than last year for Damm UK.

In May, Damm UK also announced it was to acquire the Old Speckled Hen family of beer brands from Greene King. The award-winning family of brands includes Old Speckled Hen, Old Golden Hen, Old Crafty Hen, Old Master Hen and Low Alcohol Old Speckled Hen subsequently joined the Damm portfolio at the start of July.

Commenting on the latest figures, Luke White, managing director of Damm UK says: “2025 was a great year for Damm UK, as we delivered strong growth, with both sales and volume up 19%. Furthermore, we grew our private label and contract manufacturing business by 34%. We also created 40 new jobs.

“This solid business performance demonstrates the strength of our successful UK strategy, following sustained investment in the Damm Eagle Brewery which has seen the rise of Estrella Damm and our wider portfolio, as well as driving industry awareness around Damm UK.”  

And in the UK, at the Bedford facility, the site’s daily processing and packaging activities are overseen directly by Site Leader Chris Reid, alongside Packaging Manager Fiona Wakelin and Brewing Manager Stavros Photiou.

Quality compliance and assurance are driven by Site Quality Lead Olay Ogunjobi, while workplace safety routines and physical plant optimisation are directed by Health & Safety Manager Julie Goodman and the engineering department.. Together, this core leadership matrix supervises all beer and liquid processing streams from raw materials intake to the final packaged product.

“For me, the team side of this role is the best part. I love interacting with them and learning from them,” says Reid.

But for this decorated head brewer, whose career spans more than 30 years, Reid never initially set out to work in the field. Instead, a series of chance meetings and opportunities taken would mean this Birmingham native would become one of the UK’s most important and respected brewing professionals.

“It was kind of an accident, really,” Reid reflects. “I didn’t set out with a goal of getting into brewing”. Reid’s initial fascination with beer production did not spark in a commercial setting, but rather at home, where he developed a keen personal interest in the craft.

His studies guided him to the University of Leeds, where he completed a degree in microbiology. While his academic curriculum featured a minor brewing element, Reid says he didn’t actively engage with university career advice services at the time, operating under the general assumption that he would likely remain in academia. “I thought I was probably going to stay on and do some sort of post grad thing, which I did explore a little bit,” he recalls.

However, a chance encounter completely altered his life’s trajectory. “You could call it an accidental meeting in one of my local pubs in Birmingham that had just become a Firkin brewery site,” Reid explains. “So I went down there with my girlfriend at the time, the guy out in the backyard who was sweeping up the wood shavings on the opening night, turned out to be the pub area manager”.

Upon learning that Reid had just graduated with a microbiology degree, the manager told him “’Well actually we’ve got the brewery right here that we need to find somebody for’”.

“I blanket CV’d pretty much every regional brewer in the UK at the time,” he recalls. “I’ve still got the folder with all the letters that came back. There are lots of famous names from all the regional brewers at that time.”

Chris Reid, Damm Brewery

The manager provided Reid with contacts for the production team at the Holt, Plant & Deakin Brewery, located on Dudley Road in Wolverhampton, West Midlands. In a bizarre twist of fate, it turned out that Reid had actually visited this exact facility years prior during a school trip. Following a successful interview, Reid was offered the job.

He officially commenced his professional career as an assistant brewer at the Faculty & Firkin in the Aston area of Birmingham, a venue situated right in the heart of the Aston University campus and formerly known to locals as the Pot of Beer pub.

The day-to-day realities of this assistant role were intensely physical and entirely unglamorous. “In a brewery that size, when there’s one or two of you, you’ve got to be prepared to do everything,” Reid explains. “So in the assistant role there was a lot of washing casks by hand. That was one of the main functions. And then jumping into the mash to dig it out. So, it was good fun, but it was hard work”.

As the Firkin chain rapidly expanded its footprint across the country, Reid’s technical competence earned him a rapid promotion, and he relocated north to become the brewer at a newly opened Firkin site in Sheffield.

In Sheffield, Reid took on the responsibilities of running what was colloquially termed a “head brewer of two” setup, which introduced him heavily to the administrative and managerial dimensions of commercial brewing operations. “Then you’ve got the admin side of it and the management side of it as well,” he notes.

However, after a couple of years in Sheffield, the operational landscape for the Firkin chain began to deteriorate. “It became obvious that the writing, I think, was on the wall for the Firkin chain,” Reid observes. “They were very student oriented, and I think the humour just got a bit tired.” While Reid respected the brand, the company began making widespread redundancies, which directly impacted his partner.

Amidst this corporate decline, another serendipitous meeting dramatically redirected Reid’s career. Reid would cross paths with Brendan Dobbin, a highly regarded brewery installation engineer. “I met him for the first time, and he inspired me to see brewing as more of a science than an art or a craft,” he says. Motivated by this technical awakening, Reid began purchasing specialised textbooks to deeply educate himself on brewing science. This relationship bore substantial professional fruit when Dobbin, who was overseeing a new microbrewery installation in Dublin, recommended Reid for the head brewer role.

Reid secured the position, initiating a highly successful five-year tenure in the Irish capital alongside his girlfriend. At this new establishment, named Messrs Maguire, Reid operated with an extraordinary degree of creative freedom. “The owners of the company, they weren’t brewers, they were just pub operators, so they just pretty much gave me a free hand to do what I wanted to do,” he explains.

He developed a diverse and progressive portfolio that was radically ahead of its time for the contemporary Irish market. The core lineup included a classic plain Porter, a robust 5% ABV porter dry-hopped with Cascade hops, a red ale, a US-style lager, and a continental-style lager. He also introduced a dynamic, highly varied seasonal beer program. “We were just doing different styles, whatever we wanted, really,” Reid adds.

A standout achievement from this era was a one-off 5.2% ABV German-style Hefeweizen. “We did a 5.2% German Hefeweizen style as a one off, but that was really popular, so that became part of the core range,” Reid shares. “We entered that into the Burton Beer competition, and that actually won a gold medal and knocked Schneiderweiss into silver, which they weren’t very happy about. It was quite a good day. I was surprised!”.

By 2003, after five highly rewarding years in Dublin, the logistical strain of constantly travelling to visit family and friends in England prompted Reid and his partner to plan a permanent return home. “Five years in Dublin was  quite a long time. There’s the hassle of getting back to see family and friends. You’ve always got to go to the airport and there’s everything that comes with it,” Reid recalls.

Choosing long-term professional development over immediate financial security, Reid took a calculated risk and returned to the UK without a pre-arranged job, opting instead to embark on an extended period of international travel. “I suppose I took a bit of a risk, career-wise, by not having a job to come back to, so we decided to do some travelling,” he shares. The couple spent three months touring Italy in a small Fiat Punto, after which Reid extended his travels by spending an additional month visiting a close friend in Ukraine.

Upon returning to England, Reid briefly worked in Sheffield where he had established industry contacts. Although he and the pub operator seriously explored the prospect of establishing a brand-new brewery together, the venture ultimately failed to materialise. Recognising that his career required a step up in manufacturing scale, Reid resolved to undertake the rigorous Institute of Brewers Master Brewer examinations. “I decided I wanted to do those exams, and really, I needed to be working somewhere a bit more sizeable to be able to gain the right experience for that,” he explains.

Reid embarked on what he now fondly remembers as a “blanket CV” campaign, writing to virtually every regional brewer across the United Kingdom. “I blanket CV’d pretty much every regional brewer in the UK at the time,” he recalls. “I’ve still got the folder with all the letters that came back. There are lots of famous names from all the regional brewers at that time”. This structured effort yielded several interviews with household industry names, including Marston’s, Banks’s, and Shepherd Neame, and Reid ultimately accepted a role with Shepherd Neame, relocating down to Kent.

The move to Shepherd Neame provided the exact operational exposure Reid required to advance his studies. The historic Kentish brewery offered a fascinating blend of traditional and modern methodologies; the company’s extensive range of cask ales was still brewed utilising traditional wooden mash tuns, while its lager production utilised a modern, high-volume brew stream. Working at this regional scale allowed Reid to gain vital experience across comprehensive packaging operations—specifically overseeing cask, keg, and high-speed bottling lines—as well as large-scale industrial brewery utilities such as steam raising. “It was a great grounding for the master brewer exam,” Reid remarks.

Through attending revision courses and building a robust professional network of peers, Reid learned of a team leader vacancy at Charles Wells in Bedford—a position that offered an exceptionally lucrative financial step forward.After a successful interview process, Reid accepted the job. When he arrived, Charles Wells had recently finalised a major corporate merger with Young’s of Wandsworth, resulting in all Young’s beers being brewed at the Bedford site.

The integration brought a wave of young, enthusiastic brewing talent from Wandsworth to Bedford, creating a vibrant but intensely busy manufacturing environment. “The brewery was busy. It was really busy,” Reid emphasises. The production volume surged further as Charles Wells acquired the brewing rights for major heritage brands like Courage, Director’s, and McEwan’s. Operating at near-total capacity, his core responsibility as team leader was ensuring the seamless, continuous throughput of high-volume production. “The brewery was pretty much at capacity at that time. Some of it was contract brewed. That meant beers like Red Stripe and Cobra as well,” Reid notes.

“2025 was a great year for Damm UK, as we delivered strong growth, with both sales and volume up 19%.”

Luke White, Damm UK

Over time, however, the commercial landscape shifted: an option to purchase Cobra was declined due to excessive costs, Red Stripe’s contract terms changed, and overall production volumes began to gradually drop off. While the development of craft beers under the internal “Charlie’s” banner temporarily revived production, the Wells family eventually reassessed their long-term position, choosing to exit large-scale commercial brewing to focus on their boutique Brewpoint facility, subsequently selling the primary Bedford brewery to Marston’s.

While Marston’s would go on to merge with Carlsberg UK to create Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company (CMBC), the newly-formed company’s Bedford site would go on to eventually by acquired by the Spanish brewing giant, S.A. Damm, transitioning the site into the modern Damm Eagle Brewery. For Reid, adapting to this shifting corporate culture highlighted the necessity of professional flexibility, reinforcing his core belief that “every day is a school day” in a lifelong brewing career.

Under Damm’s stewardship, Reid encountered a distinct and highly effective corporate culture. “With Damm I think there’s the right level of corporate,” he notes.  “With Damm I think there’s the right level of corporate,” he notes. “Damm has struck the right balance so there is a nice working culture at the brewery, and this is hard to get right.” 

For Reid, Damm has an uncompromising philosophy where product integrity is paramount. “There’sa big change in how we view quality,” Reid notes. “Quality is king for Damm. Damm also wants the facility to look its best and the business will invest in achieving this, which I think a lot of the UK regionals just don’t have the money to do”.

This financial backing translated into an extraordinary, highly intense period of engineering modernisation over the last couple of years, offering a fantastic opportunity for the entire team. Reid was tasked with overseeing five or six major engineering projects running concurrently. “On the surface, it was very daunting, because any one of the individual projects would have been seen as quite a meaty project in itself,” Reid admits. “But having five or six different big projects all running concurrently was a challenge but the support has been amazing. The company know what they’re doing.”

To manage this immense workload, Damm restructured his operations, embedding a dedicated project engineer within his own local engineering team. He stresses that navigating this immense transformation was fundamentally a collective triumph, rather than the work of any single individual. “It goes back to how we started. It’s all about the team. No task is reliant on one person to make things  happen. It’s a team effort”.

“I recall just standing up on the balcony seeing that canning line after all the work that went into it, transforming it from the grey, dark warehouse it was prior. That had to be a moment of pride.”

Chris Reid, Damm UK

Beers at The Eagle Brewery are produced using two distinct, identical brew streams fabricated by Briggs and Landaluce. Each processing stream incorporates a specialised cereal cooker, a mash mixer, a lauter tun, and a combined copper/whirlpool vessel. Operating with a standard batch brew length of 250 hL, the facility is capable of executing up to 12 complete brews per day under full SCADA control. To ensure continuous compliance with design metrics, automated SCADA systems generate exhaustive brewhouse reports at the completion of every brew cycle, supplemented by weekly laboratory audits analysing grist particle distribution, cold break performance, and process water.

Inside the individual brewhouse vessels, raw inputs are transformed via automated, highly customisable routines. The programmable cereal cookers handle step mashing and boiling protocols for varied grain matrices, including maize, rice, or malted barley.

For enzymatic conversion, the mash mixers support step infusion, pseudo-decoction, and double-mashing programs. This step is heavily monitored using automated sampling points that pull live parameters—such as pH and starch conversion metrics—without interrupting the active mashing cycle. The process also utilises weak worts during mashing in to capture residual extract.

Downstream, the lauter tuns regulate clarity and extract recovery using inline gravity and haze meters. Operators can automate hazy wort recirculation based on precise turbidity thresholds or elapsed time blocks, collect weak worts, and re-dose recovered trub to squeeze out additional extract. First worts and sparging variables are adjusted to the customer’s direct preference.

Finally, the copper whirlpool vessels drive boiling efficiency using an external calandria configuration, integrated steam/heat recovery loops, and specialised trub recovery paths. These units feature automated, pre-loaded hop dosers that enable multiple sequential additions without stopping the boil, alongside inline gravity, sugar, and cutting liquor dosing tools. For volatile elimination, a vapour condenser can generate a partial vacuum, while total steam energy use remains adjustable with optional re-boiling loops to hit specific target evaporation rates.

And when it comes to canning, their operation is centred around an advanced Sidel canning line capable of achieving high-speed throughput rates up to 90,000 cans per hour (cph). Canned product processing involves gaseous nitrogen injection nodes, precise extract dosing systems, and a comprehensive tunnel pasteuriser configured to deliver precise thermal treatment up to 50 Pasteurisation Units (PUs).

And today in 2026, Reid stands as the head of all production at the Eagle Brewery. His comprehensive mandate covers the brewing, packaging, and engineering departments. In keeping with Damm’s rigorous focus on product integrity, the quality control department operates as a standalone entity reporting directly to corporate headquarters in Barcelona, maintaining a functional dotted-line reporting relationship with Reid for daily operations.

Under his leadership, the production and laboratory headcount has expanded significantly, growing from 67 staff members at the inception of the Damm takeover to 87 personnel today. This growth shows no signs of slowing down, with plans underway to recruit additional staff to cover a dedicated night shift in the brewhouse and a third operational shift on the canning line.

Reflecting on his proudest professional achievements, Reid points directly to the simultaneous culmination of these complex engineering projects. “When I think back to last year, bringing all those projects together. I recall just standing up on the balcony seeing that canning line after all the work that went into it, transforming it from the grey, dark warehouse it was prior. That had to be a moment of pride.”

This achievement stands alongside his historic Dublin gold medal and the enduring professional satisfaction of mentoring graduate brewers who have developed under his tutelage before advancing into leadership roles across the wider UK brewing industry. “Seeing graduate brewers move up through the process and then going off elsewhere to the industry,” Reid remarks warmly. “You never want to see them leave, but they’ve gone off and they’re in other breweries around the country. That’s always a nice feeling”.

Looking ahead, Reid’s focus remains squarely on commercial diversification and capacity expansion. The brewery is aggressively expanding its Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) to support its commercial teams, looking at a 500ml can format equipped with fixed-widget and nitrogen-dosing capabilities, alongside the integration of 20-litre formats on the kegging line. The brewery is also integrating advanced processing hardware, including a new hop gun from Bucher Denwel and its third high-efficiency centrifuge from Alfa Laval.

As lager production continues to accelerate, Reid has already identified future manufacturing bottlenecks. “It depends on, on where the business goes really,” Reid explains. “I think if lager continues on the growth trajectory it’s on then the next pinch point will be maturation and fermentation space. Phase 2 of renovations will also see improvements to the boiler house to reduce gas and water consumption, a new keg washer to raise microbiological quality standards, and potential enhancements to our malt and yeast handling.”

Ultimately, Reid anticipates that the site’s ongoing growth will necessitate further expansion and renovation phase 3. But that’s a conversation for another day!”.