Front End: UK beer fund – An unusually liquid investment

Inside London's St Paul's Tavern, Billy Whitbread sups his first pint. He thinks it highly hopped and attenuated - a process whereby you get as much alcohol out of the sugar solution as possible. "It's Gales or Pedigree," he concludes, verging finally on the former, because Pedigree "has more of an effect on my head".

Unfortunately Whitbread – a member of one of the UK’s leading brewing families, and now a consultant to a new specialist fund, the Taverners Trust, dedicated to investing in public houses – is wrong. The brew he was tasting was Shepherd Neame, a distinctive beer made in Faversham in Kent. Whitbread and Christopher Fishwick, a fund manager at Aberdeen Trust, which is arranging the new fund, were participating in Euromoney’s special beer challenge, launched to commemorate the first beer fund in the UK.

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