Local brewer Lomsko Pivo said it would perform a secondary offering of share on the Bulgarian stock exchange in late June, according to Focus News Agency, May 11.

The shareholders have decided to list 20% of the current capital, which stands at 4.5 mln levs. The free float should reach 40% by the end of the year.

Further details about the offering will be announced within days, said Prokopi Prokopiev, manager corporate policy at Enemona, the Kozloduy-based engineering company that owns the brewer through its subsidiary Agro Invest Engineering.

In late March, the media reported Enemona was preparing to shed its majority stake in Lomsko Pivo to concentrate on its core business, the provision of construction and power engineering services related to energy efficiency, as the online English edition of Dnevnik Daily reports.

Lomsko Pivo, with an annual output capacity of 170,000 hectoliters, controls 1.5% of the local beer market with the Shopsko Pivo, Almus, Alma and Ambrosius brands.

An investment budget of BGN 0.8 million has been allocated for the brewer in 2007 to replace outmoded bottling and packaging lines.

Malt call-offs are very good time being, helped by the unusually warm and sunny weather, market analysts commented May 2nd. Sometimes the question is asked, whether there could be a malt hole in summer. Do all brewers have a sufficient cover, and can all maltsters fulfil their commitments?

The other problem seems to be that virtually all maltsters are sold out for 2007 and very well sold for 2008. That is reported from Europe, North America and Australia. But brewers have not covered their total demand for next year.

Could it be true that brewers should just secure their supplies and forget about the price side of contracts? The next few months will show, and in any case for the first time in years not only barley, but also malt markets look very tight indeed.

Sapporo Breweries Ltd said it has developed a new line of barley that keeps beer fresh longer and will start commercial production of the line in Canada in 2008, Kyodo News reported May 11. The company has filed patent applications for the barley line in about 30 countries in a bid to launch a beer material business to earn royalties, it said.

The firm said it has taken eight years to develop the barley that lacks lipoxygenase, or LOX, which causes the flavor of beer to deteriorate. Sapporo Breweries said that in brewing tests the barley was found to reduce the amount of flavor-deteriorating substances in beer to one-third of the conventional level and foam-reducing substances were reduced by half. Sapporo Breweries will serve up to 6,000 glasses of beer made with the barley for 250 yen per glass at its Ebisu Beer Museum in Tokyo from Friday.

The early draught of 2007 presents us with new problems and “promises” a barley campaign 2007/08, which could be more exciting and more painful than last year.

At the end of last week barley markets of crop 2007 exploded. A comparison looks as follows (in
EUR per ton)

French 2row spring barley, July, FOB Creil 175 – 177 (April 18) 210 (April 27)
French 2row spring barley, July, FOB Moselle 186 – 188 (April 18) 225 (April 27)
French 6row winter barley, July, FOB Moselle 162 (April 18) 190 (April 27)
Danish 2row spring barley, Oct, FOB Seaport 183 (April 18) 210 (April 27)