Moving into the winter and a lot is continuing to change and evolve at the Brewery. Production has increased significantly to where I am now at maximum capacity for my current kit. Turnaround time for beer in tank is as efficient as I can get it while keeping quality high and I am emptying tanks one day and filling them the next. I am looking into options for sustainable expansion, keen to still stay small and local while maximising the space I have for maximum output.
Years of working in Forecasting & Planning at Waitrose is coming into its own with ever more complex spreadsheets coming into place ensuring stock levels of ingredients, kegs, cans and (most importantly) beer are where they need to be. Being small means that I can be super agile and am working more and more with other local businesses for collaborations, special one off beers and customer gift boxes with bespoke labelling etc.
With Christmas just around the corner I am building up my gift box offering and you can find plenty of options on our website that has its second go live this weekend. The website is live this Friday at 10am with 20 different beers and plenty of selection bundles available to purchase. A number of these beers are brand new and some are launching straight onto the website before they even hit pubs and bars.
Trade sales continue to be strong and being small allows me to sell my beer within weeks ensuring it gets to customers as fresh as possible. I am still keeping my delivery radius relatively tight and am enjoying building a relationship with local landlords and bar owners, understanding their demands and customer trends heading into the busiest time of the year.
Where possible I am also looking to be more sustainable in my approach, specifically around ingredients and packaging. It turns out that running a commercial brewery, however small, produces quite a lot of spent grain! My original plan to compost and put back into my garden has worked well but there are only so many compost bins that one can build and fill. I have therefore engaged with a local farmer so from this week my spent grain will be used to supplement their cow feed through the winter.
I have also started using new kegs for trade beer sales. Given my scale it is hard to use traditional steel kegs as they are very tricky to wash and need expensive and large kit to do so. As a result, up until now, I have been using PolyKegs to package my beer to sell to pubs and bars. These are single use so have the benefit of low mileage and are recyclable but still use a lot of single us plastic. I have now switched to using FreeKegs which have internal bags that can be removed and replaced, the external shell can be used again and again. These have the benefit of keeping beer fresher for longer whilst also ensuring waste plastic is kept to a minimum.