A year or trading and the future
We did our first brew back on the 28th August 2015, we have passed 12 months of trading and have seen a pattern of growth over that time which is encouraging but also shows us we need to work hard in the coming months.
We started with just myself & my wife for quite a while though finally got a permanent sales person to consistently hit the phones two days per week to free up more time for making and delivering beer. Next we got a permanent delivery driver again for just two days a week to free up more time for making beer. Then more recently a full time permanent brewery assistant who is now leaving me free to put my energy into working on future projects.
We don’t always take a wage as the money we make is being drip-fed back into the company to improve what we’ve already got, paying staff wages and reinvestment in process.
We will be doing some slight re-balancing of our beer prices as of 1st Jan 2017 so that our already very fair beer prices reflect the costs in making them, those costs are set to rise for imported hops due to the current value of the Pound (GBP). With this in mind as the new season hop prices come to us there may be other small tweaks as 2017 moves on and our costs increase.
Construction is ongoing with our Warm-Conditioning room and we hope to be doing short runs of bottle and keg-conditioned beers from early in the new year.
We know Landlords feel pressure to sell beer at competitive prices, we also often wonder where the fairness is in the profit share between beer-making & pint-pulling as it often seems that pubs demand the lion’s share in comparison to what the brewery makes. (Includes brewery profit at approx £25 per cask)
Brewery Cask per pint including VAT (Blonde) = £1.20 (approx)
Pub served pint including VAT (Blonde) £2.70 to £3.20+ (estimate)
@ £3.20 per pub-pint that is £146 per cask profit for the pub.
We would like CAMRA to start making a moves to address the price of a pint to the consumer so that there is fairness of profit share going back to the brewer, campaigning for beer duty reduction is always a good thing as we get to keep a tiny bit more but it shouldn’t be marketed as making beer cheaper for drinkers! Brewing a quality flavuorsome product costs money and should be reflected in the selling price of a ‘premium product’ to consumers.
I wholeheartedly refuse to make Bland-Piss-Water to a Price!
That may have descended into a bit of a rant, though I set out with this brewery to be human-faced rather than straitjacketed corporate “You can’t say that!”.
To recap: some malt prices are up, some malt prices are down, hop prices will be up, some of our beer prices will be tweaked to balance to costs of production.
Btw, I had a pint of Guinness last night, it cost £3.90 wtf! That could be a beer that is balanced on profit share! Tasted of nothing, no substance to it… We won’t do that!
