2020 and damn it 2021 too!

Here’s a well overdue blog post, I might try and post a few things but I’ll start with 2020.

I’ll start with a bit of a copy & paste from twitter posts aka ‘live blogging’ 😉

Sales Stats:
Sales in Jan 2021 were almost 2/3 less than Jan 2020.
Sales in Jan 2021 were the worst we’ve seen since May 2020.
Post Lockdown July & August were best Months of 2020.
Seen a steady decline in sales since November 2020.
it can only get better……………. can’t it?
We were approx £80’000 down on sales during 2020.

2020 Positives:
We spent time together at home + cats.
We were forced to head into Caning beers sooner than we might have.
We spent time and effort building a Web Shop.
We got the £50k Bounceback Loan and bought a building for @WishboneTap so in the future we can bring a new drinking destination to Keighley.
These things wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for 2020.

2021 Positives:
We got the £1k Wet-led Pubs Grant for the bar in the brewery.
We got a £5k Additional Restrictions Grant.
We are literally just sending the second canning batch of Tiller Pin for canning as this was our fastest selling caned beer.
Thanks to the aforementioned grants we can afford to invest in our future and experiment with Barrel Ageing more, 8x Barrels have been ordered from France, Red & White wines, and we have a load of barrel racking on order so we can stack them up in the brewery. We have a Vienna Lager inspired beer that will go into White wine barrels and a Barleywine that will be aged in Red wine barrels, these will more than likely form part of a Canning and kegging run in about a year’s time.
We are still retaining our valued staff, fingers crossed for a productive summer where we can all get back to working properly.

Onward into 2021:
Now we have canned beers on site, currently 7 different, each taking up a pallets-worth of space each it raises questions as to how we are going to store all our beers at the in the coldstore if and when we get back to full Cask & Keykeg production as the warmer weather approaches. We will almost definitely have to extend our coldstore, so here is the bit that you’re not going to like….
The only logical place to extend the coldstore is into our Bar area but knocking down and dismantling the current bar, building a wall across the front of that area and cutting a doorway through into the original coldstore. This would mean no more Bar and if we are still to do our bar days, which we want to, we’d have a lot less space for drinkers. Time will tell and we are going to play this by ear and see how things develop, the plan even when we have our own pub in Keighley is to still do our brewery bar days once each month cos we know how people love the rustic appeal of sitting on a cask in a cold brewery drinking beers at source.
We had a vague month in mind for having our Pub up and running by but we think that date would be best shuffled along a bit until we all have a bit more stable grasp on all the Pandem(ic)onium. We were thinking December, sensibly though March 2022 might be a more realistic target.
The Pub will; front onto a pedestrian area, have a beer-yard at the back, have 2 floors – though we may start with 1, the premises will need a full rip-out – rewire – re-plumb – half re-roof, if it makes viable sense and there’s any grant funding I’d like to have Solar (PV) on the roof and an Air-source heat pump for heating, there’s no chimney so doubt we could have a wood-burner.

You gotta have ideas, dreams, plans…… plan it, cost it, see if its feasible. *Realise how much time and hard work its going to take* We might be asking handy folk to help out when it comes to sorting the Pub!