Bar Days – Not currently open, here is why

Hi guys, there have been a number of you asking when we are going to open our brewery up for bar days again. There is no simple answer to this I’m afraid, but I’ll try and explain….

Last year’s Lockdown, Grants and Bounceback Loan have all had an effect on how our brewery is working, the lockdown Grants enabled us to can our first 4 beers and the Bounceback Loan along with investment from family made it possible for us to buy a building which will eventually be turned into a proper bar in Keighley town centre.
Now that we have to store 6 different canned beers in the coldstore it doesn’t leave as much room for storing Casks and Kegs, so we need to extend our coldstore so we can store all the Casks, Kegs, Cans and also have room to let us build stock ready for sale to Wholesalers in Ecasks. The only sensible way (least expenditure) is to build a wall across the front of the main Bar area and knock a doorway through to the original coldstore.

That would mean ripping out all the cellar equipment in the coldstore and knocking the bar apart, if we did this we could maybe build a new but smaller serving area into it though that will reduce our capacity and you might not all fit in.

The brewhouse is quite full, we’ve used some of the Grant money to start a Barrel-Ageing project with two different beers, these take up quite a bit of space even when we can stack them, we have our empty casks stored in the usual place along with the Ecasks. There would be a load of shuffling around to do to setup for a bar day with the bar area turned into a coldstore, this normally takes us the better part of a full day to prep for a bar day.

Our coldstore is fairly tidy but we have already taken over the room we saved for serving Casks and kegs so we could fit all the Pallets of cans in here, we also store our Hops in here. So Imagine when we add 55 new kegs of Dassler Lager or 44 Casks of Tiller Pin we would run out of space way too quickly. We also need up-to 3x Pallets-worth of room for order picking for our delivery days.

We always wanted to start our own Pub in town and we always wanted to keep up with Monthly bar days in the brewery, we could stop selling cans but that would be silly now that we’ve started, we could never sell our beer to wholesalers, then there is *Covid and its restrictions which will hopefully end soon and we can all get back to a new normal. *I’m personally hedging my bets as to whether we really get to have ‘normal’ during 2021, enough of these Hokey-Cokey lockdowns its going to really grate if it happens again! I’m sure the government could have done better from the start if they hadn’t been so busy filling their own wallets. (End Rant)

You’ll be glad I added some Photos to this post to break up the writing….

What now then eh?

If we have to turn the brewery bar area into a coldstore then we would really like a couple of Bar days before we do it so we can welcome you all back in for Pints and Streetfood again. It would be lovely to say we are going to open in June when (if) restrictions are lifted, I’m fairly sure that we need to think about things a bit more before setting any date so please check back with our social media posts for when we tell you to get you arses down here for beers.

Cheers for reading to the bottom 😉 Team Wishbone