The conflict within

“The Conflict within” sounds like something off Metallica’s Black Album!

2022, as some of you will have seen on our social media posts, will see some completely unavoidable Trade Price increases. Some of these increases come from artificially holding beers back in price during the last 2-3 years and the headlines from the media about Energy price rises are now kicking in from suppliers, our business rates are as high as they have ever been, our staff need paying the fairest amount we can afford, prices from all suppliers everywhere are going up, Fuel prices have gone up and our Brewery & Van insurances have gone up. Everyone of our suppliers that employ people on Minimum wage have started paying them more and there are further Minimum Wage rises coming in 2022.

So, in short, our prices to the Pub Trade will be changing, some beers will be staying the same, others will see a slight balancing, and some others will see a strict uplift because of being held back previously, expect to see an increase between £0 –> £6 Per Firkin (40L) / Keykeg (30L).
*Edit* – I’ve just realised you can boil this down to, “Prices will go up while we take a cut in profit margin!”

We have also been thinking about our Canned beer prices to Trade and Direct to consumer, we made a point of shouting about how we were keeping our Direct to consumer prices at Bottleshop & Pub prices so as to ensure that during Lockdown we didn’t screw over or piss off small bottle shops and bars. We hope this did some good.
Looking around at how different breweries are pricing their direct sales to consumers we feel that we are pricing ourselves out of the Can sales market somewhat, we would really like to Can more beers but we need the turnover of stock to be a little faster so we can brew more as efficiently as possible with a portion of it going for canning.

What this means to trade is that you will be seeing our cases of cans becoming about £2 cheaper and we will also be looking at our Direct to Consumer prices too for Web-Shop sales so we can set a price that encourages more turnover of can stock and allows us to bring more new beers to can. Our Can prices have always been a work in progress and for us at least, at this time, we think they could work better.

I hope you can see the conflict in our minds, wanting to support small businesses, wanting to provide a good product at a fairly costed price, and also wanting to develop our business to be as sustainable as possible.

A quick note about brewery Bar Days, January 2022 is Friday & Saturday the 28th & 29th, we’ll have our friends from Bingley Brewery bringing their bar along for #TryAnuary and Wood-fired Pizza from Palomino Pizza on both days. Bar prices will also be started at £3 which is a more sensible price and puts us in a less conflicted price structure to the likes of Goose Eye in their Brewery Tap. There is a chance that our brewery bar days will have to cease as we need to extend our coldstore and put the cold liquor tank we’ve got to use in early 2022, yeah sure I’ve got a brewery bar plan in my head but its all a bit messy so I honestly don’t have any guarantees that after January we’ll have a brewery bar or not…. so we hope to see you all and lets make our TryAnuary Bar day a good one!

Any questions please email the brewery.