Building a Brewery - Part Five - Ready for Launch?

We might be running a month or so late but we’ve done it! We started out the year not really knowing where this adventure would take us but here we are, we’ve actually got a fully licensed fully functioning commercial brewery in our garage! 

We’ve spent all the money but the project had come in on budget and now all we need to do is get ready for launch.

Ah wait…first we need to buy ingredients for our first batches. Didn’t budget for that. Never mind.

Oh we need some cans to package our first batches. Didn’t budget for that. Erm. Never mind?

Ah what? We need some fricking labels too? Oh of course we do. Did we budget for that? Of course….not. Never mind? Starting to grit our teeth now and go into the first brews with blind faith. Let’s hope this works.

Early label and beer name concept.

The first couple of months were all about getting beers ready to sell. We wanted to have four beers ready for launch day but, having put our launch date back a couple of times, we’d very specifically set a date in the diary that we weren’t prepared to miss. So whatever was ready on that date was going on sale.

In the end it was clear we would only realistically have three beers ready but have a fourth on the way not too far behind at all and that was absolutely fine.

Two of the three beers were cracking and we were really pleased with them. The third didn’t turn out at all how we’d planned but at the same time was a solid enough beer so we decided to make that a one off beer with the other two firmly planted in our core range before we’d sold a single can.

Testing out the new brew kit.

The whole first set of brews was all about getting used to our new brew kit and understand the differences in it vs our little home brew set up. If we’re honest we’re still doing that and most probably will thorough out the course of the year (so if you taste a Meon Pale and it doesn’t quite taste the same as the last that will be why!).

Four brews down then and with a garage bulging with canned and labelled stock and a shiny website ready for orders we needed to start telling people that we were here.

The of the most nerve wracking thing about the whole process of starting a brewery for us was telling the world about it. Like seriously, we had no issues spending the money or bashing our garage around and the marketing side of things is kinda essential really but I think it’s fair to say we’re introverts at heart so putting ourselves out there like that was very scary in comparison to everything else.

We didn’t need to worry about that though really. The response was really quite overwhelming and on launch day we have boxes stacked filling up the kitchen table with pre orders ready to deliver out via courier and out locally by ourselves on our first day. We had so much fun delivering out our first beers - lots of smiling faces and loads of lovely chats about beer, it was fun and we haven’t looked back since.

And with that we close this little old mini series of articles about how we got to having a brewery in our garage. We hope you’ve enjoyed/found it useful or just managed to kill a bit of time making it look like you were doing something of importance. 

Four months and a bit months after launch we’ve had a successful Christmas season and we’re well and truly into 2024, looking forward to seeing what the year brings. Stay tuned for more updates as the year progresses and make sure you follow us on social media too.

For now though, as always, thanks so much for reading!