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Last Christmas I wrote a long waffling blog about making life count. It had been a genuinely stressful time getting the brewery up and running and by the time the festive break rolled around I was ‘proper wrecked’, both mentally and physically!
We’d been on a journey to get the thing up and running and then went straight into launch and a busy Christmas season. We spen
t little time actually getting used to our brewing kit and it was a bit of a struggle to get great tasting beer from it.
So going into Christmas I could have easily just said ‘I tried but hey ho, it’s not meant to be’. Naturally we had a few days off and by the 1st Jan I was raring to go again.
We had a simple goal in 2023, sell a single can of beer to a total stranger. That went pretty well! I think we’d sold close to 1,000 cans by year end. So going into a new year we decided to keep it simple again. We decided we’d focus on making as much consistently great beer as we could.
So have we made this year count? Reflecting now I think that’s gone pretty well again. We managed to smash through 29 commercial brew days this year, brewing our new ‘Limited Release’ range on the small homebrew kit and bigger batches on the normal kit. The can seamer sits at a count of 4,422. We’ve had the pleasure of it being stocked in three local shops and had been sold across 32 events this year. That’s a lot of beer produced and sold across a lot of events for a two person team (who also both work full time too). At points throughout the year I’ve wondered how we managed to do it!
As to whether it was any good, well our Untapped rating sits at a respectable rating of 3.55 out of 5 so I guess that’s okay on an app full of beer connoisseurs. Forgetting Untapped I do believe the best endorsement you can have is when you get customers returning again and again and we’ve had some genuinely lovely feedback this year and plenty of returning customers which is all the endorsement and encouragement I need to keep going into 2025.
Speaking of 2025 that’s all still a bit TBC but I’m excited to see what we can achieve. There is no doubt we will be here though we may go a bit quiet for the first couple of months as we brew like mad to get stock back up whilst ironing out plans and putting them into action. Whatever we do it will be hard to match what we’ve achieved this year but we will sure as hell do our best.
Enough about the future for now though. As much as we’ve had a brilliant year we’re both a bit tired and are SO looking forward to a bit of a rest and recuperate over the next few days.
Before we go though we just wanted to say THANK YOU SO SO SO VERY MUCH for all of your wonderful support in 2024. Being as small as we are every single interaction, sale and compliment we receive honestly means so much and gives us the fuel we need to power on. We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and we look forward to seeing you again in 2025!
Oli & Azzie
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