Meet The Retailer A profile of SIBA Business Award finalist Brewery Market in Twickenham

Issue 11 Autumn 2022

Up Market

Up Market

With a long career in finance for global businesses in the City under her belt, Linda Birch had been looking for an opportunity to start her own small independent business for years. A chance invite to a bottle share event sparked a newfound love of all things craft beer, and the seed of an idea to open a bottleshop in the rugby pub heartland of London’s Twickenham was formed. A few years later, Linda and her dog Pepper are now the proud owners of Brewery Market, a unique shrine to craft beer in the heart of Twickenham’s boutique-led Church Street. The site has gathered around it a loyal band of beer lovers who supported each other through the pandemic lockdowns and are now the thread that binds the Brewery Market operation and its local community together. The business is very much built around its customers, and the experience they have while drinking the beers it stocks, both in-house from the tap and at home through the off-trade side of the shop. Linda uses accessible descriptors for her beers, referencing common tastes and flavours from wines, for example, to help newcomers to the craft beer category understand what it is they are sampling. By cutting out the beer snobbery, the technical descriptors and more pompous side to the sector, Linda has attracted a wide range of customers, many of whom, like her, were previously wine or spirits drinkers. In March this year, Brewery Market was Highly Commended in the very hard-fought independent retail category at the SIBA Business Awards at BeerX in Liverpool, a fantastic achievement for such a young business. Caroline Nodder, Independent Brewer’s Editor, caught up with Linda, and Pepper, back in September to hear more about her passion for craft beer and her journey to becoming an outstanding independent retailer…

Cover Story

Business Basics

Name: Brewery Market Founded: Opened in 2018 Location: Twickenham, London Owner: Linda Birch Number of retail sites: 1 Staff: 1 full-time, 1 parttime (plus occasional shift workers)

Key product categories and

sales mix: 99% beer (with 1% soft drinks and cider)

How did you come to launch Brewery Market and how has the business developed since then?

“I'm a Finance Director for a global recruitment company, and I've been doing that since I was 16. I've always wanted to run my own business, but I was never really inspired. I must have written like, a million business plans. Cheese, sweets…it just didn’t go anywhere. Then in 2016, I had almost given up on drinking really, I was just fed up with wine and gin, and just the industry in general. The pubs I was going to after work, the bars and stuff in the City and I was getting home late just fed up with everything. And then someone invited me to join a craft beer bottle share group. It was actually being run at the time by someone that started it from [independent retailer] Real Drinks - or it was called Real Ale back then. We were living above Real Ale then - right back really early on in its existence. And we would go in and Nick [Real Drinks owner Nick Dolan] would be like, ‘try this beer, try that beer’. We were really just going down because they had some spirits and wines there too, but he started introducing us to different beers and then - I was married at the time - we started going to CAMRA pubs that year as well. So I happened to be in the shop and this guy said ‘why don't you come along and try all these different craft beers in one night?’ You just had to bring a bottle along - I think I took a really dodgy sweet potato or quinoa based beer and everybody just laughed at me. I never made that mistake again. But I was just overwhelmed by it all. And after going a couple of times, I was actually sat next to Lotte Peplow [Ambassador for the US Brewers Association in the UK and Europe]. She was one of the founders of this bottle share – it still carries on now in fact – and I just turned to Lotte and said, ‘I'm going to open a bottleshop’. She was still studying for her Cicerone at that point, and she just looked at me and said, ‘Do it!’ So I was enjoying attending the events socially, the people I was meeting and I realised at the same time that they really desperately needed something different in Twickenham. It was just rugby pub, rugby pub, rugby pub. I thought it would just be great to be able to get home after work and come in to somewhere like this. It just all fit together like the magical moment. But then it took me a few years to find the right location.”

How did you go about finding the right site?

“In Twickenham, because of the stadium and it being a small town, there's this thing called a Cumulative Impact Zone [making it more difficult to open licensed premises in certain areas of the town]. So we found this really nice premises - and when I say we I am talking about me and my dog, it was just the two of us at that point. We found this place and I really fell in love. It was this really old restaurant with teak-lined walls, it was really cool. We'd got great terms with the landlord and I was starting to make plans. And then basically we got gazumped by Tesco. So I started looking for another place and found these old offices on Church Street in Twickenham. It's just a really boutiquey street, and it was just perfect for Brewery Market, with loads of independent businesses all working together to keep the street nice, and I eventually convinced the landlord to turn it into a bottleshop. It's like a cute little white cottage and it's a conservation building. It just feels like it has really good vibes in there.”

What is the ethos behind the business?

“I knew there were some key elements to it, like focusing on bringing something different to the community in the area and all the things that go with your duty of care to that community, like making sure the environment is good, sustainability and all of those sorts of things. I also wanted to inspire people as well. Like when you're a kid and you go in to a sweet shop, and you're like, ‘Oh my God, look at this place!’, people literally walk in here and go ‘Oh my God there’s so many fridges look at this place!’ That’s what I want. I did obviously do a lot of research, I had to go to a lot of bottleshops, and I would hear people saying the same thing, ‘it's too much flavour’ or ‘I couldn't drink a whole one’ and so I wanted to focus on answering some of those issues as well. So making people feel comfortable and giving them options was really important as well.”

So you’re taking people on a journey in a way?

“Yes, there's definitely a progression in our fridges and it's such a wide and diverse selection of beers – 200 of them - you could definitely go on a journey. And there's lots of ways to make it easier for them - we often identify beers in the fridge by flavour, so we say you might like it if you're a wine lover, or if you love this flavour, it's a bit sweeter. Because some people walk in and they can be a bit overwhelmed by it all. But then if they can focus on one of these small elements, we find that really connects with people. That was always really important, not to be just selling people things, but to be getting them to taste something. And if they like it, so many times we've had customers coming back saying ‘I came in the other day, I didn't buy anything but you gave me some tasters and I’ve brought my entire family with me’. And they get a flight of beers and they have a great time. I love that part.”

What makes you stand out from other retailers?

“I would say its the way we approach beer. We're not coming at it like we know loads about beer. We're not posting loads of reviews of beers or in craft beer forums or anything like that. We are just really focusing on how, when you have a beer, how the environment affects it, and how what you do can affect the way you remember that beer. The events we do are a bit more unusual, the music we play is a bit different to what you would hear anywhere else – we are zagging where everybody else is zigging. We're not doing the opposite just for the sake of it, but we actually say ‘think differently’, that's our little hashtag. Don't get drunk, you don't need to drink so much, have smaller measures, try more variety. And just see what you like. Whereas some retailers are all about ‘buy 12 beers and get 10% off’. It's a completely different view of alcohol and how to treat it and behave around it. I know people sometimes think about music, but it’s thinking about beer and things like lighting – drinking it with very bright lights is a different experience to if you've got very dim lights. An environment makes you want different beers. And temperature and time of year as well. But actually a venue makes a real difference. That's why our branding is very much black lines and white paper. When you go into the shop, all the colour on the wall is coming from the beer. It's beautiful and cosy and warm, and it's great, but it's not our influence, it’s us saying ‘here’s all the wonderful things you can try’.”

I'd say that the pandemic did actually affect us in a positive way. I think it really helped us establish a core group of customers, a real inner crew. What’s new at Brewery Market for 2022?

“We're still catching up with a bit of the preCovid plan. But hopefully, by the end of this year, we'll have our webshop fully up to date and have that online, because things just got on top of that. And we've got plans for the end of this year and certainly into next year to go out and about a bit more, get to some festivals and things - not big festivals, but more local community events. They're the short-term plans.”

What is your pricing strategy and how do you compete with larger retailers?

“We try not to sell anything that people are selling elsewhere. Some people do walk in and say, ‘Oh my God, how can you charge that much?’. But we do really try to keep our prices low. And I'd say our pricing strategy is, when we're looking at pricing, what would I want to pay for it? So if you take an Omnipollo or Lervig which should be £16-18 a can, I would never pay that – so we'll mark it down to a reasonable level and try and recoup a reasonable profit in another areas like merch and stuff like that. It's a bit of a balancing game. We don't just put 85% markup on everything. We definitely really think about the pricing. It's quite important to us.”

How has the pandemic changed the business?

“When the pandemic started we were still really just getting into things. So I don't really know what sort of a business we would have been pre-pandemic because it was about 50/50 on-trade to takeaway. But I would say the pandemic helped us get established on the takeaway side. Because we were open just selling through the window, where other people like the bigger chains weren't open. So a lot of people were coming across us very quickly. Especially doing the growlers and we do the 10% off - a lifetime discount on our growlers if you bring it back, which is nice. So I'd say that the pandemic did actually affect us in a positive way. I think it really helped us establish a core group of customers, a real inner crew. We got a little Whatsapp group going and because a lot of these guys and girls that come to the shop are actually just on their own, most people we get are just individuals and occasional couples, we don't get many big groups. So they became a community. They created their own bubble. Some of these people are my best friends now. I don't think I'd have that group of real dedicated ‘Shop Friends’ without the pandemic happening.”

How do you balance the on- and off-trade sides to your business?

“Obviously during the pandemic it was 100% off-trade. But I’d say now we get far more people coming in, having a few drinks and then taking away. Some people will sit there and have a few beers from the tap and then take away 20 cans or something like that. And then there's other people that will come in just to do flights of beers, which they love. We don't have corkage or anything like that. So it's just the same price if you’re drinking in and taking away. I'd say it's more drinking in now. Maybe 70% of our business now?”

How successful have your virtual tastings been and how do they work?

“That came out of the pandemic as well. Because I obviously have this job in the city. Someone was saying, ‘Oh, I'm looking for a way to entertain my clients, can you do something?’ So I said I thought we could do something, we can send out a little package. So everybody gets the same beers. And we can get Zoom on. And so we started it with Osborne Clarke. And we did a load with them. We did it with Paul Davies, who's director of AleHunters and a World Beer Award judge and it just really took off. Especially because we're all about the flavour, so we designed these little flavour packs, just six little packs, tiny light little snap packs, and in each one is something that's a different flavour. So you only need to have a tiny little nibble on it, just to try it and see how it affects the beer. For umami it might be dried mushrooms, or it'll be sour cherries, or a bitter chocolate or bitter coffee or something like that. And they're still going on now. In fact Osborne Clarke got in touch the other day and they want to do one in person now.”

What do you look for in the small brewers you work with?

“I would say there are a few elements to that. I mean, obviously the people that were nice to me in the beginning when I first joined craft beer, they get in! And people that are loyal to the industry, true to what they do with their own ethos, and they’re trying to do good things, obviously you want to work with those sorts of people again and again. Someone like Duration or Double Barreled. Then I get recommendations from within the industry, just travelling out going to different breweries or festivals and trying different beers, going to other bottleshops and trying beers in different areas around the country. Never on Untapped.”

Is the energy crisis likely to seriously affect you?

“Well we've got this cold store out the back – it was offices so we lined and insulated one of the rooms and built a false wall. So we run that as a chiller basically but we have to run it all the time - you can't turn it off. But I have been lucky in that I was able to sign a contract with British Gas just before all this started and it doesn't expire until 2025. Which is so lucky. Our electrics is already high enough as is. Because we've got this old office ceiling with those massive halogen bulbs. So I’ve just installed fairy lights everywhere.”

Have you seen any interesting consumer trends coming through this year?

“That's an interesting one. I would say we get more people trying craft beer that hadn't previously. So we certainly get more people interested in that part of the industry. Mostly older people – much older, retired people.”

Does that reflect your usual customer demographic?

“We actually get a lot of teachers. Really - lots of teachers. And our LGBTQ plus community is huge. I'd say probably 40% of our customers. Because there's nowhere else for them to go in Twickenham, where they feel comfortable. There's just nowhere you can come to one bar and still get loads of variety, whereas you'd have to go to loads of different places to try out this many beers normally. It's always different. And we're super friendly as well. You can feel safe here.”

What are your plans for the business over the next five years?

“First off, I'd like to take a salary and give up the day job. I feel that's sort of happening as we speak anyway. But we do have some plans. One of them is to take Brewery Market on the road, and also to develop our own range of products. So this is something that we started doing in the beginning with hop oils and creams. But I had to shelve something, I was just trying to do too much at once. So I just had to put that on the backburner. So that'll hopefully come back, and it’ll be nice to see our products in other bottleshops. I'm actually a psychotherapist, and also a Master Herbalist. I'm really, really interested in herbology. And the ingredients that people use in their beers especially, they're so natural, aren't they? So it lends itself to something like that. I love hops. They're so amazing - antibacterial, antimicrobial, antifungal, anti inflammatory, naturally relaxing and full of essential minerals. So I started making these creams and they were really popular, so those will be coming back soon in a big way, not just me making them at home.”

What are you proudest of during your time at Brewery Market?

“I think how these individual, single people, living alone have all come together and they've made this wonderful community. This network of support based around the shop, I think that's probably what I'm proudest of.”

Who do you most admire in the craft beer retail market at the moment and why?

“This is a hard one. I think honestly anyone, literally anyone, that's opened an independent shop on their own, in this industry, I admire.”