Brewer's viewpoint West Berkshire Brewery’s Ryan Grace looks at how the business has driven forward during the pandemic

How to drive forward in the face of adversity

Ryan Grace, the Communications Manager at West Berkshire Brewery, looks back at a year when small independent brewers have got knocked down, but they’ve got up again, and come back fighting…

“The last year, 2020 (and the first half of 2021) was a time for our industry the likes of which we’ve not seen in our lifetimes. The challenges were widespread, and adversely set the vast majority of brewing and hospitality businesses unforetold challenges. Like many others, here at West Berkshire Brewery we made use of the Government’s Furlough Scheme, falling to a skeleton crew of only eight members of staff in March 2020. Days went by, with the team remaining positive, and never taking no for an answer. Opportunities were out there, and we made the best out of them with the resources we had. Having lost 85% of our business overnight as lockdown struck, we didn’t rest on our laurels, and by June we had the full team back, and working hard to save our brewery. We improved our online shop, radically shifted our operations to ensure efficiency, and set the sky as the limit. Noticing that the rise in home-consumption had led to a huge rise in the growth of many small brewers around the country, whom each shared in our can-do attitude, we vastly expanded our Co-pack and Brew services, to bring small brewers into West Berkshire Brewery to scale their craft using our professional equipment and help them ensure their growth continues. We shifted to a schedule of packaging 24 hours a day, 5 days a week to facilitate this extra demand; exceeding 79 million cans/bottles per year. This helped us identify new gaps in our technology, and we invested in packaging facilities, including one of only a handful of Fridge Pack Machines in the country, enabling us to produce multipacks ready for the off-trade. Of course, this industry was simultaneously booming, whilst the on-trade was shut. The pandemic also gave us a chance to sit back and consider our sustainability. Other than setting ourselves new goals to strive towards, we partnered with Pak Tech to reduce our single-use plastic output. We now clip all beer cans with 100% recycled plastic holders, that can in-turn be recycled once at a consumer’s home.

And last but not least, from the skeleton crew that remained in March 2020, and the 57 full-time employees that were on our books in total at the time, we’re now operating with almost 80 members of staff, as of May 2021. To this day we’re still recruiting, as continued growth both in terms of contract brewing clients and an increase in our packaging functionality has driven further opportunities for some of the industry’s best talent to come aboard. With a larger base of employees, we sought new initiatives to empower staff at all levels. Thus the WBB Beer Cup 2021 was born – a chance for our team of both prospective and veteran Brewers to learn from one another, with the prize being to have influenced our Seasonal Beer range of 2022 (and a holiday to the legendary breweries on the Continent, of course!). This has given our team the opportunity to collaborate on exciting brews, encouraging all levels of experience to take part. From the initial mash, to naming and branding the final beers, we’re creating a holistic environment at WBB, in which development is paramount. The winning brews will be crowned and celebrated at an event later in the year, and our teams will put their learnings into practice every day thereafter. It is these opportunities that in hindsight allow us to consider how far we’ve come since March 2020. We’ve been knocked down. But it’s the fight-back that shows your true metal. At the end of it all? We made 85% of the sales of 2019 anyway, which we’re proud of, as the same proportion of our usual trade was closed for much of the year. Our online shop hit sales over twenty times higher than the previous period during the first lockdown, and it remains above the levels seen prior to the pandemic. Our resolution for you is to remain positive, think with agility, and remember – it’s all for the love of beer.”

Having lost 85% of our business overnight as lockdown struck, we didn’t rest on our laurels, and by June we had the full team back, and working hard to save our brewery.

* That’s a lie, I’m not.