Meet the retailer Nick Dolan from Real Drinks talks us through 16 years in independent beer retailing

Meet the Retailer: Real Drinks

Issue 6 Summer 2021

Back to Reality

Nick Dolan has been a champion for independent small brewers for over 16 years through his business Real Drinks (formerly Real Ale) which he founded with the intention of showcasing the range of beers available from the UK’s craft brewing community. Growing the business from its foundation in 2005 with one independent bottle shop, Nick and his business partner Zeph now have three shops, each with its own taproom, and continue to seek out new and interesting small producers to showcase. But Real Drinks is not just an independent retail operation in the traditional sense. As a supplier to the large supermarkets, and in fact the largest category supplier of beers and ciders to Marks and Spencers, Nick is able to act as an incubator for small independent brands seeking to grow their distribution into the larger off-trade environment. He will often seek out new small breweries and artisan producers, promote them on a small scale in his bottle shops, hosting events like meet the brewer nights to introduce them to his customers, and if things go well, help them grow their business into supermarkets. With touchpoints at every level of the craft beer sector this places him in a unique position to understand both consumer and retail trends and continually offer his customers something new and different. Caroline Nodder from Independent Brewer spoke to Nick last month for our first ever Meet the Retailer feature…

Business Basics

Name: Real Drinks Founded: 2005

Location:

Head office in St. Margaret’s, Twickenham

Owners:

Nick Dolan & Zeph King

Number of retail sites:

Three (Twickenham, Maida Vale & Notting Hill) Staff: 25-30

Product categories and sales mix:

80% Beer, 20% made up of range of categories including wine, spirits, seltzers and pre-mix cocktails.

How did you come to launch Real Drinks and how has the business developed since then?

“I founded the business back in 2005. And the reason for that was to basically give small micro-breweries a place on the high street. I started the business stocking 10 or 12 different breweries with all the beers from the breweries bottle conditioned beers and we've grown over time to have three stores and we've also got our office which is based in St. Margaret's down the road from our Twickenham store. We were called Real Ale back in 2005 when I founded the business because it was the descriptor that everyone knew. And I was shocked to find that Real Ale Ltd had not been incorporated and that realale.com, that we still own as a web address, had not been used. And basically, as the business has grown over the last 16 years, we have developed beyond just serving and selling real ales. We started off with bottle condition beers back in 2005, we now offer in our retail stores a huge range of beer. But we also do offer more traditional off-licence products with wines and spirits as well. We are also growing other drink categories like seltzers, pre-mix cocktails, etc. But beer is at the core, effectively. I grew up in South West London. I've got dual citizenship, my mum's Canadian, my dad's English. And I was actually working out in Canada 18 years ago, and one of my best friend's dads has a farm in North Norfolk. And to cut a long story short, I helped him open up a beer shop on his farm when farming was in really dire straits, to diversify the farm. That's been a great success. It's called the Real Ale Shop. And off the back of that, I decided to open up my own beer shop down in South West London. The concept was to sell bottle-condition beer, so it was to sell beers that you could find when you went on holiday and found a new and interesting local brewery, and it was about giving them an avenue to the public in a built up area. We've grown over the last 16 years to have three stores. And as the craft beer scene has developed we have ridden this wave of new and interesting beers and styles that have come to the forefront. The ethos of the business is still the same - to give new and interesting producers an avenue to market - and we really pride ourselves on that.”

What do you do differently at Real Drinks?

“It's important to understand that our business has two major aspects to it, which really mesh well together. We have our retail side of the business, we have our three stores, but we also have what we call our wholesale side of the business. Early on in our growth, we actually got approached by Marks and Spencers to help them launch a range of bottle-condition beers. So we actually supply Marks and Spencers and another couple of supermarkets with beers. Specifically Marks and Spencers we are their biggest category supplier of beers and ciders. So what we do is we help brewers grow. We foster them through our retail stores, and where they want to start going out into the wider market into the larger off-trade market, we can help them go into supermarkets or other retailers to help their ambitions or growth.

Everyone has different ambitions of growth so we can tailor things to fit their needs. So for our stores, we're never going to compete with a supermarket purely on a price point but where we can compete is the limited edition beers that we might have in, the small producers, the new to market, the real kind of tip of the spear of the beer industry. And we can have lots of different new interesting styles and try new stuff and help brewers have a voice on the high street. From day one we have done a lot of meet the brewer events. So we have brewers that come into our stores and can meet with our customers and do tastings and do talks. We have found that extremely powerful. And that helps really build brands in our small scale retail stores, which has been really, really good. With the pandemic it’s obviously made it very difficult to do anything like that, but as things go back to normal, we will definitely be reintroducing that part of our business.”

We help brewers grow. We foster them through our retail stores, and where they want to start going out into the wider market into the larger off-trade market, we can help them go into supermarkets or other retailers to help their ambitions or growth.

Continued on page 37

Describe your business as it was at the start of the pandemic and how it has changed since?

“It's been challenging, but we are very, very blessed to be operating in the off-trade at this moment in time. The off-trade has obviously kept trading through the whole process. And we have made it one of our company missions to support brewers in any way we can. We have been trying to buy as much beer as we can from smaller guys and people who are struggling to try and keep the wolf from the door. For our stores, we had to close for about a month and a half, I think, when the government decided that we weren't a central service, then they changed their mind. We then started to open up our stores. In the past, we've run national websites, we used to run the CAMRA beer club many years ago, so we had the infrastructure in the background to turn our website on quite quickly. So when the pandemic hit and everything locked down, we turned that on and we saw a 2000% growth in that overnight. That was mainly facilitating our customers around our three stores, but national sales as well. I was out in my own car doing deliveries as well as many of the staff who were doing deliveries to facilitate the high demand. And after that initial wave, we then started to open up our stores. Our stores are effectively retail units, but they are taprooms as well. Obviously we couldn't do on-sales. So we had to reconfigure our stores back to more of a traditional off-licence setup. And we've seen very good sales through the period. It's been with challenges, but we have seen decent sales because obviously all the pubs unfortunately have been closed. They're all hopefully opening back up now and I'm really hoping the on-trade will bounce back and the hospitality sector will bounce back. But it's going to be, I think, some tough yards still ahead. We do feel that dynamic has changed. Before the pandemic I think it was something like 49% on-trade to 51% off-trade, and I think there would have been a quite seismic shift now and that the off-trade will be a significantly higher percentage than on-trade in the market going forward. We've seen a trend towards people treating themselves a little bit more being slightly more adventurous with the styles or the ABV of products they might try and starting to play around with the different beers that we have to offer, which is really encouraging. I think there's actually been a blossoming of beer knowledge.”

Longer term, how do you think the pandemic will affect retailers like yourself?

“I think there are a few factors, which we can't ignore. There's the factor of the cost that people will be able to buy products at in supermarkets, which will be cheaper than pubs. People always ask me, ‘how do you survive on the high street?’ Well, the way that we believe we have to survive and will survive going forward, is we have to offer not just really great products, we have to offer a good experience and good customer service. We can offer different products, we can offer more unique products, and we can offer a service and understanding and talk to people about the product. And people want the experience and the understanding and the product knowledge and that holds a high position in the value chain. The dynamic between the off-trade and on-trade has moved more towards the off-trade. So I think brewers are going to have to accept that and find solutions for avenues to get into the off-trade more. Have the right kind of package and have the beers in the right packaging format, etc, etc. But the pubs are not dead by any means. And the pub industry will bounce back. And we just really hope it comes back as strong as before.”

What do you think is the key to a successful online operation?

“It is a challenge. For us the entire online experience was really focused on our customer base, our current customer base around our three stores. Ensuring that we were facilitating the customer base that we had spent the last 14 and a half years building up prior to the pandemic. So it was really focused on localised marketing, although we do obviously do national marketing. During the pandemic we hired a social media manager and that's paid huge dividends to us in upping our game in all areas of our social media.”

How do your taprooms operate within your business model?

“Initially when I started the shop in 2005 it wasn’t a taproom. But as the beer industry has actually developed, we thought it would be really a great thing to incorporate a taproom. We went through a kind of a rebranding, maybe seven or eight years ago, just freshening up the look of our stores and the retail environment. And we decided that we would want to get a licence for on-trade as well as the off-trade we already had and bring keg and cask in. We found that has really added to the ambience of all of our stores really making them more of a community hub than they were previously. It’s a really nice blend in that we get people coming in for a couple of pints here and there, and still have customers coming in to do their weekly beer shop. And that's worked very well.”

Continued on page 39

What do you see as the key challenges currently for a business like yours?

“To be honest with you, with Brexit and the pandemic combined it has been an interesting last 18 months. We have made some gains. We have changed ways of working throughout the whole business. We obviously have our retail stores but half the business is based in an office. None of those people have been in the office for the last 12 or 13 months, so we've had to adapt to different ways of working through the whole business. And the more flexible ways of working we're definitely going to take forward We won't lose any of those. We're going to take all the positive things that we've managed to do, the new ways of working and new initiatives and take all those into how we operate when things get back to what everyone is calling the norm, whatever the norm is! We will take all the lessons we've learned and fold those in. The last 18 months has been about making sure we survive and making sure we're here at the back end of this whole pandemic being over. And as Brexit works its way through, being able to work our way through any effects that come from that which we may not have seen as of yet. The pandemic could have masked a number of different things that are still yet to come down the line. So we're optimistic but we’re tentative and we don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves and just make sure that we are staying solid.”

Have you seen any change in the product mix you are selling since the pandemic began?

“We’ve definitely seen people being more adventurous and we’ve seen a move to low and no as well. It's absolutely brilliant, brewers are producing some absolutely amazing, good quality, lower alcohol - not just low and no but lower ABV – beers. I really love my hops. And there are a lot of pale ales out there, or session IPAs and session pale ales even, which are between 3% and 4% and absolutely delicious. We've seen people moving more to lower alcohol, because, you know, we are a nation of drinkers. And during the pandemic, obviously, people have been drinking quite a bit, which is great, but they've been drinking responsibly. And so they've been buying some lower alcohol stuff and no alcohol stuff, but then they've also traded up to try some Imperial Porters or Imperial Stouts and trying some lovely sour beers on the market, we have seen quite a big range of purchasing across lots of different styles. We've also seen definitely, lagers coming back and high quality British lagers. So people have been really shopping around a lot of the different categories that we offer.”

How have you kept in touch with regular customers over the last year?

“We have run a couple virtual events. But to be completely honest with you, it's been quite busy with people actually being able to come in to our shops. Because of the pandemic, there had been a portion of our customers that basically were self-isolating, shielding, and they wanted a service that could deliver beers the next day, to their door. So we got to know the customers who were shielding so we could leave it on their doorstep, make sure that we moved well away before they opened their door, and they'd leave it out overnight so that they know there's no risk of infection from us to them on any of the cardboard or any of the products. We've had other customers who we turn up to the door and are like, ‘oh my god, you're the fourth emergency service here, bringing me my booze on a Friday afternoon’ after their 1,000th Zoom meeting of the week! It’s just been a blend of many different things. For some people we'd be their only social interaction - the only people that they have coming to their door that they could talk to."

How do you, as an independent retailer, work with the large supermarkets?

“We work with supermarkets, but we're also 100% independent. Our three stores are completely independent. How we pick products is around, do we like the taste of something? It's not about price it’s about flavour. So is the flavour good? We like to blind taste things. And then we look at the branding and the price after that, but really it's about flavour for our stores. And we are always trying to look for something new and interesting and kind of push the boundaries, so that we offer our customers new and exciting products all the time, as well as having a core range that they can rely on and know is of great quality. But then obviously, because we do have this other side of business, we like to see ourselves as a middle kind of accelerator for brewers. So they can come into our stores and start selling products and often they have just started. And then as they grow, we're here to help them grow in any way, shape, or form. They can get to the point of going through supplying lots of independent stores, and start to venture out to get into the supermarket game, which obviously is about volume, increasing the quality, and we're then able to help them with that. We have a whole technical team in the business and we can go and help brewers ensure that they have the right practices in place to take those next steps. It's about supporting. We have a business that we truly believed from day one was about giving small micro-breweries an independent place on the high street. And that's what we're about. But we can also then help them at the appropriate time get into the right supermarket for them.”

Continued on page 41

You recently won an award for Best Independent Retailer at the SIBA Business Awards. What did that mean to you and the team?

“It was absolutely brilliant to be recognised by you guys, we really, really appreciate it. We're an Associate Member of SIBA and we live and breathe beer, so it's been very nice to be recognised by our peers, that we are a good retailer. We've been in the market for the last 16 years, quite a long time now in comparison to some of our compatriots, and there's a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes.

I founded the business back in 2005, but that business would not be what it is today without all the staff that we have. We have a really good group of people working in the business at the moment. And they're the people who actually make the business, it's not me. It's the people living and breathing and working in the business that do it. I'm here talking about many different areas in our business, the guys and girls who are buying the different beers and finding the new and interesting beers in the market, they help us move the business forward on a daily basis by finding new and interesting things. We are very grateful for the award, but it's really not for me, it's really for the staff who have made the business what it is.”

We have a really good group of people working in the business at the moment. And they're the people who actually make the business, it's not me. What are you proudest of during your time at Real Drinks?

“I suppose that we're here today. And that we're moving forward, and the future looks very positive. I suppose I'm proudest of the staff that we have. Because I know it sounds really corny, but I know what it's like to run a one man band, I had a shop with three or four people in working part time for me. One guy who actually still works in the business and has been in the business from the beginning. And there's only so much you can do as one person. But the business has accelerated, we've had growth every single year, and I'm very proud of that, and very proud of the people who've actually made that happen.”

What is your all-time favourite beer?

“I feel there are so many different categories within beer, that I like different things at different times. So if I was going round to a friend’s house and going to have dessert like a chocolate cake or something I would take a Boone Creek. But if I was going down to my local pub in St. Margaret's, the Crown, I'd probably go for a pint of Citra. But I go through phases of drinking different styles, and every week or two, probably, I change to a new style.”

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

“There are a lot of independent stores who are doing some really good stuff. There's not one particular one I could pull out of the herd, but when I opened the store back in 2005 there was maybe one other craft beer store in London, which then about three weeks after we opened, they closed. And now, there's maybe 50 or 60 different specialist craft beer stores in London. And that tells the story that there's not one person who's doing it really well, there's a whole bunch of people doing a really good job of promoting the beer category, which I think is really great.”