Business profile We meet Dave Grant from Fierce Beer

Going global

Fierce Beer’s Co-founders Dave Grant and David McHardy met while on a training course at Sunderland’s Brewlab – a beginning they share with many craft brewers – but as former oil and gas workers from Aberdeen their global outlook really set them apart from other start-ups. The pair had travelled the world in their previous roles, making many international contacts along the way. And from the very start their plans for Fierce included, unusually, a firm focus on export. Inspired by nearby BrewDog and its global footprint, Dave and David set out to create a business which was not reliant on distributors but has its own retail arm, a loyal consumer following, and an export arm that could showcase the barrel-aged stouts with which it initially made its name. Moving from a homebrew set up in Dave’s house to a small industrial unit in Aberdeen, Fierce began its journey in 2016, and has since added five more units on the same estate with equipment now in place to eventually triple its 5,000hl annual production to 15,000hl. One bar in Aberdeen was soon joined by another in Edinburgh and, during lockdown last year, by a third in Manchester. And the duo hopes to open at least one additional UK bar site a year from now on. There are already over 3,000 card-carrying Fierce followers, thanks to several rounds of reward-based crowdfunding events, who keep the bars and bottle shops busy and have enabled the brewery to grow, even during the last 18 months of the pandemic. Fierce has now added a core range of four beers, a pilsner, IPA, hazy IPA and rhubarb pale, but it continues to win fans, especially internationally, through its barrel-aged stouts which really got the brewery noticed back in 2016. Independent Brewer’s Caroline Nodder spoke to Dave last month to find out more about his ambitious plans for Fierce and his thoughts on some of the key challenges for small brewers in the Scottish market…

Business Basics

Name: Fierce Beer Founded: 2015 (first beer produced 2016)

Location:

Aberdeen (brewery). Aberdeen, Edinburgh & Manchester (bars)

Owners:

Dave Grant and David McHardy Annual production: 5,000hl Brewing team: 3 Staff: 35 (including retail) Core beers: Fierce Pilsner (4.2% ABV), Fierce IPA (5.2% ABV), Fierce Hazy IPA (5% ABV) & Fierce Rhubarb (4.6% ABV Fruit Pale Ale). All gluten free and vegan.

Production split (cask, keg

& small pack): 40% keg, 60% small pack

Key export markets:

Russia and Scandinavia

We chose the name Fierce because we were so fed up picking up something that said it tastes of this and it didn't! How did you come to launch Fierce Beer and how has the business developed since then?

“I would say 95% of us here are ex oil and gas workers from Aberdeen. So both myself and Dave McHardy, we didn't know each other at the time, but we both just got disillusioned with the business and wanted to do something different. We were both homebrewers and we met at a training course in Sunderland at Brewlab and decided to start off from there. I actually registered my house as a brewery and I was doing stove top all grain brewing and selling to local bars from there. So that was in 2015 before starting off for real. We were lucky we had some friends at New Wave distribution and we made some beer and put it through them and got a market that way. But also our very first brew was pre-sold to Aldi for one of their beer festivals. Before we even knew we could produce beer they asked and we’d sold so that was quite stressful. So, how we started off, we did it the opposite way to probably what makes sense, which was to produce some strange and very full on beers and then back them up with a core range. Rather than starting with a fairly easily marketable product and then making some weird stuff after that. So I think that got some attention and then we back-filled. It was mostly Scotland wide at that stage – New Wave were doing Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle as well. So it started off from there. And then we found the joys of EeBria which helped us get around the country. From May in 2016 we started off with a small set of kit in a little industrial unit, which we still have, and we’ve taken on more units since then. We chose the name Fierce because we were so fed up picking up something that said it tastes of this and it didn't! It was just a little bit disappointing. So that's why we went into the market with all the stupidly over-flavoured wild things first to catch attention with the Fierce name. We wanted the name Fierce to mean it was something you’re going to taste in the can.”

What is the ethos behind your beers?

“I guess, as everyone is, we want to try to get as much as we can into people's hands as possible. We do spend a lot of time looking at where we should market which products. Way back before we started we looked at what other international breweries were doing, and we quite liked the way that companies like Great Divide, and AleSmith and these sort of guys worked, in that they only exported their big and properly world class memorable beers and not their everyday stuff. So we work a lot like that. The turning point, in 2017, was at the BrewDog collab fest when we brought out a 12% stout, and it really caught attention from there. So we're known for having that, backed up by the other things we’ve gone on to do. What we really like doing is going in and finding new countries and pushing the really weird things, again, and we are known in quite a few countries just for producing the big stouts. Because of our background in oil and gas, we did travel quite a lot. So we saw what was going on around the globe. And it did make quite a lot of difference, the fact that we're only 10 or 15 miles from BrewDog. So we saw what they did too, and we saw they were quite successful with what they did in getting a global footprint. We had a lot of friends who we’d worked with all around the world, so we thought we’d try to get our beers to them as much as anybody else.”

What do you do differently at Fierce?

“From a beer perspective, probably not a lot, there's so many amazing breweries around now and that is a great thing. We're not known as a hype brewery that only produces you know, super gram-per-litre DIPAs, because there are quite a few of them around. To be honest, I think we're known for big barrel-aged stouts. But I think what has really made us stand out is the fact we do have a couple of bars around the country. We spend an awful lot of time speaking to people and dealing with customers, and I think we're trying to push ourselves as the friendly guys. When you’re spending a lot of time with customers it makes an awful lot of difference in making sure that they know who we are, and we can respond to their queries and we are building an army of followers. It's really about following up and making sure that whoever does get to try what we produce is happy, either with that, or if they’re not then we follow up to make sure they're happy at least with what we say about ourselves. So customer service, I think, is a big differentiator.”

How have the events of the last 18 months affected your business?

“We actually did ok, because we have got the ability to produce small pack. So immediately kegging stopped and canning kept on going, and we pushed a lot through the web shop and any place that was continuing to trade with canned products. Also, because we had the three bars which immediately closed, we turned them into bottle shops to keep things moving forward. We also spent a fair bit of time working with some of the subscription companies, Beer Hawk and Beer52 and those guys. So we actually grew, which was unusual In the last 18 months, we've been able to get some cash in to triple our production. So although at the moment we are producing around 5,000hl we now have the equipment to produce 1.5 million litres [15,000hl] a year. We’ve got a new faster canning line, we’ve got a whole bunch of new equipment that was funded just because of big small pack sales.”

How has the retail side of your business developed since you launched?

“We opened our first bar in Aberdeen in 2017. And again, I was following the model of the breweries that we always wanted to see ourselves like. We were close to BrewDog as I said, but we also always liked the look of Magic Rock and Siren and Buxton and Tiny Rebel as well. Also Left Handed Giant, I remember Bruce Gray [Co-Founder] very clearly saying that he always wanted to put 70% of his production through his own places and not have to rely on distribution. So we did follow all these models and opened up our first bar in Aberdeen in 2017. That was a great thing to do. People went in there, found out about us then bought from the shop, or they’d buy from the shop then come in to find out about us. It’s all quite cyclical, that on-trade pushed the off-trade, and then we push back to the on-trade again. So this was a great model, and we opened another bar in Edinburgh a year later and Manchester right in the middle of the pandemic, last September [2020], as well, - we just loved the opportunity, couldn't turn it down. It’s a great spot and the incumbent just didn’t want to look after it any more, for whatever reason. So we opened in Manchester then, knowing that in time it would come through and be a real asset for us. We see that as a future too. We're continuing to look to open at least one new bar in the UK every year. That's our mission.”

What main challenges are you facing right now as an independent brewery in the Scottish market?

“Aberdeen is not a cask town so because of where we are we're keg driven for on-trade and just getting hold of pumps really is an issue. There are so many tied pubs and tied places that getting lines in anywhere at all is a massive struggle. Most places are owned either by Tennents or Belhaven or Star Pubs now as well. More than 90% of the places on the high street, you just can't even think of getting in to, unless do a massive deal with Mitchells & Butlers or one of those guys and sell things off super cheap. But not a lot of people can afford to do that. So we do have some local support, there are some independents, and again that's another reason why we went down the line of trying to get our own places, for surety of supply. We also are short a little bit on decent distributors. There was New Wave I mentioned before, they seem to have waned away and were sold off to James Clay & Sons. We actually deliver ourselves to a lot of Scotland, which means a lot of time on the road which is not particularly carbon friendly, but it's the only way we can get our beer out to customers who can’t come and buy direct.”

Is the current staffing crisis and supply chain issues affecting your business?

“Definitely supply chain, staffing not so much we've been ok at the moment. But the supply chain’s been a complete disaster. We've actually had to stop making a number of the things that we used to make because we can't get hold economically of some of the ingredients. We used to make a number of fruited sour beers and we just had to stop production completely for a while. It’s just because the prices are going up five and six-fold so it’s just not viable. Everything has gone up. But at the same time some of the export countries just can't afford to take beer in at the moment because the price is too high. So we've lost some export markets too. It's been really challenging in that respect. In 18 months we’ve probably changed our business plan five or six times. Some of our European export partners just don’t want to bother any more. Brexit means there’s a lot of extra red tape, a lot of extra cost. So they've stopped completely, we’ve probably lost at least half of the European export markets. I guess it has accelerated what would happen as markets mature. I guess that's one of the things that Brexit is going to do in time, we will have a better local market in the UK, as imports become fewer, but exports really aren't going to be what they used to be.”

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What is your view on the proposed Deposit Return Scheme (DRS)?

“The DRS if it was to go ahead in Scotland with the current timeline with the current plans will be a disaster. So much extra cost. We'd have to have different labels for different countries again, the English market would be different and we’d definitely lose sales there. Our bars maybe couldn’t get in the things they wanted. So we don't see it working in its current form. We think it can only work as a UK-wide thing. So our hope is that it will be delayed back to 2024 when the whole UK can pick it up and do it properly. There's certain things that are only thought about from a higher level with bigger companies in mind. It would be the wrong thing to do for the environment to put it back, we know that and don't get me wrong, we're very much behind DRS if it's done properly. But I do believe and I do hope that it will be put back, in order to do it in a more sensible fashion.”

You have successfully crowdfunded in the past. What have you learnt from that process?

“We’ve done a couple of rewards-based crowdfunding events in the past. We found that was a great way to have, what we call a Fierce Family, but a bunch of Fierce followers who will want to come and take people to the bar and be part of it and show off that this is their place. So doing that has obviously helped push us having a loyal following both for online sales, but also to get them in to the bars. This is not equity-based in any way. This is purely rewardsbased. So anyone who pledged, for every £1 they pledged they’d get £1.50 back in beer, either from our shop or from the bars. I think we’ve 3,000 people out there now with cards, which used to have a balance on them and now give them 10% discount whenever they visit or make a purchase. It's been a fantastic thing to do and if we hadn't done it, back in March was the last one we did, to help us through the first stage of the pandemic, we’d have really struggled. With rewards-based crowdfunding you've almost got to give away a little bit more than you'd like to do, just to make sure that people feel they’re getting a decent deal. But after that, the work really starts when the event closes. Because you then have to spend an awful lot of time making sure everyone's happy. They get what they expect on time, they get their card delivered to the right address to the right person in the right amount of time so they are not annoyed. You have to follow up and spend a lot of time on investor relations, or else you'll lose them. I think around 82% of the guys who invested back in the day the first time round subsequently invested a second time, or pledged a second time, because it went so well. So you’ve got to look after people.”

What do you think the craft brewing sector can do to address issues around sexism and bullying that have come to light recently?

“This is a huge thing. We're really glad, obviously, that it's raised its head and it's come out. I think the brewing industry is probably not much different from other industries in the respect that it may still be going on or it may have gone on in the past. But being such a public facing industry we need to make sure that it's nipped on the head. It's shocking that it was happening to the level that it was, maybe still is, and it's something that as people who've been employed in larger industries before we made sure that whatever happened it couldn’t happen with us. We've got a code of conduct that we have published on our website that shows exactly what our standing is and our ethos is no for everything, in terms of equality, be it race or sex or anything. I've actually spoken to a few people lately who are saying that it's blown out of proportion, which – the fact that people are saying that - is actually pretty sad. And it’s great to see that it's finally being addressed. We are fairly close to a number of people who are accused, we've worked with a number of breweries who have been accused of this. And we've actually seen it in the past, and we’ve tried to address it with some of them. We’ve personally pulled people aside and said, ‘you can do this sort of thing’ There's a lot of people, I am guessing, who never even realised what they were doing was really causing a problem. It's the same to some extent I guess as bullying at school or bullying in the workplace. Some people think it's funny, other people realise it's not something that should never exist. When we employ people, we bring them in and go through the code of conduct to make sure that they know that we are in a good place, and it's not acceptable for anyone to step outside the rules. Luckily for us, or by culture, our staff have not had any cause to complain, and I hope that's always going to be the case. It’s always been a very important thing for us.”

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How important is sustainability to your business?

“We probably have not been doing enough to be honest, because as a fast-growing young business our eye has not been on the ball as much as it should have been. We do plant trees, we work with a charity organisation that does forestation, but like all brewers we do use a lot of CO2, we do use a lot of energy. So we're actually in the process of looking to move premises, and we're working with the Scottish Government to make sure that we can work with renewables where we can. We're getting some solar panels in and we're making sure that all of the raw materials we use have got the provenance behind them to show that they're doing their best too, so every company is audited to make sure they are doing their best to be sustainable. The only thing that still worries me is when you use plastic kegs, as long as the pub gets them collected they will go back but I think it’s only 83% that are re-mulched and re-formed so we are weighing up where we go with that. I'm not sure what's worse, putting chemicals in to clean the kegs or continuing to use the plastic kegs. So we have a lot of initiatives to make sure we do what we can, but we realise our industry is not exactly the best for working on that. For us it’s very much a case of ‘could do better’ and it is one of the reasons we are looking to move because we realise we’re not doing a great job.”

What are you proudest of during your time at Fierce?

“Product wise, I'm very proud of Very Big Moose, the big stouts, but really what I’m proud of is that we've been able to grow our business, get people who, right now in the oil field are out there looking for work, and we're able to give people employment. So I'm really proud to have a team of people who may not have been so gainfully employed with the demise of oilfield. I'm also proud that we appear to have built a brand that people like. When people think of Fierce I hope they think of not only nice beers, but nice people.”

We're working with the Scottish Government to make sure that we can work with renewables where we can.

What plans do you have for the business for 2022?

“We’re looking at moving to a different premises to be a bit more friendly to the environment and more stable. We're actually looking to do some different things as well, we're looking to work with other companies globally, to have partnerships with them. Just now we work with two companies, one of the New Zealand Beer Collective, their business is UK based, but their business has historically been to bring New Zealand beer over to the UK and Europe and sell it. Now, the price of shipping etc, and looking at the carbon footprint that involves, it’s not the best thing to do. So they brew some of their beers here with us. It's a bit of a joint venture, it's a profit share, it's something that we both work on together to make sure that they're looked after. We also do the same now with Devil’s Peak of South Africa. So we're looking at other places around the world where we can work on that, this is phase one, to brew some beer here with these guys. And then we'll try to introduce our beers to their market without having to export around the world, which would make them economically not viable. Definitely not fresh. And definitely not carbon friendly. I think is a really interesting thing to do. So we look after everyone in the market here, but also to help introduce some new things to the UK and introduce our brands around the world.”

What is your all-time favourite beer?

“There were a couple of things that really made me want to start doing what we’re doing and do it the way we’re doing it. We’ve got the Very Big Moose 12% and variations of that and that is all because of standing in a pub one day and drinking Great Divide Yeti and seeing what they’ve done with that. It really pushed us forward to thinking, yeah, we could do this, it'd be great!”

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

“We always like what people like Siren did. I like Siren because they're personable, they don't go out there and shout stupid things about their product, they just get on with making amazing things. So I would say Darron Anley at Siren, but also Gareth Williams at Tiny Rebel too. I've used them personally as mentors, so I think they do a really great job.”