Business Basics

You have been involved in the brewing sector since the early 1990s. Tell us a bit more about your background and how you originally came to found Wychwood.

Name: Renegade Brewery

Founded: WBB assets acquired December 2021, Renegade launched September 2022

Location: Yattendon, Berkshire

Owners: The Yattendon Group

Annual production: 20,000hl (including contract brewing)

Brewing team: 6

Total Staff: 60 (including taproom)

Flagship beers: Good Old Boy (4% ABV best bitter), Renegade Lager (4.1% ABV lager), Queensbury

Jack IPA (6.2% ABV IPA) & Brewski

Peach Lager (4.1% ABV lager)

Production split: (25% own production, 75% contract brewed) 25% draught (split roughly 50/50 keg to cask) & 75% small pack

Key export markets: Just sent first container to Eastern Europe

“I decided at 14 when I started brewing beer in the family bathroom that I wanted to own a brewery and pubco. That was 1976 and coincided with the inauguration of CAMRA - I tried to become a member but was not allowed because I was underage. I had a confirmed place to read Economics at Loughborough Uni, deferred my place for a year, began working for Duracell, and then decided to give University a miss. I joined Bass in 1984, with my first boss being Peter Swinburn who later became the worldwide CEO of Coors. I worked for 18 months for Peter on sales and then transferred to managed houses, and left Bass in 1987 to join Allied, looking after managed houses in the West Country for Halls of Oxford and in 1989 transferring to take over Oxford city.

"In 1990 at age 27 I sold my family house and used the proceeds to buy the Witney based Glenny Brewery from Paddy Glenny. I immediately changed the brewery name from Glenny to Wychwood. In 1992 Paul Adams, the ex-Finance Director of the Firkin pubs, joined me as a partner in the business and we opened our first two ‘Hobgoblin’ managed houses in Staines and High Wycombe. By the end of 1993 we had six pubs and 3i joined us as an investor. The Wychwood brewery grew rapidly from 1990 in part due to focussed marketing on the Wychwood forest legends of witches, goblins and fairies and the fact that the Government had introduced the ‘Beer Orders’ in 1989 which allowed big company tenancies to have the freedom to purchase a guest beer.”

How would you compare the independent beer market now in 2023 with that of the 1990s?

“The competition is much, much stiffer now. So back in 1990, there were only 100 or so small independent breweries. Me taking over Glenny and turning it into Wychwood was in 1990 which was only a year after the 1989 Beer orders, which basically stopped the national brewers, who all owned around 6,000 pubs, having vertical integration. So they basically said you’re either a brewer, or you're a pub company. I mean, they circumnavigated it and it never really changed. But the one thing that did change was that those pubs that were owned by the big companies were allowed to have a guest cask beer. So that did make life much easier. You had to make great beer, then produce a pump clip, and if it was good, it would sell. Whereas nowadays, it's a hugely declining cask ale market, mainly because of the growth in craft. And all the young, educated type people that are between 18 and 39 have moved over to craft because the flavours are more fulfilling. You can get sour beer and hazy beer and IPAs, and the craft beer in pubs and bottle or can is always consistent. I am a cask ale drinker, but the big difference now is that you are able to go and say, ‘can I try that beer?’, and they think you're trying the beer because you haven't tried it before, but I'm trying it to make sure it's in good condition. And if it's in good condition, I'll have a pint. If it's not, I'll have a Guinness. That is the issue that we have. More younger people are moving away from cask and go into craft, which means there are less people drinking cask, which means that the beer is not getting such good throughputs, so the beer is not always in such great condition. So the pumps are going from four pumps to three pumps from three pumps to two pumps, there's less variety. And it's just an ever-decreasing circle as far as I can see. I have a theory about why craft has grown. I believe that each generation wants to drink something different from the older generation. You had my generation which was all about CAMRA and the resumption of fantastic cask beer. And now my kids don't want to drink cask, they don’t want to drink the same as their Dad, they want to drink craft.”

How did you come to grow Hobgoblin into the iconic ale brand it became?

“We made the original Hobgoblin beer as a wedding beer for the daughter of the landlord of the Plough in a little village called Kingham. Initially it was a 6.5% strong ruby ale and some of it ended up going to an off-licence, ‘The Grog Shop’, in the Jericho district of Oxford where back in the day they served draught beer in containers. The following day The Grog Shop came back and said they needed another three firkins, and the reason it had sold so well was that a student who was working part-time at the off-licence had re-named the beer Hobgoblin. So I asked a friend of mine to illustrate the Hobgoblin and we launched it as a draught beer, eventually lowering the ABV to 5%. The USA didn’t do cask ale and had no or zero access to the keg lager market and so instead concentrated on weird and wonderful European/UK style beers, ales, stouts, porters and put them in bottles.

"I took a leaf out of this approach and decided that the UK off-trade market could also do with a shake-up. In 1995, with the help of Ed Org and Dave Noonan the illustrator and graphic designer, we launched Hobgoblin bottled beer with what I believe was the first pictorial bottled

Continued on page 51 beer label in the UK off-trade market, we used gold leaf embossed full colour labels and an hourglass clear flint bottle with a Goblin and the words “Fiercely Independent” embossed on the bottle. Independent chain Unwins took the bottles first, quickly followed by Tesco. Within a year Hobgoblin was the 5th biggest selling bottled ale in the UK.”

What was it that enticed you out of retirement to launch Renegade?

“I live about half an hour from here [Yattendon], and I was buying an electric mountain bike. And the best electric mountain bike shop is next to the brewery. So I came in to the shop and saw the brewery and then heard that it was going into administration. And when it did go into administration, every man and his dog were looking at the business, including a well-known Scottish independent that wanted it as a Southern base, so they visited, and some well-known regional brewers visited. But the people that own all the land here, including the bike shop and the brewery building, and were renting the premises to the West Berkshire Brewery are The Yattendon Group and they had a liking for it as well. So they took it over on the 23rd of December [2021] and bought the assets. When they delivered my bike on the 6th of January [2022], the guy at the bike shop asked if I knew who had bought the brewery and when I said I was interested and what my background was he gave me the number of the Estates Manager. So I spoke to the Estates Manager and the next day I went to see the owner of the Yattendon Group and said, ‘I think I can probably fix it for you. But I only want to do three years and then I want to go back to Guernsey’. So I joined on the 6th of April [2022] and I've now done nine months.”

We decided to change the name to Renegade Brewery. We've now got a group of beers, based on a group of runaway characters, adventurers, misfits that are ‘the Renegades’.

What would you say the key mistakes made by West Berkshire Brewery were and how have you gone about turning things around?

“The brewery was started in 1995 by a guy called Dave Maggs. And of course, I know Dave Maggs, because they were local to me when I was at Wychwood. He then grew the business. He had a great product called Good Old Boy, which is a fabulous product. And these guys from the City, then bought him out in 2017/18, and built the brewery here in 2018. And it was too big. This brewery could quite easily do 80,000hl. You don’t go from the beer sales they had to this. They had a brewery that was much too big and they didn’t have the brand to make it work. They did have great cask ale, but they needed to embrace the craft beer industry, and they hadn't embraced it enough. They quite rightly were brewing and packaging for other people but they weren't making enough profit. It's taken six months to get our new branding up and running. But we do think we have a good enough craft offering now and we are continuing with the cask ale as well.”

Have you come across any challenges with the turnaround?

"When the business went down, it had raised quite a lot of money on crowdfunding over the previous years. And anybody that did invest in the crowdfunding gets the opportunity of looking at the previous year's accounts. And then they invest. And I think the reason they invested is the people around here, within a 20 mile radius, they love Good Old Boy, they love the business. They love coming to the brewery, because it is spectacular. So my theory is that people that love the beer would walk in here and see how fabulous is this, think ‘they must be doing great, here's my money’. Whereas really, they needed to do a little bit more checking. They all lost their money. And there were somewhere between 1,500 to 2,000. Some of those were just a few £100s, and some of those were lots of money. We then took over the business. But it kept the name, we couldn't

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