“The biggest challenge now is not knowing. We don’t know which pubs are going to open, which ones are going to order from us. It’s weird”
Having survived three precarious months of lockdown, The Park Brewery is aiming to get back to normal - but it’s not going to be simple
At The Park Brewery in Kingston, south-west London, uncertainty reigns. Having ceased brewing between late February and late April due to the Covid-19 lockdown, this wife-and-husband team - Frankie and Josh Kearns - recently began re-brewing for cask, in the expectation that pubs might open on July 4, as widely expected.
The problem is, of course, that the government has so far confirmed nothing - no opening date, no updated distancing regulations - so brewers like the Kearns are taking a punt. If pubs are to open on July 4 with cask ale, then the beer needs to be made now. But if they don’t open …
“It’s something we’re worried about,” says Frankie, 47. “You don’t know who’s going to open, who's going to order from us. That’s really weird! I’ve emailed the independent pubs we normally work with, to get a feeling, to find out what’s happening, and pretty much had bouncebacks. Nothing. That is the biggest challenge: not knowing.”
Plenty of other breweries are in the same boat, and plenty of them will have taken the same gamble. In the absence of government advice, small business owners need to rely on their own best instincts. But they’ve been doing that since early March: if this lockdown has had one defining feature for small breweries, it’s the hard work and ingenuity that has ensured customers could still buy local beer.
For The Park Brewery, that meant selling all, or most of, the 70 casks of beer onsite when the government announced that the public should avoid pubs and bars on March 20. The pair, who brew on a 2400-litre kit, sourced bag-in-box packages and mini-kegs, emailing their 500-strong contact list to see who was interested. They did the deliveries themselves, with help from Frankie’s nephew Finn, who returned to England from South America three weeks into a year abroad when the lockdown began.
So far they’ve made more than 1000 deliveries, mostly to homes within five miles of the brewery, despite having two kids at home to entertain. “That’s been fun,” says Frankie. “It’s been home deliveries or home schooling.”
There’s been lots of support from across the community, Kearns says, but one drinker has gone a little further, in more ways than one. Claus Lundholm is a Dane who used to live near the brewery before moving home, and then to San Francisco, for work. Before he left, he built their current website in exchange for beer (“He told us: ‘Your website is pretty shit, I could do a good job on it,’” says Frankie). So when lockdown began, and The Park Brewery needed an e-commerce site, they knew where to turn.
“Claus was able to get it live within 48 hours, from San Francisco – despite his own personal drama of being potentially stuck in the US away from his own family in Denmark. He’s a total legend,” says Frankie.
Lockdown also meant this year's big project - the purchase of a canning machine - was accelerated. Frankie and Josh, 43, had hoped to crowdfund the machine, but lockdown made that impossible. They still needed packaged beer to survive, though, so when Macclesfield’s Redwillow advertised their old set-up, they pounced.
The machine - a CASK SAMS v2 semi-automated manual system, which churns out 900 cans an hour - cost £27,500, but an appeal to their loyal customer base provided a third of that money up-front for beer at a later date. The machine has been crucial, says Frankie: canned beer made up 25 per cent of their output before lockdown, but it’s been all they’ve had to sell in recent weeks. (Gallows, their flagship pale ale, is the best seller in all formats, before and during lockdown).
“We thought it was essential for survival,” she says. “I know that sounds dramatic, but it does feel like the case. Previously we’d been outsourcing the canning or getting mobile canners to come to us, and obviously that was all off.”
The canning machine came with its own problems, though. It took two frustrating weeks to get running. “We had a nightmare installing it,” says Frankie. “We couldn’t get any technical support. We had to do everything ourselves in terms of plumbing it in and, you name it, it’s gone wrong.” That’s the main reason, she thinks, that income was down 30 per cent in April and 50 per cent in May. “Some other small breweries seem to have done really well during lockdown,” she says.
The Park Brewery, it appears, is very unlikely to match last year’s production of 700 hectolitres, even though they’re now back to brewing twice a week, close to the norm. There’s plenty of reasons to be optimistic, though. Lockdown has demonstrated how helpful other brewers and brewing organisations - particularly SIBA - can be, Frankie says, and it has helped them build on an already strong relationship with local drinkers.
The taproom, with its many distancing complications, won’t be back soon but a closer link to customers might still be on the cards. “One thing that has been really interesting is cash flow,” says Frankie. “When you’re selling beer directly to the public they pay straight away. That’s mindblowing for us.
“I’m used to spending a vast amount of time chasing money, which is really depressing day after day. I'll definitely review our payment terms. Also, like all breweries, we hope that customers will continue to support us. We’re all geared up for that now, we’ve had to respond. It’s a great way for us to get our beer out to our customers, and to build relationships. That feels like a real positive.
“I would hate for that to affect local independent shops, but they seem to be doing a great trade anyway. We’d like to do more of that, rather than breaking our backs to sell beer to a major pub co who barely pays us enough to break even. I don’t know what will happen yet, but that’s not a situation I'm keen to go back to. I like working directly with our customers.” Plenty of other small breweries, you suspect, will be feeling exactly the same way.