2017: Trials; Tribulations; Achievements
2017 was not the year we’d thought it was going to be. It’s as simple as that.
While the numbers will pretty much hit what we’d been aiming for as the clock ticked over from 2016, a single line email in February (from someone I’ve never heard of, let alone met) turned all our plans on their head. Subsequently, the things we ended up working on were completely different to everything we’d expected. C'est la vie!
The more we talk to others in the industry, the more we realise everyone is in the same boat. What appears from the outside to be a business that is doing extraordinarily well is often a bunch of people with good ideas, some semblance of strategy, and (most importantly) the energy to engage in non-stop firefighting for years on end! I wonder if the big trend for 2018 will be support groups for breweries that make things look easier than they really are?
To help keep me sane, and remind myself that lots of good things happened when the whole year felt like we were wading through an armpit deep swap, here’s a little look back on our 2017 from a bunch of areas.
And, while I’m here, merry Christmas and happy new year folks!
He aha te mea nui o te ao? He Tangata; he tangata; he tangata… goes this famous Māori proverb.
What is the most important thing in the world? It is the people; it is the people; it is the people…
We’re building a fantastic little team here at Yeastie Boys and I couldn’t be more pleased with the people I get to work with. Smart, engaging, empathetic, and good for the whole industry… not just for Yeastie Boys.
Hired in late 2016, but not officially starting until early January 2017, Charlie Docherty joined Fritha Burgin and I in the UK team as a sales rep turned brand ambassador. We call him the fixer as he generally goes around cleaning up things that I’ve started and left behind (he’s not the only one!)
Charlie set the standard early on as our youngest team member – being ID’d at The Harp as I walked in the door for our first meeting – but it’s been great having him continue to build our excellent relationships, form new ones, and being a very important ear on the ground in 2017 as I’ve become increasingly distracted in growing our ever changing business.
Annika Corley, long term beer festival bar manager extraordinaire, joined Greg Allen and Sarah Dee in New Zealand with a focus on public and trade comms. Moving to Tauranga from Wellington, as sales manager Greg Allen moved from Auckland to Christchurch, Annika has ensured we have staff in three New Zealand cities (while we brew in a fourth!).
In the last quarter, after many years of trying to persuade him to jump aboard, co-founder Sam Possenniskie became a full-time Yeastie Boy. It was tough to drag him away from his vision of a cruisy French country hideaway, and he’s not giving a lifelong commitment to the role, but it’s great to know we’ll have his intimate knowledge of the business all day, every day, for the foreseeable future as we continue to grow so strongly. And he’s one of my best friends to boot!
The New Zealand Beer Collective - Todd, Joseph and Becky - are so intertwined with Yeastie Boys that it seems only right to include them here, too. It’s been excellent to have them grow alongside us, with the added benefit of their refrigerated NZ imports helping us get all of our juicy NZ hops and some of our more unusual beers to UK.
2018 has started in an extremely exciting way, with a key hire for the future of Yeastie Boys coming a couple of days before Christmas, 2017… more news on that one very soon.
Here’s Yeastie Boys and NZ Beer Collective with some friends on our annual tour of all Draft House venues.
After setting up brewing in Australia, with Nomad Brewing of Manly in the last half of 2016, I had vowed to do everything I could to avoid moving or setting up with new breweries for a very long time. So what did I spend most of my focus on in 2017? Moving brewery in both New Zealand and UK, of course. So it goes.
Moving on from Brewdog, here in UK, was thrust upon us rather unceremoniously way back in February. While we managed to eke out some sort of transition plan, and tried hard to make it virtually unnoticeable to our partners and customers, it turned into quite the clusterfuck in late 2017. Unavailability was the key word in what should have been our best time of the year. Thankfully new beer is coming off the line at West Berkshire Brewery and we’re excited about the possibilities of the smaller batch sizes in 2018. Yes, that means a seasonal and special beer program is finally on the way.
After nine years with our good friends at Invercargill Brewery, back in our New Zealand birthplace, we moved north to Auckland to brew at Bruce Turner’s new Urbanaut Brewing in Kingsland (many in the UK may know Bruce from his time as an engineer at Fullers and Meantime). This brings our production much closer to the north island market that we mostly sell in and, importantly for our export partners, puts us a lot closer to the breweries with which our international shipments are consolidated. And it’s enabled us to kick off canning in New Zealand with White Noise and Bigmouth being the first cabs off the rank.
After considerable focus on our core range here in UK, and then the transitions of 2017 postponing the start of our UK-brewed seasonal/special beer program, the year ahead is going to be really exciting… this is quite fitting given 2018 is our tenth anniversary and we kicked off this whole business brewing nothing but one-off beers way back in 2008.
That West Berkshire brewhouse is pretty sexy, innit? Sam ain’t too shabby, either.
It’s been a very big year with a lot of growth, in what has been a particularly unique set of circumstances, in an always challenging environment. But we achieved our goals.
In United Kingdom we’ve grown our sales by volume by 197%, almost tripling our 2016 sales, and we’re now selling 3.5x our NZ volume. Given our loose goal is sales parity per capita, which would be 14x the NZ volume, we still have a long way to go!
Around 80% of our total volume from UK is sold domestically and we expect this percentage to grow, little by little, in the next couple of years.
In New Zealand our sales grew by 21%, with a 35% jump in domestic sales (up from 42% of our total NZ-production in 2015 to 62% in 2017). Export sales were level, which is particularly pleasing given we started brewing in Australia and effectively cut off one of our biggest export markets from NZ.
You could say that like for like sales were pretty good, like. If you were one of those types.
Australia is brand new, so there is no previous year to compare it by. And the sales there are completely incomparable to our old export sales (close to triple our best year). The main win here was a national off-trade contract from Bigmouth, which is being followed up by Digital and White Noise in 2018. Big growth is on the way in the Western Isles.
Interestingly, and this is something that comes as a big surprise to many people, our sales volume in small pack – cans and bottles – totally dominates our volume in the UK at 93% (Australia is up around that mark too). In New Zealand there’s not such a heavy skew with 57% of volume packaged in the small format. We expect the UK volume to swing slightly back towards keg in 2018 but, with a large amount of small pack sales already lined up, it’s unlikely be a huge move.
We see a few key areas of sales being a big part of our strategy over the next few years – a continuing reduction in the ease of export and the growing normalisation of good beer in national chains. These are areas I’ll touch, over the year ahead, on as I continue to write about Yeastie Boys future.
Oh, yeh, we also took on an interesting joint venture with Zen-noh (some of the people behind the fantastic Japanese restaurant, Tokimeite, in releasing Inari Biru in 2017.
Collaborations really suffered in 2017 as, rather than brewing and learning with friends, I had to spend a big chunk of my time looking for breweries to brew our core range.
We’ll definitely rectify that in 2018 and it seems appropriate that I drafted this blog post on the train returning from Newcastle, where we brewed WxY3 – the third instalment of our now annual Extra Pale IPA with Wylam Brewery.
We’ve found a new home at West Berkshire and, although we’ve got a lot of work to do to get everything humming, we’re in a position where we can definitely brew with like-minded people again in 2018. That’s lucky, as it’s our tenth anniversary and we’d really like to celebrate by brewing with people we respect, admire, and can learn from.
We did manage to sneak in a few beers with friends in the year past –WxY2 with Wylam, Wild Boys with Wild Weather (which I still wish had been called Downunder Brown), Liquid Cuddle with Marble, Double Summer with Fuller’s (back for a second year), and White Lies with Adnam’s. We also slipped in our first virtual collaboration with Wild Weather – Virtual IPA, which was their remix of our open source recipe for Digital IPA. And, of course, we were very humbled by the invitation to brew with the official beer of Beer Day Britain with Brewsters in Grantham - the resulting earl grey Extra Pale Ale was stunning (and so very British!).
Charlie’s first week couldn’t have been much better than brewing with the lovely lads at Wild Weather.
We also managed to slip in a collaboration with Gladstone Vineyard, who are my dad’s neighbours back in New Zealand, by using some of their Viognier / Sauvignon Blanc to create a candi sugar for a strong white ale. The wine was released as Pushmi and the beer as Pullyu, so lucky New Zealanders can try them side by side and check the influence that this unique ingredient adds.
One of my favourite collaborative projects of the year was being invited to Hereford to take part in the blending project for Oliver’s 2015 Vintage Fine Cider. Tom Oliver is a legend, and absolute gentleman, so it was incredible to have such an experience. We tried a diverse range of barrel-aged ciders helping Tom, his team, and respected friends come up with a bunch of ciders that would work in a way that showcases Oliver’s unique terroir and technique. I learnt a lot but, like Jon Snow, I know nothing…
Gladstone’s ‘Pushmi’ Sauvignon Blanc / Viognier wine was used in our ‘Pullyu’ beer. Both taste delicious!
While I missed out on my two favourite UK festivals – Leeds International Beer Festival and Craft Beer Calling – I was lucky enough to attend my two favourite festivals in the whole world: Beervana and The Great Australasian Beer Spectapular.
Beervana is a firm home favourite and every year, as I wonder if we can justify the cost of being involved, I get dragged back in to the buzz of this festival that is wonderful showcase of New Zealand beer (don’t visit NZ for summer, go in late winter for Beervana and Wellington on a Plate). It was a successful festival for Yeastie Boys, as it always is, and there are few places in the world that put a spring in my step like Wellington in Beervana week – old friends, great beer, and an inside knowledge of the place like I’ll never develop anywhere else.
The Great Australasian Beer Spectapular has to be seen to be believed. This is head and shoulders above all other festivals in the world, in my mind, and the only one where I can imagine hanging out as a non-drinker and still getting more than my money’s worth. Besides the 80-100 beers brewed specifically for the festival, there’s a whole bunch of brewery stands, endless sources of entertainment from bands, through dancers and other performers, to fun games to play and even a ferris wheel inside the spectacular building. And Melbourne: what a city! One word for GABS: GO.
I was lucky enough to also make my first trips to Spain, Norway and Belgium (though I had driven through the latter, without stopping, in 1998). I attended three very different and excellent festivals in the Barcelona Craft Beer Festival, Haand Brygerriet Winter Beer Festival and Billie’s Craft Beer Festival. It’s always great to visit new beery destinations and Barcelona, Drammen and Antwerp are all on my list for a return visit. All highly recommended destinations for any beer lover.
GABS - the Great Australasian Beer Spectapular, from the top of the ferris wheel. Yes! The ferris wheel.
In lieu of any kind of Golden Pints, here’s a few “best of” lists from my 2017 year…
Special beers that I really remember: Bacchus Islay Reserve; Harvey’s Old Ale; Gadd’s Bretthead; Prosslbrau Adlersberg Doppelbock; Liberty Brewing Divine Wind; Marble Brewery’s Prize Old Ale series.
Favourite pubs/bars of the year: Hereford Beer House, Hereford, UK; Fuggles Beer Café, Tonbridge and Royal Tunbridge Wells, UK; The Bricklayers Arms, Chipstead, UK; The Harp, Covent Garden, UK; The Kings Arms, Waterloo, UK; The Rake, Borough Market, UK; Little Beer Quarter, Wellington NZ; De Kat Café, Antwerp, Belgium; Alehouse Project, Melbourne, Australia; Smith Street Taps, Singapore.
New beer destinations: Barcelona; Derby; Singapore; Drammen; Oslo; Antwerp; Brussels (yes! The absolute shame of it… I had never been before).
Favourite beer media: Original Gravity; Brewer’s Journal; Good Beer Hunting Podcast; The Beer Podcast; Beer Diary; Pursuit of Hoppiness.
I’ll write a little more about our plans for 2018 but, in the meantime, I hope you’ve all had a great Christmas and New Year… and all the best for this coming one.
Arohanui, slàinte mhath...
Finally, because we love dogs and beer festivals, here’s Billie... he’s the dog behind Billie’s Craft Beer Festival in Antwerp. The real Billie may be around 100x smaller and less willing to pose for photos.
