giddyup! (and Kung Hei Fat Choi / Gong Xi Fa Tsai!)
Feb 20, 2026
What's Up? Firstly best wishes for the year of the Fire Horse to you - Chinese New Year this week. One of my horoscopes told me I'll be considering new business options this year - easy to fit that into our looking at pubs project but I'm not really one for horoscopes. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, then click here!
I do however believe that Feng Shui has some merit... I'm not talking about when I shared an office with my boss in Hong Kong and his Feng Shui expert sold him a little porcelain figure to ward off the evil to his south (me?!) - obviously it would take more than that 😈 - but how buildings are designed with the environment and the flow of their use. I write this as our logistics have been so challenged by us redoing our cask store (there are casks of beer stacked everywhere here!) and we bought and are trying to fit in a new conditioning tank from the sad, but spectacular (they owed the revenue about £2,000,000) blow up of Phantom Brewery.
Aside from that this week has been about core beers on the making side - Moondance and Comfortably Numb mostly.
On the noise side of things it has been Black Velvet... permanent in keg in ever more places - I think it is better in cask, but the split on our employees is 50:50 cask to keg... Oh and it got our first ever keg award. Pretty cool. Podiuming with a Bronze in the South East Indie Beer Awards on our very first ever keg entry. Of course we like winning golds and have been spoilt with a bunch over the years, but off the mark on getting huge recognition in Keg too. Cool.
What's About?
So Brewdog are mostly done then? Not going to gravedance on this as they have done a lot of good for the independent beer industry as well as - of course - a lot of bad. Am sure there are a multitude of lessons to be learned from the whole saga over time - but a take-away I would have is to try and stay grounded. Very crudely put, it ain't wise to think your own poo doesn't smell! The energy and creativity that got them going seemed to me to turn to ego and hubris... we'll learn more in coming weeks. Of course if you owe the bank a million quid you have a problem - but if you owe the bank a billion quid then the bank has the problem so maybe it will work out?! Incentives and all that....
I've spent a decent amount of time this year getting really into the detail of our production - having been told I should by a friend who used to run Coca-cola in China that I'd find stuff we can do better. Yep. Really on these numbers now - I know we usually get 155.3 casks of Moondance off a rack off, I know we get 155.4 of Alton's Pride on rack off and I know that on our midsize FV we get an average of 84, versus everything else in there gets around 82, gas costs per brew etc. etc. Lots we can learn on efficiencies. The only bit we won't touch is ingredients, but we've gotten a better gas contract, a better water one and we're going to try and run our 900L Pilot kit at the same time as the big kit to be more energy efficient. Small things; but take care of the pennies and they turn into pounds... there was more we learnt which I'll share another time.
The equivalent methodology for the Tap Room in doing this is to sort of do the opposite. Typical slippage in trade is somewhere between 12% and 20% depending on whom you believe. The best thing to do IMO is assume we are a statistic and work backwards. We had a recent change in our Tap Room Manager and we've seen an instant improvement. Horses for courses to stick with the Chinese zodiac - the previous person was just not interested or maybe out of their depth, anyway everyone is better and happier today than they were a month ago.
It could be just the February effect of course, but I'd say maybe more about better cleanliness, much better preparation and beer stocking and cellaring as well as inventory management. I don't think we've had any cash thievery for a while - but I've caught folks in the past. We start with trust but when it is broken, we're done - giving someone a second chance has sadly only ever resulted in one clear loser. Us. People mistake kindness for weakness.
Where we have seen some operational improvements in the Tap Room since the change is on stuff being given away. I reckon for most places this is the biggest line of slippage. Folks might not see it as theft I guess, but it kind of is. We also tightened up our free beers after work policy - it was quite loose - "OK to have a couple of beers" - but we felt that wasn't exactly an incentive in line with safe driving... so it is fine for staff to have a Taproom beer on us (singular) and they can take home a couple of pints free, but it isn't an open tab at the Taproom. Sometimes these cultural things can be driven by small changes in policy, just food for thought. Most important is though customer experience and important to us we get the balance right...
Anyway - there is a way you can reduce wastage, move stock faster and sell more beer... oh yes there is! That is to stock some more of our beer!!
What can we bring you this coming week?
All the best for the weekend, I am off to Wales to watch some Rugby... hoping the right Scotland turn up!
Xen
P.S.
Tempted to join the bandwagon in laying into the Andrew formerly known as Prince, but suspect I can't show you stuff you haven't already seen...
