At the end of April 2020 we brewed our first batch of beer as “proper” brewers. Just over two months later our shelves and our kitchen was full of beer, glasses and T-shirts and we were ready to launch the website and the online shop on the 9th of July 2020. In the run up to the launch Nick had spent months working on recipes. As an experienced home brewer Nick was confident that he could brew great beer but in our naivety we set ourselves the crazy goal of launching with ten different styles. It took several months and many batches to perfect the recipes. Luckily we had friends and family who were happy to be our testers and provide feedback. Our favourite reviews during this time were “tastes like licking a rusty tractor” & “I didn’t hate it!” Hopefully you won’t recognise the final beer from these descriptions!
While Nick focused on the beer I was working on our logo and label designs and building our website. I had been furloughed from my job at the local shop and the weather was amazing , however for three months I spent an unhealthy number of hours fussing over fonts and copy and images. In late June we spent a fabulous sunny day out and about in South Harris taking photographs of the beers in the Harris landscape and then back to our croft for a photoshoot of our teenagers modelling the merch!
Our social media accounts had, for many months largely featured pictures of Spud’s early morning walks. The patience of our early followers was rewarded on the 30th of June when we started our countdown to launch by introducing one beer a day for ten days. The response was great. Our first order came in seven minutes after we launched. We were in business!
Of course we had hoped that we would be busy but we had no idea just how busy we would be. Within two days we received our first repeat order and lovely comments and reviews started coming in (No Rusty Tractors this time!) It was immediately obvious that we would struggle to meet demand with such a small batch size. So, we increased capacity and started brewing and bottling five days a week. As tourists returned to the island on July the 15th we started brewing for eight to ten hours a day and delivering beer every evening to local customers, holiday cottages and camper vans all over the island. We were stupidly busy but so happy with how everything was going.
By September the island started to return to its quieter hibernation setting as visitors made their way home. We were fortunate that, due to the very low number of cases of COVID infection in the Western Isles, October’s announcement of tiers of restriction levels meant we were placed in a lower level than the rest of Scotland. This did, however mean that no visitors could come to the island.
Undeterred, in October we brewed our first Christmas beers; a super strong Spiced Stout and a fruity Cranberry IPA. The gift sets were a huge hit and we wrapped and packed hundreds of bottles of beer to be sent out to Christmas trees all over the UK. Sadly, our own Christmas was not quite as planned. We were looking forward to our family spending Christmas at Croft N˚6 but just a few days before the big day, stricter COVID restriction meant we had to change our plans. Nobody knew at the time that travel restrictions would remain in force for months after the turkey leftovers were finally finished.
At the start of the second Lockdown everything slowed down and we had a chance to catch our breath and make some plans. We had already bought a new larger and very shiny brewing vessel and started upgrading fermenters to cope with bigger batch sizes. We also applied for permission to sell our beer wholesale which meant that our beer was on the menu at The Anchorage Restaurant
in Leverburgh and on the shelves of the Island Spirit Whisky shop
in Stornoway when the first visitors arrived at the end of April.
On the 27th of April 2021 exactly one year after we had brewed our first commercial beer we repeated the recipe and labelled a special batch of our N˚1 India Pale Ale as a Brewing Birthday Beer. The last two months have been a bit of a whirlwind of brewing, bottling and labelling as we have tried to keep up with demand, and one year in we’re still amazed by the response we have had to our little Brewery and our beers. We have lots more exciting news coming up but first we’re celebrating our birthday. No champagne for us…we’ll have a beer!
