4. Doing it Ourselves

     Our five brewery employees (we use the term employee loosely as most posts are unpaid) are a brewer, a marketing manager, a website designer, a social media consultant, several photographers, a finance manager, a customer services manager, a procurement and order fulfilment team, two part time human models and one full time canine. It's fair to say that we are all (except Spud the Brewery Dog) good at multi-tasking.

     We are really proud to say that we have built our business from the ground up, literally. In typical island fashion we started building a shed as soon as we moved to croft No 6 despite the fact that the house needed a lot of work. The shed turned out to be a great space with a fabulous view which was wasted on the strimmer and so the Brewshed was born. Partly out of necessity due to our limited budget and partly because we are stubborn, we made the decision very early on to do everything we possibly could ourselves.

     Our small batch size means we can brew, bottle and label all of our beers by hand. We edit and print every label, we hand stamp gift boxes and beer mats and handwrite gift messages. Deliveries around the island are made by Nick in our trusty old Landrover. Being forty-something and certified technophobes we relied heavily on our teenagers and YouTube to learn about digital design and building our presence on social media. We've still got no idea how Twitter works but we have managed to publish a (very) simple Blog and Newsletter. Now admittedly some of these jobs would be quicker if we had a bigger set up. Most microbreweries wouldn't consider starting up without a bottling line and labelling machines but we have found there are some real advantages to doing it ourselves. Brewing beer is like alchemy. You can use exactly the same ingredients and follow the same recipe and produce beers that have slightly different flavours, aromas and carbonation. Importantly they might also have a different alcohol content or ABV. We test alcohol levels when we bottle and also sample bottles when the beer has bottle conditioned and only then do we print the labels for that batch. We like the fact that each batch is unique and importantly we never adjust our finished beer to match the label, the label matches the beer.

     You will notice that there is one thing that we have chosen not to spend our time on, our beer names. We toyed with naming beers after villages, mountains, even people in Harris but we eventually decided that we would number our beers. If you have a favourite you only need remember the number but if you have a favourite style of beer we made sure this was obvious on the front of the label. We really love the beers with clever and witty names but we thought, being just the five of us (including Spud the Dog) our time was better spent on other things.

So our fabulous team have built a DIY Brewery, what's our next big project?
Next year we hope to finish renovating our Croft house, but first we are going to enjoy the our new business and family life in our new home in Harris.