Thirsty Musing: December

I’m going to start documenting life at the Brewery on a monthly basis. I know that everyone’s time is precious, and that a few paragraphs of text is less satiating than consuming 130480 tiktoks in a similar amount of time, so I plan on keeping it to the point. 

It’s also worth mentioning that I’ll never use AI to write things for me. 

Hey folks, Happy New Year!

December’s been my favourite month at Thirsty Moose so far. Beer is sewn into the fabric of festivities and the best kind of social gatherings, so it’s been a blast for us to play a small part in people’s Christmas this year. 

Integral to this were our new gift sets. It took us many weeks (on top of all the other regular activities, of course) to find a glass that:

1. Is perfect for pouring our cans into

2. Looks top tier

3. Fits nicely into a gift box, of which would keep its contents safe while in transit

I think it can be hard to judge your own product objectively when you’ve invested a lot into it and just want it to be released to the public. It certainly helps having many pairs of eyes to review each component of the gift box. In the end, we were all in agreement that any beer fan would be, at the very least, pretty chuffed with receiving this as a present. 

After they were released, they ended up being our website’s best selling product :) Everything was delivered in time for Christmas, even the order placed on the 21st, so plenty cans of Moose found themselves under a tree on Christmas morning!

Plenty of people were kind enough to tag us in their Instagram & Untappd posts; celebrating the festivities with their Thirsty Moose drink in hand. It was so cool to see our beers in the far flung places (relative to Blaydon-on-Tyne) of: Shrewsbury, at the Coach and Horses; Sheffield, at the Shakespeare; and Stratford, East London, at Tap East. 160 Untappd reviews last month is insane! 

Amongst all the calling round different pubs and shops seeing if they’d like any of our beer, and getting our orders ready, I didn’t spend enough time myself on social media; celebrating the customers who’d gone out of their way to post our beer and posting some feel good festive stuff ourselves. I find this stuff quite difficult and it takes me a while, yet I know how important it is. I’ll focus more of my efforts into growing our online presence over the coming weeks and months.

We also decided not to do any markets ourselves this year; instead leaving it to the experts at Hen & Hops to sell our cans at various Christmas markets, and the folks at Northumbrian Gifts, Rehills, and Enjoy Beer to sell our cans in their own fantastic gift sets, not forgetting our website too.

On the brewing front, our Once upon a Tyne best bitter stocks have been replenished after its first batch proved to be one of the quickest selling beers of the year; a pretty good debut we’d say! Our North by North East session pale has also made a strong start to its life, going down very smoothly according to quite a few punters - that’s also been rebrewed just before Christmas. The last of our Hazy Hinny cans sold out in mid December. It’s a popular choice year round in can form, but its cask demand wanes throughout the winter months. We’re yet to decide when we’ll rebrew it. Belta Blonde’s casks were cleared out over the festive period, so this will likely be our first brew of 2026.

As I write this on the 3rd of January, I can’t share what grand plans we have for this year. That’s because all of the Thirsty Moose team are meeting this Wednesday. What I can say, though, is we’ve ended 2025 in a stronger place than we started it, so we’ll try our utmost to keep churning out consistently lush beer, telling the world about it, and celebrating our customers. There’s not a whole lot more to it than that.

Thanks for reading.

Stay loose, drink moose.