Thirsty Musing: January

January didn’t bring to kindest weather to us living in the North East. As we close out the month, it feels like we’ve had about 60 consecutive days of constant greyness, with the occasional downpour thrown in. But it was the frost at the start of the month that brought the most challenges for Thirsty Moose.

Our water mains pipe runs along the outside of the adjacent building to ours before it crosses beneath the road and enters TM HQ. Without any insulation it’s exposed to the elements; the most troublesome being the subzero temperatures. We’ve never been caught out by this over our previous three years of brewing here, but, in 2026, our luck ran out. We lost the year’s first week of brewing, when we were already in need of replenishing the stock that had (happily) taken a hammering over the festive period.

Mercifully, the frost thawed over that weekend and Max was able to brew again on the Sunday of that first week. And brew he did. For the first time on record, he started three brews in a week; Belta Blonde, Oot n’ Aboot, and Nowt but Stout. 

This thankfully enabled us to fulfil the wholesale orders that had been agreed for late January, keeping business ticking over during this challenging lull in the hospitality calendar. We’re delighted that our beer was so well received by the customers of LWC Lancashire in December that we were able to provide them with more beer just one month later. We’re also excited to be working with the long-established wholesalers down at Best Cask, who’ll be serving a whole host of new customers with Thirsty Moose. We can’t wait to see the Untappd reviews come in from the Home Counties!

We’re in the process of sprucing up our website; with subtle changes made to the colour scheme and landing page, and the shop’s been tidied up. Our story and ‘meet them team page’ are largely complete, and should be live come the middle of the first week in February.

There were a couple of the family’s birthdays in January; none bigger this year than Max’s fiancé Esme’s 30th! We celebrated this alongside Kate’s (my partner & Max’s sister) birthday at the fantastic Koru in Gosforth. Max spent the last week of Jan on holiday with his family celebrating Esme’s birthday, but it didn’t stop him from checking over the recipe created by the guys at *** **** for our upcoming collab - all will be revealed in the coming weeks! 

It feels good to be off and running for 2026! We took a couple stumbles out the starting blocks and took a little longer than we wanted to find our stride, but we’re moving through the gears now and are all set to hit full speed come the spring time. We’ve already committed to a number of festivals, and can’t wait to roll out the good news about where we’re going to be pouring this year. All in good time.

Cheers folks,

Sam

P.S. It was lovely to see all but a few cans of Thirsty Moose cleared from the coveted shelves of Rehills, Jesmond, when dropping off another can order from them a couple weeks back :)

Thanks for reading.

Stay Loose, Drink Moose.