Thirsty Musing: May

Podcast ~ Pop Up Pub ~ New Golden Ale ~ Tonnes More

Summarising a record-breaking month for the Moose, while also using it as an opportunity to air some hard truths about brewing.

We couldn’t have asked for a great deal more from May - it’s been the most fruitful month in our history. I feel like it’s been years in the making, and the result of putting a lot of effort into doing the basics for a sustained period of time. The benefits of doing the work do compound, just not evenly like interest would in a bank account. They come in spits and spurts. They don’t come when you’re expecting (or sometimes needing) it, then somewhat blindside with a windfall.

I’m gonna try not to fall into the habit of making all of our blogs sound the time, and simply list all of the lovely things that went well for us each month, akin to a soviet news bulletin. I wanted from the outset for these to be concise, but stripping them back to the bone leads to me listing. Moreover, I’ve not given enough airtime to the headwinds we face. I’ve probably been biased towards being optimistic, which is cool, but not wholly accurate. It makes sense to me to start giving a fuller account of the brewery while we’re experiencing the best of times, as to keep me humble, and to somewhat prepare myself for when bigger challenges arise.

So, in the spirit of flowing in and out of good and bad, showing both sides of the coin, during our best month to date, our van died. Max bought this a mere 2 years ago for £10k. It was actually the second van he swapped for the original Peugeot he got (which has a horrendous AdBlue system), but we thought it was third time lucky. Alas, the ripping of its wet timing belt last week put that sentiment to bed, or the grave even. We’d confidently assumed we’d get more than 30k miles and 2 years from it (it’s 9 years old in total), but this serves as an important lesson to us - don’t over expose the business’s balance sheet to one piece of kit which has at least a fair chance of breaking. 

We’re looking for a good lease deal on an electric van now, but for time being we’re lucky to have use of Max’s mum’s horse box, which is a vibe! We may well end up using horse boxes when we’re big enough to be delivering 100 casks a week - it’s so capacious and can carry the thick end of 2 tonnes!

On the subject of delivery, we’ve had to raise our minimum order quantity to 3 casks, due to having problems with a whole host of couriers. I gave a pretty thorough account of the time in March when a courier let us down at the 11th our for an order for the Blue Blazer, and cases like this have continued since. We couldn’t be happier with the pallet service that Elddis provide. They run like absolute clockwork. For a pallet order with them to be economically viable for us, we’ve got to send 3 casks, so that’s how we’ll be proceeding for the foreseeable. We’ll always use them for sending full pallets tho.

We were back in the Blue Blazer - our favourite pub in Edinburgh - over the Whit bank holiday week to do a little marathon offer for all to enjoy. We were trying to think of what offer would work best for the customers and from a logical perspective for the bar team. Free pints for runners was floated, but deemed hard to monitor, then £2.80 a pint was suggested. We all liked it! I was making a post for the event and wrote 26.2 miles - then it hit me - we had to do £2.62 pints!! My pint of Belta Blonde tasted flipping lovely after the half marathon, and we’ve been reliably informed from our friends at the Blue Blazer, plus Untappd, that I wasn’t the only one that thought that.

At long last, we released our Golden Goose beer. Max has wanted to make a golden ale since he started brewing 6-7 years ago, and has, I impartially confess, nailed this recipe with big lemon and thyme notes coming through. This lands perfectly in the sunshine. The beer is named in honour of Kate, who Max has named ‘the Golden Goose’ due to her flying around the brewery fixing all of our admin and systems problems, all pro bono! There’s not many Golden Geese like Kate around, and there’s certainly not many Golden Ales around which are quite like ours! I really ought to start telling the world about this on our socials asap rocky.

It did feel great getting GG released and out for the world to taste, but boy do I not half tip my cap to breweries who can knock out a new beer a week. Even if they do have 100 more employees than we do, to be able to coordinate between departments and ship product after product is pretty mind-blowing from where I’m sat, in my little plastic kids chair, on my first day of ‘running a brewery’ school. Our designs take weeks to nail down with our graphic designer - Eve (a bona fide human). Printing the labels and cask clips take another week. Plus the recipe can take many iterations before Max is happy that it’s good to go, not mentioning the brew itself… if it’s all cask like GG then it takes 2ish weeks to complete and package. If we’re gonna can and keg them using our close friends at Hadrian Border, then that’ll take another week or 2. All while not taking our eyes off the ball whatsoever on our core range. The long and short of it is that it takes a canny while to get a new product that we’re proud of to market.

As well as being a time-intensive labour, brewing is also a highly capital intensive business. Energy, water, ingredients (using plenty of fertiliser), transportation and packaging are all on the rise, and I’ve bound to miss out a good few. Commodity prices in ’26 have far outstripped the ~7% price rises we rolled out in April. For a small example, aluminium costs have risen 34% year-to-date, which can only move our can prices one way. Our margins will have to absorb 80% of this cost increase. Our biggest cost is labour, and this is an extremely humble wage for our two permanent employees - me and Max, particularly if this was spread over how many hours we actually work. 

We never want to stop brewing. That’s why we’ve got to zig, and zig, and come up with more ways to reach more people. Everything will take care of itself if more people genuinely like our beer and like who we are. 

Pouring our own pints at the Ponteland Memorial Hall is certainly one of those new ways! It was a huge slice of luck for us when, in early April, the trustees offered us the opportunity to run our own monthly events at their hall. Starting on the 26th of June, we’re going to be running our Pop up Pub; featuring food vans, live music, plenty of Moose (obvs), other locally-made sprits and soft drinks, and some less-locally made wines. There’ll be some lush outdoor seating available too. Come along for some fun times :)

I’m also chuffed to announce that, only 3 months after recording the 1st one, our very own Thirsty Musings podcast is live and available on Spotify, Apple, and Youtube! Join me and learn about everything that goes into making great businesspeople, with a particular focus on those from the North East. Soon after joining Moose, I began to see the extraordinary lengths local people have gone to keep their businesses alive - then thrive, so I wanted to understand these more and share them with everyone. Running a podcast provides me with a rare chance to sit down for an hour with our customers and some new faces from the hospitality industry and beyond. This is what it’s all about for me - building and strengthening relationships. If you’ve got the time to have a listen. I sincerely hope you get half as much out of them as I did.

Halfway through writing this (spread over 2 days), I learned that Queer Brewing are closing up shop. Admittedly I’ve never tasted their beer, and you never fully know how a business is being ran unless you’re on the inside, but this still comes as a massive shock. They looked to be holding it down on all fronts; quality branding, big fan base, packaging across the board, taproom and events, brewing an AF option (not very easy!), and a seemingly great bunch of people who really give a shit about brewing beer properly. As I write this I realise I feel largely uninformed as to why they’re closing shop. They may well be making a respectable profit, and want to reinvest it into something that gives them even more meaning than brewing. 

But after watching how their video was delivered, and from my own experience, I know that brewing isn’t a walk in the park by any means. You have to love it to have at least a chance of sticking around. Fortunately for us, we do. I’m grateful to Max for creating such objectively excellent beer. The awards back that up. I love our artwork, and the process of gradually improving our social medias and website. I love dropping off our beer to a great pub, a place where people share great times, and knowing that we’re playing a small part in those. Forgetting some of the boring stuff - the number crunching, the drawn-out chats with Claude (AI) and the traffic jams for deliveries, 90% of all this feels like a fun game, of which I want to keep playing.

Fair play for sticking with me if you made it this far, a don’t forget:

Stay Loose, Drink Moose.