Espresso: How The Craft Beer Revolution Started

0:01Morning, morning, or welcome. Yes, I have grown a tash, I have got a nose ring and I am covered in tattoos. I am your barista for the day. Welcome to Espresso Short, Snappy Espresso Short podcast episodes. I've literally downloaded all the wisdom from all the founders and all the brands, like Good, Tills, Coconut Collaborative, Candy Kittens, Little Moons, Planet Organic, and I've distilled it into this micro, short, snappy wisdom to give you a mahoosive edge on the day, to kickstart your day. So look, without further ado, let's get cracking and enjoy this espresso shot.

0:40back to the business is essentially a fiction it's like why does a story like we have well why does craft beer i know you don't like that word but just put it in sort of lameness and why why does that you have to use it yes it's the shorthand yeah so why does that boot off and then another idea doesn't boot off or like i asked how it doesn't boot off and i think for people listening to this who are founders who are going to want to disrupt categories who are going to want to create a movement and almost also be the kind of the storyteller what like one of the reasons why car scale has not taken off uh is and and and this is you know is this this is probably yeah this this probably indicative of the challenge is that it's more complicated to manage in the pub so it only lasts once you tap the keg it only lasts for max 72 hours and then it goes off uh whereas whereas keg beer lasts forever yeah that's the joy of car scales it's you know when when it's gone it's gone you know you you you it's when it's fresh it's delicious then it's disgusting it goes off it goes off very quickly uh so it's kind of like how do we you know how do we educate pubs and how do we educate people to create demand for that so that you can get enough throughput so that you can always have great really fresh uh car scale in pumps and kind of i think it will happen but it just it just it just takes time but that's been always been one of my things we always had a lot of car scales on and i have to say from time to time we did throw away quite a lot yeah we used to have a promotion in in drought house called give us a stay our daily cask and basically every monday we would charge 2.75 for a pint of car scale because we would have opened a lot of casts tapped a lot of casts over the weekend and then on Monday we'd want to just clear it all out and start again you know so that was the that's the vibe yeah so so so back to the kind of the early days of Draft House and obviously there's so much other stuff to explore but I just think in terms of this storytelling piece it's it's fascinating because I think I really believe in Perry's kind of been a big a big purveyor of this is that a brand is ultimately a story and the story pulls people and ideas of stories so i know in that first year you you you i think you had a pub and it was like was it selling italian food maybe and you said that first year was like really hard like a trough of sorrow almost it was desperately hard and then something happened whereby it began to gain momentum like what if we were to zoom in on that like what were the specific one or two things that changed in maybe the way you told the story to go back a little bit further so we had a very successful nightclub in in i had a very successful nightclub um i tend to say we but there were a couple of other investors um and if they're listening hi guys but um called woodies uh in notting hill and and uh it was it's a kind of legendary 90s uh venue uh sort of epicenter of bad behavior um the general manager the guy who ran it for us um it was an italian guy and he said to me i found a site and i want to open an italian pub i was like at that point nothing had really gone wrong uh and so i also had the pub next door to woody's apps going really well and i thought anything i did yeah being a total idiot i thought anything i do is going to be successful you know what's wrong with an italian pub you know turns out there's a lot nobody likes really well nowadays actually people like retty and peroni and stuff.

4:14And in those days, you know, it wasn't really a thing. People don't go to pubs to eat Italian food. And we were unable to sort of, you know, change that habit, change that perception. So we had to close that pub down. And we ended up, one of my other managers, he was, it turned out, was a complete beer fanatic. You know, in the very early days of what became known, this wasn't called craft beer at this stage, but there were brands like Sierra Nevada, you know, and others from the US being imported into the UK in very small quantities. And he had been to Canada where there was a lot of craft beer, you know, happening.

4:54And he was a drinks fanatic, anyway, cocktail fanatic, who was an expert on anything liquid. And he said, look, let me have a go. So we sort of dialed the pub right back, repainted it, some traditional pub colours, you know, kind of gastric pub-y kind of colour. as you know like dark reds and olive greens and you know all that stuff you were too young to remember but that was kind of what pubs looked like in the 90s uh and uh very simple menu just like burgers dogs you know whatever again you know that wasn't really a thing back then um you know everyone was trying to gastro club foods they were trying to do high-end food all right yeah we would have still like junk food basically dirty food just because it's it's kind of we just wanted to make it as simple as possible and do something that would work with beer really well.

5:45Quick one, guys. Espresso's got a brand new sponsor, Unleashed. Unleashed is inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software. We use Unleashed daily at Ireland's. I bloody love it. We've got our admin time in half, saving approximately 30k a year. Why use it? Save money, save headaches, save stress. Get granular clarity on your margins. Know where your stock is. Don't miss availability. look your favorite brands literally use unleashed as their backbone candy kins tiny rebel trip always religiously look there's a link in the show notes please feel free to book a call with josh and his wonderful sales team at unleashed they're amazing even nothing comes of it and even better news you'll get your first month free if you reference hungry thank you yes we we put some interesting beers in the bar we should dial back the decor uh we got adam who was this chap uh the the beer fanatic hired some great people who were really you know yeah interested in what we were doing uh and and you know before you knew it i don't know three three four five six months in it was really busy and it was just it was booming uh and it was because we were doing something different but not that different yeah still a pub and still sold beer and a lot of the beer was English.

7:03And meanwhile, just as we were about to open the pub, so linebacked, three, four, five, six months, this guy called Duncan Sandbrook walks in and says, we're opening a brewery around the corner behind your pub. Do you want to come and have a try of the beer? And now that's like, oh, no, another fucking brewery. There's so many. then this is like I remember when that was I think it was probably like 2007 or 8 then it was like wow someone's opening a brewery that's seriously cool epic we were so excited so we all sort of ran around drank lots of pints of Duncan's beer and had a fabulous time with Duncan realising Duncan was the top bloke and then so we sold his beer for many many years as of what that was a car scale one of our car scales uh ducken uh it's called wandle off the river sandbrook's wandle uh and uh so all those things were they all sort of came together and and and people just started to build a real loyalty to the department the people who work there they it wasn't boring and so you didn't go there you know for a really like refined experience some drinking beer uh hopefully uh yeah the staff the team weren't being boring about beer they're just having fun and but just going you should try this it's amazing uh and you know when something new came in or whatever and that just wasn't something that ever happened in the pub you know pubs you just went in and there was like Stella Carling you know Guinness um and that was it you know uh and so that so this was just something completely different but it also felt kind of the same it just felt like this is the natural progression of how a pub should evolve uh and that became the bed that was called the westbridge public house and dining rooms and that i know you're dying to jump in but that became that was the westbridge public house and dining rooms uh and uh that was the that was basically the the seed the germ uh of of draft house and then the next one we opened was on that was on battersea bridge road and down the road we opened another pub on on on north good road in battersea south battersea uh in nappy valley as they call it uh that that that was the first draft house um i've got one more story to tell on that so so so the draft house itself the name came because our second pub was supposed to be uh in westfield uh in in shepherd's bush when they launched westfield in 2009 we were we were supposed to be their pub because the woman who was doing the curation of the sort of food retail offer in Westwood was a regular in Westbridge in our cool little crowd beer pub.

9:56And so it was a massive site and we got very excited. We raised the money. It was going to cost us like 750 grand to do. It was a hell of a lot. It was just really squeaky bone time, terrifying project. And this was sort of end of 2008. And then we didn't quite get the lease over the line and signed by the end of 2008. And then 2009, you're probably too young, but it was just the end of the world financially. It was like the financial crisis blew up in January and all of our investors ran away. So we ended up not doing that part, but we had decided because we thought in Westfield, there'll be lots of you know wives dragging their slightly disconsolate husbands around around and they'd be like looking around how can I get out of this living house we wanted to have a name that was a Ron Seal type name that would do in a set of the tin and that became the draft house although we didn't end up doing that site thank god actually as it turned out although in fact if we had done it would have been hugely successful because long story but but that that i sent outside that was one of my main mistakes in business but um we ended up uh applying that name to the side that's beginning at the proud for people listening in terms of creating that story what what you've said there there's there's a lot in it and i think the first thing is you don't just sit down and create the story and then away you go so you've got to take a lot of action first mess around not mess around but try a lot of stuff throw a lot of stuff at the wall see what sticks and then the story will come out of that thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day let's be having ya if you want the fun episode it will be in the show notes a link will be in the show notes the full episode thank you so much please leave friends as well it means the world to me Oh