The last eighteen months have been pretty big for Fyne Ales – in 2017 we brewed and sold more beer than any single year in our history, we launched our growing Origins Brewing project and we’ve just about recovered from our biggest and best FyneFest ever.

And we’ve also been doing a lot of work behind-the-scenes, dedicating time to taking stock of where we are as a brewery and as a brand – what’s working, what’s not and what people really think about us. We ran focus groups in key markets (Glasgow and Edinburgh), interviewed our customers in both on and off trade and spent hours talking with our team about where they want to see us go as we grow as a brewery and a business. You might also have seen our brand survey in Autumn 2017 – the phenomenal response to which really opened our eyes to how we’re currently viewed in the market. And what did all the research tell us?

The way that people see us now, and how we want them to see us don’t match up – so we’re making some changes.

This isn’t a radical overhaul of the Fyne Ales you know – it’s the next stage in our evolution as a brewery. Who we are hasn’t changed much since 2001, but how we look has changed a few times over the past sixteen years and, looking at results of last year’s research, it’s time to change again. We’re going to develop a new look and feel for Fyne Ales that is not only more coherent, but also better represents what we do and more importantly, who we are. We’re working to develop a new look that better tells the story of our brewery, and what makes our beers so special.

We’re proud to be a working farm brewery in the heart of our rural Argyll community. We’re proud to draw our brewing water from the hills that surround us and to feed our spent grain to our healthy, happy herds of sheep, highlands cows and deer on our beautiful, historic brewery estate. We’re proud to be a contributor, not a burden, to the ecosystem in our rural corner of Scotland and we’re proud of our rich heritage as an independent, family-owned and multi-award-winning brewer of outstanding beers.

Your favourite beers won’t be changing at all – Jarl will continue to be and will always be the best easy-drinking session blonde you could hope for on a hot day – but we want the way our beers look to reflect what’s important to us: our roots, our community and our ongoing progress.

For this process, we teamed up with the incredibly talented team from O Street in Glasgow – their creative, design-led approach and work ethic has thus far blown us away. The photo used for this blog was (sneakily) taken of a corner of their notes during one of our initial meetings and we’ve borrowed it for this series of blogs as a reminder of what we’re setting out to achieve – being ourselves and presenting ourselves as best as we possibly can.

The O Street team has taken a no-stone-left-unturned approach to nailing down a new look and feel for our brewery and we’re getting closer having some exciting things to show you in a future blog. We can’t wait to hear what you think.