Welcome to this week’s Fyne Folk, our blog introducing Fyne Ales team members and talking to them about their experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. We want to introduce you to the folk who make our brewery what it is, and share their stories from lockdown, how they’ve been coping and what their hopes are for a post-pandemic brewery and world.

This week, we’re chatting to Archie – a Fyne Ales veteran with 14 years of driving and delivering our beers under his belt. Archie probably spends more time in and around pubs than anyone on our team, making sure that our casks, kegs, bottles and cans arrive at your local pub, bar or bottleshop in perfect condition, and that our trade customers know how grateful we are for their orders – especially now. Read on to find out about how Archie faced the challenges of having nothing to do, returning to the road, and more.

FYNE ALES ONLINE SHOP

Thinking back to the start of the pandemic, what was your reaction when the lockdown measures were introduced and the pubs were closed?

We were selling loads of beer, I’m fairly confident that this would have been our busiest year ever and then the government announced that the pubs had to shut and that was it – done, gone.

We were all sent home and I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself – I’ve been working for the brewery for a long time, I love my job and I like to keep busy, so the idea of sitting at home with nothing to do – yeah, I started to panic a bit.

So how did you cope with life on furlough?

The first couple of weeks were pretty tough – stuck in a one-bedroom flat, sharing a garden with four other families and only being allowed out for an hour a day – it’s not good for me when I’m used to being up and active, driving or delivering. My partner Tracy works in retail and she was working fifty hours a week because they were so busy, so she wasn’t around and I was just on my own indoors.

But as soon as they relaxed the rules and said we could do more exercise, I was out. There’s plenty of space and nice walks out in the hills around Dunbarton, so I used walking as a way of getting away from everything, of clearing my head and trying to get a bit fitter. The weather was so good, I was walking eight to ten miles a day, sometimes with weights to keep my strength up, and I lost two and a half stone by the time I came back to work.

Apart from the fitness, did you try anything new while you had time on your hands?

Before this, I didn’t really know my neighbours very well, but this was a good opportunity to get to know everyone. There’s a few older folk who we share a garden with, so we’d sit out the back with them and chat to them quite a bit – at a distance of course – but it was good to get to know them and good for them to get out of the house and talk to people.

Did the fitness kick extend to healthy eating and drinking?

Definitely not drinking. I don’t think I really over-indulged, maybe a bit in the first couple of weeks when there was nothing else to do but eat and drink, but I had a few beers.

I mostly stuck to Fyne Ales beers for a long time – Hurricane Jack and Sublime Stout, but when they were running low I started looking at what I could get from the supermarkets – there’s some really good beers in the supermarkets now, including ours obviously. I know we had a lot of orders on the website, but I think having beers in supermarkets, even just the Scottish ones, has really helped breweries during all this.

How’s it been coming back to work?

To be honest, it’s been a bit strange.

Being back at the brewery and seeing everyone was nice, but going back out to pubs to deliver beer was weird at first – seeing the plastic screens, less tables, folk walking around with masks. These are pubs we’ve been working with and I’ve been going to for years and seeing them like that, there was something strange about it.

It’s okay now, but you can’t help but think, with less people and all those months closed, how much are the pubs missing out on? Can they keep going the way they are now?

It must have been good to catch up with old friends though since you’ve been back on the road – landlords and bar staff?

Oh aye, of course – I kept in touch with them while I was away and it was good to see a lot of them doing takeaways and still trading that way. That’s the one thing that feels the same as it was before – chatting to the guys who run the pubs. There’s a lot of good people who buy and sell our beer, and we’re picking up new customers even now – pubs in down in Cumbria and touristy places that have a lot of outside space seem to be doing really well, so it’s good to get as much beer out there as we are just now.

Let’s finish by talking about the future – how are you feeling about the prospects of a second wave of the virus?

I don’t think we’ll see another lockdown as it was – maybe more local lockdowns like Aberdeen, which seemed strict but seems to have worked – but not the whole country again. We couldn’t do it, the government couldn’t afford it.

People were desperate, screaming for the pubs to reopen – well, they’ve got what they wanted and even though it’s not the same as it was, we’ve all got to abide by the rules, cause at the end of the day the rules are there and the powers are there to shut a pub down, or lockdown an area to keep people safe. No one wants there to be more outbreaks, and no one wants to see the pubs closing again.

FYNE ALES ONLINE SHOP