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’s Fyne Folk, one of the final handful of interviews as we’re running out of team members, is with Chris – Malcolm’s right hand man and master of production. Chris lives with his partner in Glen Fyne, cycling along the lane at the foot of the hills to the brewery every morning. We sat down for a beer with Chris in the Courtyard to find out whether he suffered from the pandemic panic, and how he’s feeling about the future.

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What was your immediate reaction to the announcement that pubs were going to have to close back in March?

‘I’m going to be out of a job.’ At that point there was no support announced, no furlough scheme – I went home and started looking at my options, looking at my finances and where I could save some money. I think a lot of us thought we were doomed the day they shut the pubs.

You live further up Glen Fyne from the brewer, it’s pretty isolated up there – how was it during lockdown?

Yep, 2.5 miles up the road. It was a bit weird, because it didn’t really feel like anything was different – it just felt like a really long weekend. In a way we were very lucky, there’s three houses up there together and that’s it – just miles of hills and the river, so we went out and did lots of walks we hadn’t done before, walking for miles and miles and not seeing anybody. It was very peaceful and the weather was amazing, of course.

How else did you fill your time away from work?

Oh, there was plenty to do. Decorating, gardening, and working on the cars and the motorbike – I’ve got three cars and the bike at the moment, one of the cars is in bits in the garage, so I was mostly working on that and getting the bike ready for it’s MOT, which ended up being cancelled and only rescheduled for last week. Yeah, three cars and a motorbike and nowhere to go.

Did you have anything that you were forced to miss out on – any events or trips?

We were supposed to go to Islay in April for a 50th birthday party, which we obviously couldn’t go to, and the other big one is the Ross On Wye cider festival that should have been happening next week. That’s a big trip for us every year – we love our cider and it takes place down near where both me and my partner are from, so we go down and have a good time and catch up with family and friends we left behind when we moved up to Scotland. It’s usually a proper holiday and a really good time, so gutted about that.

You were brought back to the brewery at the start of May – how did you find returning to the brewery?

It was good, I was ready to come back. It felt like I needed a bit more routine after a few too many lie-ins and idle days.

I’ve read the other blogs and a lot of people were saying how they were drinking more during lockdown, but I think it was probably the opposite for me, weirdly. Usually when I finish at 5pm I’ll come and have a drink or two in the Brewery Tap before cycling back up to the house, or we’ll come stop in at the weekend after we’ve been out somewhere and have a few pints, but that wasn’t an option so I was probably drinking less.

And how was the work itself when you came back?

Flat out. It was six weeks I was away for and coming back to work it didn’t feel any less busy than a normal May – I was on my own in the brewery for seven hours a day quite a lot, which made a difference, but the online shop was going mad, so it was all bottle and can and mini-cask rather than cask and keg production, but yeah, but between brewing, packaging and maintenance, it was flat out.

I was really, really surprised at how much beer we were sending out from website orders – we were doing over a hundred orders a day at our busiest and let’s be honest, it kept the brewery out of the shit when they closed the pubs. Bottom line is that we might not have survived without that income – the support was amazing.

Has anything changed about your role, now we’re settling into a ‘new normal’?

We’re brewing a hell of a lot more of our year-round beers than we normally would, at least it feels like it. We’ll usually do forty-plus cask specials in a year and this year we’ve only done a handful, so I don’t know if we’re brewing more of our core beers because we’re brewing less specials, or whether it’s just what people want right now – a pint they know.

Whatever it is, it’s good to be able to focus on a reduced range of beers to brew because all the beer is going out fresh and tasting brilliant right now, especially Jarl.

When you look back at 2020, how will you remember this time?

Bloody strange. Scary. It’s the weirdest thing that’s happened in our lifetime. I don’t think we’re through the worst of it yet – the schools are only just going back, and there’s localised problems coming up all the time. We’ll have to wait and see what happens I guess, but even up to where we are now it’s easily the biggest thing that’ll happen to this generation.

FYNE ALES ONLINE SHOP