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. As we welcome more of our team back in the glen, we want to 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 interview is with Iain Smith, our marketing manager – Iain’s usually the one asking the questions for these blogs, as he handles all our comms as well as digital presence, design work, photography and lots of bits in between. We caught up with him on a particularly beautiful day in the brewery Courtyard for a cold can of Jarl and a blether about his pandemic experiences.

FYNE ALES ONLINE SHOP

Let’s start at the beginning – what was your experience at the start of the pandemic?

It was all a bit crazy, looking back – I went from pouring beer down at Cloudwater’s festival in Manchester at the end of February, to picking up SIBA awards in Liverpool in the middle of March, to everything shutting down and basically being told not to leave the house less than a week later.

We were lucky enough to move into a new house about four weeks before the lockdown measures were announced, so it was quite good to have a bit of time at home, doing lots of painting, DIY, gardening – plus baking like everyone else, and spending more time with the dog. I’m so, so thankful we moved before it all started because the idea of lockdown in the wee flat we had before – ooft.

Work wise, I think that at the start of this, we figured that the big spike in online sales we saw was just going be people panic-buying beer the same way they’d been panic-buying toilet roll in the weeks before – so understandably, I was furloughed along with quite a lot of the team when the government support initiatives were announced.

You came back to work full-time quite early, though?

Once it became clear that the online shop sales wasn’t just a spike and that it had the potential to really help us get through the pandemic while the pubs were shut, I was brought back to work full-time to try and help get everything working as best we could on the website and ecommerce side of things.

And while part of it was about boosting sales on the online shop, it was also about communicating with our customers – so many folk were supporting us, we didn’t want it to be a faceless transaction, we wanted them to know that their orders were really making a difference and let people know that if they need beer – we’re still going and they can get it from us.

We did a lot of different things to keep in touch with folk, to try and keep us in their minds – people weren’t seeing our pump clips in pubs or names of our beers on chalkboards, and we didn’t want them to forget about us, so we started doing more frequent newsletters, blogs and using social media a lot more to give people an insight into what we was going on in the glen and how hard we were working to keep things going. I was looking back through our photos on Facebook last night and I think it’s something we’ve done quite well over the last few months – telling stories, showing people what we’re doing.

Like everyone else at the brewery, there was a learning curve in terms of doing different work than I was before, but it was quite rewarding. I think we did over sixty new beers last year and that cycle of planning, producing and marketing new beers was really time-consuming. In lockdown we cut everything right back to focus on our core beers and it was really nice to give them the attention they deserve – they’re in our year-round range for a reason after-all.

You’ve also been leading on a few diversification project for the brewery over the last few months.

Yeah, we’ve tried a few new things, of course – FyneFest At Home was a big job after we sadly had to cancel the festival, we had an amazing response to selling our farm’s venison via the brewery’s online shop for the first time, we celebrated Jarl’s tenth birthday and launched it in cans, and we did the UK’s first mini-cask subscription service with the Mini-Cask Club – it’s been good to have the time to plan these things and get people excited about them. If you’d told me six months ago I’d be reading up on the rules and regs of selling meat boxes online this year, I probably wouldn’t have believed you, but here we are – we keep going and trying to find new ways to reach people. There’s lots more cool stuff to come – my to do list is a bit crazy just now.

Have you been drinking lots of beer at home, like everyone else, during the pandemic?

I definitely drank more at home over the past few months – at the start of lockdown I raided my stash of imperial stouts and mixed ferm sours. I usually only keep beers that I’d like to share with folk and obviously, that wasn’t going to happen any time soon, so I decided that my wife and I should just drink them. Some of the stouts were definitely past their best, some of the sours were better than they were fresh – I guess that’s the risk you take stashing beer!

With the support we were getting and how important it was to us, I thought it’d be good to do the same for some friends breweries – I got cases in from Lost & Grounded, Cloudwater, DEYA, and a few others. The Lost & Grounded Czech pilsner is probably my favourite beer of the year so far, while Howling Hops was my “find” of the lockdown – I’ve had a few of their beers in their tank bar in London before, but I got a mixed case from their online shop and there wasn’t a bad beer in there – they’re absolutely smashing it with hoppy beers right now. My dad, who lives down south, ordered the same mixed case from them and did a video chat tasting of three experimental hop IPAs they put out, which was a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Need to get them on the list for FyneFest next year, haha!

And a lot of Jarl cans since we launched them in July – they’re so good, Jarl is really in its best ever form right now.

Is there anything you’ve been missing during the pandemic?

All our family is down south in England, so we pretty much didn’t see anyone until the end of July when the five mile movement restriction was eased. My sister and her husband had their first baby a couple of weeks before we went down, so it was great to meet my new nephew and catch up with both sides of the family.

I’ve missed a lot of the social side of work to be honest – getting out to beer festivals and events and catching up with folk in the industry – I really enjoy that part of the job, and obviously not having everyone up to the glen for FyneFest was pretty rough as it’s usually such a brilliant celebration of UK brewing and our wee corner of Scotland. We’ll make up for it next year.

I missed cask beer a bit, but was able to bring mini-casks home from the brewery to satisfy the craving, and we’ve been to a few good pubs in the last few weeks – though thinking about it, we’ve not been back to The Laurieston yet and I’m definitely still missing it a little!

What’s your take on how things are opening back up and the future for the beer industry with the restrictions currently in place?

I’m naturally predisposed to worrying – it’s my default position in any situation, so I’ve had and still have quite a bit of anxiety about the long-term prospects for the beer industry – pubs are reopening, but it still feels like early days in terms of knowing whether the ‘new normal’ for eating and drinking out is really going to work commercially. It feels like it wouldn’t take much for things to really start to hurt again, and seeing breweries having to make redundancies and bars and breweries closing down already, it’s scary.

I think I need to force myself to be a bit more hopeful – we’ve been working hard for nearly nineteen years to build our reputation for good beer, and build our community, we’ve had an amazing level of support via our online shop so far, hopefully the same amazing folk will stick with us and keep the support coming. We’ll keep brewing it if you keep wanting to drink it – so cheers to everyone who has been supporting us, and if you need beer, you know where to find us.

FYNE ALES ONLINE SHOP