We’ve been here before.
I don’t mean this in a ‘past- lives-I-was-Ivan-the-Terrible,-you-know’ kind of way. But as a testament to our unbounded optimism in the face of situations where we should know better by now. At the very least, we should know not to use the phrase ‘How hard can it be?’. One of us should really remember that, every time we’ve uttered that phrase, it’s turned out to be monstrously harder than we thought.
So, what’s brought this on? Well mainly the battle to get our online shop going. This is not a reflection on our web guys at Jammy Custard Studios, who have done such long and hard work on our behalf to get this together that if you creep up behind Patrick and whisper ‘Untapped’, he may not cry, but he’ll definitely twitch. No, this is down to all the other nuts and bolts that you need in place to run your own online service, none of which is helped by our rather different brewery borrowing arrangement.
To illustrate, here’s a paraphrased conversation I had with a very patient courier manager:
Courier person: ‘ So, where’s the business based?
Me: ‘Cardiff’
CP: ‘So we’re picking up from Cardiff?
Me: ‘ No, the beer is stored in a bond in Gloucestershire.’
CP: ‘So, we’re picking up from Gloucestershire?’
Me: ‘No, the distribution is going to run out of a wine importers in Herefordshire’
CP: ‘So, they’ll be handling the paperwork?’
Me: ‘No, we’ll do all the admin, they’ll just load the truck.’
CP: ‘So, where’s your brewery?’
Me: ‘We don’t own one. We rent someone else’s kit.’
CP: ‘ In the Cayman Islands?’
Ok, so that last bit didn’t happen. But you can see why it took a while to explain.
We also had to get some nice, sturdy branded boxes made to make sure your beer gets to you in one piece. A little easier to organise but the bill was a bit of a shock. I thought at one point that I’d have to get Mart to sell a kidney to cover it (not me - you wouldn’t buy my internal organs in the same way that you wouldn’t buy a car with differently coloured front and rear seats).
All in all, we missed our ‘open for Christmas’ deadline by 3 months. Still, faster than calling the 3 Mobile helpline (don’t ask…).
But everything is now up and running, and you can get cases of Untapped’s finest delivered straight to your door. Combine that with a pizza / curry delivery and you never need leave the house again.
Or, so you’d think.
Because the one thing you won’t be able to get online (not for a while anyway) is our new wheat beer. The brew could be safely described as challenging, as I took advice from books, the net and Chris at Warminster Maltings (Thanks!) to understand why wheat malt behaves so differently from barley malt. This, combined with a weekend spent watching the ferment like an anxious parent and a hell of a triple filtration, has made for quite a week. The beer, however, is now safely in bottle and is hugely aromatic and flavoursome. With any luck, it should be ready to sample very soon, and should be on general release in late May. And with all this out of the way, Mart and I can return to normal and start arguing about what to call it…