2020 Year Summary

21 December 2020

Year Summary 2020

As we end what has been a year like no other, we would like to say a HUGE thankyou to everyone for their ongoing support.

 

 

Covid-19: Adaptation and Determination

The Coronavirus pandemic is an unavoidable topic when it comes to looking back on this year.

Firstly, the impact of the pandemic on our industry has been awful and we are very sorry to have seen businesses fail under the extreme challenges they faced. We hope you can support your local hospitality businesses when you can, we know they will appreciate it. We have been delivering beer to our trade customers throughout the year, offering as much support as we can.

In March we were faced with a choice to lay down our pipes, pack up the hops and temporarily stop brewing or stay open, keep brewing and adapt the brewery to meet the new demand. Here we are at the end of 2020 brewing flat out!

Once our shop was added to the essential list, we acted quickly in setting up our drive-through while deciding to keep our shop doors closed for safety. Our drive-through provided customers with a socially distanced, safe and completely contact free shopping experience. Word got out and the service became very popular. Over the following months our drive-through operation was developed, becoming ever more efficient for the customers. 

For those customers who were isolating and shielding, our drive-through may still be too risky, so we started our home delivery service. This service initially offered our customers living within 10 miles of the brewery the option to call and place their order, which would then be delivered to their door by our draymen. The service was then improved upon, adapting our online shop to allow home delivery orders to be taken and extending the delivery range to 17 miles. This service is very popular and will stay part of our brewery going forward as will the drive-through.

As lockdown relaxed and the tier systems were established in September, the brewery shop re-opened its doors with safety measures made to ensure customers and staff were safe. It was good to see familiar faces back in the shop again.

Your support of our shop, drive-through and home delivery services is the reason we have weathered the Covid storm and we are very appreciative to you all.

As the country thanks the NHS for the amazing work they do, we also wanted to show our support by offering NHS workers a discount, saving them £8000 since it began. This discount will continue into the New Year.  Thank you all at the NHS. 

A Year in Stats

402 Brews producing 3.8 million pints.

73,000 cars served through the drive through.

25,000 home deliveries made within 17 miles of Rebellion.

4000 orders sent around the UK via couriers.

Over 1 million bottles bottled.

In the Brewhouse -

A Summary From Our Head Brewer, Ed Bates

 

"The sudden surge in demand from the drive-through was particularly challenging as we were not geared up to meet this demand. Lots of long hours to package the beer and where we would normally throw people at the problem, we couldn't do this as we had to stay socially distanced. There were some very tired members of the packaging team in the spring! Thankfully, we had just invested in a new automated filler which allows us to fill much quicker. Without this, we would have never been able to keep up with demand.

The bottling line was commissioned in the late Autumn of 2019 and our tank set up was designed to be able to do 1 run a week with possible 2 at very busy times. We were running these 5 times a week in the spring to try to keep up with the surge in demand. It quickly became apparent that we needed to invest in more filtration capacity and had to adapt lots of our tanks so we could bottle more beer. We also had to train up staff quickly in the new line, although they had plenty of opportunities to practice.

We bottled over a million bottles this year, each one having to be placed on the line by hand and put into the box by hand. The new bottling line has been amazing as it means we were not fighting for space on someone elses line and we have had total control on the quality of the beer. We are really pleased with how it's been working and feel our bottled beer is the best it's ever been. 

 

 

The shift from cask to small pack meant a complete shift in what beers we thought we would be brewing this year. We had brewed as many bottled Blonde batches by May as we expected to brew all year. This has meant having to balance our contract of hops and malt and substituting in different ingredients when we could not get what we needed whilst keeping the beer character consistent.

We also launched a new core beer in Overthrow. Based around Zebedee but modified to retain its balance at a lower ABV this has proved even more popular than anticipated. Just another thing to keep us on our toes this year.

The brewing team have also been joined by Sheehan who oversaw quality control in a brewery in the States. He has come in with some fresh ideas and we hope he will continue our drive to always improve on the quality of our beer here at Rebellion."

Congratulations to all in our production team for their flexibility and efforts to manage such a shift.

2021 Monthly Beer Range

2020's beer range was all related to sporting events, none of which happened. Consequently, we are going to re-run this year's beers in 2021. There were some fantastic beers this year, so it will be good to taste them again.

Open Nights

We will be hosting the open nights as soon as we can. We will be keeping an eye on the Government rules, making the call to re-start when we feel we can do so safely.

Watch out for updates on this hopefully in the Spring.

1,000,000 Bottles

At the beginning of December, we bottled our one millionth bottle of the year, the most we have ever bottled on-site in a single year, ever. Passing a milestone like this is a real motivation for all the staff and really is a testament to the effort of our brewing and production teams, who have been working flat out to keep the shop, drive-through and online shop stocked up with beer. More on this in our Head Brewer's summary below.

SIBA Digital Beer Awards

Beer awards were still being held this year, with judges being sent the beer and tasting in their own homes. We sent our bottled beers to The SIBA Digital Beer Awards, a competition open in the UK to all independent breweries. We were very happy to have won a couple of awards in the Midland region and will enter again next year. 

Red: Gold in SIBA Digital Awards 2020 (Midlands Regional) in Premium Bitters (4.5 to 6.4%).

24 Carat: Silver in SIBA Digital Awards 2020 (Midlands Regional) Premium Pale Ales (4.4 to 5.4%).

Lager: Silver in SIBA Digital Awards 2020 (Midlands Regional) Session Lager & Pilsners.

 

Coming in 2021

Hopefully, the world may begin to return to some normality next year.  We have got some plans for 2021 and we'll just have to see how many we can complete.

Tap Room

The plans are to have a brewery taproom run alongside the shop so you will be able to come to the brewery for a beer/coffee, possibly eat and then shop for your take-away beer and wine. This will start off small and be developed over time with plans still in their infancy, we will let you know more as soon as they develop.

 

Open Weekend

This is a big unknown and is very much down to the pandemic's development. We can't commit to anything currently, so please keep an eye out for news in the Spring.

Reusable 1 Litres

This project was temporarily delayed due to Covid but we hope you'll see them used in the New Year. The plan is to introduce a new 1 litre swing top bottle which will be re-usable and returnable. Once these are in, over 40% of our beer volume sold in the shop will be in returnable/reusable containers. Our trade division already achieves over 90% beer delivered in returnable/reusable containers.

 

New Trial Brewery

We have invested in a new on-site, small-batch trial brewery, which will be able to brew 500-1000 litre batches of any style of beer from around the world. This was due to arrive this week and is currently held up at Dover! This should be commissioned in the New Year and be in service by late Spring so watch out for a much broader range of once-off beers available through the shop in the future.

We would like to again thank you all for the amazing support you have given us over the year.

Lastly, we are also fortunate to have an amazing group of committed employees to have worked very hard for the last 9 months under ever-changing conditions and without whom none of what we offer you would happen, so thanks to them all also.

 

We hope you all enjoy some form of Christmas and a have a Happy New Year

Merry Christmas

From all at the Rebellion Brewery.

Let's hope for a speedy return to normal in 2021!