The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Carving out a niche
Innovation key to craft drinks success –
Flavour-filled craft beer is becoming the choice of the inquisitive drinker, as we grow ever more tired of uniform, massproduced beer.
This is great news for our taste buds and signals the start of a change which I think will have far-reaching consequences.
You won’t like every craft beer out there.
But, if you try a few, you will find some that you absolutely love.
Craft brewers care deeply about the integrity of their beers – the provenance and flavour of their ingredients, and their production methods.
Above all, brewing great beers that uphold the values and standards they hold dear.
As a result, craft beers really can capture hearts and minds.
Back in 2003, when Innis & Gunn Original was born, beer was simply not cool.
It was not drunk by people who were cool.
If you wanted to offend the hosts of a party, all you needed to do was turn up carrying some beer.
Few had heard of such things as India pale ale or triple bock.
“It will never work,” I was told repeatedly by those who were scared of change. And it wasn’t easy at first. “A beer with flavour?” people would say with incredulity. “When am I supposed to drink that?” A fair point, and so we realised that we In partnership with had another job: in addition to making great beer, we had to actually tell people about flavour and when to enjoy our beers. And so we did. And guess what? People actually started to listen, and agree!
And then we decided to go a stage further and recommend beer as an accompaniment to food.
And so it went on. More and more people started to drink and enjoy these new flavour-packed craft beers.
They started seeking them out more, and so we pioneers stopped quaking, came out from behind our sofas and started to celebrate that our beers were being enjoyed by enthusiastic drinkers.
Then we started launching beers with even greater depths of flavours, which were made using more unusual brewing techniques.
Availability grew and suddenly beer started to throw off its “old hat” image.
And so here we are today, in a very different place to 10 years ago.
The beer landscape has changed immeasurably in Scotland and thankfully still shows phenomenal signs of growth.
The on trade still grows at 99% yearon-year and across all formats (cask, keg and bottled), and the off trade still goes up 40% in value each year.
It’s also interesting to note the Scottish impact on UK craft beer. The top-two selling brands in Britain off trade are both Scottish.
Drinkers today are more interested and better educated about beer than ever – its flavours, origins, ingredients, and provenance. It is a truly incredible transformation.
Strathearn Distillery was the first of a new wave of small distilleries popping up all over Scotland.
We have faced many new and unexpected challenges associated with everything from sourcing small runs of special bottles to convincing HM Revenue and Customs that we hadn’t missed off three zeros from our returns.
Mistakes were made and plans were changed and, out of what started as probably the smallest whisky distillery in Scotland, Strathearn has ended up as the home of Scottish craft spirits.
Gin was distilled as an initial cash crop and luckily coincided with the rapidly-growing gin marketplace.
We have also made Scottish cider brandy.
Many lessons have been learned along the way. This year sees the whisky come of age, and undoubtedly more will be learned.
Only 100 bottles of single cask, single malt Scotch are available so, working with a local online whisky auctioneer, they will be auctioned individually from our third birthday on August 23 until early December, when an early single cask will be bottled. What is next for Strathearn? We’ve made the first Scottish genever (the liquor of the Netherlands and Belgium from which gin evolved) and probably the world’s first peated genever.
Meanwhile, the German spirit bierbrand is sitting waiting to be bottled, and other spirits are in progress.
Expansion is a must, but we have to retain the ethos as founder of the Scottish Craft Distillers Association and home of Scottish hand-crafted spirits. ■ ■ t: