From student homebrew hobby to 50,000 pints a month
TWO Manchester University graduates who began brewing beer in a bucket are now selling 50,000 pints per month.
Paul Delamere and George Grant met on their first day at university in 2009 and sold their beer, which cost them 60p a pint to make, at house parties for £2 a pint. Now their firm, ShinDigger Brewing Co, sells to 130 bars in Manchester and to more than 60 stockists in England and Scotland. Delamere, 27, studied management and then completed a masters in enterprise in 2013. He said turning the hobby into a business was ‘a daunting challenge’, but that the course helped him.
He said: ‘When we started home brewing, it was just a bit of fun for cheap beer, really. But we put time into the recipes, bringing styles from around the world into our kitchen in Manchester.
‘We tried some American styles. We were brewing from the grain, reading brewers’ blogs and coming up with recipes through trial and error. We would take plastic kegs to house parties and make a bit of money. One good thing about playing around at university was this bubble with other students meant we had the perfect opportunity to see people’s reactions.’
The friends spent a ‘couple of hundred’ pounds of Christmas money on their first homebrew kit, and Delamere said ‘it was always a side project. To start a brewery after university was a pipe dream.’ But eventually they decided they should try to brew on a commercial basis and ‘see what happens’.
He said: ‘We went to the bank for a £60,000-£70,000 loan, but being two graduates saying, “Can I have some money for a brewery?” didn’t get us anything. We got £10,000 from the StartUp Loans Company for branding, the kegs and to keep things ticking. It was on a shoestring.
‘We have learned so much about the supply chain and are looking to grow more nationwide now. We were profitable this year and last.’
Grant, 26, who studied international business, finance and economics, said: ‘Through a network of breweries we do shadow brewing – we brew on their spare capacity. It is a less risky model and we get to use super-high-tech kit. We can be agile and scale quickly in a capital intensive industry.’