Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Brewery’s staying true to its original values as it begins exciting new era
We want to sit and have a beer at the end of the day that we are really proud of, and we want to have made it in a way that is sympathetic to the environment, and share it with a team that has enjoyed their day at work MICHAEL WIPER
Bristol brewery Wiper and True is looking to the future with optimism after opening a new production base and taproom in the city which, it believes, provides it with the ‘perfect’ environment in which to produce and serve its popular beers, as Andrew Arthur discovers
BRISTOL brewery Wiper and True has said the launch of its new brewery and taproom is “just reward” for its expanded team, after a “very gruelling” couple of years.
The independent company, which supplies its beer to more than 100 pubs in the city and retailers including Waitrose, has opened its second site in the city in a huge industrial unit in the Old Market district, not far from the M32 and Cabot Circus shopping area.
The move will allow the business to double its production capacity to one million litres by next year, with co-founder Michael Wiper telling our sister website BusinessLive the expansion could take it “well beyond that” to potentially three million litres.
The firm, founded in 2012, has also created 17 new jobs, including a new brewing engineer and taproom staff, taking its overall headcount to 42.
Its new venue in City Business Park, which has a capacity of around 400 including its beer garden, has been designed - with the help of the team behind Bristol surf park The Wave - to be an “immersive experience” for punters, who will be able to view the brewing process from the taproom through a glass wall.
Mr Wiper, the company’s managing director, explained the business had been looking to scale up for two to three years, after exceeding maximum capacity at its 4,000 sq ft site in the city’s nearby St Werburgh’s district.
He said the it had by chance found its “perfect building” - previously occupied by precision engineering firm IMI - after a “really hard” search.
“Very few buildings come up in central Bristol in the right location, and then when they do, not many landlords are going to go for a small independent brewery over the likes of Amazon, who we were competing against for this type of unit.
“But we eventually found the one we’ve got just through a random occurrence. One of our brew team was chatting to his neighbour over the fence and the guy said ‘our business is moving out of our unit, you should come and have a look at it.’ We managed to get in there before the whole thing got put on the market.”
Mr Wiper, along with wife Francesca and business partner Al True, founded the company after initially making cider with surplus apples from the orchards of Somerset as a hobby with friends.
After developing a business plan over cups of tea during the brewing process, Mr Wiper said the group managed to persuade some local breweries to let them use their equipment and facilities to make their own beer.
Some of their regular haunts included the Ashley Down brewery in Bristol’s Montpelier area, Cheddar Ales in Somerset and even a farmhouse brewery in Essex called Dominion.
Mr Wiper said: “We built a business off the back of the generosity of our competitors. It’s quite a phenomenal thing, unique to the beer industry where everyone gets on really well and supports each other. It’s a really nice aspect of the industry.
“We spent the first few years of our business using other people’s facilities, going in on Sundays or in the evenings, making our own beers, branding them up and sending them out to trade. So it was a really unusual and brilliant way to get into the industry.”
Wiper and True opened their first site in St Werburgh’s in 2014. Mr Wiper said the business had not contemplated closing its “spiritual starting point”, even as companies face higher operating costs amid rising energy bills and record inflation.
Mr Wiper said while its new main production facility in Old Market would concentrate on its core-range beers, it would use the St Werburgh’s site to expand and showcase its production of different products, aged using French wine and Scottish whisky barrels. He added the company was also planning to reinvest in the St Werburgh’s site next year, rebuilding production kit and establishing it as a more permanent bar venue, opening five days a week, like its new home in Old Market.
“St Werburgh’s has been a brilliant place to run a business; it’s just the most supportive community, everyone gets behind the local businesses.
“It’s a really good thing to keep separate from the main production because they often have very wild side to them where there’s different yeasts and bacteria that make them sour and all these lovely things you can play around with when making sourdough bread or yoghurt.
“You can do the same things with beer. But you don’t really want that getting into your main production facility because it can wreak havoc. We’re also very aware that a lot of the people who come to the St Werburgh’s venue are local commuters and it would feel a bit crazy to close that down and move on.”
Mr Wiper said he could “understand entirely” why there may be those who might think the brewery’s craft ales were unaffordable.
A can of one of its signature drops, the Kaleidoscope pale ale, retails at between £3 to £3.50 at its can kiosk in St Werburgh’s and in local shops. A six pack on its website is priced at £18.
Mr Wiper said the company, which saw a turnover of £1.8m in its last financial year, said any impact of the cost-of-living crisis had “yet to be seen” on its sales, which he said were growing “quite significantly”. He added there was “a lot of opportunity” for breweries of Wiper and True’s scale.
“We are focusing on the best product we can possibly make and we hold very true to that and we have a lot of work that goes into making our beer as good as it can possibly be. A huge amount of work goes into quality control and research and development.
“The other thing about our busi
ness is we run it with our values at the heart.
“For example, we pay the living wage as a starting point for our staff, which for a small business is a big thing. People like Tesco’s don’t as a multi-billion pound profit-making corporation. We’re currently a lossmaking small business but we invest in our team and we invest in things like sustainable production.”
Mr Wiper said the company was building “the most sustainable brewery” in the UK; the site’s roof is covered in solar panels and it has carbon-capture built in. By the end of this year the business is also hoping to re-harvest waste material into energy.
“We don’t operate like a lot of other businesses that provide cheaper beer,” he added.
Wiper and True is among a number of organisations to have signed up to a Bristol City Council climate change initiative which calls on businesses to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 and make an action plan to achieve it.
Mr Wiper said the business has also managed to get all of the brewers in Bristol around the table to form the Bristol Brewers Climate Forum.
The online forum will allow brewers operating in the city to discuss sustainability issues affecting the trade, including electricity and water usage in production, and collaborate on possible solutions such as work renewable energy tariffs.
Wiper and True’s new venue at Old Market will also contribute to the company’s ambitions to help combat climate change.
A 100 kilowatt array of solar panels already installed on its roof will be expanded later this year, and once complete will provide 70% of the building’s electricity use.
Mr Wiper said it will be the first small-scale brewery in the UK to be re-harvesting CO2 made from fermentation and reusing it, instead of letting it out into the atmosphere.
The company has also invested in a new high-spec production kit, designed to boost efficiency by helping it to get more extract from ingredients, reducing water usage and allowing for a 10% saving on malt and hops. It will also look to start using equipment later this year that will allow it to reduce its cardboard packaging by 60%.
Mr Wiper said he was “really proud” of the company’s “proven track record of adapting”, which he said it had demonstrated during the pandemic, a “really difficult time” for the industry when many other small independent breweries were forced to shut down.
“The biggest thing for us was we suddenly had 70% of our sales drop off and our facility was set up largely to serve pubs with draught beer. We were doing some canning but we didn’t have the establishment ready for 100% of our product going into cans.
“We shifted our tactics straight away. The first thing we did was set up a takeaway kiosk and online shop. We didn’t do any direct consumer web business before and within 48 hours we’d set up an online shop and were delivering locally in Bristol. Within weeks we’d expanded that.”
The company pivoted its production operations to enable it to can more beer.
It soon had a canning line that could not keep up with the demand, requiring the introduction of different shifts for its production teams and changes to the way is processed and distributed its beer,
Mr Wiper said: “We completely changed our practice in terms of our sales outlets, so for example, we started to sell in more small convenience stores and places that were succeeding in the pandemic, such as online and the channels that were surviving.
“We did everything we could and we reviewed our product offering, making sure it had the right appeal for the right people.”
Mr Wiper said the excitement provided by the new venue was what the company’s team needed, after the “fear and uncertainty” of the last couple of years, during which they had done their best in a “terrible situation”.
“We’ve been able to really focus our energy so positively into the future and into something that’s not just a nice next step for us but is a massive, massive improvement in terms of all the equipment we’re buying being top of the range.
“The taproom is going to be the most beautiful venue that I know of attached to a brewery. We’ve expanded the team with all these inspiring new people that are pushing the business to the next level themselves.
“It feels great, really positive, and scary and all things at once. But it’s absolutely what the team deserves having got through the last couple of years.”
While Wiper and True has been “very structured” in its planning to get to this point, with future sales and production targets in place, Mr Wiper said it’s ultimate ambition as a business was “really simple”.
“We want to sit and have a beer at the end of the day that we are really proud of, and we want to have made it in a way that is sympathetic to the environment, and share it with a team that has enjoyed their day at work.”