Cuckoo Brewing
There are lots of ways to start a brewery.
Perhaps because of that, the craft beer market is much more crowded than it was 5-10 years ago - there are far more breweries competing for the same tastebuds.
But breweries are expensive! Quite honestly, we don't have £50k-100k for a second-hand setup, and banks aren't desperate to lend to breweries, so we've decided to take another well worn route...
Contract Brewing is the practice of one established brewery being contracted to produce the beer for another. This is generally done when a brewery can't keep up with demand and they need to scale up, or if a larger brewery has overheads that require them to keep their staff and brewing equipment busy. It's a symbiotic relationship and it happens more than you might think.
Cuckoo Brewing is pretty much the same as contract brewing, but a bit more hands-on. A cuckoo brewer is more involved in the actual brewing rather than just outsourcing the work. As with contract brewing, this has the benefit of making sure the 'parent' brewery is busy, whilst the 'cuckoo' is not lumbered with the setup costs of a real brewery at its inception.
There's a bit of a stigma attached to all of this ("you can't be a real brewery without owning a premises where you brew"), but it feels like this is fading. Some relatively big names started out with cuckoo/contract brewing arrangements, some are still dabbling from time to time.
We see it as a great opportunity to produce the beer we've been dreaming about for years without without the hefty initial setup costs, whilst we gauge whether drinkers like our recipes, branding and concept!
It fits us at the moment, and we're happy to say that! Whilst the goal is still to own a brick-and-mortar operation, it would feel disingenuous to portray ourselves like that at this stage.
As always, if you fancy giving is a try, feel free to take a look at our shop! There's free shipping on orders over £40, too!
You might see cuckoo or contract brewing referred to as "gypsy brewing" but we don't believe this is a term that is fit for purpose and will never use it to describe ourselves or any of the practices described above.