Collective action

What do you call that? Within the parameters of UK beer, we don’t really have a word to describe this setup, even though it’s common, and even celebrated in places like Belgium. For example, Delirium and Früli are both brewed by Brouwerij Huyghe, but that isn’t really a talking point, and doesn’t seem to matter to consumers because each brand is so distinct and consistent in its identity, and Huyghe is an established, family-run brewery. Of course, Belgium’s beer scene didn’t endure a period of bigger breweries buying smaller breweries just to close them, in the way the UK did, and so perhaps isn’t as wary of what ownership can mean.

What one might call the ‘acquisition’ of Shindigger — a term which feels so much more sterile than the nuanced and very innovative reality — meant that all beer could be brewed under one roof and, as James puts it, “we got to combine two really good teams of people. Paul is basically my right hand now, and we run the business together. George was always on the sales side of Shindigger, so he’s continuing in that role, heading up his small but absolutely brilliant team of people. It’s amazing that we now get to work with them too. All this has meant that the brewery structure is so much better with, for example, a dedicated QC manager. It's definitely changed how we work, but that has improved the quality of the beers that we make as well, and the beer is ultimately what we're passionate about. 

“I think we've learned that you can give each one of those brands and every product we make so much more attention because we have a larger team of people who are more specialised or experienced in different areas. On the other side of that, all this change has definitely been an eye opener. We're still operating like an independently owned micro-brewery — and that's kind of inevitable, because I'm running it and I've never had the experience of managing a brewery this size. The fundamentals are still there, but we also had to learn quickly, because our volumes have grown scarily fast by combining the three. I would imagine we're probably one of the largest producers in the North West right now.”

Surprisingly, James says this change in his approach to volume came last year, when indefinitely continuing to batten down the hatches and weathering the brutal economic climate we’re living in no longer seemed sustainable. “I was getting close to the point where I was like, ‘I love what we do and want to keep doing it, but very soon we’re either going to have to quit or go big, to improve our economies of scale’. Obviously we went for the latter, but we could only do that by inviting Shindigger into the fold, and because the building our brewery was in could essentially hold five times the tank space we were using a year and a half ago.”

This is a really crucial detail in The Brewing Collective’s story, and makes its way of working unique in the UK at least. When James recognised the need to expand, his first thought wasn’t to increase Mobberley’s output specifically. We’ve all heard stories about businesses that grow too quickly, can’t find a big enough market for their output, then fall into debt, forcing closure. So, instead of buying more tanks, hammering output, then desperately trying to flog all the extra beer Mobberley would suddenly be producing, James thought of other brands similarly hungry for tank space, and which would benefit from a better economy of scale. Inviting Shindigger into the fold meant all three brands could benefit from the capabilities of a bigger brewery without any of them having to destabilise their operations or team with rapid growth.

“I think our industry has to be on the cusp of change,” says James. “I made this decision to go for something slightly different, which isn’t to say our way of working is the way forward, but that there is ‘something next’ for the industry that we’re probably very close to. I would hope that we're not the last to do something like this, because having experienced it, I would be very interested to see how successful small producers could be if they joined forces, and moved away from the norm of being like, ‘we're opening a brewery and the brewery is called x, and x produces y kind of beer’, you know?”

This is perhaps what makes Mobberley, Shindigger and Weekend Project’s new setup more a collective than a company. There’s a respect for each project’s separateness, but a joyful celebration of what can be achieved when we come together.