The second iteration of the brewery project I started with my good friend Rich (previously West by Three).

My responsibilities include:

 

Financial, Project Management, Marketing, Email Campaigns & Bar tending Festivals

Design Services

Branding, Artwork, Website, Packaging, Merchandise, Equipment, Plant & Space

Tech Stack

Custom Shopify, Custom Production Tracking App, Xero Bookkeeping, Google Workspace & CRM admin

Unfortunately, we were forced to rename our trademarked brand after a tedious & costly legal saga in 2018.

Rich & I work full-time jobs, Freetime seemed like the perfect name for our side hustle.

Freetime was born in February 2019, we poured the first beers under the new brand at the Craft Beer Rising festival in the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in London.

I introduced the new branding with a merchandise pre-order campaign a couple of weeks before the CBR festival.

The intention was to drum up support, engage our audience & cover the cost of the new gear.

Building on our success from 2018, we were oversubscribed locally & with our wholesalers.

Due to demand we had stopped bottling & focused on shipping pallets of kegs.

We couldn't keep up with the sales demand and needed to increase our production capacity & simplify our eclectic line-up.

Our pale ale (Mating Surfaces) & Helles (Spezial) were the top sellers.

We invested in two new fermenters (FVs), allowing us to scale production of these core products.

Our lagers were popular & we had identified a market for high quality canned lagers.

The next phase of our planned expansion in 2020 was to scale up our brew-house, purchase more FVs & a canning line.

Little did we know what was coming round the corner.

The covid-19 pandemic & the strict lock-down rules in the UK left our keg only model exposed, sales stopped.

In October of 2020 we dumped £40k of kegs that were past their sell date.

This is the most disappointing thing I have experienced in my professional career & it was hard for us to decide when/how to restart production.

On a positive note, one batch of beer did survive 2020.

In late 2019, we produced an Imperial Stout set to age for a year in Welsh Whisky barrels.

Our friends at BeerRiff, let us use their canning line to get 2992 packaged & out for Christmas 2020.

Throughout 2021 & 2022 we produced collabs with BeerRiff, we would brew & they would package.

This reduced the risk of being stuck with too much keg stock & they had a direct to consumer retail channel to move the product through.

We started contract brewing, producing private label beers for venues in Wales.

This was a great way for us to use the brew-kit without being stuck with too much stock.

London based tech company Nothing approached us to brew them a rice lager for their Soho store launch party.

The first batch, beer (1) was a limited run & they printed each can with a handheld dot matrix printer.

It was a hit so we produced a full length run for them, beer (2) sold out in 3 days.

We continue to contract brew for select clients as we look for our dream retail & production venue.