Best Supermarket for Craft Beer?

If you have been following Hardknott for any length of time you'll know we've had great success with our beers into Morrisons. Certainly most of the supermarkets are now realising they need to add some craft beer to their line-up. Morrisons have certainly upped their game and are pushing to have better beers. We are part of that push.

Nothing can ever stay the same. We started with three beers in Morrisons, Azimuth, obviously, as our staple, Infra Red, which is a bit of a darling for us, and Code Black, which if I were honest is a bit extreme in the favour profile for most people.

Code Black didn't make the sales needed to justify the shelf space. It's a fairly hard costing issue. Shelf space costs the retailer money. Turnover per shelf metre is a key indicator of performance. Not surprisingly Code Black got the chop quite early. A shame, but hardly surprising given a microsecond of thought.

A year into supplying Morrisons and they are keeping things very live, as are we. It's fun to produce something new and it really excites me to get that new thing out there to the great craft beer fans. Last year we launched Intergalactic Space Hopper at Craft Beer Rising in Glasgow. It was well received and we supported it in our own way with a very daft video, where I make quite certain that no one is going to accuse me of not putting my own reputation on the line for the purposes of getting us noticed.


Intergalactic Space Hopper from Hardknott Brewery on Vimeo.

Looking at the total craft beer range the beer buyer decided that Infra Red perhaps hasn't done quite as well as they would like and we should try some thing else in it's place. He noticed Intergalactic Space Hopper had been making a few waves and asked if we'd like to consider supplying that instead of Infra Red. To be fair, I guess Morrisons probably listed it despite my crazy video antics, or for that matter any other imagery that might have originated from the Hardknott PR clunky machinery. Whichever, we're just pleased we can once again get much more of our great craft beer out to very many more people.

Apparently it is going live today, although twitter tells me it's been on the shelves for a few days already in some stores. Out goes Infra Red, in with Intergalactic Space Hopper, and early indications are that it is doing well.

Looking at Twitter I'm seeing some people finding Hardknott in Morrisons and declaring them the best supermarket for craft beer. I don't know if this is fair, or entirely due to Hardknott, but I'm going to claim it anyway, as outrageous and potentially inaccurate declarations are by and far the most successful ways of getting one's name better respected.

So, get sown to Morriosns and buy some stunning craft beer from Hardknott.

Enjoy.

Crazy Intergalacticness

This post has developed into a rant. You are best advised to avoid reading it and just watch this video. It's daft, I put quite a bit of work into it and despite the effort, I still wonder if it'll hit the spot. I love it if folks watch it, share it, and if you really want to, take the mickey.

The beer is called Intergalactic Space Hopper. It's 5.2% pale and hoppy as hell. We're launching it at Glasgow Craft Beer Rising and Grasmere Guzzler this weekend. Ann and I'll will be a Glasgow, Scott will be at Grasmere on Saturday.

Intergalactic Space Hopper from Hardknott Brewery on Vimeo.

And so, to the rant.

Promoting beer is an interesting job. It's certainly getting trickier to make oneself heard with so many breweries out there now. Makes me kind of frustrated when some people seem to feel that it isn't simply great the choice you beer drinkers have. The choice out there is fantastic, there is just a huge amount of cask beer everywhere now. Microbrewer keg beer is becoming much more popular than to be honest even I thought it'd become. Choosing just how bright or murky the beer you buy is all down to walking into the pub or craft beer bar you know and trust. If you want it cheap, go to Wetherspoons.

For the poor brewer it does mean putting in extra effort to get noticed. We know we don't always get it right, but we try, and it's pleasurable when we get noticed, there's no doubt about that. Sometimes the reasons for being noticed aren't exactly the way we planned, but getting noticed in an ever increasingly crowded marketplace is almost always a good thing, even if the attention gets a little uncomfortable.

We are releasing a beer this weekend. It's a good beer, stacked full of bright hop aromas and a good punch of complex hop flavours. I'd say stunning. Considering we've had some problems this year getting the hops we wanted, partly due to our own inability to accurately predict growth combined with administrative cock-ups both at Hardknott central and at hop merchants. It didn't help that some hop harvests were short last season.

Despite the brilliance of the beer, that just isn't good enough to generate sales all by itself. So, I do what I do to try and promote the Hardknott brand, and if I were honest I'd say it's getting tougher to get it right. When we started Hardknott it almost seemed all we had to do was write a few blog posts and everything would be alright. We were actually saying to people that we hadn't got enough beer. So, we took the risk and took out some fairly eye watering loans, by my modest standards anyway, and went for expansion.

We've made some mistakes, worked hard, put out some marketing projects, on next to no budget, and had some success.

"O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!"

Indeed, it is something I consider all the time. How is Hardknott perceived? How am I perceived? We work very hard, make a meagre living out of beer. I imagine much like most people in the beer industry we are driven by a passion¹ for beer. I do wonder just how much the diversity of beer out there is so great because a huge number of people are working very hard for very little financial return. Yes, some breweries are doing fantastically well. We're stuck just a little bit far away from the metropolises to make it quite as well, but we do OK, partly because I refuse to wind my neck in, and give an outward impression of having limited self awareness.². The reality is, as Jeffrey Bell is well aware, I consider frequently how both myself and my business are perceived.

So, if I were honest, I'm not entirely happy with the video I post here. I've put a huge number of hours into it. Learned a lot about animation and syncing it with music. I had some fun trying to get the right feel to the sound track. I am sure it'll get some people going WTF? Whatever, it's here, and so is the beer. Go ahead, talk about me, I'll cry into my beer tonight, but so long as it gets the Hardknott name out there, on balance I'll feel good about it.

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¹There you go, an example of a word that we become afraid to use, because it has to some extent become a cliche. But I believe there are many people, working their fuckingⁱ socks off to make fantastic beer, driven not by greed, or sinister capitalist intentions, but by passion. Let us say that we do exactly that, eh? without taking the god damn piss.

²Stonch has returned! I give himⁱⁱ two links to his blog in this post. That should please him. But then, despite his reasonably successful attempts to wind me up, his blog has given me good mention this last few weeks, so I can't, in reality, complain.ⁱⁱⁱ

ⁱYup, that's out of character for this blog. But, right now, after going to bed at 4am to get this video finished, and now being up with fire in my belly, determined to get the beer to Glasgow, I feel it's justified.

ⁱⁱOr should it be them? Seems there are four of them contributing now. Geez, that makes it all the harder for me to keep up with blogging too.....

ⁱⁱⁱYup, you are right, in a way I'm complaining. But whatever. What leaves me slightly confused is what on earth Mr Bell is actually playing at. His comments seem directed at suggesting I should stop doing what I do. My persona, and that of my brewery are organic and from the heart. We're still an incredibly an incredibly small brewery and to be honest I absolutely have no intention of winding my neck in. To stay afloat in this new and incredibly busy craft beer scene we simply have to work hard with limited resources. So stick that in your pipe Stonch.

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I quite like the music for this, although it could do with a fair bit of mastering to get it better. Time, you know. Anyhow, some of the complexities of the piece are lost due dipping it to hear voice overs and the like. If you if you are daft enough to want to hear it unadulterated and with the sound synced animation too, it's here. Ann say's I should issue a epilepsy warning as the animation is quite flashy light by itself.

Intergalactic Space Hopper just the music and sound to motion stuff. from Hardknott Brewery on Vimeo.

Craft Beer Rising Glasgow - Intergalactic Space Hopper

Who remembers space hoppers? I do, first time around. I was about 5, and back then a bouncy rubber ball with a couple of handles where just the thing for a family who couldn't afford a chopper bike for Christmas. I have fond memories of bouncing around on such daft things.

It's been a while since we've been to a good craft beer festival with a new beer. We thought we'd bounce along to the Glasgow version of Craft Beer Rising this year, and decided it would be a wheeze to try out a new recipe. Scott is getting quite good at formulating stuff all by himself, with only a cursory glance at the recipe from me. I wanted to see just how much space-age hugeness we could get into the beer. So, he set about a hop loading that was almost entirely at the end of the boil, after flame out and in dry hopping. The aroma is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

The beer will be released Friday 4th September at the first session of Craft Beer Rising Glasgow and simultaneously that day available from our webshop. If you are a pub, or distributor and want to get an advanced order, give us a call and ask for Ann.

This is an unusual announcement for us, as the beer isn't quite ready yet. I'm ordinarily uneasy about saying too much regarding a beer before it is ready to go. However, you guys need plenty of notice so you can get your tickets and try the stuff.

Just in case you can't get to Glasgow, we've also got some going to Grasmere Gussler at Tweedies bar, along with a fair selection of other Hardknott beers. This event occurs the same weekend as Craft Beer Rising.

Just a warning though, there is a chance that I'll get around to making some sort of daft video to go with the release. It might involve real, retro space hoppers, but I've yet to decide.