Fear, A Year, Then Beers: We’re Back Brewing Baby
Wow what a journey.
I’m posting this article exactly one year after we found out our previous site had shut its doors on us (1 October 2025). Kate and I were about to walk into Big Penny Social for the 2025 Brewers Congress when we received the email from the owner of the building we’d brewed in for five years, essentially saying, “you’re immediately homeless”.
It was a big, big blow. We were totally winded and not in the right frame of mind to socialise with our excitable friends and industry colleagues. The future of brewing, the new techniques and technologies, the dramatic stories of success buzzing around us and excellent beer to drink. It was a brutal day.
But I’m not going to write about the how’s and the why’s of all that. Today it’s about celebrating the achievements of the last 12 months with Jen and Kate and everyone else that helped us get here.
TL;DR: it was a whopper of a year. A tough one. But we built a brewery and a taproom with lots of help from some incredible people. We feel lucky and proud, and we’re nearly there. We’ve just opened Yard by Hand properly - Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Come down, say hi. It’s £5 pints on Fridays.
For those that want to strap in and read on, let me run through nearly everything that happened in the last 12 months…
The first big problem we had was an Art You Can Drink brew day that had now lost its slot. This was our Dark Elderberry Sour collab, Threads, with Fashion Designer, Fumbalinas. We either had to pull the plug or find somewhere else to brew it. We really wanted this project to go ahead even though we had no real idea of our future. Luckily, our friends at Loud Shirt said we could move the brew day to their East Brighton brewery. Life savers. So they were the first people on the - about to be very long - thank-you list!
We‘d just spent a year on a big drive - the best year yet - increasing sales by over 20%. It felt like we were still in the zone - still busy - and we hadn’t yet seriously contemplated what was happening to us. We needed to take a moment; to take stock of reality.
We don’t have a brewery and we’re running out of beer.
And a brewery running out of beer isn’t a brewery for long. And a brewery without a brewery isn’t a brewery at all. What are we actually going to do?
Our options were: call it a day, pack it in, it was fun while it lasted. Big shame, bad ending, but we can hold our heads high. We could start again from scratch - we still have our tower brewery. It would mean limiting our range and reach until we built up enough funds to expand again. Saying goodbye to all those customers and partnerships. This would be going back ten years.
We could go back five years. Back to when we were originally expanding out of the Hand in Hand. We could keep customers and partnerships going, but it means finding cash to rebuild quickly. A lot of work, a lot of risk.
Were we delusional? I don’t know. Time will tell. But I think you have to be delusional to do anything creative or start a business in this world these days. You have to believe in yourself, your team and your brand, otherwise what else is there?
We literally checked these things off during our discussions.
Do we believe in ourselves? Can we individually do this? Do we want to? Do we have it in us? It’s going to be a really hard slog. Harder than that actually, and all of our money will be on the line, as well as all of our time and energy for years. Check.
Do we believe in the team? Are we the right people? The three of us? Ok we have Jen on Experience - running venues and events. We have Kate on Product - managing the portfolio, creating products and running production. And we have me on Story. I’ve been a bit out of it for the last ten years, being a silent business partner, but I’ve run big budgets and creative teams. Check.
Do we believe in the brand? We’ve been here for a decade making and selling beer - locally, regionally and nationally. We make great beer and have strong community connections in a number of communities. We’ve also made some great brand connections and partnerships. We’ve certainly not arrived where we want to be, but we were on our way there. There’s a solid foundation to build on. Check.
OK. We think it’s all there. It’s decided: we’re going to do it.
Now what?
The first thing on our minds was a business plan and approaching finance companies. What asset finance could we get? How much operating capital could we borrow to get us through the dark months? What are we building and how much was it going to cost?
While I was working on that, Kate was trying to solve the equally important problem of how we keep brewing and selling beer. What would our range look like during this period? Who could we serve?
We essentially have five different audiences: 1) our own pubs, 2) the amazing venues that have permanent Hand lines, 3) venues who buy from us frequently, but rotate us alongside other breweries, 4) the wider marketplace: venues who fancy trying something new and find us on Sellar, festivals or wholesalers, and 5) our webshop - selling packaged beer, gift boxes and merch directly to customers.
The customers we needed to protect the most were our permanent lines. Those taps are hard to win and easy to lose. The people who honour us with permanent lines have been hugely loyal and we wanted to make sure they could continue getting the beer they'd committed to at the price they were used to.
Range-wise, we could do most of this with four beers - Shaka, Toadlicker, Otto and Bird.
So one of Kate's jobs was essentially: how do we make enough of these four beers to keep those permanent lines permanent without a brewery. Time to call some friends.
Lakedown helped us enormously. They took on production of two of our biggest-selling beers - Shaka and Toadlicker. We already had a relationship with them as a few years previously, Kate was making their beers for them when they were building their new production facility. There was already a lot of trust between us. We knew they could make our beer, and we knew it would be excellent and consistent.
Lost Pier in Brighton stepped in and started making our cask Bird for us. Then there was Fauna in Arundel, where Kate cuckoo-brewed Otto and Bird Keg on their kit.
We had also committed to supplying Worthing Festival with lager, which was a big problem for us if our brewery wasn’t built in time (hint: it wasn’t). So Only With Love, who had just moved into their awesome new site in Burgess Hill, brewed a batch of Pocko for us so we could keep the festival contract.
These four breweries kept us going. They’re heroes to us and we can’t thank them enough. For anyone who’s read this far, please look them up, buy their beer, visit their taprooms.
So, at this point, we had a business plan and a production plan, but no money and no site to move into.
We had a deadline to move our stock and equipment from the old site by Friday 16 January 2026 - still a couple of months away, but if we didn’t find our forever home now, we’d have to move all our stuff somewhere temporary and then move it again. You’ve had that when you’re moving house and the dates don’t quite work and you have to use a storage company… Well it was like that, but we had over 20 tonnes to move. We definitely wanted to avoid doing that twice.
We'd viewed several places with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Coveted some that were out of reach. Some sites may have worked; other sites would have been incredibly difficult.
Then it just happened. The way we like it.
We were on our way to look at some brand new industrial units in Worthing. On the way there, the satnav sent us to the wrong place and, while we were turning around at a dead-end, we noticed two empty buildings with to-let signs.
We jumped out of the car, looked through the windows and collectively thought: these are the ones. There was something about the light and the way they felt. We arranged a booking immediately and after one quick view later that day, we said yes, let’s do it.
This seemed to take a couple of months to negotiate, and in the meantime, we were trawling the finance options. Time skidded on.
At this point it must have been around December. I’d created an enormous project plan with everything we could think of listed with owners and dates. It stretched out until the end of May - if we weren’t brewing by then, we’d be in some trouble (insert laughing emoji, or the skull one).
Everything was suddenly urgent and stressful - we’d agreed terms for the site and were trundling through the paperwork for our first tranche of finance. But it was now Christmas and New Year when finance folk, solicitors and estate agents are all a little slower than we needed. By the time they were opening their emails after their holidays, we had less than two weeks to wrap everything up.
The week we had to move our stock, we also had to sign the finance deal, have the money transferred, pay the deposit, complete on the lease, pick up the keys, hire a forklift and actually move. This was literally down to the wire, all coming together in a matter of hours. Somehow, it just about fell into place, but this might have been the most intense week of the entire 12 months. It’s a bit of a blur, but wow, thinking about it now makes me itch.
So it was thundering down with rain and it was cold and dark, but luckily, we had our great pal Oli Lane helping us out. We had a couple of vans, forklifts and pallet trucks at both ends and we just went backwards and forwards between West Worthing and East Worthing for two days until all 20 tonnes of stock and stuff were moved. It was brutal, but at the end of the week, everything was finally inside our own building, and for the first time, we had somewhere to call home and we could start building.
I went to work surveying the new site: measuring every wall inside and out, measuring the roof, trying to determine its height, pitch and structure - obviously miffed this didn’t already exist - and I drew up the floor plans. Kate, Jen and I then started mapping out our ideas on the laptop and with tape on the floor. This was the first feeling of real, true excitement pumping through our veins. We could see it all taking shape.
It had to happen fast. We now had more liabilities than ever and needed to start making money, but we were sitting in an empty room without a brewery, a taproom or any of the licenses or permissions to make money.
We decided we needed to get the taproom up and running first. This is good revenue going immediately into our bank account. Our Artist in Residence, HelloMarine started painting the beautiful mural (a piece Marine had created for a Dishoom Permit Room Peach Lager we’d made a couple of years previous). It felt right that the very first thing happening in our building was a huge piece of art.
Long time Hand Wrangler and Bar Builder (and incredible musician by the way), Joel Whitaker, started building the bars including the 4mx3m back bar with floating shelves. Friend of the Toad, DJ and set designer Rich Drew helped us build and get furniture from film and TV sets, including the temporary wall we built between the taproom and the empty brewhouse space. And as well as running events for our venues, Rhiannon helped with pretty much everything. It was all hands to the deck.
I can’t believe how quickly the taproom came together. On Good Friday - 3 April 2026 - our taproom - Yard by Hand - opened on a temporary event license. People came and drank beer, listened to the DJs and ate the food. It worked. We were open… Sort of.
We still needed planning consent for the change of use including the taproom. In the end, the application took over six months, during which time, our planning consultant was terrified at the progress we had made without consent. Quite right. We knew it was risky but we simply couldn’t believe this wouldn’t work. It had to work.
Now onto the brewery build.
We’d secured the asset-finance for the tanks we needed, but old shitty-pants wotsit pred had just started a war in Iran, which was threatening to raise steel, fuel and shipping prices. We reassessed our tank plans: let’s not get them all manufactured new and shipped, risking our entire tank farm sitting in containers on a dock somewhere, let’s mix it up.
So we ordered three 40hec tanks from China, bought two second-hand 20hec tanks from BRZN, which Kate had actually brewed on before, and two second-hand 20hec tanks from Fauna. And out of the blue, Larrikin kindly let us look after two of their 800l tanks.
So now we had six tanks! And once the new hygienic floor went down, the tanks were in. We had some time to wait for the glycol chiller to be installed, so we hooked them up to bar chillers and were ready to go.
We just had to wait for HMRC to sign off on the APPA (our producers license). It’s worth noting that we already had one (for ten years), but we had to make a change to it as it’s a new site. We’d been in contact with HMRC and had filled out all the forms back in January and again in April, and it oNly tAkEs 40 DaYs.
So we waited.
Eventually, APPA in hand, over two months late, in the middle of August, we brewed our first beer at the new site! Around that time, the 40 hec’s arrived and were eventually moved in and stood up. We had our nine tanks - the full line up for our five year plan.
Then, about three months late, we finally got our decision notice from planning. This meant no more temporary licenses and we could open our full hours.
At the time of writing, we’ve brewed a bunch of Shaka, Toadlicker, Bird and Otto batches and brewed a number of specials including Maray - Atlantic Pale, Fest - Marzen, Havi - Hopfenweisse, Cappa - West Coast Pale and Hersha - Kolsch. Phew.
We’ve still got things to do: finish plugging all the tanks into the glycol chiller, put up the cinema screen, do up the snug, build the big cold store (including pouring a new floor for it to sit on), building the temporary and then the permanent partition wall in unit 5, buying and building all the shelving units and replacing the toilet block. Oh and signs. We need to put up some signs.
But here we are. Twelve months later. Nearly done. Just about survived. Here’s to many more years.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. But more importantly, from all of us at the Hand, thank you everyone for your support. From me personally, thank you to Jen and Kate in particular - I’m the lucky one, I get to tell the story about how awesome you both are.
The thank-you list is long, but here goes:
The people: Our families and friends that dug us out of holes. The wonderful people that contributed to our crowdfunder. All those that support us at our venues. The teams at our venues. Our rocks Joel Whitaker and Rhiannon Fletcher-Towler. Richard Drew, Oli Lane, Marine Gentils, Jamie Macmillan, Jonathan Jones.
The breweries: Lakedown Brewing, Lost Pier Brewing, Fauna Brewing, Only With Love, BRZN, Larrikin, Loud Shirt Brewing
The venues: Black Dove, Alphabet, Bee’s Mouth, The Independent, The Rook, Hector’s, The Old Forge, The Snug, Spun, Dandy, Artist Residence, Pink Moon, The Grizzly Bear, The Dorset, The Heart and Hand, The Mucky Duck, Seven Cellars, The Depot. And many more!
The businesses: Elite Stainless Fabrications, Halo Electrical Contractors, Inndispensable, AM Refrigeration, Brewstar Systems, Albion Planning,
Thank You.