Brewery Focus: Laura Rangeley – Abbeydale Brewery

We now move onto session number five in our brewery focus series and we’re speaking to Laura Rangeley, Office & Communications Manager at Abbeydale Brewery in Sheffield. Abbeydale Brewery was established in 1996 and has a cracking range of both traditional ales, along with more crafty brew wrapped in some pretty awesome artwork! We’ve been loving their latest canning exploits and just had to find out how they are coping with the current situation, especially being a very cask driven brewery, also owning two pubs in Sheffield.

How much have things changed since before lockdown?

“It’s changed quite substantially really, about 95% of our business was direct to pubs, so obviously in the first stages of lockdown that was completely wiped out. So we very swiftly had to move our operations to focus on our online shop, which luckily we already had up and running but it was a very small part of what we did. Overnight it became our primary way of getting beer out to people, so that was a really big change for us. We moved to doing mini kegs from the cask stock that we had available and in a very strange twist of luck, which seems like a strange word to use at these sorts of times, our canning line arrived within the first two weeks of lockdown. It was something we were expecting to receive at some point but we weren’t quite sure when that would be. We were able to get it installed and moved the majority of our production to canned beer, so most of the fresh beer has been destined for can. The one thing that hasn’t changed has been our people, so our team has stayed the same, we’ve mostly managed to keep all of production working, obviously with social distancing measures in place at the brewery. We’ve all really pulled together and done what we can to keep things moving and come up with new ideas and new ways of working to keep up with the changing world.”

What’s been your biggest challenge?

“Probably getting all of our processes up to speed and turning the online shop from being something quite small to something that could handle the majority of our business. That was a really steep learning curve for us but we were able to pull it together and keep adapting it. Then from there we’ve been making sure that we’re talking to all of our customers appropriately, as we've moved from talking to trade, to talking to the general public. I do most of the social media, so for me it’s been about answering a few questions that we’re being asked. It’s been something that we’ve had to adapt to quite quickly but everyone’s been absolutely lovely, so it’s made that challenge a lot easier.”

What have you learnt?

“I think that we’ve really, really leant the value of our community, which is something that we already had a lot of faith in, not only the way that people around Sheffield have been but also nationally. Everyone has rallied round and embraced what we’re doing, trying out new things, trying our core products, including Moonshine which was previously our flagship cask product and has now been moved into can. So I think the adaptability of our community and our beer drinkers has been really humbling for us and we’ve learnt how much that really means to us.”

Can you share any of your future plans for after lockdown?

“I can try! It's still really a bit of a guessing game, not really knowing what’s going on but in terms of our can production, lockdown hasn’t really changed our plans, it’s just accelerated them. As I mentioned, Moonshine is now in can, the rest of our core cask range will also be making the move into can over the coming weeks and months. That’s probably something we wouldn’t have completed until the early part of next year but we’ll have them all available by the Autumn. We also had a couple of festivals that were going out over the summer, particularly Funk Fest, which is our wild beer project, so we’re trying to think of other ways that we can still do that, without there being a big gathering of people.” 

What will be the first pub that you hit up after lockdown and what will you be drinking?

“It’s such a hard question, I’ve got loads of pubs rattling around in my head! It’s a difficult decision but I’m going to be loyal to our own pubs and I’ll say our pub The Rising Sun in Fulwood and a pint of Daily Bread, Best Bitter which is a favourite.”Cheers Laura, we’ll definitely be heading down there after lockdown!