Brewery Focus: Miranda Hudson – Duration Brewing
In early May, we participated in the Duration Brewing Tour & Tasting event, which was epic! It showcased some of the fantastic beer that the brewery based in Norfolk has created. We caught up with Co-founder Miranda Hudson, to find out things have been going for the latest in our Brewery Focus series. 
How much have things changed since before lockdown?
“It’s really weird, everything’s changed and nothing’s changed. The stuff that we wanted to do before, like communicate and be a very tuned brewery, that’s there even more than before. Because we were so new, we were sort of finding our feet and this has helped us do this quicker. All of our processes have been scrutinised and streamlined and we’ve changed our route to market. Some of our channels have got a bit more attention than we thought they would at this point but if anything the plan hasn’t changed on a day to day level, it’s just accelerated. How we operate and the way we reach our customers has changed quite a lot however. We were entirely wholesale, so we’ve gone to direct trade and our online shop has picked up a lot. Yea, I feel that we’ve adapted pretty quickly but everything for us was already in place. So, everything’s just gone a bit faster, we’ve started talking a lot more and being a lot more communicative on our social media channels. It’s an industry where everyone talks to everyone anyway but I feel that this has happened even more than before. We’ve been regularly checking in with our online shop customers, our trade customers and our wholesale customers, sort of getting a snap shot on how everyone’s going and making a judgment on that. So it feels a lot more collective and we’ve gone a lot more online.”
What’s been your biggest challenge?
“Accepting we can’t control it, it’s been really hard to plan. We’re very thorough with our planning, thinking long and hard about when we get here, what we’re going to do. The biggest challenge has been external forces. In the first week wholesale disappeared, in the second week the couriers went a bit haywire and in week 10, suddenly it seemed like we were never going to get cans again, so the biggest challenge has been exhausting yourself and knowing that it could all change anyway. Finding pace and knowing where you’re at in the marathon, we panicked and one of my challenges was getting over being petrified and thinking what if, what if, what if. We looked at our numbers really early on and knew that we could sustain ourselves no matter what happened, we weren’t established enough, so we went back to our shareholding and got a bit of cash flow. That took the pressure off, not a challenge per se but we tried to knock out the challenges really early on.”
What have you learnt?
“People that love beer, love beer and that they’re where the energy comes from and to focus there and not to focus on the bits that are just risks. It’s not time to hunker down and cower in the corner, it’s time to just believe in what you can do, understand what you can’t do and just crack on.”
Can you share any of your future plans for after lockdown?
“We had planned on the 4th of July to open the taproom, I’d love to bring that back and get on with making it a destination brewery like we always intended. I’d love to celebrate where we are and what we do with a really nice destination offering. I just want to continue with our plans to keep making good beer. By November we should have a little bit of our wood division, so I’m really excited to keep chipping away on that side of things. That’s where a lot of our passion comes from and it has been since we started.”
What will be the first pub that you hit up after lockdown and what will you be drinking?
“I’m going to go to my local, The George and Dragon in Newton by Castle Acre and I’m going to have a pint of Pintail from Moon Gazer.”Duration Brewing are calling on drinkers to ‘raise a chorus for independent beer’ with the launch of Quiet Song – its new 4.3% Classic Wit. On July 4th, they are inviting independent venues to join in the launch by using their taps for take-out beers or by creating their own Duration & Friends offering across can and draft. Participating venues will be able to share access with their customers to a founder-led Meet the Brewer Virtual Tour & First Pour Tasting event.
