April 2008

We went over to our borrowed brewery yesterday to pick up the first casks of Velocity and to arrange the next brew, only to discover that the owner has decided to shut up shop and amalgamate with another much larger operation some miles to the south. Unfortunately, this blows our immediate plans for more beers out of the water and it seems clear that our beers will be fairly rare commodities this summer. He’s out of action for some time at least.

However, I expect the situation to improve come the autumn because we now have a firm date for the lease on our premises in Steyning along with a verbal commitment from David Porter, our endlessly busy brewery supplier, for August. This puts us in the frame for the winter months with more Merry Andrew beer. I’m told a preview cask went down well in the Isle of Wight just a few weeks ago.

We’ve got plenty of bottled Merry Andrew, a few casks that have not yet been allocated to the Church Ale, or festivals, and plenty of casks of Velocity bitter as well so I’ve no doubt we can hold out. In the meanwhile I’m interested in doing at least two more brews before our own plant becomes available so I’m writing to some alternative breweries within 100 miles of here to see if they’d be interested.

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I am angry. Very very angry indeed. In fact I couldn’t be more angry if you poured boiling marmalade down the back of my neck and beat me over the head with a lump of poisoned granite. Why ? VAT. That’s why.

Let me explain. I’m preparing our first ever set of invoices today and the brewery is VAT registered. If you are a registered business, you claim back the VAT on items you have bought for the business and charge VAT and the items you sell – if they are vatable. We are VAT registered because we are making a large capital investment in equipment of around £30,000 and we can reclaim back around £5000. Enough for a second hand van perhaps. If you think you are going to do more that £60,000 pounds worth of business each year you have to register anyway, and in business terms that’s not a huge annual turnover. So we are registered.

So far, so good. As it happens, we don’t pay VAT on malt or yeast because these are foods, but as the man from HMRC explained today when I checked – beer is VAT chargable because it is booze. So we have to stick on 17.5% whenever we sell it, and any VAT registered business that buys it, claims that money back.

So why the red mist ? It may be woefully inefficient, prone to fraud, and generally time consuming but VAT is a fact of life surely ?

Perhaps. But the price of a cask of beer contains a significant percentage of duty. As a small brewery, we are charged less but even in our case every cask we sell carries slightly more than £20 duty. A full sized brewery could easily pay closer to £50 – it actually depends on the strength of the beer in question. Of course, this duty is passed onto the publican, who in turn passes it onto the final customer.

With VAT on top!

Let’s make that clear. We are as a country, paying VAT on duty. A tax on a tax! The infernal cheek of it!!

To put this in perspective, the recently much heralded beer duty rise was announced as 4p per pint, this year. The actual tax on a pint went up by 4.7p. Why? because if a brewery passes on that 4p the end customer is charged an additional .7p of VAT. and keep in mind that the increase is due to ratchet for the next several years.

….and what’s done with that duty ? Tales of waste are almost too numerous to mention but to pick a particularly egregious example we paid £4000 in food expenses to a man who has subsequently claimed to suffer from bulimia.

What a revolting thought.

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A very large number of tickets went out on Tuesday and I hope, will be arriving at their destinations shortly. I have a few tickets left but they are now pretty much all allocated, so unfortunately if you didn’t get an SASE to me yet or picked up your tickets from the Ropetackle building directly, its probably too late for this event. However we are now planning a second event and any SASEs or requests that appear from now on will be given priority for the second one.

Beyond this, there is the comissioning of the brewery itself, and with the best will in the world I can’t see that being complete until autumn (this year I hope). There will be the inevitable party surrounding this. So I can forsee at least a third event as well.

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Planning consent for our proposed premises has been granted. I’m so excited I can hardly breathe.

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We currently have our first large scale batch of Velocity fermenting, hopefully its going to be ready in time for the launch on May 10th. Now I’m starting to plan the third batch which very much looks like it will be a stout since we are still experimenting with the wheat beer flavourings.

The question about the stout is – what do we call it ? There are two choices here, we could name it after a slightly obscure local character William de Braose, known to the Welsh as ‘Black William’ or we could go for a slightly more neutral name like ‘Black Hat’.

In fact Black William was my first choice because it keeps up the local link, but in fact a little bit of research shows that he was a complete ****, commiting various attrocities both in the Adur region and Wales. There was a happy ending however as eventually the Welsh hung him! Of course this is thirteenth century stuff, but I wonder if people still remember what sort of a person he was ?

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Church Ales used to be a common feature of English community life. A special beer would be brewed and people would be invited to come to church to make a donation to whatever cause the event was supporting and drink the beer. The beer itself was free. Some churches had church ales so often that they had a special building to hold the festival in. Unfortunately, the whole idea was made illegal by the Puritans, and not revived after Charles II came to power, which seems odd as I get the impression that he liked a pint.

We are launching the brewery on May the 10th with a revival of this tradition supporting two charities: The Worthing Churches Homeless Projects and the Friends of St. Nicholas who contribute to the infrastructure of a fine old Sussex grade 1 listed church. I should add that the Church itself does not support or endorse any of this, although I hope that some members will bear the story of the Wedding at Cana in mind and attend.

I’ve mailed everyone who has already signed up with a working email address (Matt at the Evening Star – I’m looking at you!) with a direct invitation. If you have not yet signed up for news (why not?) but would like to come and try some of our beer for free and perhaps donate to our charities, you will need to get a ticket. Numbers are limited because of the size of the venue so you will need to be quick to get to this event.

If you are within easy travelling distance of Shoreham by sea, tickets can be picked up at the reception of:

The Adur Business Centre
Ropetackle building
Little High St.
Shoreham by sea
BN43 5EG

If you know Shoreham at all, it’s the new office building on the High St. by the Norfolk bridge. Reception is on the second floor and is open during normal business hours.

If you would like to attend but can’t get to Ropetackle, send me a self addressed stamped envelope to Andy Dwelly, Adur Brewery Ltd at the above address and I will send you a ticket.

If you can’t make it on this occasion there will be a number of other launch events taking place over the next little while, so keep watching the blog, and don’t forget to sign up.

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Highly skilled IT gnomes captured the sound of me quivering with fear as I was interrogated at Southern Counties Radio this morning.

here.

…actually, they were all perfectly nice, but I really was quivering with fear.

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I’m invited onto the BBC Southern Counties Radio breakfast show at about 8:30am to enthuse on breweries in general and our one in particular.

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…just back. Lasko, Crno Baron, Staropramen. Names to counjure with, if only I could pronounce them.

I did learn a few words of Slovenian. It turns out that what we call a hot dog is ‘hot dog’ and pizza is ‘pizza’.

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