James Brown

 

One of the world’s most successful Internet beer bosses James Brown is currently the toast of Britain, having set up the biggest online festival in history. Here he talks to YoA’s own Emily Gunn in an exclusive interview.

By Emily Gunn
James Brown is a name you should be applauding in lockdown if you’re a British ale lover. Not only has he been running the most popular craft beer club for seven years, delivering much-loved ales to our front doors, but he’s successfully hosted the World’s first online beer festival for us to clink our cans too. I chatted with the founder of “Beer 52” about how isolation has affected his companies sales over the past three months.

Having a break from the highlands, we start the call with the Scottish chap admitting that he’s appreciating the few degrees of warmer weather being located in London. He goes on explain what happened to ‘Beer 52’ when Covid-19 hit, “As soon as the lockdown was announced, we saw an insane peak and surge in the demand for orders. We had seen it coming and we thought, if the pubs are shut, people are going to want to get beer somehow. Thankfully we had a bunch of temporary staff that could come in and help us. It was very unknown though… we were ready to react when it happened.”

I asked James why he thought society was reaching for their website for their alcohol fix, “I think many people haven’t explored having beer delivered to their door. Before this, I think people thought it was a strange concept. People are willing to give it a shot. We have been pleased to try and cope with the demand.”

And it seems that demand was larger than life as he tells me, “We set up a new production line to pack the orders. We got it up to the point where we could send 10,000 orders a day from our warehouse. That was double what we normally do. It was great.” It seems James was thankful to help out his budding partners throughout the world, “The increase of demand meant that, when lots of breweries closed because of Covid, we were able to help those guys keep production running. We needed beer for these thirsty punters across the UK wanting it delivered.”

Understanding that, even being an isolated nation, we wouldn’t slow down our need for booze, I was intrigued to find out what region was most needing their fix, “London and the South East is a huge area and lots of our members are from there. I guess because craft ales has been there for quite a while. All the places you could normally get these cans in London weren’t there. There is a nice spread, even in rural areas where the supermarket was much further away. To be able to get it delivered to your door was a great thing.”

Launching the World’s 1st online ‘Cyberfest’, James tells me what influenced him to put on the night in, “It came about because lots of the breweries had dropped 80 percent of sales overnight. We were thinking about how to sell online. We came up with the idea to host the first online beer festival where we could invite our favourite breweries on a four-hour live stream with tasting and tours. The reason we did it was that we thought we could use the power of the Beer 52 community and do that to help support the brands, and they were paid upfront for the beer. We had thousands of our members join online. Friday sold out in a few hours with 5000 tickets. Because of that, we did a second session on Saturday. It was incredible.”

I quickly came to discover who has the best role within the team. Callum, the beer buyer, gets to taste the shipped-in produce to pick who gets placed in the boxes, “We still have stock flowing in from all around Europe. Poor Callum… his house is actually full of boxes of beer to try and test. I think there are some team members living locally, so he has dropped some on their door and ran away.”

With such unique flavours on their website, I wanted to know what stood out the most for the owner, “The vanilla chocolate nitro stout that we had on Cyberfest. It’s a polish brewery, called Browar Stu Mostów. Normally beer is carboned with Co2, but this is carbonated with nitro, super smooth similar to Guinness. They also did tips on how to pour it. It was just amazing, very unique.”

I finished by asking this humble hard-working individual if he was optimistic for face to face beer festivals in the distant future, “Since this began I’ve just taken it as it comes. We are at the mercy of the decision-makers, it’s frustrating sometimes. I would put a big question mark over how that will operate. I hope it’s sooner rather than later. Something we would love to do is host Cyberfest for events around the UK and get comedians and musicians along.”