Lend me your ears…

We were genuinely taken aback by the positive response to our recent blog post (State of the Elusive Nation) and have received incredible support and encouragement since we posted it. We're now more motivated than ever to push ahead with our plans to grow our little team and get more beer out to our lovely customers.

One thing we've really struggled with in the past few months is capacity. We can only produce so much beer from our current location and with a potentially expensive move to fund in the coming months, need to produce and sell beyond what we can reasonably manage with our current resources if we are to achieve our aim of having more space in time for the summer. Just adding more tank capacity, even if we had room for it (and we very much don't), wouldn't solve the problem in itself. There just aren't enough hours in the day to brew more. We're running as hard as we can.

We chat with our friends Luci and Mike at Double-Barrelled Brewery (DB) on a regular basis and we've become good friends since first meeting them when they were still in their planning phase. Andy declared them both as 'mad' on hearing their initial plans and was very much made to eat those words as they built their dream brewery to incredible acclaim (although he maintains that Luci is definitely a little bit mad!). We're very different sized businesses with different ambitions but have lots in common in terms of the things we like to brew, the way we conduct our business and our desire to play an active part in our respective communities.

DB have ambitions of their own this year and have recently taken delivery of additional tank capacity to grow into. During a recent chat Andy was having with Mike, the suggestion of cuckoo brewing came up. DB have capacity they're not fully utilising yet and we're desperate to brew more beer. A plan was hatched!

Cuckoo brewing is not something we'd considered previously but having given it plenty of thought, a commercial arrangement with our friends at Double-Barrelled is the perfect interim solution. Aside from technical considerations such as them having the same water source as us and the same ingredient suppliers, we'd only really consider such an arrangement if we had complete trust in our hosts to treat our beer as if it was their own in terms of the love and care it receives from mashing through to packaging. We trust the team at Double-Barrelled unconditionally and with them being just up the road in Reading, can be involved in the brewing and packaging without placing additional resource constraints on our little team. They’re able to package into the same formats we do in house and can take care of that for us without impacting their own production schedule.

So here we are, brewing our first 15 BBL (2400L, or triple our current brew length) cuckoo batch today at DB HQ. We're brewing a West Coast Pale called Sing You a Song which will be released in early March and we can't wait to hear what you think! Any beer we brew at Double-Barrelled will be clearly labelled as such and we've no plans to move any of our core recipes. It will be very much business as usual at Elusive HQ. We'll just have a bit more beer to sell. And Ruth is very happy about that.