Behind the Bar with Miranda Hudson
Back in 2021, during the very long lockdown, I sat down with Miranda Hudson of Duration Brewing. Miranda has been running Duration with her partner Bates since 2017, and their beautiful site in Norfolk has been up and running since late 2019. Getting a bricks and mortar business off the ground, just months before the global pandemic hit has not been an easy task, but with the help of their team and following, they have made it through the worst of it.
In this interview we talked about how businesses had to adapt to such a huge change in 2020, our mental health, how Duration began, Miranda’s experiences within the beer industry and what is next for the brewery.
What are you drinking?
Miranda: I’m drinking a Shifting Baseline, which we just packaged this week, it’s a 5% pale ale. It's got mosaic and simcoe, then we also use a Belgian blend yeast in there. So it’s a really hoppy pale ale, but it’s got a little bit more stone fruit from the yeast.
Helen: I’ve got the Quiet Song. I really like the fact that you put the three tasting notes on the back, it reminds me of specialty coffee bags.
Miranda: Of course it's quite subjective. Bates didn't want those three words for ages, but I got them in because so many people buy with their eyes, and they just want something really quick to digest. Not everyone will taste what you say is there.
Helen: Of course, but that’s part of the fun. So, could you please introduce yourself!
Miranda: I am Miranda. In my mind I'm still establishing a brewery called Duration, and we're based in West Norfolk. I’m mostly marketing, probably, a bit of recruitment, and a bit of finance. Bates is definitely the creative lead amongst us, and I'm more like trying to put the brand out, so he has the direction on what we put out beer wise, and then I kind of dress it up and send it out into the world.
Helen: How did you get into beer?
Miranda: I've always been a drinker, and always been quite a… not a fickle drinker, but a broad drinker. I probably got more into specialty beers through my husband Bates. He took me on a trip of the US, because he's from South Carolina, so we went from South Carolina sort of all the way up and then into Chicago. He took me around a whole load of tap rooms and places. And prior to that, I'd probably had maybe three or four different beers, maybe a few Belgian beers here and there. I'd say my predominant beer drinking prior to meeting Bates was just at uni in the 90s when it was about playing pool and just having quite a lot.
Photo Credit: Theresa Undine
Helen: So how did Duration come about?
Miranda: I think it sat inside Bates's head for quite a long time, because he’s a sort of cook-chef-brewer. He’s always either been working in a bar, brewpub, restaurant so he’s always been about what gets put on the table. His expression is often you know, like, we'll have dinner parties, and I'll be the gobby one, and he'll be just making a really delicious dish for everyone to enjoy. He’s ended up reading a lot about food anthropology and kind of, yeah, travelled a lot through books from people like Bourdain. He also spent some time in Colorado, he brewed at the smallest and also the biggest brewery in South Carolina at the time.
When he came over to England, he went to Brew By Numbers for a while, and then he was with Brewdog setting up the bar side of things. I think he always thought “when I do it I know what beers I like, and how I want to present it”. So one day I just said to him “if you want to do it for yourself, do you see it as a London brew pub? Or do you see “this” or “that”. I just kept asking those questions.
I think we did a pitch like in 2014, to a food chain group, who have some nice restaurants and they're quite, you know, a nice company. They're more like a growth model, but they were really keen. But he was like “it wouldn't be mine”. I said “well, look, if it's not with them, and they were offering you like a blank check to sort of set up a business for them, but you were sort of doing what they needed. If that's not you, then what?” So then he really started thinking about it, and we talked about it with friends who are really into beer. And then it sort of became our company because I was working on it a lot.
I think he always wanted it to be quite farmhousey, so we knew it wasn't going to be in a city. Then we started looking around sort of Bristol away and out in the North. We were London based and I have family in London, so we didn't want to be too far. But if we're going to be farmhouse, we need to be where people farm, near some running water, some nice hardwood trees, you know, to get all the good yeast and work with other local producers. So then we found a rundown derelict site, but thought that it would be impossible to do that.
Helen: Wow, I mean I wouldn’t even know where to start. I’ve thought before about, you know, business spaces in a city, and how hard it is to find the right space but to go right out into the countryside
Miranda: But you know, when you try to do something, especially even if it's a city thing, for example planning a restaurant, all you can think about is the other restaurants you’ve been to. So there ends up being no such thing as an original idea. But I actually think if you go entirely off-piste… if you just go way out to somewhere that you don't recognise, and it doesn't exist, it's almost just like a pure blank canvas.
Helen: What were you doing before you started Duration?
Miranda: In 2014 I was doing up properties, freelance, having done it with architects for about five years before that. And, they were really nice, the architects, because they let me sort of come back part time, so if I didn't have enough freelance work, I could go do some gigs with them. I've always been a bit of a gigger. I've always sort of found my own way. When I met Bates on a sort of holiday, I took a sort of sabbatical and got a round the world ticket. I’d already bought a house in London, and I had done it up and split it into two, so I used to live in half of it and then rent the other half out.
At the time AirBnB was just beginning to take off, and I was really into it. So I was like, let's work the algorithms and see how I can become a super host. And my niche was doing Hindu and bridal parties, and that seemed to be what the house attracted. So I was doing that, and also doing properties, I had a really small portfolio of about seven or eight clients, and they each had like a couple of houses, but had moved out of the city, or were in the process of buying a few houses and doing them up. So I was working with those clients, and doing projects, new kitchens, new bathrooms, two to five month kind of projects. Which suits my dory style brain where I like new things quite a lot.
So I was doing that. And then I had also just set up a UK arm of an international charity that was sort of around ending gender based violence and giving rights back to women and girls who had for whatever reasons been discriminated against, and had not had equality.
Helen: A big change for you to then start a brewery?
Miranda: So Duration was definitely a big, big mix up, but it was nice because obviously I then had experience in project management but then also to renovate? That’s another skill in itself, especially when looking at a derelict site. That’s a big thing.
Thankfully, we got quite a good grant and the landlord also owns the property, we knew that it was kind of a liability until he did it up. So to put a sort of tenant on a long lease that is bringing industry into a sort of otherwise rural area would actually give the area a chance of keeping, you know, school leaver type people, there'd be more jobs for those people to not have to leave rural life and go to a city. It was definitely a complicated build. Bates was really great in that he'd worked in lots of breweries, and he kind of just was like “I want this brewery to be sustainable, I want it to not be too impactful from a sort of environmental perspective, and I want it to perform really well for the brewers so that they don't have to do just lots of physical and manual labour”.
The wish list was just ridiculous, both in location and specification. And so my job in making that dream sort of be fulfilled was to sort of fundraise and project manage, so yeah, I guess I had some skill sets. It was definitely a bit more than I could chew. But we got there.
Helen: I’ve unfortunately never had the chance to visit but it looks absolutely incredible. And you’ve got staff now too?
Miranda: Yeah, so we are a team of seven. So our Operations Manager Hamish was our first hire. So there was him and Bates on the brew team. And I was sort of doing the selling, administrative and marketing for the first year or so. We had a local lad called Ned, who actually worked in fishing, and has gone back to that now. Since you know, the last 15 months, we've sort of doubled in our staff, so we got a really nice brewer called Dan. And then someone who helps with both retail and bookkeeping, and a bit of sales.
It’s a growing team, we're actually just about to advertise for a few more positions. It's really nice, having a team, especially because me and Bates just live and breathe it. But all the people that have joined us, they see it like their company, and they're so dedicated. We've always planned the structure of our company to sort of have staff equity, so that is really important to us. Same as with our shareholding, we got a really small local shareholding. And it was really important how that was structured, and yeah, they all have to know that there's never going to be a big payday buyout. And so they've got to be in it as a passion project that maybe just gives them a little dividends wherever.
So yeah, it was really important to us to find the right people and to structure the company in a way where it would grow sensibly and to meet our ambitions. Because for Bates, it's just to put something good in the world with his beer. And, I don't know what it is for me, I do want it to be rewarding, but to be a life project. A living thing that exists because it exists and the people that are in it, make it what it is. Today was our first staff member, our first employee has reached a point of eligibility, and is now entering a staff retention scheme with equity. So I'm really chuffed about that.
Helen: It’s really nice to hear you talk about it like that, it’s such a hard line to tread in terms of smaller businesses making things ethical and sustainable from the supply side of things to the way we distribute. So often I’ve found that businesses that focus a lot on maybe sustainability or recycling or more animal based stuff, don’t necessarily have the same approach to their staff. It’s like a really odd disconnect. But it’s definitely a battle that business owners have on how to operate in capitalism as ethically as possible.
Miranda: The first thing I think you have to do is define what success is. So, like, success for Bates is very different to what success is for me. I really like community. I want to build a culture. So for me, a company that, you know, plays together, works together, but also respects each other's differences in you know, like, we've got a couple of members in our team that they like to finish and shut the door and not come back until Monday. Then we've got a couple that at the end of the shift, want to sit down together, have a beer, you know. Socialise a bit together, and I want it to be all those things for each team member because everyone's work life ratio is a different thing.
So yeah, I think I think you've got to think what success is for you so that you can really hit your goals. So for Bates, it's that he makes sure he champions the best styles that he thinks could otherwise be forgotten. He wants to make sure the craft beer doesn't homogenise again, and just become this one way street where you can't have a wheat beer. And then yeah, it's different for everyone. A couple of our team members want to rock up, be really, really productive and then bugger off. And I want to give them that.
Photo Credit: Henry WS Muller
Helen: Yeah totally, being able to understand staff member needs and that everyone is different can be hard. Especially as you say, you’re all in it. Like Rachel who co-edits with me was a little less involved at the start, mainly because she was really busy at the time, but she’s way more involved now and is so very important and I cannot imagine what it would be without her. But at the same time I want her to know she doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to, especially with our time being voluntary. And then sometimes she’s like “Helen, remember when we used to hang out as friends?” And I have to like check myself a bit.
Finding that balance when its something you have made is so hard, like wanting people to have that option to also immerse themselves, but also letting them know that they are also so welcome to have boundaries.
Miranda: It's like a rollercoaster, isn't it? Yeah, it is defining what success is. I don't have a mission statement, but I guess being a farmhouse brewery and showcasing agriculture is a big thing for us. But also, it's really important to us that we give back more than we take. So like, not for brownie points or anything like a lot of this stuff is not really that glamorous, but Bates probably spends more time than he'd care to cleaning out our membrane bioreactor, so that we can clean all of our waste ourselves. And like not emit… any factory has a level of waste, but we really, really want to address anything that's toxic that we create ourselves. And that's a way of being sustainable.
And if I don't have a happy team, I'm not gonna have a company I want to work in for the rest of my life. I'm really lucky that the team is growing and they’re really dedicated and switched on. I'm chuffed to bits.
If we've got a captive audience, and everyone's at home, why don't we make all the beers that we otherwise wouldn't? So I think our values came out even more in lockdown in terms of beer styles, and making sure the product was good.
Helen: So how has the pandemic been for you and your team?
Miranda: I think everyone's gone right down to what their foundations are, everyone has realised what is essential to them. So I think for us as a business, it's really helped us think of our critical path a lot more directly. When everything was stripped back, we just needed to put beer in boxes and, and find online customers. And that happened, thankfully.
Everyone had to react, and react really quickly, and adapt and change. And that's just tiring really, so I think we didn’t stop and we all ran on adrenaline for a bit. It’s been really hard to be that reactive. It's like, you need to get the long goggles back on and be like ”what do we actually want when we're not just responding to the market?”
I think for the company, we decided we wanted to just stay relevant, stay present, extol our values and just keep making beer and never let the quality of the beer slip. You know, like I saw some breweries do a lot more like New England IPAs and play the hits. And we were like, if we've got a captive audience, and everyone's at home, why don't we make all the beers that we otherwise wouldn't. So I think our values came out even more in lockdown in terms of beer styles, and making sure the product was good.
For me personally, I think it was pretty sketchy at times. Like, I'm not, I'm not a patient person anyway. And like, suddenly having a 7 year old kid at home and having to work, and suddenly being really scared that I might not see my mum again. I think there will be a lot of trauma, and people will have to breathe out and be like, Oh, we can go out again. And I don't know.
Helen: Yeah I think people are starting to come to the realisation that it’s been really difficult. I keep having conversations with people who are like “I don’t know whats wrong with me, I can’t stop crying and all I do is feel sad” when all they’re doing is going to work but the pandemic has become this palatable but still hugely overarching problem. It’s both great and terrible that our brains are able to adjust to difficult situations as a defence mechanism, but it also disconnects us from being able to understand why we’re unhappy.
Miranda: The collectiveness that happened was quite impressive too. I do think that it was at times really beautiful, but it comes with trauma. When I used to work at a charity, I used to work in an area where babies were looked after. One of the nurses had this great way of thinking and she just said that babies need to be cuddled, they need physicality. And because we’ve all got these work ethics. We're all just still trying to do our work in all these different ways. Like, there's a big elephant in the room. And I feel like no one's given themselves the space, we've all been through this massive thing. We all need to breathe out.
Helen: It’s interesting because some people didn’t stop and some people did stop, or had to stop, or found other things, or just completely altered the way in which they work. I was furloughed but I mean I didn’t stop really, I couldn’t, I have quite bad anxiety and I knew that I needed to keep my brain busy otherwise I’d just end up in a bad place.
Being furloughed did eventually lead me to building Burum, but I mean initially I helped out at Hard Lines a couple of days a week, just bagging beans and helping with online orders. And for the first three months of lockdown, the hospitals in South Wales didn’t have catering so a bunch of food and drink independents got together to make and deliver food for the hospital staff, so I made a lot of cheese sandwiches in that time. It was nice to be able to help but also it kind of helped me too.
Miranda: Yeah, I had to go back on medication because I'm bipolar, and usually I can sort of channel that into work. So even if I know I'm just cycling up, I can be like okay I'm going to rewrite the beer board, or just file something, and I’ll get into serious detail while I’ve got high energy. But yeah, I remember just feeling like this is a really squeaky time, and I don't know how I'm going to keep a lid on it. Like we built a very, very big brewery, and it’s a bigger project than anything I've ever done. And it had only been running for four months, and I've never run a brewery. And we had kit repayments, I mean finances are a real big area for anxiety for a lot of people. I was just thinking like “this could sink us very, very, very quickly, and it won't just sink us it will pull my whole family. And there are four people's jobs here” you know? And not knowing when those grants were going to come out. And because we're not hospitality, but part of our supply chain is hospitality. We were never forced to close or had help for being closed. But also we had no customers so.
And then we had to do so much growing, and contracting. It was quite tricky because you’re sort of trying to predict markets that shop in the day. And I just missed people, I ended up turning half of our production area into a sort of kiosk, and we would have people in one household at a time. The chats were really important to me. So then we started doing monthly online boxes, where you could order beer and we would do a drink along and show you the brewery. Just having that structure every first Thursday of the month, sharing the brewery, sharing beers was just super important.
Photo Credit: Mark Newton
Helen: Outside of the pandemic, what has your experience been like in the beer industry?
Miranda: I was really lucky that I met a lot of like, influential women pretty early on. I’d say for me so far it has been positive, I’m quite an outspoken person and I don’t know how much negativity I’d stand for. There's obviously a lot going on at the moment about how things could be better, and I think that’ll probably always be the case. Humans do tend to mess things up a bit. We need to learn how to get along with each other. And, you know, be kinder in general. But yeah, I'd say, as an industry, my experience within beer has been very welcoming. And I was also really lucky that Bates was quite well regarded, so when I went around banging the drum for Duration and being like “would you want to do a collab with us?” everyone was quite receptive. I think he's a bit of an enigma. And people just want to figure him out.
So from where I've been, it’s been a really inviting space. It has taken me a while to take ownership, and be able to say “I own a brewery” and sometimes people say “but do you do the brewing?” and I’m like … “No, I own the place, is that okay?”
So I've had a few people sort of downplay, or assume that I don’t know as much, but I talk a lot so it doesn’t take long for me to prove them wrong. It took me quite a while to feel like it was my idea and to have some sense of ownership over the project, and it wasn't that I was just facilitating the love of my life's ambition. Often it felt a lot easier for me to say “oh, well, Bates, is this Brewer and he wants to put this into the world and I'm here to help him”. And I remember listening back to an interview I did with Nat Watson, and being like “oh, man, I could have done that so differently” you have to sort of say it so many times before you feel comfortable in a role.
And even being comfortable saying “Oh there is another person in the team that probably you'd be better speaking to” but at first I’d be like “am I an imposter?” but now I don’t give a shit, like I’m not too geeky about beer in terms of the process, like I’ve got the nuts and bolts but beyond that I’m like “lets drink some and talk about it”
And the thing is my life hasn't been handed to me on a plate, I've always had to work to get where I am. And I'm really proud of that. I didn’t have the easiest upbringing, and I managed to carve out a bit of stability in my life… which I decided to trade in to have a brewery but it’s mine. I own that. I am really lucky in that I was able to reach a certain level of comfort in my life. Then when I entered beer, next to someone who was pretty well regarded and had a lot of knowledge, and then was able to set up a brewery…. It’s a really privileged entry point.
Photo Credit: Ashley Carter
Helen: Totally different but in those first few years when my wife built her business, and I kind of helped out and was involved in the beginning but never really on the team, and at the time I was doing a job I really hated, but I felt a little like I didn’t know where I fitted in to the world. Where my place was? And for a while I was just known as Sophie from Hard Lines’s wife. Which was both insanely cool that people knew who Sophie was and that Hard Lines was doing so well, but also frustrating that I didn’t kind of have my own identity. Since starting Burum I feel like I’ve got some of that back, obviously it has taken me ages to be comfortable talking about Burum and the fact that I own it, but as you said, I’ve said it enough times now outloud and now it’s really empowering. Even if this is only a blip in time it’s my blip?
Helen: What are your goals for the next year?
Miranda: Well we're about to do a little expansion. I've just put in efforts for some grant funding to hopefully put a couple more tanks in, and maybe another bit of kit that will help us get better efficiencies and we want to upgrade our fridge coldstore a little bit. So that's going to be a little project that's going to be going on over the summer, and in the background into early next year. We're beginning to put planning applications in things to sort of build another little bit. We're sort of just thinking about how we use the space a bit more. We've put a few events back in the diary, which is really exciting. So yeah, there's a few festivals popping up and tap takeovers over the summer. So that's really nice to be thinking that we're going to be getting out and about, seeing friends and beer drinkers again.
We were really lucky that when we were doing our brewery plans we did a lot of collaborative brewing. So we can now do all return invitation collabs. We've already done a few of those, but we're planning a few more so we've got one with Beak, one with Elusive, Unity. The other thing I’m really excited to do now because it's growing season, we're doing a couple of beers with some heritage grains. And Dan, one of our brewers, his uncle lives right near the brewery and is a beekeeper, so we're going to do our first non vegan beer with local honey. We've just talked with a local farmer, and we're going to put some wild cherries in the mix.
So it's really nice to think in the seasons and think of what, what adjuncts are sort of available nearby to put in.
Helen: Not that it’s something that you need to have, but have you ever delved into any sort of beer education? I’d like to hear from other peoples experiences in beer education, especially when we’re trying to build our own education platform.
Miranda: I haven't done any formal training, other than I made it along to like, six or seven of Nat Watsons beer schools. I just found it really helpful to have a vein that I could sort of latch on to. The origins of why things have happened, why beer is located where it is, water profiles, grains, hops, size of kit. How different techniques of brewing and growing have informed how beer is drunk from place to place. There’s a real access point to history.
Helen: Absolutely, that’s definitely something that’s interested me, how the beer styles and drinking culture have been lead by technology and social developments over time.
Miranda: Being in Norfolk, we could not make the beer as delicious as it is without adjusting our water. Norfolk is brilliant for growing, because the ground is really full of flynn and chalk, which creates a really nice filter, so it means that you have really rich beds of ground for know agriculture and growing stuff. But for beer it would only taste good for certain styles. I like the way we can cheat being in the rolling mountainous hills of Germany to make great pills.
Same as when we do barrel aged stuff, rather than just let the yeast go hot, while we let the barrels go in and out with the seasons, we've actually put plate chillers in them. So now with science rather than wizardry and magic, we can know that the yeast is going to perform better and work more consistently, if it's kept at this temperature.
Helen: It's nice to have that cross between technology and magic. I’ve just been writing about cider today, and I was banging on and on about how magical it is.
Miranda: I think the cider movement, especially that pet nat sort of cider, or even the low intervention wine, there’s a venn diagram of all great things in the middle, where it’s a little sour, a bit bretty, delicious.
Helen: And that venn diagram is a very exciting place for me, and kind of the heart of Burum Collective and working with people in this way.
It’s a fast growing and fast changing industry, and it needs to catch up with itself.
But I do think there's a lot of inspirational people within it.
Helen: What would you like to see from beer over the next few years?
Miranda: I would like to see Hops die down a bit, which I think is already happening with lagers and stuff. I'd also like to see this self awakening actually do some good because there's no point having this epiphany if it’s not going to be helpful. I want beer to look within and also look without, and not get so involved with itself so that it's not connected to the world. I'd like there to be more education, and dialogue about beer staying diverse, both inside the glass and around the glass. Then know where it's gonna go in terms of it being a high value product. And there is a conversation at the moment about how it becomes more accessible, without compromising the quality and commodifying it. So I think it is a niche product, some part of it needs to stay loved, and looked after. But yeah, I don't know where the debate is going to go with big beer and little beer. I’d just like beer to keep looking at itself and making sure that it grows in a way where everyone that wants to be involved in it feels like they have a place. I think that's really important.
Helen: It’s such a complicated industry, in so many ways, but that’s a really nice way to put that. It’s so emotion driven because beer is people, and it’s kind of everyone's passion project.
Miranda: Like music really. There are a lot of similarities with beer and music, like as an industry. Different things for different people. But I don’t want it to become a contracting industry where the bubble bursts and it all dissipates, I want it to keep moving forward and challenging itself. Bringing different flavours forward.
Helen: Absolutely, it’s really important to be able to be introspective, which not everyone is necessarily good at doing but we have to try. In order to ensure everyone is having a good time instead of just a few people.
Miranda: I'm definitely for there being a big conversation and things being addressed, but maybe my part will come up a bit later. And maybe there's a few people waking up to stuff right now. And it's their time to really develop and grow in this at the moment. So I'll leave it to them.
Helen: And it's such a difficult thing to like, engage with in that way. And it is tiring. Over the past month I’ve seen a lot of people say “look I refuse to share my story again” which I can just fully understand. Sometimes it feels like we’re living in a time loop but I think that I can’t help but be hopeful every time this conversation comes around.
Miranda: It’s a fast growing and fast changing industry, and it needs to catch up with itself. But I do think there's a lot of inspirational people within it. And you know, there's a lot of voices and there are some negative voices. But I definitely feel like there is a lot of support from people because we all share a common passion. And like, I think that's a really, really nice thing about a small industry. We're all figuring out how we get along with each other, how we grow and how we make space for everyone.
Photo Credit: James Beeson
Duration have just completed a close to £500k equity crowdfund raise on Crowdcube and are busy working to deliver on their project goals that include building a dedicated taproom and kitchen in their majestic 16th century stone barn, expanding production and adding to their sustainability focus with rainwater recapture on their roofs and planting a fruit orchard to increase the biodiversity at Abbey Farm and go into their future mixed fermentation beers.
You can pay them a visit in their barrel store where they run Tap Days on Fridays and Saturdays as a family and dog friendly and fully wheelchair accessible taproom with great local street food on Saturdays or you can catch them out and about at beer festivals across the UK and Europe or check out their latest releases over at www.durationbeer.com
