Hello Wilderness
As part of Welsh Drinks Month, we invited James Godman from Wilderness Brewery to share their story and expand on the breweries ethos.
In this piece James talks about sustainability, transparency, how business can be utilised as a vehicle for change and their upcoming plans.
Hi I’m James. I run a small brewery in mid Wales pretty much single handedly (although my partner provides invaluable moral, and financial, support). We make modern interpretations of traditional European beer styles. Most of our beer is aged and soured in our collection of wine and whisky barrels, with mixed cultures of yeast and bacteria. The aim is to make interesting but approachable beer, so while the majority of our beer might be outside the mainstream, we’re still reaching for balanced and accessible flavour profiles.
We’re totally independent, have no investors, it genuinely is just us in the company. While that has downsides, we get to run the business exactly as we want. For us, that involves being totally open and honest about what we’re doing, supporting progressive causes and working to minimise our environmental impact.
Some of the things we do are extremely basic, like carbon offsetting deliveries, or using sustainable packaging materials (perhaps this is naive, but shouldn’t this be the default for modern businesses?).
For us, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to be transparent about what goes into our beers, customers deserve to know exactly what they’re consuming. We publish our brew sheets for every batch under a creative commons licence, laying out our methods alongside ingredients and suppliers. In non-pandemic times, we welcome visitors to the brewery anytime - again, we like people to feel there are no secrets. We also try to honestly answer any questions about our beers and our business, and to support other breweries, established or in planning, sharing anything we’ve learnt.
We believe in equality for all, so we work to support progressive causes with a proportion of our revenue from online sales and from each new can release. We acknowledge that we are thirty-something, cis and white, so don’t want to come across as preachy, but it is hard to find the right line sometimes, so we always welcome constructive feedback. In the last year we’ve managed to donate to some great charities fighting hate speech, supporting trans children and during the pandemic we’ve been able to donate to local food banks.
For 2021, we’ve committed to funding a small new portion of nature reserve for each release (via the wonderful Helsinki Foundation). It’s not a huge financial contribution, but it’s nice to feel that even our one off beers could have a lasting positive impact.
We try to work with local businesses where possible, for the sake of community, convenience and for access to high quality produce. One of our favourite recent releases came about from a regular swap I have with our friend Andy the baker (we provide beer for use in some of his wilder sourdough, he bribes us with pastries), who had a glut of surplus grapes in his polytunnel. We spent a great morning picking grapes with his kids, then added them to an ageing beer. It turned into something we’re really proud of (beautifully funky, lightly sour), and we released it in bottles with a stunning collage label designed by Andy’s very talented partner Leanne.
Our beers are constantly changing, the cultures in the barrels change over time and the climatic conditions vary from one year to the next. Therefore, we’ve been moving away from having any core beers in our range, to a situation where nearly every release is a one off, sometimes something very new, or sometimes leaning heavily on experience from previous batches.
One change we’re really excited about is making more beer featuring locally grown fruit, as last year we bought our own small orchard. It’s currently got a nice collection of mature cider apple and perry pear trees, plus some good blackberry and raspberry producing hedgerows, so expect to see a few more homegrown fruit-spiked beers in the next year or so.
Production volume wise, we’re already butting up against the amount of beer I can brew and package by myself, but our big investment for this year (with help from crowdfunding backers and the Welsh Gov) is for a small automated canning line (arriving in the summer), which will help speed up packaging, freeing up time to focus on quality and experimentation.
We’re realistic about the size of our potential market and we’re not interested in growing to the size where we’d need to sell to supermarkets or Wetherspoons - not that our style of beer would really work for those sorts of retailers! Our ideal outlets are small indie bars and bottle shops where they know their regular customers and their tastes. Some of the most useful feedback we get is funnelled through independent outlets, and we support those businesses too, as much as we can, in terms of online events and tastings etc.
We’re really lucky to have muddled through the last year. We’ve been blown away by the generosity of, and support from, our customers, through mail order, local delivery and our crowdfunder. Keeping everything in house, with a team of one has advantages in terms of flexibility, but also rather limits what you can accomplish. Plus, maintaining a balance between work and a young family is hard! Personally I’ve been trying to limit work to around four days a week, so that I can spend more time with our young daughter. Being flexible around family life has been crucial during the pandemic and throughout the life of the brewery. A couple of years ago, when we were first getting going, we had a serious family illness, meaning we had to shut down for six months, and I’ve been working on rebuilding my mental health ever since. Part of that has been to express my feelings more openly, so you may have seen our recent beer names taking a melancholic turn!
However, we’re really excited about our plans for 2021 and beyond, our confidence has been boosted by the reception to our recent beers and we can’t thank our lovely customers enough for supporting us through a difficult year.
