Hello everyone. By now you’ll have seen that we’re not opening on 4th July. We thought we would bring you up to speed on what we are planning to do instead.
You might have seen that we’ve recently purchased a hand can seamer, it’s not technically a canning machine – they start at about £25k – but it is something we have been thinking about doing for a while. It’s known in the trade as crowler filling (crowler = can growler). The idea is that it will replace the plastic bottles we currently use which aren’t ideal in the hot weather as they aren’t really designed for carbonated drinks.
The cans are 500ml and are purged with CO2 and then “bottom filled” using a tap adaptor which helps to keep oxygen out of the can giving it a bit longer life, we reckon they can last for about 14 days as long as they’re kept in the fridge (but need to be consumed the same day as they are opened). We still plan to use the 2 pint milk bottles for still ciders and, if you’d prefer it, you can have your beer in those, you just need to let us know.
Moving over to cans will have some other implications to our service; we are changing the minimum order requirement for free delivery from 2 x 2 pints to £15 but this does mean that you can choose a wider variety of drinks for your order.
Putting beer in cans opens up the prospect selling beyond our local delivery area and for this reason we’re going over to web ordering. It’ll be a couple of weeks before it is ready but you will have an option for pick up, local delivery and courier delivery to the rest of the country. We’ll also be selling some guest beers and ciders in bottles and cans.
The move over to web ordering in turn means that we will be delivering to the whole of the ST7 post code and not just Alsager.
Lastly we are opening up our click and collect windows a little wider on Friday and Saturday. We will now be open for click and collect between 12 and 4pm both days.
Before I sign off I’d just like to thank those of you who’ve supported us in these last 13 weeks and apologise that the last couple of days’ deliveries have been a bit late. We’re just getting our head around the demands of packaging in can as opposed to milk bottles.
Cheers
Sean and Jacqui.
