Can't Douse The Fire

Unfortunately due to the fundamental break down in mine and Chris' relationship, which has been deteriorating pretty much since we started, I have to step down as Director and Head Brewer of Burning Soul.

As you can imagine this is absolutely devastating but first off though I want to thank all of our outstanding customers who have had our back since day one!

I truly cannot find the words to describe how honoured I am by your loyalty and kindness. From the moment we opened our tap room doors just brewing small batches for the tap, we had you awesome people coming in enjoying the beers, buying t shirts and then spreading the word of this new place with good beer to all the bars. We had bars calling us to place orders 3 months before we even had a proper brewery installed to actually brew on. Maybe I’m biased but the community vibe and feel in our tap room is the best, better than I could ever have dreamed of. I’ve met so many lovely people, the way you can see people just relaxing and meeting each other and becoming good friends over time all through enjoying a beer is spectacular. I’ve had lots of people comment over the years of how amazed they are that everyone is so friendly and how welcoming it is, so I don’t think it is just me being biased!

It's only the people that make the taproom the truly special place it is, without you it’s just a unit in the backstreets of Hockley that sells beer.

You are the fire that keeps Burning Soul warm.

As I said this decision comes through the most gritted of teeth.

The reason I’m writing this is just to get a chance to express myself, as me being the more reserved (but certainly not less passionate one!) I just don’t have the best skills when it comes to conversation. Chris is naturally more outspoken than me and he has a great way with people, that make them naturally gravitate towards him, which is an incredible skill and makes him a first class salesman. It’s for this reason that Chris heads up all the trade sales and provides the brewery tours as you have to play to your strengths.

I’ve always been a bit shy, with a bit of anxiety but in the last few years the great people I’ve met in beer has really helped me shake this off. I’m a completely different person to the one I was 6 years ago. I remember I volunteered to work on the bar for the first ever Birmingham Beer Bash in 2013. I was so excited that Birmingham was getting its own cool new festival. I turned up trembling with anxiety at the thought of talking and serving all these people. As soon as I got behind the bar and had some tasters, as Wok (the dude managing the bar) insisted I had to know what they taste like, it was just the most natural and fun experiences I’d had. It was this moment I was sure that this was what I wanted, being around great people, drinking great beer.

At this point I’d been home brewing for a while and remember talking to Brian from Weird Beard, who was also serving on the cask bar that I was on. They had not long set up themselves, I was telling him I wanted to start my own brewery and trying to pry as much information as I could out of him.

That evening as a whole was life changing

I’ve spent the last 3 years pouring my blood, sweat and tears into this business and I am incredibly proud of what it’s achieved. Personally, building everything of its physical presence, from designing and building the brewhouse (with the help of my pal Anthony for some welding skills), to everything in the taproom. Creating the recipes, constantly trying to hone in on them and the brewing practices to brew the best beer possible and building our brand through social media.

A huge unspoken hero of Burning Soul is my wife, Carina, who never gets any credit but is absolutely the ballast that has kept us sailing. She has handled all our accounts, helped me to better understand business and cashflow, helped keep on top of emails that were getting missed and even done a few taproom shifts, as well as help keep me sane along the way. Not to mention working her full time job to keep a roof over our heads, while it took the year and a half to get Burning Soul into a position where we could actually take a wage.

She was also the one that funded our expansion, which made taking a wage possible, securing £10,000 personal loan in her name. This was spent on our order of the first pair of the 4 new Uni Tanks that we currently have, which has taken us up to the 6 fermenters we have today. It also paid for our mezzanine floor, which I installed, for the crucial extra space for our increased production. The increase from these additions quickly paid for the following two Uni Tanks and then consequently led to us being paid. Without this expansion we were stuck in a hole. On the surface it looked as though everything was going great, which it was in a way but the reality was the business was only really covering its own costs (ingredients, beer duty, keg costs, electricity and rent). Having exhausted all our capital and no funds to reinvest it was an extremely difficult time. 

I remember talking to people and them being lovely saying how pleased they were that everything was going so well. I was nodding like yeah its going well, which is true the beers were getting great reception, we were selling everything we were making and the good word was spreading like wildfire. The only problem being we completely missed the mark on cashflow. We had been working harder than ever and not earned a penny in over a year. 

I remember we had 1 bar account in particular that was overdue by a month, so 2 months since we sold the beer and owed us about 2 grand. We needed to pay our keg bill so we could order more kegs to rack the finished beer in our tanks ready to sell. We had to call them to say look, if you don’t pay us we can’t make any more beer, that’s how close to the line it was at times.

Carina was also the one who entered us into the Indy Man Thirsty Games competition. I bottled up our best beers and sent them in to be judged. This got us to the final three to go and pour for the entire four days at one of the UK's most prestigious beers festivals (and my personal favourite) next to the amazing folks from Little Earth Project and Affinity. This alone would have been incredible enough but we also went on to win it. 

The knock on effects of this cannot be underestimated; it instantly got us national exposure in the best light possible. We had orders coming in asking for pallets of beer, that there was no way we could possibly fulfil. We were making about 20 kegs a week which was being swallowed up by our tap room and local bars. As we’ve grown we still have never really managed to catch up, which to be honest is not a bad problem to have. Birmingham has flourished with a whole range of great places to drink good beer, most of our production goes to providing beer to the Birmingham area.

Winning the Thirsty Games meant we got to come back the following year for all 4 days with your our bar, which was incredible. We sold out of all our beer a few hours before the session ended on the 3rd day, which was ace!

Then we were lucky enough to get invited back this year, which was of course excellent as usual. Entering that one competition has resulted in us being at this killer festival every year since we started. A true privilege and incredible exposure.

Not only that when we were doing the Thirsty Games one of the guest judges was Logan Plant, someone I was in awe of at the time. He came over to taste the beers and loved our Barrel Aged Coconut Porter. He was asking me the method used to get the distinct coconut flavour in the beer, which I was struggling to believe he was actually asking me!

Meeting Logan at Indy Man probably helped with us then being invited to the Beavertown Extravaganzas (though be it controversial with the Heineken investment, still an awesome event and exposure). Following that being invited to go do a collaboration brew with them in London as part of the 7 deadly sins series and then invited to the launch at their Birthday Bash Festival.

The gravitas of Carina’s input into the brewery through her actions are unprecedented.

Yet she never tells anyone, never mentions it and she’s never earned a penny through the business. Everything is split 50/50 through Chris and I. She’s also never received any recognition so I think it’s only fair that I let people know now, as she is losing just as much as I am.

So why walk away?

Probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. Since the start the pressures and workload of the brewery have led to the slow destruction of mine and Chris’ relationship and this is equally as difficult to deal with as losing my brewery. We’ve been friends since the start of secondary school, always went out drinking together every weekend since we could and he was the best man at my wedding.

It became clear very early on that just because they’re a great friend doesn’t mean they’re going to be a great business partner.

I wanted to walk early on due to my frustration, but we had tied into a lease for 3 years and I’d invested all the money I could muster into it. In a way I’m glad I didn’t even though it even though it has come to this, we’ve had some incredible experiences along the way and achieved things that I never thought we would. We’ve always managed to look much bigger than we are as a brewery.

The pinnacle of the experiences being our collab brew with Jamil Zainasheff, they say the sky’s the limit and it felt like I’d hit a height that wasn’t possible. Here’s this dude from America, whose podcast I’ve been listening to for the last 8 years and now he’s stood in our brewery, we’re having a blast and he turns out to be the nicest guy going. I used to listen to the podcasts from when I was brewing in my garage, just trying to learn everything I could and he taught me so much. Might sound sad to some but as an unashamed beer nerd he was totally number 1 of my list of people I’d love to go for a beer with in the world.

At this point its hit the apex for me and it feels like I could no longer look back and think I could have done more. The tension between Chris and I has become unbearable, there’s a track I heard that helped motivate me to take the leap in the first place and start our own brewery. I don’t think anything has ever resonated with me in such a way as the words at the start of this track https://youtu.be/b36r3JWGxcI I’d listen to it a lot especially, when times were tough just to remind me

“once we finally got down to something that the individual really wanted to do I’d say to him you do that! and forget the money.

Because if you say that getting the money is the important thing, you will spent your life completely wasting your time you’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing thing you don’t like doing, which is stupid! Better to have a short life that if full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way” the late great Alan Watt’s

The track ends with “its so important to consider this question what do I desire”

All I wanted to do was make great beer and have a great time doing it with my buddy and that was the drive.

I still want to make great beer, I love to brew but the negativity between us is not good for either of us to be around and certainly not good for the business. I’m not going to spend my life in a miserable way.

So there are only 3 options

1 I buy him out: but he doesn’t want to sell

2 He buys me out: for enough to cover me starting up again

3 We liquidate a profitable thriving business and let all our customers down

Liquidation would basically lead to both of us getting pretty much nothing and lots of negativity and questions. And the destruction of something we’ve worked so hard to build.

There’s a huge amount of me and my personality in that place and I would rather leave it standing than see it snuffed out in its prime.

So it only left one painful option really, which was to take the cash Chris is offering for my half and start something new uncompromising and exciting so I can reach a steady state of mind.

And this is how Steady State Brewing Co will be born.

Name is based from Steady State Theory. It’s the Theory that the universe is always expanding but maintaining a constant average density, no matter in the universe is ever destroyed, it just becomes part of something else.

And that only one point in time matters and that’s right now, not the past, not the future.

Starting again from scratch is massively daunting. Finding a perfect space is absolutely key and once I find a space, the new brew kit is going to be at least 3 months away so nothing may happen for a while but watch this space!

www.steadystatebrewing.com

@SteadyStateBrewing across all social media

Thank you for everything and thank you for taking the time to read me babbling on for so long, I'm very grateful for your time

cheers

Rich