Having decided that I didn’t want to commute to London and persue my career in commissioning TV, I thought it would be a good idea to start up my own business and look after my 9-month old son. Why not?

So, the BottleShop (or Bottle Shop back when it still had a space between the two words) was born on November 23rd 2010.

The unique thing about the business was we stocked 300+ bottles which could be enjoyed in The Goods Shed after the market floor had closed or taken home. I was told the idea was madness as nobody would pay for bottled beer given it was 3 for £5.00 in supermarkets but I didn’t intend to sell supermarket beers.

We started with the best Americans on the market including Flying Dog, Brooklyn Brewery, Dogfish Head and Stone. I also took the BottleShop van into London every week and collected beer from The Kernel, Brodie’s, Brew by Numbers and other new breweries that were emerging at the time.

As the years went on, the craft beer market developed and I saw new venues opening up like Beermoth in Manchester. They got in-touch to ask where we were getting our beers from and whether they could buy some. This is how the wholesale part of BottleShop started. I still remember the first pallet of US beer I bought over and how it needed to be pre-sold to help pay for it.

However, I also encountered the issue of how badly imported beer was treated. Many of the cases were either near-date or had already exceeded their best-before date. When I asked the importer about this, he laughed and said that was the way US imports were. I didn’t think this was a reasonable reason and took it upon myself to find a better solution.

This involved working with bloke called Charles Dimont in California and consolodating pallets of beer from multiple breweries and sending them over in refrigerated containers. Cold beer is happy beer and the Americans brew amazingly fragile, amazingly awesome beer that’s designed to never be stored above 5 degrees C. It’s also brewed to be enjoyed within weeks of being bottled. In contrast, the UK has no refigeration (outside of the Winter months) and generally has 12 months BBE on every bottle.

I travelled the world to meet breweries at festivals and sign them up to be their importer. The first big win was at the Mikkeller Beer Celebration in 2013 when it was still at a tiny sports hall. Green Flash from San Diego and Omnipollo from Sweden both agreed to let BottleShop be their distributors. We became Green Flash’s Distributor of the Year in 2016 and were the biggest export market for Omnipollo in 2017/18.

One of the keys to BottleShop success was having our own bars. I raised £100k from some Dragon’s Den type investors to get our railway arch in Druid Street, Bermondsey. This meant I didn’t have to drive everything from Canterbury into London and it also meant I could open up a bar. The first day was pretty memorable as I was the only one serving and had printed up some lovely sheets with every beer we had available. To access many of them, itinvolved me having to run to the back of the arch and find what they’d asked for. It was chaos but it was amazing.

Things grew over the years. Bermondsey got a mezzanine so we could hold more people and host the sales team in some offices. We opened up a franchise in Newcastle which ended up being a massive learning lesson and closed within a year. Margate was our fourth bar and I’ve got such amazing memories of seeing an empty shop on the seafront that was partially converted into a fish & chip shop and knowing it was perfect. Margate never asked for us, but with the excellent management of Steve Taylor we created something really special.

With over 800 wholesale customers across the UK, a warehouse in Canning Town (that we crowdfunded to fully refrigerate) and 40ft containers coming from America every month, we’d grown into a £4m turnover business.

I’d grown up buying beer from James Watt at BrewDog, carrying cases across London with Logan Plant from Beavertown and working with Mikkel from Mikkeller to make the UK a stronghold.

We’d tried to secure funding several times and always got to due-diligence stage. However, every time we were denied the funding for the same reason. The beer industry has no contracts, there’s no protection and the craft beer industry was defined as a ‘fashion’. Obviously, this was hugely frustrating but it turned out to be prophetic.

Having grown with Beavertown since they started as a team of three people, I’d signed letters to their bank to help with their expansion and felt like we were indeed partners. However, it all became very challenging when Beavertown ran out of beer for a year. They’d moved to new premises in Tottenham but hit their brewing capacity really quickly due to the enormous growth of craft beer. They prioritised their own direct-sales and third-party distributors like us weren’t as important as when we were growing the brand for them for free.

Every week was a guessing game to see how many cases/kegs you’d get and it’s fair to say that I was pretty vocal to them about how this wasn’t great for us. Eventually, Logan called to say we were going to be cut-off. No more Beavertown. This took around 20% of our wholesale business within a month with no substiution to offer our customers. It was a big blow. It was also just before their deal with Heineken was announced.

Next is Mikkeller. They were over 25% of our import business and with no notice decided to go with another UK distributor. We found out when a festival told us they’d already got their Mikkeller beer delivered from another company. Aparrently, this is the Danish way of doing business. It also conincided with them getting a lot of VC money to fuel their expansion.

So, we had two torpedo’s hit our bows within a year. Amazingly, we continued to grow turnover but it wasn’t enough and in March 2019, we had to go into Administration. Gathering the team on a Monday morning to tell them all that it was game-over was unbelievably awful. We had a great business people loved but the reality was that I’d given away too much equity to my initial investors for the business to be viable. It was a huge shame as we’d come so close (5 minutes) to BrewDog buying us outright.

It was 9:55am on a Monday morning and I was poised to send the emails that would announce BrewDog had bought BottleShop after two weeks of due-dilligence. I’d emailed James Watt to say that we were up for sale, we met that night and James presented a deal that would save us. However, the American investors in BrewDog had heard what was going to happen and decided to revise the offer to something my shareholders were never going to accept and we had to decline the revised offer.

They knew that this would force us to go into adminstration and believed they could save money by doing things this way. However, it would mean BottleShop was open to offers and the team at Beer Hawk put in an offer that beat BrewDog. I was now employed by ABI / ZX Ventures, who owned Beer Hawk. The plan that was sold to me was BottleShop Bermondsey would continue as our flagship bar and we’d launch Beer Hawk FRESH to continue the wholesale business.

This didn’t happen as the ABI lawers deemed BottleShop untrademarkable so not something they could take forward. They were going to open up the Bermondsey bar as a Beer Hawk bar but after six months, realised the rents and fire safety issues with the building weren’t going to work. It was pretty sad to see the venue go.

before this though, on its last night as a BottleShop bar, my wife and I went along and it was utterly perfect. We’d installed some amazing new fridges so every bottle in the building (600+) was at serving temperature. We’d put in a stained glass panel at the front made from the ends of bottles and new shutters that really opened up the building. Our draft G&T was pouring nicely, the draught Duvel machine working and there was a lovely mix of customers enjoying the place. For me, it was one of the best bars in the world.

Nothing can take away from what was achieved by The BottleShop from 2010 to 2019. We made a difference to many lives through the outrageous tastings we did (10 Fuller’s Vintage vertical tasting, every Trappist beer in one session, The Bruery tap takeover and serving Omnipollo from a slushy machine). People I meet have hugely positive memories of their BottleShop experiences. We didn’t do things conventionaly, we did what we knew was awesome and hoped people agreed.

It was incredibly hard work but worth everything for what we achieved.