Seasonals

After a long time of the global beer market being totally dominated by a handful of massive companies, there’s never been a better time to be a beer fan.

As well as producing a solid core range of half a dozen beers, almost every brewery (some of the big multinational breweries included) put a lot of focus on their seasonal and special release programmes. The number of releases continues to rise to the point that it’s almost impossible to keep track of.

The world’s number one user on beer ratings site Ratebeer.com, ‘fonefan’, has sampled in excess of 55,000 different beers since 2006, but this barely scratches the surface of the 635,000 unique beers indexed by the site.

Although our heritage is firmly rooted in building brands and showcasing classics, we put a lot of time and effort into maintaining our specials list. It’s essential for us to make sure that our customers can stay competitive by always having access to the latest specials. However, we don’t just take a scattergun approach, buying everything that is put in front of us. Our purchasing team give enormous consideration to quality, first and foremost. Regardless of rarity or fancy branding, there is nothing that can disguise low quality beer once it is in your glass.

Crucially, we can only work with all of the fun specials if we are strategic and correctly gauge the relevance to the UK market. This ensures that we manage to bring enough of something over to allow our customers enough access without leaving too many missing out, while also balancing our stock holding.

Core Brewery Partners
Many of our existing partners release a schedule at the start of the year detailing their planned seasonal releases. We do our best to plan ahead and give our account managers enough information and lead time on these to help our customers preorder, to help guarantee access and to ensure we turn stock over as fresh as possible. However, as is typical with modern craft breweries, specials and collaborations pop up all of the time, and we do our best to always get these in stock.

Spot purchasing
We are occasionally offered interesting specials by breweries that we don’t necessarily work with all year round, picking these up as general stock for our specials list. The best way to catch these is to watch out for your account manager’s specials mailer - and get in quick as they are first come first served.

Regardless of rarity or fancy branding, there is nothing that can disguise low quality beer once it is in your glass.

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