20 CRAZY YEARS RUNNING A BOOCH BIZ/2

TAKE TIME OUT to smell the roses. Breathe! Staying balanced and minimising anxiety during stressful, trying times will in turn keep the yeasts and bacteria in your brews calm and balanced.

Case study: In 2015, spinning too many plates, I began losing that balance. To save cash I’d moved from London to Manchester, unaware of the toll it would exert. I then had to let my brewer go as standards slipped in my absence and had to resume brewing myself…living 275m from Hastings!

As the brews lost their own balance during this impossible set-up an almighty breakdown was creeping up on me as I fought the inevitable. In May 2016 my mind crashed - after one brewing disaster too many - like a hard drive scattering it’s files, and I had a near-fatal fall that saw me hospitalised and bedbound for a year.

LESSON LEARNED

I’d ignored the signs to slow down and ploughed on. My anxiety levels were impacting on the brews; as a perfectionist I was selling below par product, impacting my mounting trauma.

TRUST OTHERS

Ultimately the experience was a necessary one, forcing me to regroup from my NHS bed and reimagine how the biz *should* be run after 13 years. How it was time to slow down and trust others again…

I still carried the scars from aiding friends - who I’d been guided in 2002 to take part in their “soul path” program (see recent posts) - to get their tea hobby off the ground, watching aghast at meetings as they bickered and fought all the while p’ing my savings away; a sense of betrayal I likened at the time (April 2004) to my soul fracturing…

Calls to local microbreweries from my bed yielded not one but 2 super brewers to help get going again, who I knew to trust and depend upon without fear of betrayal.

PROUDEST ACHIEVEMENT

Within 5yrs we won 7 @guildoffinefood Great Taste awards!

BIGGEST ADVOCATE

@daviniataylor (pic), who began featuring us soon after I was back on my feet. She believed in what we were doing and yielded a vast boost in online customers between 2017-22, enabling us to gradually withdraw from retail. And yes, as sparkling and radiant in real life as on her Instagram!