The Craft Beer of Covid Conversation – Part 3/3

Welcome to the third and final part of the Craft Beer of Covid Conversation. At the end of part Two, Joey finally stopped taking Simon on tangents and was about to reveal a nostalgia-heavy brewery that is no longer with us...

Read Part One here.
Read Part Two here.

Joey: Alright, I’ve got a good one for you. A brewery that I had forgotten existed, but I remember getting a lot of it and this is going to really turn the nostalgia dial up for a lot of people: Dig Brewery.

Simon: Oh my, that is good. They were from Digbeth, in Birmingham. I went to their taproom post-Covid! They had bottles of tasty, fruited sour beers and would wax top them. I loved it. Super Potion! It’s all 2020-21 in my Untappd. Loved Dig and it is very much no longer in business. I was really sad when they closed.

Joey: Dig was good, and I liked their funky, kind of gothic slime theme. Dig brings me right back to the living room in 2020.

Simon: I have some very high rated check-ins for them.

Joey: Goodness me, you love this shit. “4.25. That was incredible. It was viscous, it was fruity, so much so that it inspired a day trip”. Untappd has so many issues but as a beer diary it is Unrivalld.

Simon: I remember being a little disappointed when I went to the taproom because it was under renovation and consisted of only a couple of benches outside. I still got to try the other Dig beers but I was expecting a big warehouse space with pizza, ramen, whatever, and I was so confused, and next door was a bingo hall with an outside space.

Joey: What do you think went wrong?

Simon: I got the feeling it wasn’t that well run. A bit chaotic, slow. The branding is maybe quite representative of some of the chaos behind the scenes…

Joey: Dripping with slimy chaos.

Simon: It was not a slick operation. You wonder what’s behind a brewery, and sometimes you visit and they know what they’re doing. Dig was not like that at all. It was all, “oh, we’re just painting on some signs right now”. It was surreal, a few of us on these benches outside, and then all these people wasted playing bingo in the middle of the day.

Joey: To be fair, this sounds like it could be the best Saturday of your life, doing a bunch of drunk bingo and having some Dig.

Simon: Yeah, in some ways obviously an elite experience but not what I was expecting. I wonder if they’ve gone in other directions, or are brewing with other people.

Joey: Dig. Full on pandemic brewery for both of us, I love that. Ok, final three breweries, and I know they’re all still going, but definitely not prolific in London. First – St. Mars of the Desert.

Simon: SMOD! Where have they been?!

Joey: Think they’re in or nearby Sheffield, I believe the owner is a very successful brewer from America. Came here, made these beers, living the dream.

Simon: With extremely iconic branding. It was so easy to recognise, and the name of the brewery was funky. I remember during lockdown you’d go into a beer shop and they’d have SMOD and you’d notice it straight away and think yes I would love to snap that one up. And it was always a bit different.

Joey: They have a huge Untappd rating. Current average 3.93/5, must be one of the highest in the country. But I haven’t seen a SMOD in ages, probably a London thing. But they were everywhere in 2021. I haven’t drank one of their beers, according to this, for four years.

Simon: Yeah, the last one I had was 2021 too.

Joey: They’re definitely still going. I think we need to do a research trip to Sheffield. They’ve got the best, apparently, indie beer pub in England too. Rutland Arms.

Simon: I guess luckily for them they don’t have to distribute everything anymore. Or they’re just brewing less, or they just capitalised on Covid, brewed a tonne, made loads of money off everyone around the country and rightly so, and now they’re just chilling.

Joey: Alright, penultimate brewery: Merakai. It’s a couple, very inclusivity-driven, they did a lot of good diversity and equality campaigns. I drank a lot of that. Their whole thing is inclusion, allyship, diversity. It’s great.

Simon: I met them, the two of them. They’re really nice people. It’s very highly rated and I feel like I drank a good bit of it. It was definitely third lockdown, not first or second. I haven’t seen them in London pubs or beer shops since COVID but they’re still going, down in West Sussex.

Joey: Very glad to hear that. Ok, last one, I know they’re still around a lot but for me, they were a big lockdown one: Arbor, with the massive pint cans. They’re in the suburbs of Bristol. Simple branding, all black.

Simon: Also the cans were not only bigger, almost always cheaper too. It was a bit suspicious. Like, why is this only £3.50 and it’s even bigger than usual cans. I think my mental association with them is negative because of the size of the cans.

Joey: Totally hear that. Almost a little bit like they’re trying to trick you, but there were moments in lockdown where I’d go all in on cost-benefit analysis, baby. It’s bigger, it’s cheaper, so it would appeal. In a post-pandemic world much less so – I haven’t bought an Arbor beer for about three years.

Simon: So, what lessons can be learned? I guess it was an unprecedented moment so it’s hard to try and summarise useful learnings from all this. There were breweries that leveraged it perfectly like DEYA, and breweries that collapsed because their on-site trade was too big a part of what they were doing.

Joey: At the end of the day, that taproom-centric business model was working fine, but for Covid coming along, and you can’t predict that. The can-forward kind of places like DEYA and obviously Verdant smashed it, then you’ve got the breweries increasing their distribution. They might partner with Beer52, as well as those Cyberfests or whatever, but then how do you consolidate that and keep going afterwards?

Simon: It seems like a lot of breweries didn’t have a post-pandemic strategy. Easy for us to say now, though.

Joey: Northern Monk, which I only discovered properly during Covid, were involved in all the Cyberfests. The brewer and owner would always record clips and talk about their beers, and it’s still a huge brand and maybe even underappreciated. They clearly had some sort of strategy.

Simon: It definitely felt like a brewery that was going to go out of business, with the elaborate can labels that could unroll and stuff. I was so bored, I’d unroll it, stick the other end on a glass and take an artsy photo of it.

Joey: I…I am going to need to see these photos.

Simon shows the photo.

Joey: Incredible. The level of blocking and physical cohesion that you’ve gone for. The commitment to an unwrap that you’ve stuck to the bottom of another bottle for symmetry. What a picture this is.

Simon: I’ve actually got so many bottles and cans on the table in this photo. One, two, three, four. Is that a Pressure Drop Alligator Tugboat?

Joey: This is an extraordinary photo of its time. A Northern Monk collaboration with DEYA, the label stuck to a Gravity Well can, with an Alligator Tugboat in the corner and a Verdant Experiment glass. This is a work of art. Purchase that, IndieBeer, and hang it on the wall. 25 year old Simon, the Da Vinci of beer photography. That is a lockdown in a nutshell.

Simon: You are kind and I am going to take all of this literally. So to wrap up, let’s summarise our top three Covid-era breweries that really take us back to the hellscape. Number one has to be Dig.

Joey: Dig seemed to electrify your mind, I saw that emotional connection to the lockdown era.

Simon: It’s the saddest thing because they were so good.

Joey: Both of us also put S43. It wasn’t good, necessarily, but it certainly transported us. And then rounding out top 3 Covid flashback breweries?

Simon: Oh, 100% Pomona Island. Who even are they? Where are they? I thought they were gonna be the next big thing. Like, they were next to Polly’s in my mind as this hype beast because they were sort of from somewhere else and everyone was talking about them.

Joey: Yeah, or next to them cos of alphabetical order.

So many breweries, so many beers, that was a ride and a half, Simon. Thanks for joining me on this journey. And let’s never have to do it again!