Recipe for Greatness
Recipe for Greatness
How Small Beer Are Brewing a Mid-Strength Revolution | Felix James
Felix James, co-founder and head brewer at Small Beer, takes us through his brewing journey from childhood experiments to pioneering the world's first brewery dedicated to beers under 2.8%. His passion for biology and fermentation forms the foundation of a revolutionary approach to creating full-flavoured beer with less alcohol.
• Started brewing at age 4 with a home experiment using a milk bottle and bread yeast
• Biology degree led to professional brewing, beginning at Budweiser where he learned rigorous quality standards
• Met business partner James Grundy at Sipsmith, gaining crucial business experience beyond brewing operations
• Spent over 18 months developing recipes before launching Small Beer
• Designed custom brewing equipment focused on extracting maximum flavour rather than alcohol
• Created the brewing system from scratch, taking personal risk when manufacturers initially questioned the design
• Pioneered the "mid-strength" beer category in the UK market
• Developed the concept of "coasting" as an alternative to alternating between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks
• Small Beer sits below the diuretic limit, reducing dehydration and hangover potential
• Available in Waitrose, Ocado, Majestic Wines, and launching in M&S from June 18th
Three, two, one zero and liftoff.
Jay Greenwood:Liftoff no. Felix James, co-founder and the head brewer at Small Beer. Felix holds a degree in biology and his brewing journey started with a home brew experiment at the age of four and eventually led him through roles at AB, inbev, bullers and Sipsmith Waymare's future business partner. Together they launched Small Beer, the world's first brewery dedicated to beers under 2.8%. Felix, welcome to the podcast, thanks so much for having me.
Jay Greenwood:It's a pleasure, good well it's a pleasure to have you on and I wanted to jump in and ask about your first brewing experience at the age of four, with a milk bottle and bread yeast. So, looking back, what do you think that moment said about how you're wired? Is it curiosity, is it rebellion? How do you sort of think about your childhood?
Felix James:That's a good question.
Felix James:You know, I now have two young kids I have a seven year old and an 11 year old and they are fascinated by making things and crafting and I guess as a young child I probably did thousands of little experiments.
Felix James:But that one really stuck with me in a big way and it wasn't just because it involved brewing and yeast, it was, I guess. I was fascinated that there were little living things that were so small that I couldn't see them and that they were producing something for me, and in that particular instance they were blowing up a balloon full of carbon dioxide on the top of a milk bottle. But I loved the idea that there were little biological things happening and I wouldn't have necessarily even known that they were biological at the time, and we as humans didn't know anything about microbiology for the vast uh, you know, for the, for the vast majority of our existence. But for me that was just fascinating and I loved it and I continued to be completely in awe of small creatures, um, for effectively, well, I guess, my entire life and now it makes complete sense to me that you went to go study biology based on this passion.
Jay Greenwood:Now I'm trying to thread sort of the the sort of linear progression view. But you were in the library and some they were talking about a brewery role and you just said that's what I want to do for my career. So how did that come around? What was your interest in that?
Felix James:so at that stage that was when I was studying biology at imperial college in l London and I had been very much involved in the food industry Again. You know, in London at Borough Market around London Bridge, I was selling biodynamic vegetables at a market stall. I was also doing a bit of cooking and in my spare time I would make and I didn't have a huge amount of spare time at the time with two jobs and a degree but in my spare time I would spend my time cooking foods and particularly fermented foods. I was making sauerkraut and bread and yogurt and all sorts of fermented foods.
Felix James:And I came across this, uh, I came across this video of these guys in northwest arkansas, in the middle of america, um brewing a six pack of beer in their kitchen and I just thought, wow, I had no idea that you could. I mean at the time this was before the sort of the renaissance of home brewing came about again. I know it was, you know it was certainly around when we were kids and some of my parents' generation were into it, but in the kind of early noughties no one was home brewing and I saw this video of these guys making a six-pack and it really appealed to me that you could make a small batch of beer If anything. I thought that you know, if you, yeah, if you wanted to get into brewing, you had to make lots, and so, literally the very next day, I went out, going to hunt down some, some barley and some hops, to start brewing myself. Uh, did a bit of home brewing, um, and found myself actually then home brewing in one of the shops that I was working in and cooking in, and I did a little community brew, uh, with some of the people there and we, we brewed together and we bottled it, and one of the people that was there was a, was a lecturer at the Royal College of Art, and I ended up getting a. This was age 19, I think.
Felix James:I did my first series of guest lectures at the Royal College of Art on how, on how to brew beer, to a bunch of master's students doing their product design course and so, as part of their their end of year product project, we, um, we made a beer together and we served it, uh, during their their sort of end of year project release, um, and it just I loved the idea that not only were we, we were fusing food and biology together in one space. We were also bringing people together and giving them something to get excited about and to enjoy, and to this day, I still love that experience of giving people joy through giving them alcohol. Joy through giving them alcohol. Um, and yet, as we'll get on to, you know, when we talk about mid-strength beer, I've always felt slightly, um, torn between this concept of giving people small amounts of alcohol and enjoying life, and then giving them too much alcohol and potentially being a destructor, you know, being a bad influence on people's lives. So, um, so this is where we've ended up today, but the but at the time, yeah, I'd heard, I'd overheard a couple of people talking about a job in a brewery and the.
Felix James:The funny thing to me was that they were, they were going, yeah, who'd want to work in a brewery? And I, I just I overheard that little caption and I went me. I want to work in a brewery, please. Where is this place? And I have these wonderful little ideas buzzing around in my head that I would go and work at a little microbrewery in London somewhere. And one of my friends at borough market at the time, a chap called evan, went off and had set up the colonel brewery, um, and we used to share uh home brews when we were, when we were working at um at borough market, uh, and I just couldn't believe that, um, that there was this opportunity available. So so I ended up on the phone to a recruitment agency that this person had put me onto and the recruiter said God, you'll never believe it, this is the most incredible job for a grad to start out in the world of brewing. And it turned out to be a job at Budweiser.
Felix James:I have to say my initial reaction was I'm not really sure if I want to work for Budweiser. I don't think that they have that same sense of craft and foodie-ism about them, until I had a conversation with my mum, actually, who said look, don't, don't write them off just because they're big. Go and find out what you can learn from them, and if you really don't like it, you can go and find something else. And I'm so glad that I took that advice and went and started working for Budweiser, because I learned so much working for the big guys. And I guess if there is one piece of advice that I would take from this, it is that I think that that all sort of worked out in the right way.
Felix James:For me, starting out working for a big company and then moving your way down um is really beneficial. It from two aspects. One is that your skills are wanted. So medium-sized companies want to be big companies and they want to know how the big guys do it. Small companies want to be medium-sized companies and they want to know how the medium-sized guys do it. So your skills are desired if you already have a little bit of that large company mindset, but also the the level of quality that we found, that I found working at Budweiser was just astronomical.
Felix James:I mean, they are working to such tight, to such tight levels of control that everything is very precisely done.
Felix James:And it's taken me almost my entire career in brewing I've now been brewing for coming up to 20 years to figure out why a lot of these things were done there. You know and, and, and. Initially you kind of think well, this is ridiculous. You know they're they're doing tests for the sake of doing tests here. You know this is not actually making beer, as I understand it as a biological process, as a craft, making good quality products. Surely you don't have to do all this testing, surely you don't need all these levels of control and throughout my career I've actually found that a lot of those things really are very much necessary and in a in a way, I kind of started out brewing with a very much with a home brewers mindset of okay, you know, we'll just crack on and see where it takes us, and more and more I've realized that some of that bigger brewing mindset really does help when you're trying to scale and make sure that everybody has the experience that you have as a, as a brewer.
Jay Greenwood:Yeah, it's really interesting. I had the managing director of Merchant Gourmet the other day and he scaled from large businesses to a slightly smaller one and he was saying exactly the same thing. I was talking to a startup the other day. As they were talking about some of their process, I said, oh, so what like uh, standards, controls do you have in place for this? And they said we don't have any. We're a startup with an envelope. Myself said but you go, how are you measuring this or anything like? There's no standard controls and how are you progressing? So it's definitely a theme I agree with them. Before we go on to small wick, I want to talk about your time at Sipsmith, because that seems really formative chapter for you. So I guess what lessons did you draw from building Sipsmith? That was such a pioneering brand at the time and I guess what surprised you when you switched beer with the difference of the two?
Felix James:so I had. So by that point I'd worked at Budweiser and then at Fuller's and I guess I was working my way up the management chain in operations, in brewing and packaging and very much the operations sides of the business, and that's how I landed this role as head of operations at Sipsmith and it's actually where I met my business partner who is the head of sales. I guess when I took on that job my entire experience of the drinks industry was all revolved around operations and I hadn't really had much contact with marketing, which I very quickly found was what drove Sipsmith as a business. It was incredibly marketing focused. Sales finance, you know, all these worlds had sort of been slightly alien to me and although I'd come across the various teams working at Fuller's, I hadn't really understood why they existed and what they did and how crucial they were to the business. And we always believed as the operations team that we were the most critical people because we were making the stuff. So there wouldn't be stuff to sell or stuff to market or stuff to, you know, to recoup finances from if you didn't have the stuff to sell in the first place. So that was, I guess, a bit of an awakening moment for me, kind of a revelation for me, understanding that there was more to making products than just making them and putting them into stock.
Felix James:I learned so much about the running of a small business and also about scaling a business. I mean, you know, working at the likes of Budweiser and Fuller's, I really didn't see growth in the same way that with Sipsmith. You know, I joined when the team was, uh, it was a team of 12 people and by the time I left, three and a half years later, we had almost 70 people on the on the team and we were selling in 50 different countries. So it was a, it was an extreme uh version of, you know, seeing a business scaling um and seeing what we needed to do in order to get there, both operationally but also financially, um, and team-wise, you know, developing skills. So it was, yeah, that really gave me an insight into, uh, how to run a business, not just how to brew beer, um, and clearly we weren't brewing beer, then we were making gin, which all seemed extremely simple.
Felix James:In my mind, brewing beer is fraught with pitfalls, you know. There are always things that you can do to mess up brewing. Brewing itself is relatively simple when you compare it to packaging beers and making sure. You know there are so many different moving parts, so many things to get wrong. Um versus distilling, which is relatively simple. Um, you are. You always have another chance to to try again with distilling um and you're not really.
Jay Greenwood:You know you're not battling with the microbes, which is always the thing with beer, you know, is you've got to make sure everything is absolutely sanitized, sterile, clean um before you can even start to think about brewing that's one thing I found really fascinating actually by listening to you, because I'm a big beer lover and I've sort of been curious about this big movement recently, about, you know, just packing beers with so many crazy stuff and I actually found it really interesting to talk about actually how difficult it is to brew just a lager because it's very simple ingredients versus you can mask a lot of stuff with all these crazy new things they're putting in beers and that's really surprising to me because I always thought it would be the opposite, that these crazy and all these things they're putting in actually are more difficult. But it's actually the opposite right. To get a really good lager right is actually the hardest task, I guess, right.
Felix James:Absolutely, and that was one of the major things that I learned working at Budweiser. People think of Budweiser as being pretty tasteless, pretty tasteless. Um, and they do have. I guess their, their entire, uh, their entire being is very much the opposite of what we do here, and they're making alcohol that you can drink without really tasting it so much um the.
Felix James:The critical thing is that yes they are extreme about their um, their approach to taste, but that is because the beer is so um, is so mild in taste that it is extremely easy to detect any kind of off flavors in there. And yeah, and absolutely you're right, you know that a lager is very much the hardest beer to brew and therefore, when we set out setting up small beer, I was really, I was concerned, I was worried that we were doing something that was going to be technically really really difficult and that if we couldn't get the ultimate beer right, if we couldn't get that lager right, then we just wouldn't have a product to bring to market. And so that was very much. You know, our first task was we spent a good year and a half just brewing on weekends, evenings, you know, continually, and it was almost before the whole concept of setting up a business came to light. You know, it wasn't when we first started talking about small beer. It came about in the pub.
Felix James:So so the um, the idea was uh, james and I effectively were were in the pub after work, we were both working at sip smith at the time, um, and we would always be scanning the pump clips, you know, on the, on the front, on the bar front and and sort of saying well, you know, we've had a long day at work, it'd be great to have a beer, but at the same time we don't want to be absolutely knocked for six and struggling to, you know, to stay awake on the train home and the our options were very limited to either non-alcoholic beer or beer at sort of five, six percent and the. You know, the craft beers at the time were so exciting, um, but it was. You know, what we wanted was something that was consistently good, was always going to be available to us Potentially. You know, occasionally we'd find a cask beer that was perhaps three, maybe four percent Great taste, but it would be there one day and gone the next. You know be on a rotational line and so we wanted something more consistent.
Felix James:So originally it was literally a case of well, there is a gap here, but we're not going to approach it from a business perspective until we know that this is really possible.
Felix James:So it was a year and a half of really hard graft, just creating a product that we were really happy with, craft just creating a product that we were really happy with.
Felix James:And I I'd even go as far to say that it was only five years really into uh, into running small beer that I was genuinely so confident in our product that I could take it to friends and family and say, look, this is the best thing you've thing, you've got to drink this. Until that point, the beer was certainly good and I certainly didn't feel in any way that there was a better alternative out there, but there was just something, just that little edge, that little attention to detail, and sometimes I find that that is really what makes a product is that very, very last little sugar coating that gets it to the point where you're really, really excited about it. And that, for me, happened around the beginning, the beginning of the pandemic. Actually, it was probably sort of yeah, 2020 going to 2021 where the beer just suddenly started shining. Like, honestly, we were so, so happy with it and from that point on, you know, we just haven't looked back.
Jay Greenwood:Well, I'll move on to the technical points of the beer in a moment, but I wanted to ask you you mentioned James Grundy, your co-founder, and I'm curious about sort of the conversation. You both sort of saw the problem. You both needed the product but was how it's kind of different from actually then forming a business partnership. Were there any conversations you had or any signals where you thought this would be the right person to create the business with?
Felix James:Yeah, absolutely well. The funny thing is, I mean, they say you know, don't start a business with your friends or family. And James and James and I at that point were very much, um, we were colleagues and we enjoyed spending time together, but we weren't spending all of our evenings and weekends together until we started doing all these brewing trials, um, and I think what we found is that we both really spur each other on and at times that has almost been a sort of you know, uh, it's almost been urging each other on to the point of frustration. You know, it's like we've got to do better. We've got to do better and uh, but more and more.
Felix James:I mean, now I see him as he's. He's more than just a best friend, he's like a life partner. I mean, we're, we're, we're very much partners in crime and we but we do certainly have, we have complementary skill sets, let's put it that way. So james is very, very fast paced, um, he's, he's keen to have had everything done yesterday, um, and uh, and he's constantly driving the business forward, uh, whereas I guess I have a little bit more of that sort of oh, let's just put the brakes on and and hold hold fire and just check that this is working before we take the next step, which is it's funny. Sometimes we surprise each other because it's clearly, you know, we're more nuanced than that and it's not always just a case of slow fast, slow fast, but there is. I learn new things about James all the time and I think we have slowly kind of learned a lot from each other over the years.
Jay Greenwood:And on the talk on to sort of the formation of Small Beer Co. And one of the decisions at the beginning was to create your own brewery. So I'm curious about how did you sort of evaluate the risk profile of that and potentially de-risk it? And I think I read as well, or I might have listened to the fact that you actually had people already ordering the beer before you actually even set up the brewery. So how did that come around? Was that part of the strategy to sort of de-risk the sort of startup costs?
Felix James:I mean, there is the perfect example of james versus me so keen to just start selling?
Felix James:um, but he'd already. You know, james had started selling the beer before we, before we'd done anything. I mean, it was, um, uh, james had sold the beer into the Savoy Hotel. So our very first day of trading we sold to two customers One was a butcher's shop in Peckham and the other one was the Savoy Hotel and he sold the beer into the Savoy before we'd even built the brewing kit that we were going to use to brew the beer. We'd even built the brewing kit that we were going to use to brew the beer.
Felix James:Thankfully, by that stage I had requisitioned my home brewing kit from the end of my garden and brought it into the brewery and we were continuing to do our trial brews in the brewery space and we had already applied for our license. We had our license coming. We had already applied for our license. We had our license coming. So literally the day that the brewer's license arrived and we had sign off from HMRC that we could start brewing was the day that we made our first sale into the Savoy. And yes, those first bottles that we sold into them came from a little home brewing kit where I was furiously brewing three or four brews every single day. Working like an absolute dog, you know all day, all night to make our beer.
Jay Greenwood:And how do you approach creating a product that is much lower in alcohol traditionally than some beers but still full of the flavour and sort of the premium sort of taste that you guys created? Was there any specific like benchmarks or tests that helped you guide you, and I'm also I want to think about sort of how much involvement you had in the design of this brewing kit. I'm right thinking that you basically made it to your spec, so I guess how did that all come into place, creating this product?
Felix James:Yeah, so I mentioned that we'd spent a couple of years you know, a good year and a half, by the time we were trial brewing here as well. It was two years of developing the recipe but also the kit. In fact, the recipe, but also the kit, in fact, the recipe itself is not as unique as you might think. If you took our recipe for our lager, for instance, and you showed it to a brewer who walked in off the street, they would say, yeah, that looks like the recipe for a 4%, 4.5% lager a very traditional recipe. A four, four and a half percent lager very traditional recipe. Um, and it's really the process and the design of the kit, um, that mean that we can make that beer at half the strength of a traditional lager, um, but with all of the flavor that you would expect from a four to five percent beer. Now, that design, so the process design, uh, I designed entirely from scratch, um, and I guess when I say that I knew that I still had to fulfill all the traditional steps of brewing, so I wanted to heat things up and cool things down and and and filter out solids and um, and I, you know, I still wanted to go through the full traditional fermentation that you would expect from a traditional lager. So we actually lager our beer.
Felix James:A lot of people say well, if you're making lower strength beer, does that mean that you just ferment it for a shorter period of time, or you don't ferment it as completely as you would ferment a bigger beer, you stop the fermentation, and that's absolutely not what we do. So we make beer in effectively a very traditional way. All of the magic, as it were, our USP all lies in the way that we conduct our mash, which is the first step of brewing for us. So we we're effectively using traditional brewing methods that you would, that you would expect to use. From a from a traditional brewer's perspective, we're incredibly inefficient, because brewing efficiency is all about turning a quantity of grain into as much alcohol as possible. What we do is we turn that quantity of grain into as much flavor as possible with a moderate level of alcohol, and so it actually frees up, uh, the creative thinking process. It allows you to do more um with that grain rather than just focusing on making as much alcohol as possible, um, and so, yes, I, I designed the process, uh, on a very small scale, um, and in fact, even when we started brewing here we were doing really small, like absolutely minuscule, like lab-sized mashes, lab-sized brewing process, and then, and each one of these, each one of these processes I always try and isolate and just work with that.
Felix James:There are so many variables in brewing that if you can isolate a single variable and just work on that one in a very scientific way, you can get much further than trying to do a full brew and then trying to figure out which variables you've managed to keep the same and which ones you've changed. So you know quite a quite a straightforward scientific process really, um, but I guess one that I've become very familiar with through, uh, my degrees in in, in, um, in biology, uh, science, and then, uh, and then in um in working in these. You know these bigger brewing companies where they were very scientifically rigorous about what they did, and and then I took that process and I did. I designed the brewing kit specifically to do two things really one was to brew the very best small beer the world had ever tasted, and the second one was to save water. So, um, we'd both been in the industry for long enough to see that, um, that the drinks industry is. At times it can be incredibly wasteful, and so we're very conscious of the fact that brewing consumes a lot of water, and it was one of the things that, uh, that we really, we really wanted to reduce as much as possible.
Felix James:So when I say that I designed the process from scratch, I was really looking at you know what are the individual processes that I want to do here. Rather than just relying on the sort of perceived wisdom of brewers that has been going back for hundreds of years, where people say, well, yes, of course, you have to have a mash tan, you have to have a copper and you have to have a an under back and you have to have all these elements, I sort of thought, well, I know that I have to have something similar to that. I do want somewhere where I can heat things up, I do want somewhere where I can sieve things out, but they don't necessarily have to work in the same way that people expect. So I designed all the equipment, took the blueprint to the manufacturer and said here you go. Can you give me a quote please?
Felix James:I went to a few different ones and the guys who I was really excited about a company called Gravity Systems they came back to me and they said look, we like what you've done here. We've actually never had a brewer come to us with a full blueprint of their, of their brewery. Um, but what you've given us there is not going to brew beer. And I said, look, um, it might not brew your beer, but it certainly will brew the world's best small beer. It is an. You know, it is a different product that I'm looking to make here. That said that if the kit didn't end up producing a saleable product, that they weren't going to be liable for it. And therefore I was accepting all liability and it really was just me personally, because James is not a brewer. So I took on quite a significant bit of risk there, also considering the fact that this wasn't all about personal money. I mean, we were taking on investment at this point to buy the brand kit. So there's a big risk.
Jay Greenwood:So I wanted to ask you about sort of the category you've almost created from scratch. So I guess in the UK my sort of feeling is people are either 0% or they're drinking. So how do you approach the challenging of people to understand that mid-strength range and what has been an effective strategy for you to get them to understand it?
Felix James:That's a great question. I think when we first started making and drinking our beer, uh, initially there was certainly some some stigma around non-alcoholic beer. You know we're talking sort of pre-pandemic when we first started out we started out in 2017 and we were getting a bit of pushback from the occasional person saying, you know, don't really get this. Um, you know, non-alcoholic beer isn't that great. I'm very happy drinking 5% beer. Why would I want to drink 2% beer? And at the time, we also didn't really have the terminology to talk about what we do, so it was very confusing. You've got no and low. You know the no and low. You know the no and low movement, which effectively is is talking about beers that are around zero percent. You know up to 0.5 percent, but less alcohol than you'd find in a loaf of bread or a banana. Um, and I think there was, you know, there's also the term low alcohol beer, which describes beer up to 1.2%. So, again, the completely useless phrase for us to be able to use, and so we were sort of trying to use the words that were available to us to describe what we were doing. We knew that what we were doing absolutely made sense because we knew that we could have a beer, two, two and a half percent, enjoy ourselves, still, get the buzz, wake up the following morning without a headache, you know, without a hangover. Um, and this, you know, this worked. I'm not just saying one beer, I'm saying, you know, we could go out all night and have a, have a good session, and wake up, um, uh, carefree, the following morning. We knew that our beer wasn't dehydrating us as we were drinking it. We knew that it was giving us, in fact, just as much fun as we would have drinking stronger beer and that really, I guess, over time, our alcohol tolerance was reducing, so we were actually having more fun on smaller amounts of alcohol, which was which is an interesting point because I guess, um, certainly pre-pandemic.
Felix James:There was still a sense of slightly sort of macho behavior towards drinking alcohol, in particular around beer, where you know, if you were seen drinking a half pint of beer or if you were seen drinking you know, a lower strength anything, it was kind of perceived as well it's, you know, that's not really the done thing. We, as a culture, our drinking culture revolves around drinking beer in pints and actually, when you look back to our history, the history of drinking beer. The vast majority of beers that we used to drink were of a lower percentage, you know, in the sort of twos, threes and fours, and it was only really with in the sort of 90s and noughties that we started drinking this export strength beer, continental premium lagers, at sort of five percent, and then with the American craft beer movement sort of pushing those percentages up and up, and we continue drinking our beer in pints and we continue thinking that we could drink, you know, six pints and get away scot-free, and that really, I mean it works. Perhaps when you're in your early 20s we were talking about you've experienced I, I certainly experienced um that when you hit your 30s and then 40s and you know you have kids and you know you have all sorts of other things to to deal with, uh, that just doesn't work anymore. It's um. So I think actually going back and learning a bit from our history, um, and shedding that that behavior that existed in the sort of early noughties has really, really helped to bring people around.
Felix James:So now when we talk about mid-strength beer, the term mid-strength is still relatively new. Mid-strength is still relatively new. It's one that's been used for a long time in Australia, where they have a lot of mid-strength beers that are effectively like a watered-down version of a bigger beer that they serve at sporting events. They don't always get the best rep. Taste-wise they're not quite the same as what we do, but people are familiar with the concept. Now, here we've really only in the last couple of years, um, we really pioneered the use of the term mid-strength as well, and that's one that's now being used across the the spectrum of drinks. So, um, so there's now quite a big cohort of mid-strength wines that are available in supermarkets. Uh, there are mid-strength spirits, so mid-strength wines around sort of six, seven percent alcohol, mid-strength spirits, sort of 10 to 20 alcohol. And all of a sudden the market's shifting. The demand now exists because people know that there is this stuff available.
Felix James:Um, and there are also, I guess, that there have been there's been an advent of people learning to moderate their alcohol consumption, and I would say that the pandemic was one of the catalysts that allowed this to happen. So people when they were working from home and sort of getting used to this behaviour of working from home and perhaps drinking a little more than they perhaps were pre-pandemic certainly in the first lockdown there was this familiarity with. Well, we can kind of get away with it. You know, we can work at home, drink lots of alcohol and do it all again tomorrow, and then I think, uh, with successive lockdowns, people realize that actually that doesn't really generate the fun that you think it does when it's when it's all novel and and exciting. Um, and so people were looking at different ways of moderating and certainly when the pubs opened back up again and people got back to more normal drinking behavior, they were looking for something different.
Felix James:Um, and the non-alcoholic beer movement has certainly helped. So, uh, those those non-alcoholic beers becoming more mainstream, better in quality, more accepted, has helped to frame this thinking that actually there isn't a great stigma around drinking non-alcoholic beer so much anymore and people accept the fact that there are some fairly good quality versions of non-alcoholic beer out there, quality versions of non-alcoholic beer out there. So all of a sudden there is this new wave of people who are what we call zebra striping. So they're going from drinking a full strength beer to a non-alcoholic beer, to a full strength beer to a non-alcoholic beer. And that's pretty tough for two reasons. One is that once you've had a full strength beer, taste-wise it's quite hard to drink a non-alcoholic beer, uh. The second one is that the more you drink um, the worse you get actually trying to differentiate between these beers and and what you know and and trying to, uh, stick to your rules of of um, of how you're going to go about drinking your beer.
Felix James:So people go into an evening with a strategy. They say, okay, well, I know I've got to get up tomorrow morning. I know I've got a lot to do, or I've, or I've. You know, after this barbecue I want to get home and see the family, or I want to do, you know, do some exercise in the morning, for instance. I have goals, you know, I've got things that I need to achieve and that all sounds great. Just before you go to that barbecue, once you're a couple of pints in, you're sort of thinking, well, that can probably wait another day, it's OK, I'm here to have fun now, um, and that's when the wheels come off, so it's um, whereas what we offer is an alternative to that, that, that moderation tactic, um, and it's one where, instead of zebra striping, um, the mid-strength collective as a whole, we've come up with this concept called coasting.
Felix James:Where you can, you can basically keep your, your level of drunkenness slash sobriety to, to a nice level playing field. So you still get the buzz. You get up to the point where you're enjoying yourself. You get to that kind of one or two pint feeling, which is always this wonderful effect. You know, I kind of feel like you go to the pub, it's a nice sunny day or you're in a park or whatever it is you have. You know you have a beer or two. You feel amazing.
Felix James:From then on, sometimes it can be a little bit of a downward curve. You know you have more beers. Beers it doesn't necessarily mean that you feel better and better and better. In fact. You know, after three or four beers sometimes things really start to get worse. Um, and certainly if you're not feeling worse right now, wait until tomorrow morning and see what that feels like.
Felix James:So this is where you know, actually, if you, if you have a mid-stre, it doesn't necessarily mean, you know, the mid strength beer is all about sessioning. You know, going out and having five or six pints. You can have a beer on a Wednesday evening with dinner, enjoy yourself and just know that. Well, this isn't going to affect me tomorrow. You know, sometimes even one beer now, for for me I'll have one, five or six percent beer, uh, and although I don't wake up feeling hungover, I still don't quite feel as on the ball as I would do if I hadn't had that beer. Um, and I certainly found that having young kids as well, you know, waking up at three or four in the morning after even one beer was virtually impossible versus, you know, versus being able to spring out of bed when you haven't had that beer.
Felix James:And all of a sudden, we've realized that there is more to health, you know, than just having a hangover or not.
Felix James:In fact, um, we know that beer, and alcohol in general, really affects our level of hydration, and so small beer sits below the diuretic limit, which means that you're, um, you're actually hydrating as you drink rather than dehydrating, which significantly reduces the potential for a hangover.
Felix James:But also, alcohol affects your sleep really quite detrimentally, and we have run studies showing that small beer doesn't affect your sleep in anywhere near as much as a full strength alternative.
Felix James:And then your mental health as well, you know, just being aware of your own personal mental health is, you know, something that we've all come to be much more in tune with, um, I guess, in recent years, and the effects of alcohol can be really detrimental. Even, you know, even if you don't think that you are an alcoholic, for instance, um, even drinking small amounts of alcohol can be quite disruptive to mental health. And so we really find I mean, I, I sleep well at night knowing that the beer that we produce, um, is allows people to have a great time together, you know, to socialize, uh. Or perhaps you know, if you're just having a beer, uh, on a weekday evening and you just want to relax, gives it, gives you a great experience, but it's virtually impossible to get really drunk on our beer. You'd have to be drinking a hell of a lot of it, at which point it sort of becomes a little bit of a strange experience because you're just gorging with liquid.
Jay Greenwood:Well, that seems like a perfect place to wrap up the interview, and I've been keeping my the interview and I've been keeping my lip seal while you've been chatting about how much of a fan I am of this product. I've tried it recently and I try so many products from so many people and but I was genuinely blown away by how good this product was, because I've heard you talk about it before. But it does exactly what you said it would do, where it gives you that nice buzz feeling of a beer does, which, first of all, gives you the amazing taste of beer does, which is literally impossible from everyone. It does not exist in the zero, zero to low. It just does not exist.
Jay Greenwood:So you get an amazing taste of it, but then you also get that buzz, but then you know it's not that. Like you know, like you say, you get that horrible feeling after, and now it's just that perfect feeling, and so I just want to say what an incredible product you've created is honestly the product I've been needing and searching for for a long time. So thank you so much for creating an amazing product and also the time and dedication you put into your craft. It's admirable. So I really appreciate the effort of you um james and the small um and small beer.
Felix James:Thank you so much, jay. Well, look I mean for those who are listening and want to get hold of our beer take a look at our website. We do. We sell the beer directly from our website, direct to your door, but you can also find it in Ocado, in Waitrose, in Majestic Wines and soon also and this is exciting we're about to launch an M&S for the first time, so from the 18th of June you'll be able to pick up a four pack of our cans. We have a Lager and a Hazy, both available in M&S. So the Lager is 2.1%, super crisp, clean, refreshing, delicious beer, and the hazy is tropical, fun, hoppy and just excellent on a summer's day. So, yeah, enjoy those. And you'll also see us in lots of pubs, pubs, bars, restaurants, hotels, and particularly around london, uh, but also kind of branching out into into the wider world, um and and certainly across the uk yes and uh, this is not just me enjoying the beer.
Jay Greenwood:I've also got friends coming over tomorrow. I've got four crates ready for them to enjoy as well. So that's how much of a product I believe in. I think it's great product. So again, thank you so much, felix and uh. Appreciate you coming on.
Felix James:Jay, you're a star. Thanks so much.
Jay Greenwood:As always, guys, thank you so much for listening, really appreciate the support and if you guys like it and you're enjoying what you're listening to, please like and subscribe and write a review. We'd really appreciate it Again. We'll be back doing this weekly and, yeah, if you want to know more about starting a food business, head to wwwjgreenwoodcom. But, guys, as always, thank you and be great.