A moveable feast

It was a total fluke that Jacob connected with UBrew, a small and now sadly defunct contract brewing facility under an arch in Bermondsey, which charged a monthly subscription to brew on one of the site’s several 100-litre kits. After reaching out and securing membership, Jacob worked out of UBrew for three or four months. “You’d go down on a Friday or Saturday every other week, and brew alongside four to eight other brewers for the day. It was a brilliant way to learn because you’re all sharing knowledge, and finding out first-hand what not to do from each other’s mistakes.”

However, over time, Jacob realised the limitations of working at UBrew. He had gotten his recipes to a point that he was ready to start fine tuning them, and wanted more control over fermentation time and temperatures — something that’s not easy when you’ve got limited access to the beer. So he moved operations home and onto a Braumeister. Sure, this was a smaller kit, but it gave Jacob the opportunity to really get familiar with exactly the kind of product Jiddler’s Tipple would sell.

“At the time, I'd noticed the lack of really tasty lower-ABV beers on the market,” he says. “They were often a bit watery, overly bitter, just not that flavourful. At the dinner parties I was then throwing and attending, the beer offering always seemed to be a 7.5% tropical pale, and everyone would just be wasted by dessert. So, I thought, let's try and rein in the alcohol and keep as much flavour as possible, so we can extend the party. So, I went to a brewery with two and a half grand savings, and said ‘can you brew me a batch of this beer?’. My thinking was that if it sells, great, I'll buy some more, and if it doesn't, I'm sure I can find some friends and family to help me drink a batch of beer. I took it to some farmer’s markets and luckily for me, people loved the beer.”

At this point, Jacob was still working a full time job as head of operations for a food and drink logistics company. “Because of that, I also immediately had a place that could do the logistics and fulfilment for me,” he says. “With all the pieces in place, I launched Jiddler’s Tipple in 2019, just before COVID hit. Luckily, because I was so small and was outsourcing, I could just pivot away from making everything in keg, and start putting everything into can. After two years of growing the business organically — by which I mean filling my backpack with samples and dropping them into pubs on my way to work — it started to gain momentum in London, and in February 2022 I managed to quit my other job and go full time on Jiddler’s Tipple.”

After a year of managing to pay himself a steady salary, Jacob hired ops manager Alice, and just recently brought on a dedicated sales manager James, bringing the Jiddler’s Tipple team to a grand total of three people. Interestingly, now that the brand is gaining momentum in supermarkets and more broadly across London, Jacob is more determined than ever to keep contract brewing, and has no interest in opening a bricks-and-mortar brewery of his own.

“The way I see it, if I had my own brewery, I wouldn't be running it anyway,” he says. “I’d hire a head brewer, who’s a trained and experienced expert, and would be able to manage a commercial-sized brewery. That’s what the team at Renegade is for us. My strengths are in sales and operations, and on the recipe development side of things, so that’s what I stick to. Piggybacking on capacity at another brewery helps both parties, because the bigger brewery is more capable of filling its capacity and covering its overheads, and the smaller brewery is tapping into their economies of scale.

“It’s funny, because so many other industries across the food and drink sector don’t have the stigma that sharing resources does in beer. Contract manufacturing products is common because it's so expensive to open up a manufacturing facility. If I want to go swimming, I don’t build a swimming pool, I use a local pool. That’s an extreme example, but it makes the point.”

Jacob is the first person to say Jiddler’s Tipple has taken a very risk-averse approach to growth, and has developed slowly, with almost no investment so far. Now, having established strong connections with an array of reliable stockists, he feels ready to throw some fuel on the fire, and is seeking £300K of investment to fuel the brand’s next phase of development.

“Hopefully next year we can start serious conversations about opening a tap room in London somewhere, and have an absolutely banging menu to go with it,” says Jacob. “I’ve just got this dream of having a line of shirts along the wall, or hung on a conveyor belt, like they have in sushi restaurants, going around above people’s heads.”

For context, Jiddler’s merch comprises an array of vintage shirts, each unique, with a Jiddler’s Tipple logo sewed onto the front pocket. It’s utterly charming, and the unique patterns on these shirts have made their way onto Jiddler’s labels. The connection between vintage shirts and craft beer might seem tenuous if you’ve never met Jacob, but just a quick conversation makes it easy to imagine him choosing a shirt to don for dinner. As such, his invitation to drinkers to pick one too, feels like pulling up an extra seat at the table, and welcoming drinkers into the world of Jiddler’s Tipple.