Running Down the Avenue — Stirchley Wines & Spirits in Birmingham
A shop trading since 1979 with six hundred beers on the shelf is a distribution network that nobody set out to build.
Our take
For a lot of small breweries a shop like this is the only place a stranger will ever encounter them. The supermarket cannot carry them, the algorithm will not surface them, and the brewery cannot afford to sell one bottle at a time to people who have already heard of it.
The line to keep from the piece is the owner's: curation is the superpower of an independent. That is the argument for an independent directory as well. Listing every brewery in Europe is the easy half. The value is in someone deciding what belongs on the shelf and standing behind it.
We would like BREWNION to work the way that shop works, which is to get a brewery found by somebody who was not looking for it by name.
The reporting is Pellicle’s. The opinion above is ours, and we have not reproduced their article. Read it where it was published →