Sam Hawcroft talks to Great Newsome director Matthew Hodgson about how the brewery is holding its own in Holderness…
The craft beer industry is having a tough time of it at the moment. Scores of small brewers have gone out of business in recent months, with Covid and Brexit being the biggest factors in ending the boom of the past couple of decades.
Great Newsome Brewery, though, in the heart of Holderness, is a working farm – and this, alongside the constant innovation of its beers, branding and spin-off products, has insulated the business against some of the most difficult trading conditions in recent times.
Indeed, the pandemic ended up bringing about a greater focus on online retail as pubs – the brewery’s main wholesalers – were forced to close overnight. This was an even bigger concern, says director Matthew Hodgson, because in January 2020 the company had just made its biggest-ever investment to double the capacity of the brewery.
“By March 31 of that year, we were thinking, what the hell have we done?” he says.
“Pre-pandemic, at least 80% of our business was cask beer into pubs, then it flipped completely on its head and was nearly all bottled beer for people to drink at home. We already had an e-commerce side to the business, but it was really quite small. Sometimes we got one order a fortnight, but during Covid we peaked at about 100 orders a day.”
As a result, the team completely changed the way they worked, refining how orders were packaged and processed. “To some degree, we’re still doing that,” says Matthew. “We’re still offering the same service. People are not ordering to the level that they were, obviously, but it’s still in excess of what we had pre-pandemic, so, if anything, we probably came out of it a bit stronger.”
Timing is everything, and, while the Hodgson family had long harboured ideas of launching a brewery, they didn’t do so until 2007. Matthew had wanted to go into the farming business straight after completing his A-levels, but his academic prowess led his parents to encourage him to go university instead.
“My other passion was engineering,” he says, “so I went on to university and did a degree in airframe structures, because at the time British Aerospace was looking for graduates. Then about halfway through my degree, they stopped taking people on as the aircraft industry was on a bit of a downward spiral. I came away from university and tried to apply for some jobs in the agricultural machinery sector. I didn’t really get anywhere, though, so I was drawn back to the farm.”
Matthew credits his father, Laurence, with allowing both him and his brother the freedom to come up with ideas and diversify, and in 1999 they did a feasibility study on setting up a brewery. “At that time there just wasn’t enough business for us to be able to make it profitable, so we knocked it on the head, but it was always there in the back of our minds. It wasn’t until about 2005-06 that we decided that it had actually got some legs.”
The family had always been interested in beer, despite the fact Laurence was “terrible” at home brewing, according to Matthew. “When we were kids, we always used to go on holiday in the UK, but the pubs were all pretty much the same – not like it is now. My mum and dad would look for different beers and write them down, and that’s where the idea came from, really. We thought there was room for it to work and we started from there.”
They wanted to keep it local and affordable, but hitting on the right branding was tricky at first. Holderness is a bit light on instantly recognisable landmarks, apart from Withernsea’s Pier Towers and the lighthouse, and Great Newsome is in the middle of flat fields nowhere near the sea. But then they hit on an idea – thanks to the farm’s spaniel, Jem, with a little help from Matthew’s wife Donna.
“The dog used to greet visitors to the farm, and it also had a habit of staring into puddles, ponds, or anything that had water in it. So, my wife suggested, why not have the dog staring into a pint glass, like the HMV dog staring into the gramophone?”
This, as well as leveraging the heritage of the fourth-generation family farm (started by Ida Mary Hodgson in 1925), proved to be the “best thing we ever did”, says Matthew, for when Covid hit, the support of local people who were familiar with the beers, as well as local suppliers with whom they’d built up good relationships, proved crucial.
Matthew’s mother Doreen was Great Newsome’s first salesperson. She ran a small catering business at the time, and would ring around potential customers in between making apple pies. She still keeps tabs on things but the team has now grown to 10, while Matthew’s son is head brewer.
Craft beer, perhaps more than most food and drink products, lives and dies on how good it is – its consumers by their very nature tend to be discerning, the sort of people who gasp in horror and spin on their heels if entering a bar that only offers mass-market bitters and gassy lagers. “We do an annual customer feedback survey,” adds Matthew, “and the number one reason people buy from us is the quality of the product. That is above anything else. So it’s key to me that any money we spend on getting our team as good as they can be, pays off in good-quality products.”
The core beers available year-round include the ever-popular Sleck Dust blonde and Pricky Back Otchan golden ale, Cold Snap lager, Jem’s Stout and Frothingham Best bitter, all of which have won numerous regional and national accolades, alongside changing seasonal tipples such as Winter Warmth. About a year ago they released the new Chrysalis range, eight beers inspired by the variety of butterflies found on the farm, which have been “really well received,” Matthew says.
Great Newsome beers can now be found all over Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and occasionally further afield as the company deals with national wholesalers that take on the beers for promotional periods. And, it turns out, the Italians have a taste for British ales. “That’s our main export market,” says Matthew. “We’ve been delivering out there for about eight years now and that’s regular business. We go out to northern Italy at least once a year to meet the customers and the guys out there who distribute our beer.”
Matthew acknowledges the “pressure from all sides” in the wake of the pandemic and the current cost-of-living crisis, but emphasises that good customer service must go hand-in-hand with great-quality products. The family keeps a close eye on the marketing, too, doing some of the more “personal” aspects such as the newsletter in-house, but working alongside Pace Communications on other essential PR needs. “It’s just getting that bit of extra help to be a bit more professional,” says Matthew. “Getting the product right is one thing, but you’ve also got to have the right sort of brand, the right image, which is what we’ve tried to do.”
To that end, they are looking at a design refresh for some of the core beers, but Matthew insists it will be evolution, rather than revolution. And as he looks to the future with the current team, efficiency is another major focus. “We’ve done loads of work on making sure that we’re not wasting anything, and have obviously kept an eye on the prices of things, such as energy use, but there’s more work to be done on that. The guys are itching to make new products, too, but that’s something I sometimes have to rein them in on!”
They also want more people to visit them, and Matthew firmly believes that the “middle of nowhere” location is not a barrier, having visited a similar small brewery in an even more remote area in the West of Scotland that was a magnet for tourists. The Great Newsome Festivale has been running since 2018 and increased in popularity with every year, and plans are afoot to expand the shop and create a small bar with a covered area where people can enjoy beer and be entertained whatever the weather.
Matthew has naturally taken more of a back seat as the team has expanded, and now spends most of his time either in the office or meeting customers. “When it comes to employing anybody for the business,” he adds, “it’s difficult to find qualified brewers around here, so it’s always been more about finding the right person who will fit in with the team. Someone who understands our ethos is more likely to get the job than somebody who comes overqualified. I’ve got four people who had never brewed beer before coming here.”
There are the family’s other businesses to keep across, too – such as Little Otchan Glamping, which was set up by Matthew’s brother Jonathan and his wife Catherine in 2008, and Holderness Logs, which the Hodgsons bought from neighbouring farmer Steve Biglin in 2018.
Does Matthew have a favourite beer? “That’s like asking who my favourite child is!” he says, but admits that Sleck Dust is his “go-to” tipple if he’s having a pub meal. “That said, some of the special butterfly ones have been really good. I give the guys in the brewery pretty much free reign to develop the recipes and keep out of the way of all that now.”
Next summer there’ll be a new lager joining the range. “We hoped to have it this summer,” says Matthew, “but we weren’t happy with the branding and the name. So that’s been postponed until next year, but the recipe is ready to go.”
To borrow an advertising slogan from a rather famous brand of stout, “Good things come to those who wait…”
