Tart & Soul
Every now and again in Vault City’s history, we take a (brief) moment to pause and reflect, and to think about the exciting times ahead. This is one of those moments.
We’re a completely independent brewery, and that means we’re in charge of our own decisions (even the stoopid ones). It also means things move pretty quickly and we wanted to take the time to catch everyone up on the latest news from the vault.
Firstly, we bought a brewery
If you follow us on social media then this shouldn’t be a surprise to you, but we very recently made things official, finalising the paperwork for our brand-new location which was more-or-less crowdfunded through a big sale in February and March this year. Curious to why we did things this way? Check out our blog for all the details. The TLDR version is that we raised well over the £250k needed with your help, and we’re working on the next steps to make the move from our Portobello site. We’ll be detailing our grand plans soon, but the move will be done in phases starting with our office and warehouse teams while we build our new production space.
Introducing some new faces
Our team just got a little bigger, with over 30 of us now between the brewery, our warehouse, office, and taprooms. We’ve recently welcomed two new faces to our sales team and thought this would be the perfect chance to get acquainted.
Meet Martin
Meet Martin Monro, our new Commercial Director, freshly onboard following some impressive stints at Northern Monk, Camden, and Rekorderlig. Martin's joining the sour side to steer our sales team and spread the word about Vault City. With a knack for innovative strategies and a rich background in the industry, he's perfectly poised to take modern sour beer to the next level.
Say hey to Ray
Ray Adam is our new Business Development Manager for Scotland, joining us from BrewDog, where he honed his skills as a Regional Sales Manager supporting the on-trade across Scotland. He’s ready to hit the ground running and bring his expertise to taprooms, bars, and bottle shops all across the country. Our Scottish trade customers will be seeing a lot more of his friendly face.
Changes at team Vault City
Now I know what you’re thinking, what happened to Joe Cruickshank? Did his homebrewing take him down a new path? Did he finally find fame after starring in so many Vault City videos on social media?
Well, we’re happy to say he’s still with us, and while the fame may come later, his role has changed a little for now. Joe has spent the last 3 years looking after a wide range of Vault City customers and distributors, getting to know their wants and needs when it comes to modern sour beer. He’ll now be taking a front seat when it comes to new product development, leading our monthly special edition releases so we can continue to push the boundaries of beer with new and exciting flavour combinations.
Like an old retired cop, Joe’s trading a wild life on the road for desk duties at the brewery. While that means our trade customers will get less face time with him outside of festivals, it does mean his expertise and ‘gotta catch ‘em all’ attitude towards best in class craft beer will be put to good use.
With a fresh qualification this January, Joe’s our new resident certified cicerone, putting that nose and palate to the test, developing recipe concepts, and helping sign off our latest releases.
What else is new?
We’re working on new releases every month as usual, with at least 6 new flavours to choose from. We are making a few tweaks in the background as to how we do things when it comes to new releases, specifically for our trade customers. We’ve started rolling out some lovely new email templates and we’ll be communicating all new releases using these mailers on a fortnightly basis with key info and details on how to order.
We’ve also introduced lower ABV releases with a price point that’s just as tasty. Our new Radler and Strawberry Margarita Gose table sour will help provide different entry points to Vault City as a brewery.
To the future…
Our new brewery will help us bring everything under one roof, and it’ll also allow us the space to really experiment with what we can do at Vault City. This means a full-scale barrel-aging programme with both imperial sours and stouts, a long-overdue foray into the world of mead (after some seriously tasty test batches last year), and other alcoholic beverages…
