no. 039 | Hand
batch no. 039’s brewery have been so brilliantly generous with their time and the telling of their story, we haven’t the desire nor the need to intervene. Here they are in co-founder Clark Left's own words, start to finish.
"Hand Brew Co was founded in 2016 by JenniferLeft and me, Clark Left, a year after we bought the iconic tiny Brighton brewpub, The Hand in Hand (aka ‘the Hand’). It’s where it all started for us and where we got our name.
The Hand has been serving beer for over 150 years and brewing it under a number of names since 1989 when the legendary Bev Robbins took the roof off and lowered a tower brewery into it.
We knew the Hand well. Jen had worked there on and off for a few years in-between touring with her band, which is how Jen and I met - on the local music scene. Jen played bass and sang in a band called Gloria Cycles, before creating solo work as Jennifer Left like Hushabye, and I created Flash Pan Hunter and Diner. Jen studied textiles and Clark studied digital media at university, and were keen to make a go at some kind of creative endeavour whilst holding down their day jobs - Jen in events and me in marketing. Needless to say, ending up owning pubs and a brewery wasn’t a plan until it happened.
It happened by chance, really. We were talking to the then-manager of the Hand about how the process of buying our first house was going (badly) and he joked “why don’t you just buy the Hand instead?” We didn’t know it was for sale until that moment and had never spoken about buying a pub. Later we sat on the beach and discussed it. The more we spoke about it, the more we liked the idea, and having the brewery inside it made the whole thing doubly exciting.
The Hand is really tiny - like a living room - so I kept my marketing job, leaving the day-to-day running of the pub to Jen. I was briefly tempted to leave my job and learn how to brew. I got a few chapters into a book about brewing before realising that I simply don’t have the brain for that sort of science. Jen was really interested in learning the brewing side of the business too, but we made the decision to find someone who knew what they were doing and could join us in this adventure.
So the hunt was on for a brewer. We met brewer, Jack Tavare, through Gary Sillence, who started Brighton Bier in the Hand’s tower brewery whilst keeping late Bev Robbins’ Kemptown Brewery going. Jack was brewing on a small kit at the micropub, the Watchmakers Arms in Hove and was keen to work on something bigger. The Hand kit was bigger and madder, but not too big - 800 litres. It all came together quickly and Jack joined the company as Director within a year.
Side-note: Jack was also a musician having got his grade eight on trumpet, and we had actually met in a previous life. Jack worked in a bar that Jen and I used to drink at years earlier. So it was obviously meant to be!
Jack fixed-up and modernised the tower brewery, which included removing the open top fermentation vessels (similar to Yorkshire Squares), rebuilding the fermentation room in the cellar and installing three new fermentation vats (which had to go through the floor), and installing chilling system that runs through the entire building.
Jack created our first beers - Shaka being the very first - initially just for the pub, but soon, for more and more local pubs and bars. Before long, we were also cuckoo brewing on other local kits, bringing up the volume to meet the demand.
So that was the first four years 2016-2019.
In 2020 when the pandemic hit, Jen was coming up with clever ways to keep the pub alive and the staff paid, and Jack built the new production site in Worthing - a seaside town a short drive West from Brighton.
The production site is a high quality, steam heated brewery in an old 6000 sq ft printing press. The brew kit has 50,000 litres of fermentation capacity across 15 tanks, and the automated canning line and large 5°C cold store means they can produce, package and store their beer in the best possible conditions.
As the production site was getting up and running, we thought this was a great opportunity to reset and rebrand. This is when we consider ourselves really starting, when we grew into the brewery we wanted to be".
And it's clear that incorporating art into your beers and can designs is important to you both. Where does this spring from?
CL: "We love to bring people together and work together. It’s what we’ve always done. When I was trying to design the Hand logo when we bought the pub back in 2015, he drew hundreds of options, but couldn’t come close to a piece of art that Jen had found online. It was a sketch of a hand that used negative space to create a hand in a hand. Perfect for our pub. So we contacted the artist and asked if we could licence it. The artist was Joni Marriott from Germany. We then asked a local artist called Mel Evens to paint Joni’s hand in gold for our pub sign.
As part of our rebrand back in 2020, we wanted to showcase local artists. Initially, we planned to work with a new artist every year, but once we saw HelloMarine’s art on our can labels and bar badges, we fell in love. Her approach was a perfect match for us - creating bold colourful work with positive energy. Marine is a French artist that has lived in Brighton for many years, working out of her studio in the Phoenix Art Space.
Marine is now our Artist in Residence and she works with us on our core range, specials, collabs and seasonals. We love them all, but a couple of our recent favourites are for Dishoom’s Permit Room collab lagers Peach (last year) and Lime & Sea Salt (this year).
Being art, music and theatre lovers, we were keen to pursue ways to work with more artists, so we created the Art You Can Drink project. This is an annual collaboration with an artist in a different field, creating long-term partnerships where a percentage of the profits goes to a charity close to the artists’ hearts. The idea is to create a line-up of an artist, musician, writer, comedian, poet, chef, actor etc.
The first collaboration was with superstar conceptual artist David Shrigley. His favourite drink was Shaka so we added some grapefruit and Toadlicker was born. David came up with the name, created the artwork and an awesome animation we use for the advert.
The second Art You Can Drink collab was with chef, recipe writer and hot honey hero, Ben Lippett (because, you know, food is art!). For this, Ben worked with the brew team on a Vienna Lager recipe, which Ben named Wiener Dawg. Ben’s longtime collaborator Sophie Winder created the artwork.
We’re currently working on our third collaboration, which we’re excited to announce soon.
Art is hugely important to us. We love the saying “Art is the thing nobody asked you to do, but you did it anyway”. It’s something that is both deeply meaningful to the creator and can resonate with an audience in unexpected ways. Music is the soundtrack to our lives and art is everywhere. We surround ourselves with it and are lucky to know some incredible artists in many fields.
We have a space in one of our pubs (the Toad in the Hole) in Worthing, where we’ve created a white wall gallery. Initially it was for a one-off open exhibition for artists of all calibres - something our team have always wanted to do - but we didn’t take it down; it stayed for a few months and a lot of the art was sold. It was so successful that we’ve just finished hanging the second exhibition for a Worthing-wide winter festival called Darkfest. Sixty six pieces were hung on the walls and the opening night private viewing was visited by around 150 people. The night included entertainment from Mythago, the border morris dancers and beer poking, where you stick a hot poker into our award-winning Sticke Bier, Sparren".
You've chosen your home on the UK's South coast, in Brighton. What is it that drew you there?
CL: "Our brewery started in our brewpub, the Hand in Hand, in Brighton. We love Brighton, it’s nestled in-between the beach and the countryside, it has a rich history of art, theatre and music, two excellent universities, quick connections to London and the airport, and now the food and drink scene is booming. The brewing scene here and in the surrounding area is great to be part of and there are so many excellent pubs and bars celebrating craft beer (or should we call it indie beer now?).
We chose Worthing for our production site as, at the time, we sold about 50% of our beer there. It has some excellent pubs and micropubs and we opened our second pub there, which also serves our entire range.
And how many people are on the journey with you at Hand?
We have a team of four brewers and a delivery driver working across both sites on our range and contract brews, led by Head Brewer, Kate Hyde. Kate has just been nominated and made the short list for brewer of the year by the British Guild of Beer Writers, which we’re hugely proud of.
Kate is moving into a new role of Product Director in the new year, where she’ll continue working with the brew team on managing our portfolio and building a sales team, but also working more closely with Brand and Marketing Director, Clark.
Jen is Experience and Events Director, running our venues and events, and Jack looks after Production and Finance.
So, short answer for the brewery, there are eight staff. However, our wider team, which includes our venues, is 21".
When it comes to your beers and approach to brewing, how would you describe your ethos?
CL: "We started the brewery in in a pub and made the decision to create a full line-up of our own beers for the bar. This meant we needed one of every style you’d typically see on a bar in keg and cask, and for them to be sessionable. Our core range couldn’t be wild or divisive; we needed people to love them enough to keep coming back. This was our guiding principle for our core range: high quality, consistent, sessionable beers for every palate.
We wanted to create a completely vegan-friendly core range with gluten free options. We have five core range beers, three Art You Can Drink beers and we create about ten specials a year, so there’s always something interesting on the bar and something exciting for the brewers to do.
There’s a real connection you feel when you brew in the building that the customers are sitting in. The brewers will be walking up and down the stairs on brew days meeting and talking to the customers. The feedback we get is quick, but just as importantly, the buzz of seeing the community enjoying the beer makes the stairs less painful.
The quality and consistency thing sounds obvious and easy to say - who wouldn’t want high quality and consistent beers! You can’t keep customers or grow without that being an important part of your approach and ethos. It’s something we don’t skimp on though. Jack has built a brewery that holds this at its core. We recently got SALSA accreditation too.
Our goal is also to get closer to our environmental goals. We have 125 solar panels on the roof meaning a lot of our beer is made with energy from the sun. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re on that journey. We made a pilsner-style lager called 795 as a project beer to see if we could create this style with ingredients sourced closer to home. We reduced the miles by using mainly English ingredients by 80% bringing the distance travelled to 795 miles. Although this was a project beer, it was so successful, we brought it into our core range".
It sounds like you've had an incredible journey to-date, but it can't have been without its challenges. What would say is the biggest hurdle you face today?
CL: "Rising costs are always a problem and the energy crisis was a huge challenge for our brewery and pubs. Seeing the price of a pint go up and up is hard on everyone, but when added to the changes in drinking habits and younger generations drinking less, it makes for a perfect storm.
We’re finding that customers still love the social aspect of pubs and bars, but we’re starting to see a new trend in people either drinking lower ABVs or alternating between their favourite pint and alcohol free beers. It’s interesting to see and it’s something we need to pay close attention to, so we’ll be making some nolos [no-to-low-alcohol beers] very soon, which is an exciting challenge to have".
And how about your biggest opportunity?
CL: "Our biggest opportunity is almost certainly Kate moving roles and building a sales team. We’ve done everything so far without a permanent sales presence - mostly inbound sales, word of mouth and branding - so to have someone of Kate’s knowledge and experience leading that is going to change everything for us.
We’ll be expanding our reach in the South East and visiting a lot of UK cities, but we’re also looking forward to getting into Europe next year with our Art You Can Drink collabs. One of our opportunities is with David Shrigley’s Grapefruit Pale Ale Toadlicker. David has a shop in Copenhagen, which will stock the beer, but he also has a huge following globally so we hope to sell a lot of Toadlicker outside of the UK to consumers".
Let's finish up on Hand's immoveable principles. What are your non-negotiables when putting beer out into the world?
CL: "Top of the list: we don’t do anything outside of our core values (CASCADE - champions and sponsors of the community, arts, the drinker and the environment). These guide us on every decision we make, including the ingredients we buy, who we sell to, where we sell, how we work, and who we work with.
Secondly: every part of the process is important to us. We sweat the small stuff. It’s really useful having Jen and Jack working together - Jen running the pubs and Jack running the production. It means that the brewers can give advice to the bar staff on storing and serving beer, and vice-versa; Jen can give feedback to the brew team about how the beer is going down. So we have great insight into what makes a great beer experience for our customers - from ingredients, to storage, to how the glassware is cleaned and kept. There’s great trust and respect across the team when it comes to our products. So we don’t cut corners, we listen to each other and act.
Thirdly: we’re fiercely independent. We don’t have external shareholders and we don’t have a plan to go in that direction".
An addendum: since we spoke with Clark, Hand's Head Brewer Kate Hyde has been shortlisted for The British Guild of Beer Writers' Brewer of the Year. We wish her the best of luck!