no. 058 | Shiny
Credit analyst to pub owner to brewer — it’s quite the trajectory. batch no. 058’s Shiny was founded in the Derbyshire countryside in 2012 and today is one of the East Midlands’ most respected craft operations.
Pedro Menon wasn’t a brewer. He was a credit analyst at Egg Bank, and when redundancy arrived he could have gone looking for another desk job. But instead, he started searching for somewhere to build a brewery.
He found it in The Furnace Inn on Duke Street in Derby. A former Hardy Hanson’s pub it had a good name for cask beer and enough room out back. He bought it, sought planning permission for a small brewing kit in the rear garden, and got to work.
Before the Furnace kit was ready, Pedro had already been cuckoo-brewing his first Shiny beers at Nutbrook Brewery in West Hallam, learning the ropes and building his recipes. So when the first proper brew day arrived he had a pretty good idea of what he was doing. The kit, however, wasn’t quite ready. Half of it was still being installed as the brew day ran on. “By the time the brew day was finished and the installation crew had left,” Pedro recalls, “I found myself somewhat exhausted and overwhelmed, with the first beer in done and thousands of pounds worth of equipment I’d planned so long for, but still didn’t know how to use properly.” Regardless of his trepidation, Shiny’s first beer, Launchpad — a 3.9% pale ale — was born.
The name Shiny came from a long list of possibilities. “It has such positive vibes,” Pedro says, “and fitted with the business I wanted to create.” It also gave him a practical hook: shiny metallic pump clips, bright and distinctive on a bar crowded with more conventional designs. The clips became a signature and so did the beers. Shiny built its early reputation on highly hopped, untraditional cask ales such as pales and IPAs that felt genuinely modern in a region where that was still relatively rare.
Awards soon followed and so did growth. By 2016, Shiny had moved to a 5,000 sq ft site at the Old Hall Mill Business Park in Little Eaton, a quiet village just north of Derby. The new home brought a 12-barrel brewhouse with it and, crucially, the taproom Pedro had always hoped to build. Ten keg lines, four cask handpulls, over 150 bottled and canned beers, pizzas on weekend evenings. Derby CAMRA named it Country Pub of the Year in both 2024 and 2025.
Sustainability is treated as an ongoing project by Shiny, rather than a fixed endpoint. The brewery runs on 100% renewable electricity, whilst spent grain goes to a local farmer as animal feed. Meanwhile, surplus yeast heads for bio-digestion, becoming renewable natural gas. Used hops go to composting. Water consumption sits at a strong 3.77 pints per pint produced (the industry average is generally considered between 6 and 8) and this is something they continue to try to bring down.
Shiny’s slogan is ‘Making Happy People’, which came from a beer of the same name. However, it clarified something Pedro had been quietly building towards all along. Making people happy is nice. Making happy people, he reasons, goes further and becomes something more long-lasting. That instinct runs through everything at Shiny. From a pub garden in Derby to one of Derbyshire’s most quietly impressive craft breweries, the name still fits.