On the road... and on the phone.

The plan seems to be coming together. We're managing to time all our beers so that we can get them out of the fermenters in 6 days - this means that we can brew twice a week, do the cask washing, racking, selling and cleaning - and have time to actually deliver the stuff.
How much easier it would be if (as others might say) "three days to ferment, three days to condition and on the seventh day it's ready'. What we make here is genuinely cask-conditioned beer (real-ale if you will). We know that many of our customers don't want our beer hanging about in their cellars for a week or two before they can start selling it - this means that we have to hold the casks in our store for at least a week after racking (longer for our stronger beers). But that's fine by us - we're not pretending to make real ale. This is the real thing.

Anyway, time & yeast permiting, you'll be able to see the Stringers beat-up red transit belting about the lake district full of lovely beer.

Funny thing happened to our sales team (n=1). While enquiring of the bar manager of a lakeland hotel if they'd be interested in trying some of our beer, we were informed that there were now too many breweries and that, no, they would stick to the ones they knew already. I've been sniggering (at odd intervals) about this all day. I shouldn't laugh - it's serious really. But I'm tickled by the idea of someone saying that (a) his customers have all the choice they need, thank you very much, and that (b) he has enough suppliers competing for his employers custom.

Truly, as Eldridge Cleaver may have said: if you're not part of the solution - you're part of the problem.