Interview
Success in a bottle
A London brewery is making a name for itself with new beers – while proving people with learning disabilities make great ale. Sean Kelly went to meet the team and drink to its health
Ignition is a flourishing new brewery in south London that employs a majority of people with learning disabilities on its nine-person team.
This has brought them some publicity but Nick O’Shea, who runs the company along with Will Evans, does not want this to be their unique selling point.
‘We struggle with this because, you know, should it really be news? People with learning disabilities get a job. Is that really a news story?’ he muses. ‘Are our expectations that this is impossible?’
The important thing for the brewery is that it produces really good beer – which it does.
‘We don’t compete with charitable products – we compete with the beer market. Because you’re not going to buy a charity beer. Well, you’ll buy it once, but we genuinely believe it’s about people buying a good product. Otherwise, we would basically just sell beer at Christmas.
Ignition is clearly a friendly place to work and the team all insist on first names. Tash and Chris show me around the brewery.
Tash is the qualified brewer whose skills are at the heart of the business and who oversees the whole process of brewing and directing the team members who help.
Chris enthusiastically explains how things work. He shows me the mash tun, which is almost as tall as him, and the large wooden paddle with which the mash is stirred by hand.
He and Tash explain the process and the ingredients involved in brewing beer. Chris is admirably concise about what happens next: ‘You keep it somewhere dark. When next week comes, you can drink it.’
Michaela (left) and Jill get the beer ready; top: Chris causes a stir at the mash tun
Well oiled
The brewery makes about 1,000 bottles of beer a week. They produce three beers: a pale ale they call South of the River, an India Pale Ale called Jump Start and a porter known as Well Oiled Machine.
Purely in the interests of research, I have tried all three and can happily report they are great. More to the point, my son Liam – who is a serious craft beer fan – also gave them a big thumbs up.
Nick says the original idea for the brewery came while he was volunteering at the Tuesday Night Club at Lewisham Mencap. Many people were unemployed yet were clearly employable so he decided to help. The only question was how.
‘You either say to Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s: ‘Can you take some of our guys?’ And that’s just going to go on forever … Or you take matters into your own hands.’ In the end, he says: ‘We just decided we were going to brew.’
Nick had never brewed beer before and does not even drink much of it. So, that’s two brewer stereotypes disposed of right there. However, his day job as an economist meant he could easily identify brewing as a self-starting business with the potential for decent profit margins.
He points out that brewing is labour intensive and involves a number of straightforward, learnable tasks, such as filling bottles or labelling them, which are ideal for a team learning the trade.
As an example, he says ‘the process of bottling the beer is very easy. Someone gets the bottles out, someone washes them, someone stacks them, someone fills them, someone caps them.’
Come and brew
I ask how they chose the team members. ‘We leafletted everybody at the Tuesday Club, a weekly Lewisham Mencap disco, and said ‘Do you want to come and brew?’ and, apart from one addition, the team we have now are those who said yes. So, they picked us.’
The brewery has expanded and, after a crowdfunding campaign, opened the Taproom bar, where they sell beer directly to the public.
For the crowdfunding, Nick and Will made a short film on a mobile phone. They put it online on 3 May and, a month later, had raised £24,000. Quite a bit of that came in the form of presales; this involved people signing up to buy, for example, a three-month supply of beer. In effect, this part of crowdfunding is a loan they have had to service and repay.
This response showed that the demand was there. “The public just said ‘this is a great idea’,” says Nick.
Ignition Brewery is a company limited by guarantee; there are no shares or ownership. In the hopefully unlikely event of the brewery closing, any assets would go to Lewisham Mencap.
I sit with the team as they put labels onto bottles by hand. It is a sociable job and people chat and laugh as they work. The atmosphere is good and it is easy to see everyone is pulling in the same direction and wanting the brewery to be a success.
Putting the label onto the front of the bottle is relatively easy to get right (it has to be put on straight), but the back label has to match up neatly behind the front one, which is a bit more tricky and takes more care.
Nick lines up the bottle labels – a sociable job
I chat with Michaela as she works. She tells me she has been involved with the brewery since it started in 2016. Chris joins us and is keen to try out the role of interviewer. He asks her how she is getting on in her job. ‘I am doing fantastically well,’ she tells him. ‘I agree,’ says Chris.
Michaela tells some of the brewery’s history. For two years, Ignition had only the back room for brewing but, in the past six months, it has been able to use a large front room, which has become the Taproom bar. As a result, they are now putting beer into kegs (barrels for draught beer) as well as bottles.
l-r: front row: Jill, Tash, Nick (founder) and Chris; back row: Nick, Michaela, Will, John
The Taproom is open several evenings a week so the brewery employs a bar supervisor, Sarah, who oversees work in the bar area. Team members take orders, serve the pints and operate a till which has diagrams to show each beer. The bar is cash free so staff do not have to count money and calculate the correct change.
‘It is such a wonderful place to be working,’ Michaela says. She tells me about a previous job which sadly ended in redundancy. She is all too aware that the vast majority of people with learning disabilities are unemployed.
‘If it hadn’t been for Nick who started the brewery, I’d probably have been in the dark somewhere, because it’s never easy for people with learning disabilities to get jobs. All you need is someone who wants to make it possible for people with learning disabilities,’ she reflects.
Out on the high street
The Taproom, which fronts Sydenham High Street, is a visible sign of the brewery so is great for publicity. It closes around 10pm, so people often drop in to have a beer or two on their way out to somewhere else.
The room, rented from the council, has other uses during the day, such as for yoga, so it has to be cleaned and the bar has to be put up and dismantled every evening. It sounds like a lot of work.
‘It’s tiring, yeah,’ says Nick. ‘The first few weeks, we all felt we’d been run over by a bus. We’d wake up the next morning and think: ‘I can’t do that again’. ‘Has it got any easier?’ ‘Yes, because we all know what we’re doing now.’
Staff are paid the London living wage (considerably better than the statutory national living wage). A couple of team members are on training programmes and Nick and Will are still volunteers. They have set themselves a target that, as turnover increases, they too will be paid the London living wage.
Sales have been very good. ‘The future is looking bright,’ says Nick with a smile.
Super-reliable workers
Clearly one of the secrets of success is the team itself. Nick says the team members are ‘super reliable’. He adds that he has worked in all kinds of teams but the great thing about this one is that ‘everyone does what they say they will do’.
He wants to make it clear that employing people with learning disabilities has not been hard at all: ‘I think we’ve shown what people can do without very much effort. Every single challenge we have set our team, they have risen to. The hard bit has been the administration that comes with a brewery. There’s a lot of paperwork; there are a lot of rules you have to follow. But the team … it’s easy.’
Some people have asked when team members move on but it is a proper job and Nick seems a bit scandalised by the thought of poaching: ‘Would you say that to any other successful company? No you wouldn’t.’
I ask him if he can sum up what in particular he feels people with learning disabilities contribute. ‘They make great beer,’ he says, smiling. Well, I’ll drink to that.
Team members’ forenames have been used by request of the brewery
Sean Kelly was chief executive of the Elfrida Society from 2001 to 2012 and is now a freelance writer and photographer Sean Kelly/www.seankellyphotos.com
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