Can you do it for The Goodness

The Goodness Brewing Company

We are The Goodness Brewing Company, an award-winning microbrewery set up by a group of friends in Wood Green, North London. Covid-19 has hit us hard, 90% of our sales used to be to pubs and in our taproom but now we need to be able to sell direct to you. To do this we want to be able to can our beer right here in the brewery. We’re raising £50k to buy a canning machine so we can continue to get our fresh delicious beer straight into your hands.

Our Story

The Goodness was founded by Damien, Joe, Mike, Oliver and Zack, five friends who have been sharing beer and good times with the people of Wood Green since 2018. The Goodness has always been about bringing people together. We grew out of a community hop project that we set up for local people to grow hops and make an annual harvest beer together. We strive to make the highest quality, flavourful and easy drinking beers for everyone to enjoy. Community sits at the core of what we do and so it was very important to us that we create a fantastic, welcoming and inclusive place for you to come and share good times with your friends and family. We feel that our taproom and event space became just that, somewhere anyone feels welcome, not only those as fanatical about beer as we are. In the short year we had our doors open we put on a number of great events, bringing a handful of global acts to Wood Green and even more importantly, providing a platform for local artists and musicians to showcase their talent in public, many of whom hadn’t had opportunities to do so before. We’ve deeply miss this part of our lives and can’t wait to have you all back sharing good times with us again. 

Wood Green

We spent almost two years planning our brewery and there was never any doubt where we wanted it to be. We made Wood Green our home because it where most of us live and it’s a place we all love. We share our space with many other local artists and small business and love being part of this community.

We’re right on the doorstep of Alexandra Palace, which we think has the best view in London but is more well known as a venue for massive music events and trade shows. It’s a short walk from our taproom to Alexandra Palace, making us a great spot to stop by for a drink and bite to eat before or after a show.

Covid-19

We opened the doors to our taproom in May 2019 and were just gearing up to celebrate our first birthday when the world changed and we all had to go into Lockdown. At that point almost all our sales were either to pubs or in our taproom. This literally stopped overnight. Unfortunately, we weren’t eligible for the £25K hospitality grant that helped so many other businesses survive through lockdown, so we needed to find another option fast. If we were going to survive we needed to get our beer into cans very quickly and start a delivery service.

We were blown away by the support we got from the community around us. So many of you told us how much you valued what we’d brought to the area and wanted to help us pull through. With this support we were able to reopen our Covid-safe Taproom in July. We created a safe, welcoming environment and launched a great new table service app to help you feel comfortable about visiting us again. Our staff were just great at adapting to this new world and these few months the taproom was open over the summer helped to keep us going. But now as we move through this second lockdown the uncertainty of whether we should be planning to supply pubs or packaging cans for delivery is an incredibly hard calculation for us, which is completely compounded by not having a canning machine.  

Covid-19 has been tough on the brewing industry and hospitality sector. The changing safety restrictions have made operating and especially planning near impossible. The breweries whose business model focussed more on bottle shops or even supermarkets were certainly better placed to weather the storm.  

How a canning machine will help us

Canning is for us the ideal small package for beer, as it provides freshness of flavour, stability of product, ease of transport and storage. Its also a great canvas for incredible artwork from local talent. We currently rely on mobile canning companies to come to the brewery and fill cans for us. This service has helped us get our beer into cans so we can continue to deliver to you but it has a number of drawbacks.

• First of all we have to book a canning slot far in advance of when we actually need it. This makes it difficult for us to plan for even small changes and creates a production pinch point that isn’t always best for ensuring our beer is at the optimal condition for going into cans.
• The mobile companies also have a minimum volume which is much higher than we would like. This adds cost but more importantly it forces us to package more beer than we would like to in one go. Our hop forward beers are best drunk as fresh as possible so we’d much rather package them in smaller quantities and more often. This is better for you as a consumer and for our business, as we sometimes have to pour beer down the drain because it’s faded over time and no longer meets the quality standards we expect.
• Finally, the cost of third-party canning makes it extremely difficult for us to package every beer we want to. 40% of the production cost of a can of our beer is getting it filled. That’s including the ingredients, labels, the can itself and even the brewers time to make the beer- almost half of our cost is having someone else come in to put that beer in the can for us! This means that even if we were able to book a slot with a mobile company anytime we wanted, there’s no way we’d have the cash to do it.

Having our own canning machine will enable us to do the following: 

• Bring a greater variety of fresher beers to the small pack market
• Safeguard us against disruption to the draught market
• Help us pivot the business as circumstances change so you can enjoy Goodness beers regardless of whether pubs are open or closed and most importantly while we’re unable to have visitors in our Taproom
• Bring down the price of our small pack beers, due to savings made from packaging in house
• Split our packaging across draught and small pack according to demand for a particular style
• Employ a local person to come and operate the machine for us
• Open up the use of the canning line to other breweries to rent for the day. This will make sure the machine is well used and is helping other local breweries out.
• Enable our business to become more sustainable so that we can continue to share good times with you for many years to come

What we’re fundraising for 

We’re crowdfunding for a canning machine that will not only help us survive the pandemic but also enable us to get more high-quality fresh beer to you faster and cheaper.

We've decided to go with a machine from Micro-Can who are the leading UK manufacturer of small scale canning lines. Priding themselves on the ability to supply a full turnkey package with no compromise on quality. We chose Micro-Can as they are a fellow independent British business.

We need to raise £50k to buy the machine.

What we’re offering you

We've put together a pay it forward package full of great offers, including; beer, merchandise, double your money in the taproom, access to fresh can releases, even make your own beer with us.

Thanks for your support

The Goodness Family