CELEBRATING 10 YEARS OF ELUSIVE BREWING!
In many ways, that first brew right at the end of April 2016 feels like only yesterday. I remember the excitement of mashing in that first batch and the two year journey from winning the national home brewing awards in early 2014 to getting the keys to Unit 5 Marino Way and beginning our buildout in early 2016. We were lucky enough to have plenty of demand for those first few batches and I don’t think we’ve ever really caught up with it. As it happens, that first batch wasn’t quite right and had to be re-brewed. There was no way something I wasn’t happy with would leave the brewery and that’s something I’ve stood by over the years. Our customers place trust in us when they order our beer in a pub or crack open a can and we take that trust very seriously.
Andy cleaning the tank after brewing Elusive’s first beer in 2016
Our first four years saw us expand slowly, adding two more fermentation vessels including a double-sized one in 2018. By the time we reached the covid lockdown in March 2020, we’d hired an experienced full time brewer in Ricky Moysey and opened a small tap room on site. Then we started to find our sense of place - trying to make Elusive a bit less elusive to our local community! Our lovely tap room customers, locals and the fantastic home brewing community really rallied round us during those lockdowns and we had a busy web shop along with lots of local deliveries heading out in the van. On occasion too many for me to manage in a day!
That’s when Ruth Mitchell joined the team - at first volunteering her time whilst furloughed to help with those deliveries and then becoming our driving force as we emerged from lockdown. Ruth gave me the confidence to invest in expansion and take the brakes off - “Andy, we need to brew more beer. A lot more beer!”. By the time Ruth moved onto pastures new, we had replaced all our fermenters with dual purpose vessels we could easily carbonate beer in, bought a brand new canning line and more than trebled our production and revenue. We also took on a third industrial unit to build a bigger tap room and further increase production and hired Iain Scrutton, a former science teacher who has become our jack of all trades - the face of our tap room, master stock wrangler, occasional brewer and handyman who can turn a pile of reclaimed wood into anything!
Elusive Taproom, Unit 7 Marino Way, Finchampstead
Lockdown also brought us Oregon Trail. We’d first brewed it at the end of 2019 as a collaboration with our friends and wonderful customer The West Street Alehouse. When we started contract canning in the summer of 2020, we brewed it again and the first batch of 2400 cans sold out in two weeks. We’ve struggled to keep it in stock ever since. If Ruth was the driving force behind our growth, Oregon Trail was the beer that would ultimately define us as a brewery, some four years after that first brew. When I started Elusive, I never wanted it to be big. I wanted it to be good and do good. Post-covid we focused a lot more on that last part - doing good by our local community through supporting and working with some wonderful local charities.
Oregon Trail, the beer that needs no introduction, and Andy’s latest book The Modern Homebrewer
We are now a team of five - Ricky and Iain were joined by Magnus as our delivery driver and most recently Rachael as Operations Manager. We’re still small but we’re bigger than we were! We’ve recently upgraded our brew house and in 2026 will brew 30% more beer than we ever have. We are thankful to all you wonderful people who seek it out in your local or order online and incredibly grateful for all our wonderful wholesale partners and trade customers for stocking us. Here’s to the next ten years!
Join us on Saturday 30 May 12-8pm for our 10th birthday party at the Elusive tap room!
