The 30 year journey
Posted by Pete Arguile on
From humble beginnings… is an oft-used phrase, but accurate in this case: Liquid Solutions was founded 30 years ago as a one-man-band with headquarters in a rusty caravan parked in a neighbour’s field. The small pack craft beer ‘revolution’ was in its infancy in 1996, so the Grand Idea was to offer a mobile bottling service so breweries had product to test market without investing in equipment or transporting their beer to the small number of contract bottlers available at the time. Sales of the demo-ed equipment would surely follow once producers had confidence their bottled best bitter could sell…
So, day job as winemaker/brewery was jacked in, life savings were splurged on sundry items of bottling kit, bundled into the back of a home-made trailer and the journey began. Or to be more precise, hundreds of journeys, clocking up 30,000 miles per year and many more 5-to-9 working days then the 9-to-5 variety.
With a background as part technologist, part microbiologist, the founder promoted hygienic methods, using a portable steam boiler for sanitising equipment, sterile bottle rinsing, and membrane filtration for the product. Attention to detail and focus on customer needs was, and still is, the company philosophy. Problem was, doing a good job at a fair price meant customers kept booking more bottling sessions and postponing equipment purchase.
Sensing that physical and mental burn-out was only a matter of time, the mobile bottling service was gradually wound down and the company moved towards sales of equipment via partnerships formed with UK and European manufacturers, while also running a brewery in-house and contract bottling service. Still many 5 to 9 days, but more air miles than motorway…. ‘Headquarters’ developed to a spare room in the house plus a garage, then to a portacabin and farm barn.
Nowadays, with the vast increase in small pack sales of craft beer and many other liquids, we focus on sales of equipment and consumables both UK made and imported from across the globe, holding large stocks of bottling and filtration equipment plus sundries like hoses, pumps, stainless fittings, filter cartridges and spare parts.
The ‘hard yards’ put in on the mobile bottling and production lines have proved invaluable experience as we can see things from a producer’s perspective, but it’s great to have more 9-to-5 type working hours, which our team of six now spend in a fairly comfortable and spacious industrial unit: happy days!