It’s finally dawned on me the irony of having a section called ‘News’ that hasn’t had anything in it since October… even glaciers move at a faster pace than that! Our first few months of trading have been an absolute whirlwind of activity and hard but brilliant work. We’ve been stocking and restocking, fine tuning the website and getting our processes right, suppling online tastings and beer and cider festivals, making up and flattening down more cardboard boxes than I can count, promo stuff, setting up the pop up shop and thankfully enjoying some blissful escapism in heading down to a number of cideries to collect yet more stock. Even if the 8 hour round trip drives are a killer! The other key jobs of building up the follower base on our socials and trying to wrangle our brand icon cat Wotsit into doing anything vaguely helpful (fat chance unless you have treats) as well as all the thousand other things involved in setting up a new business from scratch has kept us pretty busy. Fun though! 

We’ve grown the stock range to over 700 different beer and ciders now, something that still blows my mind! (Until I see the invoices and then it become pretty real…) I never thought I’d be able to start a business in such strange times like this pandemic but when the chips are down it really shows you the incredible support there is out there in the craft cider and beer community. I have been blown away by the friendship and support shown by so many people to me as I’m building things up here. All the uncertainty hasn’t helped but I took the decision to try and see it as an opportunity – even in the isolation period when my partner got Covid I was running the business in the spare room, juggled with looking after my poorly person and was hand washing more than I ever thought possible! 

As with many small businesses, the start of spring has coincided with the start of things hopefully beginning to ease and we are making plans with our friends at Beer Nouveau to add an incredible beer garden to the click and collect shop, which should keep us busy for a while! We’ll be posting updates on both our socials too, but expect us to be opening as much as possible 🙂

Also, I promise to not leave it months between blog posts next time, so watch this space for actual news about what we’re up to.

Thanks for supporting The Cat in the Glass! It means the world to us.

Until next time, keep up those purrfect pours…

Team CITG