2024: A Year of Pints and Progress! 🍻
Hello! We hope you have a fantastic Christmas and are ready to raise a glass to the New Year. Welcome to our 2024 Year in Review! It's always good to take a moment and reflect on the past year and look forward to the next.
2024 has been another record-breaking year for us here at Bullhouse, and we couldn't have done it without our amazing staff and loyal customers. Thank you! 🙏 Your support means the world to us and it's been an amazing few years since we managed to get Bullhouse East open. We've been working hard all year to make sure every sip of Bullhouse beer is top-notch, whether you're enjoying it in a pub, at home, or at Bullhouse East.
It's a tough time out there for everyone, especially small businesses. Here at Bullhouse, we're all about community. We're a gathering place, a hub for good times and great beer. And that's something worth fighting for.
We've been lucky to open Bullhouse East and also to have a great network of distributors to share our beer with a wider audience across the UK, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands. 🌍 But we're still rooted in Belfast, and we're passionate about making our local community even better.
We're also proud to have played our part in creating the newly formed trade body for indie brewers in Northern Ireland, with SIBA creating a new region for Northern Ireland in 2024. Working collectively, we can make a real difference in the industry and we're currently working on big plans for 2025. 🤝
Looking ahead to 2025, we'll continue to champion a thriving hospitality industry and lobby for positive change. We believe in the power of pubs and breweries to bring people together, and we're excited to see what the future holds with the pending publication of the independent review into NI's licensing system.
Production highlights:
- Sales: Up 15% 📈
- Rolling Papers, Suds, and Road Trippin': Our top sellers (collectively over 50% of our volume) 🏆
- Total beer sold: 2667HL, or 469,542 pints! That's 1286 pints a day, or 53 pints an hour! You folk are thirsty! 🤯
- Bullhouse East: Serving up 32% of our beer 📍
- Rest of NI: Enjoying 15% of our beer 🍻
- Beyond NI: 53% of our beer is spreading the Bullhouse love far and wide 🌎
Some other highlights from the year include:
- Collabs with Modest Beer, Lacada Brewery, Brewser, Beer Hut Brewing, The Woodworkers, Bailies Coffee Roasters, The Errigle Inn & Rascals.
- A total of 28 beers brewed across the year.
- 2 x new 35HL Fermenters installed.
- Installation of our hopper and auger for a bit of help mashing in those 750kg grists.
- Installation of a bigger water storage tank at Bullhouse East in anticipation of Bullapalooza and the busy weekends.
- The launch of Bullhouse Unplugged hosted by our very own Danny.
- The launch of our monthly charity quiz, this year in partnership with Age NI.
- Biggest Bullapalooza yet, on the only weekend of good weather all summer!
- The establishment of SIBA’s Northern Ireland region to continue to lobby for licensing reform.
- Not one, not two but three appearances on BBC Saturday Kitchen Live, featuring Suds, Brick and El Capitan.
- Web shop sales up 88% as a result.
Award Wins 🏆
The big highlights for us this year were winning the Community Engagement Award at the SIBA Business Awards at BeerX in March for Bullapalooza and then winning Best Drinks Producer in the UK at the 2024 BBC Food and Farming Awards.
Both of these awards are testament to the hard work of our team but also would not be possible without our hugely supportive customers and community, so thank you. In 2025 we’re going to continue to do what we do best, quietly trying to produce the best beer we can produce and bringing people together through the power of great tasting beer. A big thank you as well to David and the team at Viti Pizzeria for serving up the best pizzas in Belfast all year.
Here's some highlight pics of the year to enjoy while sipping on a tasty Rolling Papers.
