Beer is Heavy

Beer is heavy. Annoyingly so. Running a brewery has all sorts of unique challenges, but one of the most underappreciated is that of transporting all the beer to our much beloved customers. At Fell, most of this ordeal revolves around putting beer into vans and driving it to where it needs to go. Sounds straightforward enough. Sadly, the reality is far less so.

You see, in a typical summer week we have more than 10 tonnes of beer to get to a whole host of different places. What’s more, as much as we love it, Cumbria’s geography poses its own set of challenges and our customers have all sorts of interesting requirements for receiving deliveries. I think it’s probably fair to say that while we are indisputably a brewery, we are also very much a logistics company.

When we received the results of our carbon footprint, we knew that doing something about our diesel vans would be on the agenda. We also knew it would be one of the most challenging things to implement. The market for electric cars is now flourishing and completely transforming the automotive sector. With respect to electric vans, it’s fair to say that things are far less developed. Light commercial vehicles have a whole different set of challenges and, at Fell, we demand a hell of a lot from our vans, due to the nature of our cargo. We also need them to go a long way, with delivery routes often exceeding 200 miles. Heavy loads, steep hills and cold temperatures are a brilliant destroyer of battery range.

Despite all this, we took the plunge a few months ago and I am happy to report that our latest member of the team, a Maxus eDeliver 9, is beginning to find their feet. All the predictable niggles were encountered to begin with, and there are some unavoidable constraints that we’re learning to cope with. That said, I consider the roll out to have got off to a good start. With anything as fundamental as this to our business, change is difficult to manage and never easy.

The new electric van will be covering our Cumbria and North Lancs deliveries to begin with, due to some dull and complex legalities. That said, that’s over half the beer that needs shifting on a typical week. In our 2028 decarbonisation plan, we set ourselves the goal of reducing our emissions from distribution by 40%. It’s too early to say yet how far this single change will get us, but it should be a chunk of the way.

As for reductions beyond this, as ever, things become more complicated. We’d need to see more technological advancement and infrastructure come through into light industrial vehicles before we convert the whole fleet to EV. Getting all the beer where it needs to go with just electric vans is too scary right now. Another option is to replace diesel with HVO (biodiesel). I didn’t think this would be viable but our maltsters, Simpson’s, have switched over their entire fleet. There is an interesting debate to be had around the role of biofuels in years to come. Perhaps for another blog.

As ever though, we will stick to being up front, transparent and clear about what we have done and plan to do in the future. It’s been great to see the new EV van out and about delivering beer. Hopefully this is just the beginning.

Cheers, Tim