Brewery owner tells James O'Brien of how Covid is 'crushing' his business

15 October 2020, 14:12

This is the moment a caller told LBC's James O'Brien of the enormous economic hardship his business has suffered during the Covid crisis.

John from Huddersfield, who co-owns a brewery with his brother-in-law, called into LBC on the day after the UK yesterday reported another 19,724 cases of Covid-19 and a further 137 deaths.

The exchange also took place after Boris Johnson this week introduced a new three tier lockdown system in a bid to tackle local outbreaks of coronavirus.

Speaking of the financial impact of the Covid crisis on his business, John told James O'Brien: "It has been horrendous.

"Yes, OK, we've changed from selling to pubs to selling direct to customers through our website. But that makes up nowhere near what we were doing before.

"I've got my life savings in this company, and before lockdown we were growing at 60% which was just incredible. We were on to do big things and [the Covid crisis] has just crushed us."

Later on during his conversation with James, the caller added: "The worst bit about it is we have pub landladies and landlords that ring us. They're crying on the phone. They don't know what do.

"We're trying to help them but we can't help ourselves, and there's no answer to any of it."

When asked by James what the best-case scenario for him would be going forward, John said: "Really we need the pubs to have normal opening again and obviously that's not going to happen anytime soon. But we've just got to keep changing with the times.

He added: "We won't give up and we want to be there for those pubs that can re-open on the other side.

"As hard as it is for us, we want to be there for the people who are going through hell at the moment..."