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A home-brewing couple who turned their hobby into a £5 million enterprise say beer has brought them “even closer together”.
Luci and Mike Clayton-Jones, from Caversham in Berkshire, began their brewing journey in 2015, crafting a custom “Ginger Beered” brew as wedding favours for their guests.
The enthusiastic response sparked a business idea, and Double-Barrelled Brewery was born.
Initially operating out of their garage, the couple quickly outgrew their humble beginnings. By 2018, they had moved into a warehouse, scaling up production to meet growing demand.
Today, Double-Barrelled Brewery produces up to 1.3 million pints annually and boasts partnerships with major retailers such as Waitrose, John Lewis, and Tesco.
Their range includes classic brews alongside more experimental flavours, like rhubarb and custard and an espresso martini-inspired imperial stout.
With their business mantra being “continuous improvement”, the couple, who are working with Three Business, want to carry on trying new things and hope to be “one of the big family brewers in the UK down the line”.
Luci told PA Real Life: “I can’t see us running a business together with anything else.
“The beer industry is amazing, it’s full of lovely people who are hugely passionate about what they do, and we’re really lucky in that sense that, yes, it was beer that brought us even closer together.”
Luci and Mike first met at Lancaster University in 2006.
Mike, who worked in supply chain consultancy and logistics management at the time, proposed to Luci, who worked in food and drink marketing, in Paris, and the couple got married in 2015.
They discussed working together during their honeymoon in the Seychelles, and registered their business on Companies House as soon as they got back, naming it after their double-barrelled surname.
They converted their garage into an official HMRC-registered production room and travelled the world for research in 2016, visiting breweries and bars across the world in Japan, Australia, the USA and Canada.
After purchasing a small commercial kit, they started producing small batches of beer — 100 litres at a time — from their garage, focusing on a distinct range of kettle sours and imperial stouts.
Luci said: “The biggest thing we learned from home-brewing is, it’s so hard to make good home-brews on that basic set-up.
“You’re in buckets and you move it from your fridge to your airing cupboard to control the temperature, which, the more you get into the brewing science of it, you realise how critical it is to get right.”
In February 2018, they launched their beers at the BrewLDN festival, but they made a “conscious decision” not to bring any pale ales or IPAs.
They took an imperial stout and a raspberry and beetroot sour beer, and they believe this helped them stand out among the competition.
“We were in a room with 200 breweries, no-one had heard of us, and we had Waitrose’s head of beer and wine come over to our stand because she’d been dragged by her colleagues to try our beer,” Luci said.
“This was such a key part of our business because it took us from a dream to, ‘Hold on, we’ve got something here, let’s do it’.”
They moved from their garage in Caversham to a 6,400sqft warehouse in Reading, Berkshire, with a new 3,000-litre brewhouse.
This meant they could now produce 3,000 litres of beer at a time, and this is where they created their best-seller pale ale called Parka and opened their on-site taproom.
In 2019, Luci and Mike hired their first employee and won Pride Of Reading’s Entrepreneur of the Year award, and in 2020, they opened their online shop.
Their beers are now sold in pubs and shops across the UK and in retailers like Waitrose, John Lewis and Tesco.
Luci said: “I think one of the greatest things about running your own brewery is being in a pub, hearing someone order your beer that you don’t know, and them drinking it and enjoying it.
“There’s no better feeling than that.”
Ahead of Valentine’s Day, new research from Three Business shows nearly nine in 10 Britons think their romantic partner plays a vital role in their career success, with 50 per cent open to starting a business together.
Luci and Mike said “there’s pride in everything” they do and, although they find it difficult to switch off, they love working together.
Mike said: “It has been our life for the last six to eight years, so it’s hard to picture what it would be like differently now.
“With traditional couples, you wake up, go your separate ways to work, have a couple hours in the evening together, then go to bed and that cycle repeats, and you don’t actually see very much of each other.
“We’re the opposite. We see each other all the time and we absolutely love that.”
