Around a decade ago I took the long 23 + hour flight to Perth, Australia to catch up with my family that emigrated there back in the 1980’s. Having hired a convertible car that at the time was considered an unusual car to have due to the climate, I explored a relatively small amount of Western Australia. Perth itself is considered the most isolated city in the world and at the time I visited, it wasn’t heavily populated either. That’s not changed much now with less than 2 million people living there in 2018.
One of the places I visited was about an hours drive outside Perth to a very empty town called Fremantle, that at the time had less than 10,000 people living in it. Traveling with my cousin Nick on a hot day, we walked down a quiet side road looking for somewhere to get a drink. We stumbled across the ‘Little Creatures Brewery’ and that’s when I discovered my favorite Pale Ale. Despite my reputation for having a beer, I don’t really drink that much, more quality over quantity and this beer was most certainly a quality brew. Getting back to London I was clearly going to miss it and decided to find some way of getting it at home and remember having to pay through the nose to have a case of 24 bottles shipped over. In recent times supermarket chain Waitrose finally began selling the beer and for a reasonable price too.
Sometimes I was lucky to find a pub that sold it and would then feel obliged to share a fairly camp picture with Nick back in Australia.
Now things have reached a whole new level with Little Creatures opening a brewery in London’s Kings Cross area and naturally I had to pay them a visit.
It’s safe to say that lately we’ve had some Australian type weather, with a fairly intense heatwave. Along with visiting the brewery on a Friday night, it was always going to be busy experience. However, regardless of how busy it was, I was really impressed with the level customer engagement from the team of servers and the detailed knowledge they had of the brewing process and of course how each of the now local brews tasted. I was even offered a selection of tasters to explore my next choice.
The servers really knew their product and the history of the brand. I was particularly fascinated to learn that when the owner first moved from the UK to Australia he wanted to make his own cask Ale like he had been drinking back in the UK. However, warm beer in that climate was never going to work. So he created a beer using hops that were and still are imported from the UK. Doing this he created a beer that has a more intense and distinctive flavour.
I got chatting to a fantastic, customer focused manager called Madeleine whom I bored with the story above. She could tell I was a fan of the brand and she made my night by giving me a bag of goodies that included a Little Creatures Baseball cap, T-shirt, Serving tray and a collectable metal sign. I have to say, that was very unexpected and very welcome.
It’s rare to find great customer service, product knowledge and a great product all in one place. I’ve often found that that you either get one or two of the three. On those rare occasions when all the boxes are ticked, it’s worth writing about it and singing their praises as I have now. Hopefully you’ll get to pay them a visit some time soon and get the Little Creatures experience yourself.
Cheers!
