Say Hello to Our Brand New Sponsors — Loughran Brewers Select

After four long years of support, it was tough to say goodbye to our friends at Hop Burns and Black, who sponsored Pellicle from the day we launched in 2019. Since then we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to secure a new sponsor—one that understands what we’re trying to achieve with our magazine and podcast and supports the future aims of our publication.

We’re very pleased to be able to tell you that we’ve secured an initial two-year sponsorship deal with Loughran Brewers Select (who trade as Loughran Brewing Stores in the Republic of Ireland). This sponsorship will cover both our website and our podcast, and over the next few weeks, you’ll start to see their adverts appear embedded within our regular features, as well as at the introduction to all the podcast episodes we plan on publishing over the next couple of years.

Before we tell you why we think this is such a good fit, I think it’s pertinent to tell you all a bit more about the history and background of our new sponsor. The history of Loughran Brewers Select dates back to 1908 when the Loughran Family began to farm barley and supply the brewing trade. In 2014, James Loughran—the 7th generation owner of this still family-run business—established Loughran Brewing Stores to supply high-quality brewing ingredients to the burgeoning beer industries in the UK, Ireland, and mainland Europe.

The business expanded in 2022 when ingredient wholesaler Brewers Select joined the Loughran family, expanding the number of suppliers within the brewing ingredient and raw material industry it was able to work with. Some of those suppliers include Crosby Hops, a family-owned hop farm in Oregon, USA, Bairds Malt here in the UK, and industry-leading yeast producer Lallemand (to name a few.) Today, Loughran Brewers Select is dedicated to supplying the highest quality brewing ingredients to the industry and is invested in telling the stories of these ingredients, from farm to glass.

This is where our own partnership comes in. Since Pellicle was founded in 2019, we’ve been hugely invested in the agricultural nature of beer, and have published award-winning stories that cover the supply chain, from trailblazing UK hop farmers to innovative craft maltsters, and more besides. Thanks to our relationship with Loughran Brewers Select, we’ll instantly broaden our connection to beer’s agricultural roots, with massive potential to cover this within our regular features, and future podcast episodes. We’re incredibly excited by the prospect of this, and the stories we’ll uncover.

As a business, we aim to run Pellicle in as transparent a way as we possibly can. Whether that’s through publishing our rates or giving our Patreon subscribers detailed monthly updates on what’s happening behind the scenes, we endeavour to be as open and honest about how we run our publication as possible. If you have any questions about this sponsorship, please drop an email to matthew@pelliclemag.com. The ads, by the way, will appear on the site like this:

Our partnership with Loughran Brewers Select will cover about 10% of our operating costs this financial year (which runs from the beginning of April to the end of March the following year). We’ve immediately invested this in commissioning some new features, with more planned for the near future, plus we gave a small bonus to our editorial team of Lily Waite, Katie Mather, Jonny Hamilton and Matthew Curtis, for the time they spend ensuring the work we publish is the best quality we can possibly make it.

This means we are still reliant on our subscribers for the other 90% of our income, and our aim is still to grow our number of subscribers to 500 by the end of 2023 and push our mag into profitability. We’ve also decided what we want to do with that profit: to increase our rates again, to increase the retainers we pay our editorial team, and as a stretch goal, we’d love to open a small office or studio in our home city of Manchester (maybe one with a little bit of space for events and podcasts, we can dream!)

With Loughran Brewers Select’s investment into Pellicle, we are pretty confident that we’ll be able to keep going as we are for the next couple of years. We’re hopeful that this is accompanied by a growing number of subscribers, so we can gradually and organically grow the magazine into a sustainable business that pays freelance writers, photographers and illustrators great rates, promptly, for several more years to come.

If you enjoy reading Pellicle or listening to our podcast, please consider becoming a subscriber for as little as £1 a month. You can sign up by visiting patreon.com/pelliclemag.

A huge thank you to James, Will and the team at Loughran Brewers Select, and here’s to what we think will be a long and fruitful partnership that hugely benefits us as a publication. More importantly, we feel it will benefit you, our readers.

— Matt, Jonny, Katie and Lily x