We hope you, your families and your teams continue to be safe and as well as can be. Thank you for your continued support and communication. Because of this, we’re still here, still working from home and still planning for a better future together.
We’ve held back from email communication over the last 4-6 weeks because if your inbox is anything like ours, it’s full and relentless. Instead, we’ve kept in touch with all our regular ordering customers via phone, social media and (where it’s been safe for everyone to do so) with some social distancing catch ups.
None of our business models were designed for lockdown, so we’ve had to do a ton of adapting together. We’ve extended our Slow Fees timeline, suspended our Super Slow Fees timeline, collected empty kegs and hibernated our operations to suit the circumstances. We set Kegstar up as an “empty keg” business so unwinding everything we’ve known over a long hard continuing lockdown has its challenges for us all. If we’ve messed up because we didn’t or don’t have the answers, then we’re sorry and we will get there. Thanks for bearing with us.
As well as managing our own cost base, team plans and mindsets as well as we can, we’ve offered any support we can to a load of the great industry programs out there. It’s great to see the industry’s work coming together with processes for safe disposal of beer and recovery of duty, the relaxing of licensing of outdoor spaces, the review of the social distancing guidelines, rent relaxation measures, duty holidays and VAT reductions being suggested.
We’ve been working on a service with our partners Thielmann, Ware-Logic & Kegspertise to help recover your duty in our kegs at venue in the UK only. It’s something that should help with any QA issues or recalls in the future. You’ll need to ensure your venue customers are fully compliant with the guidelines listed below before we can help and your unique Kegstar scanning & tracking data should be able to help you too:
https://beerandpub.com/briefings/bbpa-guidelines-for-retrieval-of-containers-annex/
https://beerandpub.com/briefings/best-practice-for-destruction-of-beer-in-cellars/
https://beerandpub.com/briefings/destruction-of-beer-in-cellars-to-reduce-risk-of-environmental-damage/
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/destroying-spoilt-beer-during-coronavirus-covid-19
https://www.returnyourbeer.co.uk
Please give your regular Kegstar contact a call to find out more. We’ll share the details soon if there is enough demand and we can make the costs work for everyone involved.
If you or your venue customers have any empty kegs that need collecting then please encourage a scan for collection via the Kegstar app or call us on 0800 5345000. We’ll make arrangements to get the required collections as soon as we can but please bear with us while we flex our normal 5-day collection window to ensure everyone involved is safe.
With Netherlands hospitality industry already out of lockdown, all of Ireland looking to do so through July and England now with further easing from July 4th, we still have a long road of learnings ahead, but it’s progress against the bleak backdrop of the last 3 months and we intend to still be here to help in any way we can.
We have good stock holdings of 20L, 30L, 50L and 9G casks, so if you need new supplies then please order responsibly and always scan them to venue to avoid any undue costs. To help share the impact of guesswork we’re not charging for next day deliveries on orders placed before 12:00hrs the preceding day, we remain on skeleton crews in our partners so we can’t guarantee next day delivery, but we’ll try. To help us to help you, where you can give us more notice and work to our regular 5-day window then we’d appreciate it. We’ll also continue to take orders over the phone and via email and not charge non-Mystar Orders Fees until at least the 5th July for the same reasons and we’d like to hear from you…good, bad or indifferent.
With the hospitality opening dates across all our operating markets now clear, we will announce in due course our Pay It Forward packages as a “thank you” to all who’ve kept supporting us, kept talking to us and kept working with us throughout lockdown. It will include discounts or rebates on items such as Issue Fees, Delivery Fees & Empty Collection Compensation (all the standard and some new T&Cs will apply) to get us all restarted.
When we reached out at the end of March, we shared our own #dontwriteoffreachout ethos to get us through each day. We’ve since turned it into a small external campaign across our social media channels and we’ll keep encouraging you to please stay close and keep talking to us so we can help. We’re still here and remain dedicated to helping get more of your great beverages to more happy draft drinkers when the time is right!
Thank you for your continued support. Please stay safe and well.
Christian & The Kegstar Team
