Holly is quick to tell me that she’s not the face of Brolly Brewing. This responsibility, she says, is ‘all Brook’ – her husband-cum-business partner-cum-co-parent-cum, well, likely a bit of everything.  

She’s decidedly a little nervous about being interviewed, a task, that I’m told via email, has on pretty much all prior occasions fallen to her other half.    

Taking a brief pause to let her brother into the workroom, she begins to tell their story – one that started with Brook’s early years, spent in a local pub. 

‘‘I think that was his kind of childhood, spent in the hospitality stroke village pub kind of lifestyle.’’ 

However, opening their own brewery was far from expected– when they met, Holly tells me, ‘that was never on the agenda.’ ‘‘He got into brewing just because he loves the taste of beer. When we met, it was him that got me to like craft beer too. It wasn’t something I’d necessarily drunk beforehand. He absolutely adored craft beer and got into homebrewing because he was like, I think I can do this too.’’ 

So, for the grace of beer went Brolly Brewing. Starting off with pieced together kit in the rather more modest setting of their kitchen (‘brewing’s a nice smell, but it’s not nice in your home’), they were keen to find the right place to grow. A recommendation from a friend put them in touch with a farmer who allowed them to set up shop in a ‘tiny little shack on the green’. This was 2017, the same year their first child was celebrating birthday number 1.  

Another friend, at the time, was taking ownership of a farm in Wisborough Green and offered them a spot in an old chicken coop. They stepped up, naming their first beer ‘Lowfold Wissy’, after the farm.

Three years passed spent on the green, which led to a date that is now burned into the public consciousness – 23rd March 2020, the day former Prime Minister Boris Johnson uttered the five fated words: ‘you must stay at home’. 

For Brook and Holly, the collapsing of a standard business routine led them to draw inspiration from one of the more traditional drink service formats – the humble milkman. Brook woke up at 3am, filling up ‘growlers’ (the layman’s term for bottles) at the farm, hopping in the car, and delivering beer to the pint-pining public. Holly planned the routes. ‘‘The first few weeks, it was only a couple of hours’ worth of deliveries. But as it went on through the lockdown months and word got out, his delivery rounds were four or five hours long, and he’d be absolutely exhausted by the end of the day.  My dad even helped out, and then I used to do a very local one with the girls in the back of the car, singing away to nursery rhymes as we went.’’ (I dare not stoop to ask if Ten Green Bottles made an appearance). 

Like all businesses that lasted through the pandemic, in the embrace of the unconventional, they survived. Expansion, again, followed – in the form of new farmland, enabling them to set up a bar, and, more ambitiously, a self-titled festival (‘Brollyfest’) which likely laid the groundwork for their newest venture, The Brolly Fermentarium – a live music venue featuring regular acts from local groups. ‘‘Brook has always been very passionate about music. He studied music at university, and he’s very musically minded. We’ve always had that link with socialising, beer and music – especially live music.’’ 

Growth followed growth. A brewery had folded in Horsham, and Brook and Holly seized the chance. And so, Brolly Brewing 3.0 was set in motion – months of planning, building work, designing, decision-making. The amalgamation of all that had come before. Holly, who describes herself as ‘very risk averse’ leaned on Brook’s instincts (and ‘impulsivity’) to make it all work. Brook let Holly take charge of design – and following months of head nodding and vague statements of encouragement, was able to step back and see the vision come together. ‘‘It was just this penny drop moment of, ‘Oh it’s all come together. I see what you mean.’ So, I think that’s where my strengths are – pulling together the vision and taking Brook’s ideas and turning them into something, I suppose…something tangible that works.’’ 

I wonder if Brook and Holly feel much aligned with the term ‘power-couple’. Certainly, sustaining and growing a full-scale business over ten years, while both holding other jobs (Holly, working in a school, and Brook in sales), and raising their two children, seems to recall a uniquely strong dynamic. How do they find the right balance between life and work? ‘‘It is tricky. The boundaries can easily slide. Normal life just becomes work life and work life becomes normal life. It all blurs into one at various points. But we’re pretty blessed with the team that we’ve got. We can go on holiday, for example, and park it a little bit, and be like, ‘Right, it’s all under control. They’ve got it’. We’ve kept most of them since day one, which is, as we’re told, often quite unheard of in hospitality.’’

Their team, which encompasses servers, brewers, managers and more – are, Holly says,  deeply loyal to the business – which she suspects is driven by the idea of personal ownership. ‘‘We want them to have a sense of involvement in the process. So, they’re able to talk more openly and more passionately about our beer and our product and why we’ve chosen that particular hop for that beer – things like that. And that’s why we share a lot of information with them, that sense of feeling involved.’’ 

Given their tagline is ‘all we do is for the love of beer’, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the focus for Brolly Brewing is exclusively on the booze. Undeniably, Brook and Holly are passionate about the process they first got to grips with at their dining table. But equally, they wanted to build something that the whole family were welcome at. ‘‘I think lots of parents get kind of pulled along to those pubs that are classically kids-friendly, where there’s a big bouncy castle in the garden, that sort of thing. But then you’re losing out on the quality and the atmosphere as an adult. Whereas hopefully what we’ve created is something that is the best of both worlds.’’ There are colouring books, Holly says, and games for children to enjoy, but she hopes, all without infringing on the space to make it feel dominated by a younger appeal.