To celebrate the 3rd anniversary of Lumina, we created a double strength version - 8.4% Double IPA, Illuminati. We also gave ourselves 2 audacious targets - Get trending on UK Twitter and serve Lumina/Illuminati in 1000 venues around the country - with a £10,000 charity donation the end goal.
Those of you running Endure 24 in 2023 would have noticed that we provided the bars for the event and boy do runners enjoy a beer! As part of this, we had planned to enter a team to run the event.
Sadly for us, a number of unfortunate injuries and schedule clashes took out our team one by one, until just one person was left - JD. JD rose to the occasion and ran solo!
In the end, after a pint of Soundwave to start and some mid point Pastel Pils during, JD managed an incredible 95 miles within 24 hours. We had a justgiving page running, the final total of which we doubled, bringing the final total to £2840.
For Autism Acceptance week, we took 10p from every £1 spent on the webshop to donate to Autism Awareness. At the end of the week we doubled the final total, donating £2582.20 to a great cause. Thank you to everyone who made purchases that week!
When April Fools' comes around, everyone likes to have a little fun. Our little fun this year was to announce "A silly drop of Maiden". We'll let you work out the anagram for yourself, but the announcement was that we were waxing cans of Maiden. The ruse was designed to look fake, and look like a classic April Fool, but invited those who were intrigued to sign up to learn more.
A couple of days later, we revealed that we had indeed waxed just 10 cans of Maiden, which would go up for sale to those who had signed up. Each can had a different price - £20, £30, £40, £50, £60, £70, £80, £90, £100 and a massive £500 - we think that might make it the world's most expensive beer.
Of course, every penny of those sales went to Charity and our bit of fun helped to raise £1040.
In 2023, we turned 10 years old, a big milestone for us. Hopefully you were one of the record number of people we had on site for a brewery party. As part of that party we had two different charity raises: A raffle to win a very special etched box of classic Maiden bottles, and tickets to 2 barrel store tastings hosted by founder, Darron.
We raised £400 from the tastings and an amazing £1640 from the raffle, with a total of £2040. Thank you everyone!
The funds from this, and the waxed Maiden cans were split equally between Dingley's Promise, Launchpad Reading and the RNLI.
A few years back, we collaborated on a porter with our friends from Ukraine, VARVAR. The beer would become an instant hit and a bit of a classic - MAVKA.
After the start of the war on Ukraine, we knew we had to do what we can to help out. And so we rebrewed Mavka with specially labelled Ukraine flag colours. 100% of the takens went to the Red Cross to help in Ukraine. Our biggest donation to date of £19,755.
Every so often, a portion of sales from a beer will go to good causes. A couple of notable times we've done this are Euphoria and Are You Listening?.
Euphoria was a sour beer, in collaboration with Queer Brewing and Loddon. For every can sold, 50p was donated to brilliant LGBTQ+ causes selected by Lily (Queer Brewing), Jake (Loddon Brewery) and Erik (Siren).
We also donated 10p from every can of Are You Listening? sold to Mencap, raising £192.
In 2021, with the country in lockdown we hosted our 8th Anniversary celebrations online. The Grateful Eight festival had multiple 'stages' of live and interactive talks, breakout rooms, street food cookalongs, a lot of laughs and a lot of beers. We also had several charity aspects running throughout the day which ultimately helped to raise an incredible £6198. this was split evenly between Reading Red Kitchen, Hospitality Action and Leukemia UK.
Thank you to all those who tuned in!
