Siren Craft Brew’s Lumina at 5: An experimental success written in the stars

The Lumina story starts with the popular Suspended In… series. As an experimental series it encouraged Siren Craft Brew to be adventurous.

The Finchampstead brewery’s founder, Darron Anley, is delighted with its success. Here, he talks about five years of Lumina and what it has meant to the company.

What we saw with Suspended In.. at the time, pre-Covid, is it filled a great range gap for us.

Yu Lu at 3.6% and then Soundwave at 5.6% is a big gap.

One of the things that always struck us about Suspended In.., what we felt was its point and its place was that we rotated the hops and recipes. That’s what the entree was telling us they wanted, 

It was a great playground for us to really start getting to grips with how to create something with great flavour, body and mouthfeel; it was a starting point for that. 

It was a great space to learn how to play with hops and get the most bang for your buck.

It became so popular that we were brewing multiple batches every two weeks, so that gave us a lot of room for trialling.

Bang for your buck is important, right? Because ultimately the business survives on getting the most out of what you’re putting out.

When you’re looking at a product that you want to put out regularly, you’ve got to be able to sell it. You’ve got to be able to sell it at a price point and if you want to be able to do the volume, you’ve got to be comfortable with the price you are putting it out at.

It’s very different to the other end of the scale where you’re putting in 25g per litre of hops that are probably the most expensive hops you’ll ever buy, but those beers are there for a different reason.

There’s a lot in Lumina that talks about making accessible beers, and you’ve mentioned hitting that ABV point between between Yu Lu and Soundwave, but there’s more to being accessible than just an ABV. Being a Gluten Free beer is helpful, but also creating something that will make a Pubcos tap list?

It was very much a part of the original design, yes. We’d been doing a lot of work with our Futurist beer and a couple of other bits we’d been playing with. But Futurist was always much more heavily hopped. There was no way we could translate that into our core range

What it did show us was that there was definitely an opportunity in that gluten free market. We were looking at it as there wasn’t really anyone else in that space with a core beer. With the experimentation we knew we had to have a product that would come out every single time under the Gluten Free limits and that it didn’t change the profile of the beer in any way. When we established that, it was a no brainer really.

MORE CHEESELOGS: Lumina’s star-studded launch five years ago

How has how has Lumina and the success of it changed the thoughts and processes within Siren Craft Brew?

It challenges myself and the leadership team regularly.

What I’ve always said is that I don’t want Siren to be a one-beer brewery. I don’t want Siren to be the Lumina brewery or the Soundwave brewery.

I want to make sure that we have a portfolio of well-thought-through products. Putting Lumina in there is definitely a challenge.

It’s the easy product to latch on to from an entrée perspective. Whether that’s price point, rate of sale or just visibility.

Pubs want it, it sells well and they know their customers will enjoy it too.

In terms of how it’s changed our thinking, it’s about balancing it all out.

Being a brewery with a hugely popular beer or two, but also having enough product to tick all the boxes people want when they visit us online or in person.

How do you make sure that you’re not just riding on the coattails of Lumina then?

We dedicate time to ensure our new product development remains a large part of our management time. Fleshing out ideas and concepts and building lots of interesting, exciting ideas into the road map for the year.

We have to excite and interest our customer base first and foremost. That comes from us, the things that we’re experiencing, reading about and learning about.

We have a dedicated time every other week where we will sit down and we will do ‘new product development’ recipe discussion, which covers – depending on where we are in the cycle, what we are thinking about, what areas we interested in and what products do we want to go out and add to the programme.  

This is all additional to a few ‘baked in’ concepts that we decided ahead of 2025, for example some very cool ‘Soundwave Mashups’ coming next month, the return of Time Hops, and maybe something chocolately before Christmas.

The launch of Lumina came at a difficult time. I know the business, and every brewery was pivoting to trying to do things differently. Siren decided to launch a new Flagship beer.

There’s so much to say about that, because I think you’ve got to set the backdrop for it.

We made the decision that we were going to make this addition to the range around October 2019.

We were trying a product called Refractions, and we were doing that in a similar way to what we were doing with Suspended In..

There were lots of different hop combos and process tweaks; I think we got up to six before the pandemic hit. We had a winner and October was the point where we started briefing people around artwork, marketing, things like that.  

All this was on a timeline for a June 2020 launch anyway, but then the lockdowns made us second-guess everything. We had the recipe and the artwork, but we didn’t know whether we were going to launch it or not.

At the time the pandemic hit we were owed three quarters of a million pounds by our entrée customers, we were indebted to other businesses – like everyone else – who had no business and no trading going on whatsoever.

We had 19 tanks full of beer, which had been all destined to go to on-trade, because at that point we’re about 80% on-trade.

In the cold store, we had something like £350,000 worth of stock.

But we got our heads around it, and by June – I wouldn’t go as far as saying that we felt in comfortable position – but we just thought we had an opportuntiy to lean into and absolutely go for it. 

We brought in a local PR company to help launch which we’d not done before and it was time to be adventurous. **** it, let’s throw everything at it and see where we get to with it.

They were on board they and came up with some great ideas to embellish the themes and stories we’d been working on.

Launching to the press with an astrophysicist [Dr Becky Smethurst] was fantastic. It was a great launch and I think in many ways it’s easy to look back and go well, you know, everybody was trying to be different and interesting. In a sense, it was the perfect time to get cans in people’s hands.

But actually I think when you’ve just got to wrap up that whole piece. It’s worth pointing out how ballsy it was. It wasn’t a given that it would work. There was no test mapped out. Sometimes you just have to roll all the dice – our team, brand and products – and in this case for us it worked.

Around a month after the launch, so as to give people enough time to get hold of some cans, we hosted an online stargazing night, which was brilliant. We were lucky with a clear sky.

Becky’s part of this was talking about what everyone could see with a nice cold can of Lumina in hand.

Beer writer Melissa Cole shared an amazing picture of the moon with a special camera.

We did another one about a month later for our own customers where they had all the custom branded planispheres, surely the only brewery planispheres ever made.

I remember sitting outside with my kids and we were laid out there on the patio looking out at the beautiful cloudless sky as the stars filled up.

It was really cool that we were able to do that.

The aim was to make the most of the lockdown, get people outside and connecting over a beer. It worked a treat.

To summarise then, taking all this into how does Lumina as a product, produced by your business, make you feel?

I love how we launched Lumina. I love how it’s been taken on by our customers and Pubcos alike.

I absolutely love the fact that when I go to festivals, people say when they put Lumina on “it outsells everything else we’ve got”. 

In just five years it has built up such a great and loyal following. I’’s the beer that we always wanted it to be. The nature of the industry is that people always want to try the new things – that’s why they’ve got into it.

But we’ve found that Lumina really does hit the spot, and it’s something people come back to over and over again.