Well, who saw that coming? Something to distract us from chat about Brexit and other nonsensical stuff has popped into our lives and taken over absolutely every aspect of society, both personal and business, with devastating consequences.

I won’t go into the detail about the virus and what’s happened around the world as we have all probably – rightly or wrongly – spent too many hours watching Sky News going into the detail, but the truth is that this is going to touch and change every single person’s life in the world in some way which is truly mind blowing to understand and to even contemplate, let alone think about with regards to our own personal response to it and the implications on the GreatDrams business, which is far reaching.

The hospitality sector (that’s bars, pubs, clubs and restaurants amongst other things) took an absolute kicking, with people not able to go out and people not wanting to go out and be around other people for fear of catching the virus, venues and staff really suffered.

A lot of places closed down permanently, which was very sad for the industry and those who used to frequent them, but for the staff it created a massive loss of income, loss of tips and loss of something to get themselves up for in the morning – the mental health toll could be as devastating as the financial toll. The Independent forecast that aside from the tragedy of the continually rising death toll, albeit much slower now most of us have had our two vaccines, the long term implications for populations are the shear volumes of people going bankrupt due to a lack of work and being able to work and pay their bills and hit their financial obligations, leading to increased suicides and other mental health issues.

And for us, a super-small independent whisky bottler, the COVID-19 virus has really changed the whole outlook of our business.

We went in to 2020 with clear plans for growth and the building blocks to build the business in a sustainable fashion all in place but saw all whisky tastings that were booked with us cancelled, our export business ceased to operate with everything – rightly – on hold for ages and then landscapes changed and priorities changed around the world, much reduced footfall at the few events we have been able to have our products at due to weather and now the virus, all the bigger events through the summer which were to be the backbone of our volume sales were cancelled, very expensive deposits for said events were lost, all business travel and most meetings were cancelled, new business was all put on hold but we were fortunate that we were first to market with virtual whisky tastings and remodelled our entire business really swiftly to shift to online sales to make up for the loss of revenue opportunities offline which we do well at.

Thanks to the newly created virtual tasting side of our business, we somehow managed to double turnover in 2020, though that has rebalanced to expected levels this fiscal.