Coming up with an idea for a brilliant beer can be surprisingly easy. Turning that idea into something you can actually brew at scale, package legally, market confidently and put in front of customers is where things get considerably more complicated.
That gap between “I’d love to create my own beer” and “here it is, ready to sell” is exactly where Tūn Brewing founder Richard Alston can help.
Beer Ideas Are the Fun Part. Then Reality Arrives.
Perhaps you have been homebrewing for years and have finally decided it is time to launch a brewery. Maybe you already run a beer brand but want to develop something new without investing in your own production kit. Or perhaps you have the beginnings of a recipe scribbled in a notebook and no idea what happens next.
Whichever stage you are at, there is a lot more involved in bringing a commercial beer to market than choosing some interesting hops and designing a nice can.
Recipe development, scaling, finding a contract brewer, packaging, licensing, labelling, marketing and distribution all have to come together.
The UK Government's own guidance on commercial brewing covers everything from HMRC requirements and Alcohol Duty to food safety, selling, distribution and labelling. It is useful information, but it also gives you a fairly good idea of how quickly the to-do list can grow.
Richard's commercial brewery services are designed to make that journey considerably less intimidating.
Meet Richard: A Brewer Who Learned by Doing
Richard's relationship with brewing started long before Tūn Brewing existed. He began making beer as a teenager, later returning to brewing as a creative outlet before eventually turning a long-held ambition into a commercial beer company.
As the Tūn Brewing story explains, that journey eventually became Tūn, a Manchester brewery built around interesting beer, inclusivity and the idea of drinking with purpose.
But setting up a beer company also meant Richard had to learn about the decidedly less romantic parts of the industry.
There were recipes to develop, commercial breweries to work with, labels to design, rules to understand, packaging to source and decisions to make about how the finished beer would actually reach drinkers.
That experience is an important part of these services.
Richard isn't approaching the process as somebody standing on the sidelines telling you how a brewery should work. He's someone who has had an idea for a beer brand, worked through the problems and gradually figured out how to turn it into something real.
And, importantly, he's still enthusiastic about the bit that started everything: making good beer.
Recipes That Have Already Earned Recognition
Richard's approach to recipe development isn't just something that works in theory. The beers he has developed for Tūn have gone on to pick up multiple awards for taste.
At the Great Taste Awards 2026, four Tūn beers received awards after being assessed through the competition's blind judging process. Archetype, Tūn's Modern English IPA, was awarded two Great Taste stars, while Gem State of Mind, Lemondrop and Quaternity each received one star. More than 15,000 products were entered into Great Taste that year, making the recognition particularly satisfying for a relatively young brewery.
That followed success at the World Beer Awards 2025, where Gem State of Mind picked up a Bronze award for taste in the England Milkshake IPA/New England IPA category. Tūn also received a string of awards for its can and label design.
Those awards provide some reassuring evidence that the process behind Tūn's own recipes works. It's the same practical approach Richard now brings to developing beers for other brands: start with an idea, test it properly, taste it, refine it, and only then prepare it for commercial brewing.
Start Small: Developing Your Beer on a Pilot Kit
One of the biggest services Richard offers is recipe development.
Rather than creating a recipe on paper and immediately committing to thousands of litres, the process starts small.
You'll talk through what you actually want the beer to be. That might include its style, flavour, aroma, bitterness, ABV, ingredients and the sort of drinker you imagine buying it.
Richard then takes that idea and brews it using Tūn's pilot brewing system.
That means there is something tangible to taste before moving to commercial production.
Through Tūn's recipe development service, clients receive physical samples of their pilot brew, followed by a scaled commercial recipe once the beer is finalised. Vegan and gluten-free recipes can also be developed where required. Current custom recipe and pilot sample packages start from £695.
Why go to that trouble?
Because moving from a small recipe to a commercial brewhouse is not simply a case of multiplying every ingredient by 100. Different equipment, efficiencies and processes can all affect the finished beer.
Pilot brewing gives you room to experiment before the expensive part begins.
Taste it. Discuss it. Change something. Brew it again if necessary.
It is considerably nicer discovering that your IPA needs tweaking on a pilot system than after a commercial tank has been filled.
And once the recipe is agreed, the intellectual property belongs to you.
From Pilot Batch to Commercial Brewery
Getting the recipe right still leaves one fairly obvious question.
Where are you going to brew it?
Building a brewery from scratch is neither necessary nor realistic for every new beer business. Contract brewing offers another route, allowing a brand to commission an established brewery to produce its beer.
It is also a model Richard knows well because Tūn itself has used contracted production.
Richard can help source an appropriate brewing facility and project-manage the move from pilot recipe to commercial production.
Tūn's current manufacturing service can facilitate commercial runs from 20 to 200 hectolitres, with smaller batches potentially available depending on the project. The service can also cover packaging materials including cans, boxes, kegs and casks.
In practical terms, this support can include:
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developing and testing your original beer recipe
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preparing the recipe for commercial-scale production
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identifying an appropriate contract brewery
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liaising with the production facility
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overseeing the brewing and packaging project
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helping with can labels and keg collar design
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sourcing packaging materials
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supporting the journey from finished beer to launch
It means you don't necessarily need your own brewhouse, production team or years of brewing-industry contacts before creating a beer brand.
What About Licensing, Labels and All the Other Stuff?
This is the part of starting a brewery that doesn't tend to feature quite so prominently in the daydream.
Nobody begins imagining their future beer company because they are excited about statutory information on a can.
Unfortunately, it still matters.
Depending on how your business operates, questions can arise around alcohol licensing, HMRC, wholesale registration, food business requirements and where and how you intend to sell the beer. Current Government guidance, for example, states that businesses paying another brewery to make their beer generally do not need their own HMRC alcoholic products producer approval, while businesses selling alcohol still need to consider the relevant licensing arrangements.
Then there's the label.
Packaging needs to look good, certainly, but beer labels aren't simply miniature billboards.
Government food-labelling guidance sets requirements around information such as the product name, net quantity, business details, allergens and alcoholic strength where applicable. Some mandatory information must also appear together in the same field of vision.
Marketing alcohol brings another set of considerations. The CAP Code's alcohol rules, for example, cover issues including responsible advertising, age targeting and the types of claims alcohol brands can make.
Knowing about these things before ordering thousands of printed labels tends to be preferable to discovering them afterwards.
Brewery Workshops: Learning How the Whole Thing Fits Together
For people who want to understand more of the commercial side of launching a beer brand, Richard also offers educational workshops based on the experience he has gained through building Tūn.
Sessions can cover areas including licensing, go-to-market strategy, marketing and the legislation that affects beer label design.
The aim is to make some of the less obvious parts of launching a beer business easier to understand. Alongside developing a good product, new breweries need to think about how that beer will reach customers, how it will be promoted and what legal requirements need to be considered before packaging goes to print.
These workshops give Richard a chance to share the practical lessons he has picked up while developing Tūn, including the things that are much easier to know before you launch than to discover afterwards.
For startup breweries, that can provide useful context before committing significant time and money to production. Existing breweries may also find the sessions useful when preparing a new product, reviewing their route to market or refreshing their branding and packaging.
You Don't Have to Build a Brewery to Build a Beer Brand
One of the most exciting things about modern craft beer is that there are increasingly different ways to enter the industry.
You can be passionate about beer without immediately buying fermenters, leasing an industrial unit and attempting to become a production manager, licensing specialist, designer, salesperson and marketer simultaneously.
You can start with an idea.
Then test it.
Then taste it.
Then work out what comes next.
That is ultimately what Richard's brewery services are intended to provide: a practical route from the beer in your head to the beer you would actually be happy to put your name on.
Whether that's developing a completely new white-label recipe, managing production with a contract brewery or simply helping you understand the commercial realities of launching a beer brand, the aim is to make the process feel a little more achievable.
Got a Beer Idea?
A great beer business rarely begins with every answer already worked out. Sometimes it starts with little more than “I'd really like to make this.”
Richard has been through that process himself, from brewing because he loved it to creating and launching Tūn Brewing commercially. Now he's helping other people turn their own ideas into beer.
If you've been thinking about launching a brewery, creating a signature beer or taking an existing beer brand in a new direction, you can book a one-to-one meeting with Richard through Tūn Brewing to talk through your idea.
So, what's the beer you've been thinking about making?
