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David kefford, bottling hall team leader

With pubs closed for months on end, Bottling Hall Team Leader, David Kefford, worked hard to keep up with online sales and the exceptionally high supermarket demand for bottled beers.

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My job is extremely process-driven. Everything has to be done to a set routine, because of the nature of what we do… consistency in the beer bottling process is key. Of course, things go a bit wrong at times, but it’s always in a controlled way, and each shift has its own ebb and flow.

We have a schedule that looks a bit like a TV guide detailing what we’re bottling and when and it anticipates eventualities like machinery breakdowns – we even refer to each order run as a programme. We have an engineer on hand just in case bottling has to stop for a breakdown so we can very quickly sort it out and get everything back up and running as soon as possible. We might get ahead of ourselves and gain an hour on the schedule, but we never relax because the next minute a pump on the labellers’ glue might stop working or we might have a steam leak or a belt might go and need fixing. But every scenario is planned for, as far as it can be.

Unprecedented times

Of course, the pandemic was something out of the ordinary and not something that could be scheduled or programmed for. I don’t think anyone where I work at Hen Hall in Bury St Edmunds could anticipate how crazy things would get as a result of it. I certainly didn’t. I find it hard to pinpoint times and dates of when things happened, because we were just so very busy in Bottling that the pandemic is all one big blur.

Traditionally, March is a quiet time of year for us – there’s a lull after Christmas and there’s a good while before summer barbecue season starts. But when pubs closed in March 2020, that very first lockdown coincided with a spell of warm weather and sunny days. Suddenly, everyone was working from home or furloughed, and pubs were shut, so if you wanted a beer you had to go to the supermarket or a shop to buy it.

Supermarket orders rose by 43% compared to figures for 2019 and online sales via our beer shop website soared by over 2,000%. I think everyone was hoping to chill out in their gardens with a beer and sit the pandemic out for a few weeks. Of course, it all went on for a lot longer than that – and demand remained high.

Leaning in

We had to work out a way of fulfilling all these orders, while operating in a way that was safe for the team. Hats off to the management because whatever we needed to do this, we got. We put in place one-way systems with floor stickers and barriers to ensure everyone was socially distanced. There are about 18 of us here and everyone was split into two bubbles, so you only ever worked with the same team members.

I was doing 6am until 6pm shifts one week and then 6pm to 6am the next. I’d do my handover by phone, to limit contact with my colleagues and each shift was so full on. The team worked nonstop and we all had to adapt quickly to changes in how we operated, for example, trying to avoid each other while working with the machinery. But we managed it, and everyone did amazingly well. Of course, there was a bit of nervousness about working during a pandemic, but we were all sensible about following the rules, both in work and outside of it. None of us caught Covid-19, as far as I’m aware.

Staying safe

Personally, I just worked and worked, and it helped me to take my mind off things. On my days off I didn’t go anywhere or do anything, I just stayed at home because that felt like the safest thing to do.

I found Christmas hard because my daughter lives in London and we hadn’t seen her for seven months, and of course, we had to cancel all our plans to see her. It was sad, but we just accepted that it was how things needed to be.

It’s fair to say that I used work as a distraction from the pandemic. I found the sheer volumes of beer arriving by tanker from the brewery to be bottled exciting. The constant activity was brilliant and shifts flew by. It was really hard work, but I enjoyed it. I just got my head down and focused on the job at hand, which meant I could avoid all the news headlines. Because it did get pretty dire. If I’d been furloughed, I’m not sure how I would have dealt with it all, if I’m really honest.