The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected!

How true it was. On Friday morning we set off a 6.30 in the Clio to get up to Tyne Tees to see our product getting bottled. As Rupert said excitement levels were high. At last we were going to get hold of the one thing we had talked and thought about for the last 6 months.

But alas, an hour and a half from the bottler, while Rups and I were having a much needed coffe in a service station, the phone rang. There was a problem.....

Not a manufacturing problem, per se, but there was a problem with the labels. They had been sleeved to high which meant the bottles couldn't be capped. Rups and I were left in stunned silence, had we come all this way just to turn around and go back home? Was someone conspiring against us to try to make sure this bottle never got off the ground?

Well we weren't going to let this stop us. We had come to see our product bottled and labels or not it was going to happen.

We set off again and made it to the bottlers in good time to get to the bottom of what was going on. One way or another we were going to make sure things kept moving.

It was quickly agreed that we would go ahead with the bottling but on clear instead of the sleeved bottles. While this wasn't ideal it meant that we would not loose our bottling time and we could oversee the final mix of our product.

A couple of hours and a sausage sandwich later our product was ready to be mixed. This was the moment of truth. Was what we had taste tested a hundred times and tweaked to perfection going to deliver on a big scale....

Rupert and I wait, feeling a little nervous, before the taste test


The product was brought out and we, along with a couple of factory workers, were all poured a small glass each. Before Rups or I could even make a comment the woman from the factory burst out with a big 'ooohh, that tastes really good, what's in that?' The man who had come in with her also started up 'yeah it's not sickly sweet like alot of the drinks we mix here'. Rups and I looked at each other, these comments weren't contrived but the same as the ones we had made when we first tasted the drink all those months ago and decided this was what we wanted to re-create. It was a great feeling and our confidence and mood lifted once more.

Rups and I feeling pretty pleased with ourselves in the bottling factory after the taste testing

Rups sits on some of our sleeved bottles we can't use

With the product now safely secured it was time to think about getting down to South Wales for our mates stag do ( a nice 550 mile round trip in the clio!), but not until we had paid the sleever a visit first, well it was sort of on route and, unsurprisingly, we weren't getting any of our calls returned.

I'm going to leave it there for now and I'm sure Rups will update you tomorrow on how the label saga has gone.....