The Bubble was a passion project. My former Cave Direct colleague Rob Young and I were having a few beers, and started considering the fact that all beer podcasts have the same premise, same presenters and often the same guests on them. We wondered how the craft beer movement was supposed to grow when all it did was talk to itself.
From that conversation came the seed of an idea – a beer-based podcast that spoke to people outside the beer bubble. In the first few episodes we spoke to campaigners at alcohol charities, financial journalists, soda makers, coffee producers and more – trying to get some insight from their industries and also their views about ours. From there, the scope has grown. We started bringing in beer industry people to start talking about their other passions – cheese, dungeons and dragons, advertising, Christmas songs, films and more – slowly growing our bubble to include just about every geeky industry or hobby there was.
To help the podcast grow, and to bring it closer to the Craft Beer Channel, Brad and I started doing a weekly news podcast, looking back at our weekly video, the comments we received, and the wider world. We kept it silly, light, excitable and irreverant and released it at 5pm every Friday to help people make the cosmic leap between work day and home life.
It’s now one of the UK’s top 50 food and drink podcasts and growing all the time thanks to our weekly Friday 5pm episodes and monthly Bubble features.