The Big Interview: Petra Wetzel, West brewery founder

Petra Wetzel at the West Brewery, Templeton Building, Glasgow Green. Picture: John Devlin

Engaging and straight-talking, she doesn’t hold back when detailing the tribulations she and the business have faced as well as the triumphs.

A dark moment came when the firm went into administration into 2008, with Wetzel only discovering it was in “complete and utter dire straits” when she was phoned by an irate supplier who said he was owed thousands of pounds.

She had to decide whether to stay a single mother with a part-time law job, “or did I want to buy the business back and become an entrepreneur?”.

She opted for the latter, but wasn’t sure she’d made the right choice.

“I remember thinking ‘what the heck have I done’,” she says. “I’ve bought a business out of administration, which had gone bust... I was a single mum, and my parents lived in Germany.”

She also says she knew nothing about brewing or running restaurants. “I thought ‘you’re an idiot Petra — you just did this to prove a point’.”

Having funded the business with equity from her parents, when looking to buy it back she turned to her entrepreneur father, who had prompted the idea for West when visiting her in Glasgow and being unimpressed at the beer on offer.

She told him: “If I let it go you’ll never see that money again, or you can lend me some and I’ll buy it back from the administrators and I’ll try again.”

The only promise she could give him was that she would “work so hard nobody will have ever worked harder and I will try and make this all good again. I stood by that promise.”

At the time she says West was a business that “wasn’t doing well at all, that didn’t know what it was and that wasn’t performing on any level. I just thought ‘stuff it — I’m going to learn how to do this’.”

That she did, with curry expert Charan Gill advising her on how to run restaurants, and help arriving on the drinks side from Hilary Jones, a stalwart of the brewery sector.

Jones had just retired from Scottish & Newcastle, and Wetzel says they instantly clicked.

The West boss says she knew nothing about beer but was determined, and Jones brought 30 years’ experience of brewing, was too young to stop working, and had her pockets lined with a large retirement payout.

“I jokingly said to her: I can’t afford to pay you — but I think you could be of huge use to this business.”

Jones agreed to work for free, teaming up with Wetzel for a year and later investing and then exiting the business.

The pair started to think about the potential of West, the only UK brewery to produce all of its artisan beers in strict accordance with the German Purity Law of 1516.

This was completely different to how Jones had brewed, says Wetzel. “Because she came from a big business, she made us — although we were very small — as good at consistency, quality and health and safety as the big boys but without any of the red tape.

“I credit Hilary 100 per cent with getting us from being a very small pub brewery to being a proper brewery.”

Wetzel says it also tied in with her ability to find “the right people for the right jobs”, which she attributes to West’s success — and laughs that she sometimes wonders if the business has done well despite not because of her.

But the numbers speak for themselves: it has 125 staff across its brands and last year unveiled a £5 million brewery at its original Templeton Building site on Glasgow Green, which includes a restaurant and wedding venue.

The move increased capacity ten-fold to 25,000 hectolitres a year, and as well as this West On The Green site, West On The Corner in Glasgow’s West End opened in 2015.

German-born Wetzel studied at the University of Glasgow after her love of Scotland was sparked by a school exchange to Kippen, Stirlingshire. She returned for her studies in Scotland’s largest city, then spent two years in France at École Supérieure de Commerce de Rennes, before returning for her final year.

She laughs that her homesickness was for Scotland rather than Germany, and her love of her adopted country – her accent is far more Glaswegian than German – prompts ire at the Brexit vote.

“I’ve lived here all my adult life, but if they don’t want me as a German citizen, I’ll just go back to Germany.”

Is that a serious prospect? “I don’t think so. Would they be stupid enough to ask me to leave considering I pay millions in tax and employ 125 people?

“I employ 45 EU nationals at the moment — why would they then let me stay if [they] would have to go? Nothing makes sense.”

As for how the UK’s decision to leave Europe affects her professionally, she says West buys its hops from Germany, which have increased in price by about a quarter in the last 12 months.

That’s on a business level, but on a personal level, “I’m out for a fight,” she says. “If you feel that you’re not wanted in a place where you’ve made roots, that’s a really unsettling thing.”

Wetzel says she never had a career plan, with her first job working as an ambassador for Glasgow at what is now the Glasgow City Marketing Bureau.

She then became a lawyer “by chance” after a partner at law firm Maclay, Murray & Spens approached her and encouraged her to train as a lawyer.

“I thought the public sector might not suit me long-term. Maybe I was slightly ambitious and quirky… I’ve never been very good with rules and regulations.”

Before she did her diploma, however, West hit the wall, and she left law to rescue the business.

“So I’m on my third career,” she laughs. “People always ask me what I would do if I sold West – and I’ve got no plans of selling – but if I did I would buy land in Perthshire and run a tree nursery.

“I’m not good with dressing up… I wear jeans and a sweatshirt most days to work so I would just love to wear wellingtons and a big jacket, and dig with my nails into the earth.”

However, her plans to be what she describes as “a granny with a garden centre” will have to wait. In April last year she launched West Women, a investment fund initially of £100,000 to help emerging female entrepreneurs in Scotland’s food and drink sector.

It is proving a cathartic experience. “I’ve made more mistakes than you can shake a stick at over the last ten years, probably in life and in business, and so anything that I’ve learned out of that process... to then get somebody to not make the same mistakes twice is actually really great.”

Wetzel describes herself as a “reluctant businesswoman,” adding: “The older I get, I think I don’t know whether I’m really very good at this. I think maybe there’s a little bit too much of a rebel in me and a free spirit to really be in business,” she adds, crediting her team with West’s growth.

It seems a less hands-on role at the beer business is on the cards. “I’m hugely passionate about West – I just love that business so much – but it’s at a stage at the moment where I truly think I’m probably the person who’s in its way.

“It probably needs me to step back slightly… and let the people who really know what they’re doing do their job well,” she says.

This comes after she spent the first five years with the company doing “nothing but West. All I did was I worked and I was a mummy. I was so focused on the business I [knew] every single detail… whereas that’s not really where my energy should be these days.”

She also would like to spend more time with her son, who is heading towards his teens and needs her “for guidance and moral support”.

She says she is glad not to be running a publicly listed company, explaining; “I always say I’m a benevolent dictator when it comes to what happens at West – what I say goes.”

West has also just “wasted an enormous amount of money” on a project in Edinburgh, with plans for a permanent venue falling through at the last minute. (“My language on that phone call was appalling,” she says of when she found out.)

“If we do well I reap the rewards,” she says, stressing that she lives a very modest lifestyle, “so what I want to do with the money is to contribute to something bigger in the future, which is obviously why the [West Women] fund is so important to me.”

She is proud that the business has little bank debt so is not too reliant on external funding.

A gratifying moment in its progress came about a year after she bought the business back, “when I saw the red turn into black – we have been making money since 2009, which is no mean feat considering we in 2008 still lost quite a bit of money”.

It comes after the experience of a business going bust. “I don’t ever, ever want that to happen to me again. For about six months I didn’t know whether I could stay in my house or not.”

West is now on the lookout for a site in Edinburgh after the previous plans fell through, and as for further expansion, Wetzel cites anywhere “within easy driving distance of Glasgow”.

She is proud that the firm has reached that crucial landmark of being so well-known that taxi drivers instantly know where it is.

“Glasgow has made me who I am today,” she adds, saying she would classify West as sitting alongside Glasgow institutions like the Ubiquitous Chip and Cafe Gandolfi.

The business has just launched Heidi-Weisse, a bottled version of its draught Hefeweizen, a move she says is huge for the firm. “That’s the kind of stuff that in 2017 I’m going to put my focus on. We’re working on two other products – one in bottle and one in can. The beer market is still one of the most exciting markets I’ve ever been involved with.”