Drawing on almost five decades in Birmingham, Stirchley Wines & Spirits has evolved from a traditional neighbourhood off-licence into one of the UK’s best-known independent beer specialists. Jo Gilbert caught up with owner Krishan Rajput to find out more

When my father first opened Stirchley Wines & Spirits in 1979, it was a very traditional off-licence. Back then, businesses tended to stay firmly in their lane. You were either an off-licence, a wine merchant or a pub, and your role was simply to serve the local community.

Beer was mostly domestic brands and family breweries at that point – none of the sophistication or experimentation that exists now – but in the late 1980s and early 1990s we started noticing more imported beers entering the market. That was really where our beer journey began. We started bringing in beers from Germany, Belgium and what was then Czechoslovakia, because they offered customers something different. People had heard of brands like Budvar, but they didn’t really know the stories behind them.

We realised early on that we couldn’t compete with supermarkets on scale, so we needed a point of difference. We wanted people to walk into the shop and discover something unexpected, whether that was a German lager, a Belgian ale or a beer they’d only ever tried on holiday. If we stocked something, there had to be a reason for it to be there.

That approach naturally led us into craft beer long before it became mainstream. We had Thornbridge on the shelves in the late 2000s, Brewdog in 2009 and were talking to Beavertown when it was still brewing out of Duke’s Brew & Que. At the time, nobody really knew how the market was going to develop, including the breweries themselves. A lot of it was trial and error.

Social media changed everything because suddenly we could connect directly with breweries and consumers. It allowed us to stay ahead of trends and understand what was happening across the wider market much earlier.

Today, what excites us is still fundamentally the same thing: good beer. If a brewery is doing something interesting and telling the right story, that matters to us. We can’t sell something passionately unless we genuinely care about it ourselves. Customers come to us because they know we’ve thought carefully about why a product deserves shelf space.

Our ethos has always been very much about trying to be a bit different. Whether it’s championing sake or collaborating with events like Birmingham Beer Week or the IWC, we’re always trying to be better than the next guy and push a little bit harder.

The Stirchley area itself has changed massively over the past 15 years. We’ve now got three breweries on our doorstep, as well as some fantastic independent restaurants and businesses nearby. That’s helped turn the area into much more of a destination and naturally brings more people into the shop.

At the same time, we’ve deliberately stayed true to being an off-licence. We’ve never wanted to become a hybrid bar space. Retail is still at the heart of what we do.

The market is changing. Traditional retail doesn’t really work anymore in the way it once did. It’s been broken since Covid and independent businesses have had to adapt very quickly. We’re aware that we’ll probably need to expand our model over the next few years. Selling online will likely become part of our future.