Ubrew and I'll make up the stories

When is a brewery not a brewery? When the lease was never signed. Ubrew spent a lot of time last year talking about their new unit in Manchester. Well there isnt one. 

We wrote about it here.

Pictures even appeared of said new Manchester unit but these turned out to be the existing London one. This northern unit was due to open by mid 2017.

So what happened? Well Ubrew were unable to explain the fact that news put out by at least two rags said they had opened up north. Whats more the management of Ubrew were quoted as saying that a large percentage of the capacity had already been sold. This was in April 17. Today they do not have a unit open in Manchester. 

Something somewhere has clearly gone wrong. Now Will Horsfall has left - he was half of the company. The latest accounts show another loss of £102k which was a surprise as the London unit was reported as being oversubscribed. 

On line journalism is wholly unreliable

Spot the difference in these images, apart from the perspective. That's right, they are in fact the same places.

These images appeared in Business Insider and the Manchester Evening News a year ago in articles on a Crowdcube funded company - U Brew.

The Manchester article had the caption - 'The UBrew Taproom in Manchester' and the Business Insider piece had the caption 'UBrew's Bermondsey Taproom'.  Both articles were about the company opening a new UBrew in Manchester, off the back of the reported phenomenal success in London. This was a year ago and according to the Business Insider, the company had already pre-sold 75% of its Manchester memberships and was massively oversubscribed in London.

We dont know if these pictures are taken in London or Manchester but we think it's London. It certainly isnt both unless they have a cut and paste business model. According to the company's website, they only have a taproom and operation in London. New hubs in Berlin and Manchester are 'pending' and have been for over a year now. This seems a little odd given that a year ago they had 'sold' 75% of Manchester's membership; according to the articles. 

What can you believe? Well clearly nothing in either of these two virtual fish and chip wrappers. The intern who wrote the piece for BI, then wrote another piece on Ubrew in February this year. Seemingly Ubrew was a massive hit with 459 courses sold in 2016; up from just over 300. Courses costs on average £100 - you do the math and see if this a scalable proposition! BI just trotted out more and more of their plans to go global whilst ignoring all the nonsense it wrote back in April 16. The two pieces are here and here. The Manchester EN piece is here.

There are other oddities. In the BI article, it is stated that the company had just raised another £140k from some business angels but there is no allotment of new shares form SH01 at CH for this. The Confirmation Statement for 2016 confirms the issue of extra shares and the presence of some new shareholders. But where is the allotment document? Failure to file this document is an offence. Ubrew contacted us on Twitter to say they had 'raised' 3 rounds of funding - two via subscriptions and one equity. The one equity must be the Crowdcube campaign. Never in the history of business funding have we heard of business angels 'funding' a company by buying their product in advance. That is simple rewards based crowdfunding. So again the BI article is incorrect. We asked Ubrew to confirm this but had no response.

As you would expect the interns at Crowdcube have been posting all this rubbish as real news. How investors are supposed to be able to make a value judgement based on this type of false news is beyond us.