Five years of Lumina

The story of Siren Craft Brew’s best-selling beer Lumina, is one of calculated risk. From COVID can release to a crowd pleaser at venues across London and the South, including a quarter of Fuller’s 400 premium pub and hotel estate.  

The brewery is celebrating five years of a beer that has quite the story to tell: A launch that included a stargazing Zoom night with a bona fide astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst, a third birthday that saw £10,000 donated to charity and enough cans sold since 2020 to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. 

Siren Craft Brew founder Darron Anley explains: “The success of Lumina is that it hits the spot. It takes all the work we’ve done on our brand, all the experimentation to produce a product that people choose over all others, it’s hit the spot.”  

The brewery has always aimed to be at the forefront of experimentation, producing high-percent barrel-aged imperial stouts through to the hugely recognisable Soundwave, an IPA that satisfies most markets. 

With Lumina, Siren took a lead on bringing a sessionable, tropical, and crucially – gluten–free product to market. As awareness around Coeliac disease has rocketed over the last decade, Siren has lead the way in producing an incredibly inclusive product. 

In 2023, the business backed its brand, its product, team, and customer base. £10,000 would be donated to charities, including the Make-A-Wish Foundation, if #LuminaHour trended on social media and the beer became available in 1,000 venues around the UK. 

The targets were hit and a donation made. It goes some way to explain the calculated risks Siren Craft Brew took, and why it is challenging leading brands on supermarket shelves and a favourite of pub estates like Fuller’s.  

“This is a great addition to our beer range and is already proving popular,” says Ed Fryer, Marketing Manager at Fuller’s.  

“A gluten free beer that combines great branding and history with a fantastic beer is right in our customers' sweet spot from a taste perspective,” he adds.  

Now exported to 20 countries including France, Hong Kong and Australia, in 2025, Lumina continues to look upward, and will celebrate its fifth birthday in style with big online giveaways and a brand new merchandise range. 

All of that, from one 330ml can of gorgeous Lumina.

Useful Links

• Lumina Launch: https://www.sirencraftbrew.com/stories-andevents/blog/lumina-our-shining-light  

• Lumina Hour: https://www.sirencraftbrew.com/stories-andevents/events/lumina-hour 

• Lumina Hour sparks £10k donation: https://www.sirencraftbrew.com/storiesand-events/blog/lumina-hour-sparks-10000-donation  

Darron Anley, Siren Craft Brew owner comments (full interview below): 

I love how we launched Lumina. I love how it's been taken on by customers and the pub trade alike. 

When I go to festivals and trade shows, people tell me: "When we put Lumina on, if it's not on permanently, it outsells everything else we've got,” I think that tells you everything about the job we did. 

In just five years, it's built up such a great following, such a loyal following, and it's that beer that we always wanted it to be. The nature of the beer industry is that people get into it because they like to try all the new things.  

The success of Lumina is that it hits the spot. It takes all the work we’ve done on our brand, all the experimentation to produce a product that people choose over all others, it’s hit the spot.

Lumina Samples

Lumina is available to sample in 330ml cans. If you would like to feature Lumina as part of a round up, samples and additional imagery can be obtained by contacting press@sirencraftbrew.com 

Earn from Lumina sales

You can also join up with Siren Craft Brew as an affiliate, where you can earn money for any beer sales you generate via our webshop. Please get in touch with press@sirencraftbrew.com for further details.

About Siren Craft Brew 

Headquartered in Berkshire, Siren Craft Brew is a passionately independent brewery that truly believes there is a beer for everyone. Brewed and packed in Finchampstead since 2013, the multi award-winning brewery is proud of its quality, unfiltered, modern, flavour-forward beers using only the best ingredients.

The Siren Craft Brew range is firmly rooted in Greek mythology. It is said the sirens’ voices entwine into a complex, layered melody, and so do the ingredients that go into making great beer.

Starting 12 years ago as a team of three, Siren Craft Brew has blossomed into a team of over 60 people, brewing the equivalent of more than four million pints in 2023.

Founded by Darron Anley, the modern brewery now exports to 25 countries worldwide, selfdistributes throughout the UK and is now stocked by the likes of Sainsburys, Waitrose, Morrisons, Asda, leading chains plus independent pubs, shops, and restaurants.

Siren Craft Brew also sells direct to the consumer through its website and on-site tap room. The company has a prolific brewing schedule, on average releasing an experimental beer every week. A drinks industry trailblazer, Siren is a leader in barrel ageing and the interplay between wood and beer.

For more information, visit the Siren Craft Brew website or connect via Facebook, X, Instagram.

Interview with Darron Anley – founder of Siren Craft Brew – on the fifth anniversary of the launch of best-selling Gluten Free beer Lumina.

The Lumina story starts with the popular Suspended In... series. As an experimental series it encouraged Siren Craft Brew to be adventurous

What we saw with Suspended In.. at the time, pre COVID it filled a great range gap for us. Yu Lu at 3.6% and then Soundwave at 5.6% is a big gap. One of the things that always struck us about Suspended In.., what we felt was its point and its place was that we rotated the hops and recipes. That's what the on-trade was telling us they wanted, 

It was a great playground for us to really start getting to grips with how to create something with great flavour, body and mouthfeel, it was a starting point for that. 

It also was a great space to learn how to play with hops and get the most bang for your buck. 

It became so popular that we were brewing multiple batches every two weeks, so that gave us a lot of room for trialling.

Bang for your buck is important, right? Because ultimately the business survives on getting the most out of what you're putting out.

When you're looking at a product that you want to put out regularly, you've got to be able to sell it. You've got to be able to sell it at a price point and if you want to be able to do the volume, you've got to be comfortable with the price you are putting it out at.

It's very different to the other end of the scale where you're putting in 25 grams per litre of hops that are probably the most expensive hops you’ll ever buy, but those beers are there for a different reason.

There's a lot in Lumina that talks about making accessible beers, and you've mentioned hitting that ABV point between between Yu Lu and Soundwave, but there's more to being accessible than just an ABV. Being a Gluten Free beer is helpful, but also creating something that will make a Pubcos tap list?

It was very much a part of the original design, yes. We'd been doing a lot of work with our Futurist beer and a couple of other bits we'd been playing with. But Futurist was always much more heavily hopped. There was no way we could translate that into our core range

What it did show us was that there was definitely an opportunity in that gluten free market. We were looking at it as there wasn't really anyone else in that space with a core beer. With the experimentation we knew we had to have a product that would come out every single time under the Gluten Free limits and that it didn't change the profile of the beer in any way. When we established that, it was a no brainer really.

How has how has Lumina and the success of it changed the thoughts and processes within Siren Craft Brew?

It challenges myself and the leadership team regularly. What I've always said is that I don't want Siren to be a one beer brewery. I don't want Siren to be the Lumina brewery or the Soundwave brewery.

I want to make sure that we have a portfolio of well thought through products. Putting Lumina in there is definitely a challenge. It's the easy product to latch on to from an on-trade perspective. Whether that’s price point, rate of sale or just visibility. Pubs want it, it sells well and they know their customers will enjoy it too.

In terms of how it's changed our thinking, it’s about balancing it all out. Being a brewery with a hugely popular beer or two, but also having enough product to tick all the boxes people want when they visit us online or in person.

How do you make sure that you're not just riding on the coattails of Lumina then?

We dedicate time to ensure our new product development remains a large part of our management time. Fleshing out ideas and concepts and building lots of interesting, exciting ideas into the road map for the year.

We have to excite and interest our customer base first and foremost. That comes from us, the things that we're experiencing, reading about and learning about. We have a dedicated time every other week where we will sit down and we will do ‘new product development’ recipe discussion, which covers - depending on where we are in the cycle, what we are thinking about, what areas we interested in and what products do we want to go out and add to the program.  

This is all additional to a few ‘baked in’ concepts that we decided ahead of 2025, for example some very cool ‘Soundwave Mashups’ coming next month, the return of Time Hops, and maybe something chocolately before Christmas. 

The launch of Lumina came at a difficult time. I know the business, and every brewery was pivoting to trying to do things differently. Siren decided to launch a new Flagship beer!

There's so much to say about that, because I think you've got to set the backdrop for it. We made the decision that we were going to make this addition to the range around October 2019. We were trying a product called Refractions and we were doing that in a similar way to what we were doing with Suspended In.. Lots of different hop combos and process tweaks, I think we got up to six before the pandemic hit. We had a winner and October was the point where we started briefing people around artwork, marketing, things like that.

All this was on a timeline for a June 2020 launch anyway, but then the lockdowns made us second guess everything. We had the recipe, the artwork, but we didn't know whether we were going to launch it or not.

At the time the pandemic hit we were owed three quarters of a million pounds by our on-trade customers, we were indebted to other businesses – like everyone else - who no business and no trading going on whatsoever. We had 19 tanks full of beer, which had been all destined to go to ontrade, because at that point we're about 80% on-trade. In the cold store we had something like £350,000 worth of stock, most of which was large pack.

But we got our heads around it, and by June - I wouldn't go as far as saying that we felt in comfortable position - but we just thought we had an opportuntiy to lean into and absolutely go for it. 

We brought in a local PR company to help launch which we’d not done before and it was time to be adventurous. **** it, let's throw everything at it and see where we get to with it. They were on board they and came up with some great ideas to embellish the themes and stories we’d been working on. Launching to the press with an astrophysicist [Dr Becky Smethurst] was fantastic. It was a great launch and I think in many ways it's easy to look back and go well, you know, everybody was trying to be different and interesting. In a sense, it was the perfect time to get cans in people’s hands.

But actually I think when you've just got to wrap up that whole piece. I think it's worth pointing out how ballsy it was. It wasn't a given that it would work. There was no test mapped out. Sometimes you just have to roll all the dice – our team, brand and products - and in this case for us it worked.

Around a month after the launch, so to give people enough time to get hold of some cans, we hosted an online stargazing night, which was brilliant. We were lucky with a clear sky! Becky’s part of this was talking about what everyone could see with a nice cold can of Lumina in hand. Beer writer Melissa Cole shared an amazing picture of the moon with a special camera.

We did another one about a month later for our own customers where they had all the custom branded planispheres (surely the only brewery planispheres ever made). I remember sitting outside with my kids and we were laid out there on the patio looking out at the beautiful cloudless sky as the stars filled up. It was really cool that we were able to do that! 

The aim was to make the most of the lockdown, get people outside and connecting over a beer. It worked a treat.

To summarise then, taking all this into how does Lumina as a product, produced by your business, make you feel? 

I love how we launched Lumina. I love how it's been taken on by our customers and Pubcos alike. I absolutely love the fact that when I go to festivals, people say when they put Lumina on "it outsells everything else we've got.” 

In just five years it has built up such a great and loyal following. It's the beer that we always wanted it to be. The nature of the industry is that people always want to try the new things – that's why they've got into it.

But we've found that Lumina really does hit the spot, and it’s something people come back to over and over again.

Contact: Tom Canning press@sirencraftbrew.com

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