How it all began

Let me just say contrary to people’s perceptions, frulibeer.com is not an official fruli site. It is a site set up by two fans of the red stuff that thought (for some very odd reason) that setting up a site dedicated to a fruit based alcoholic drink was a good idea.

I suppose it was simply down to the fact that we wanted something interesting to focus on, so we looked at our interests... drinking being one of them.

The picture to your left is where it all began, the Rutland and Derby Arms. A quality pub in Leicester and one that I would definatly recommend to anyone. It has more beer taps than you can wave a slightly drunken hand at and also has a good atmosphere. We get on well with Dave the manager who also owns The Looking Glass on Braunston Gate - another pub well worth visiting.

So how did this Fruli obsession begin? Well, through a con really. I said to Dan (the other frulibeer.com founder) "You want to try that strawberry beer mate, its well nice". The fact that I'd never tried it was another thing, but before we knew it and much to the amusement of everyone else with us, we had two fruity pints sitting in front of us.

Thing is we really liked the stuff.

The next day I have a look on the web to find "page cannot be displayed" when I type in fruli.com. This being a bit of a shame, I proceed to find out who owns the domain. Once this was found I made the owner a most generous bid of £20 for his domain. Unfortunately he works for Specialist Brand Development - the UK distributor of Fruli - no deal done.

Undeterred (and with a bit of persuasion from Dan), we decide to buy frulibeer.com.

The site was born.

Obviously we didn't originally use the official fruli logo, and we pointed out right from the outset that this was an unofficial site.

The site was basically based around the idea that a pub that serves Fruli is a quality pub. Not only this but it’s also not that easy to find. It was decided to call a crawl around these pubs a "Fruli Trail"... a popular feature of the site, and one that we research as much as possible!

Other areas of the site included a fans gallery, a searchable list of fruli pubs and a "fun" section just to encourage more visits really.

After two months of the site, we realised something a bit special was going on. Fruli fans from all around the country were emailing us telling us where they had tried the red stuff, and even sending us pics of themselves to prove it.
We set up a newsletter and couldn't believe the amount of people signing up, just to be kept informed of a strawberry beer.

That was when we received an email off Specialist Brand Development. They wanted to know a little more about us, and why we had set up a website about their beer... understandable really!

The meeting we had next was a classic... but one I feel for the next blog...