After what looked like a promising career with Maclay Murray & Spens Petra Wetzel left the law to get into the brewing sector. She is now poised to see her West beers hit bars and shops across Scotland. Richard Draycott enjoys a pint and a chat with her.

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Former Maclay Murray & Spens employee Petra Wetzel is a woman on a mission. The German-born entrepreneur is aiming to establish her WEST Bavarian beers as the official beers of Glasgow, the city that she adopted as her home as a teenager. Quite an ambition considering the competition – Tennent’s - but the energetic Wetzel is confident that she can win out.

“There really is no Glasgow beer at the moment,” says Wetzel. “The Red T of Tennent’s is not really a Glasgow beer. My father is a big beer drinker and when he would visit me from Germany he would ask what the local Glasgow beer was and I would say there wasn’t one. We want WEST to become Glasgow’s beer. We want people visiting to be told by Glaswegians that WEST is their beer.”

I meet Wetzel at the home of her small but perfectly formed brewing empire WEST, which is situated in the east end of Glasgow in the old Templeton Carpet Factory. The spacious bar, restaurant and brewery enjoys views across Glasgow Green through huge wooden framed windows and its panelled walls and sturdy wooden furniture fill the room with the Bavarian beer hall atmosphere Wetzel was aiming to create when she set out on this business venture in 2006.

Although just 33, Wetzel’s story is already an interesting one. She arrived in Scotland from Bavaria when she was 19 as a result of striking up a pen friendship while still at school in Germany. As it turns out the girl she began to correspond with was a girl called Eilidh McRae, who went on to study law and is now a procurator fiscal. Wetzel applied to Glasgow University to study law for a year, but was unsuccessful. As a result she studied Management, French, Politics and Art History. After two years she relocated to France to study, but her heart missed Glasgow so she returned to Glasgow University for her last year. On graduating she took a marketing job with Glasgow Tourist Board and worked on the international side of the organisation helping to sell the city as a conference venue and she played a part in Glasgow’s hosting of the Champions League Final in May 2002. It was during this time that fate once again pointed her towards a legal career. On signing up Glasgow Tourist Board to the German British Chamber of Commerce she met Michael Dean, who was the Head of the European and Competition Team at Maclay Murray & Spens.

Wetzel says: “I struck up a friendship with Michael and told him that I had once wanted to study law at Glasgow. He said I obviously had the drive for law and could make a good lawyer. So, he asked me to go and work with his team at Maclays and see how I liked the law with a view to going back to University to study an accelerated law degree.”

“At that time the European and Competition Team at Maclays was doing a lot of cartel work and a lot of clients were European based with offices in France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and because I could speak those languages I fitted into that department well.
As a result instead of staying for six months and then heading off to university I stayed with them. I did a pre-diploma traineeship, which means I worked with them and studied with the Law Society. That was in January 2002 and then because I was so busy with work I kind of neglected my exams, so I only started sitting exams with the Law Society in year two.”

In March 2006 Wetzel and her husband opened the WEST Brewery, but events transpired to keep Petra away from the business.

Firstly she became a mother when son Noah was born and then her mother had a serious accident, which saw her relocate home to Germany to take care of her while she recuperated. During this time the brewery was run by husband Gordon, but the pair separated in October 2006 and Petra focused on being a full time mother to Noah until the brewery went into administration in February.

However, that did not mean that the WEST concept was dead in the mind of its chief architect Wetzel – was this her tough legal mind set playing its part?

Wetzel says: “The brewery had been mine and my dad’s idea and because I had poured a lot of my own money into it and I knew it could work if it was managed properly I felt that I just needed to give it another go. If I hadn’t I would have always thought ‘what if’.  I could have packed up and moved back to Germany and lived very happily I suppose. I didn’t have a job and lost pretty much everything over this, but I just thought that this was too good an idea and concept to give up on.”

It was at this point that Scotland’s curry king Charan Gill became involved with Wetzel, becoming a minority shareholder and non-executive director of Noah Beers, which acquired the WEST Brewery and re-launched the brewery and WEST brand with Petra Wetzel spearheading the company.

After just three months since that move the company is already poised this month to start bottling the WEST beers brewed on site to strict German purity laws and distributing them to bars, restaurants and retailers across Scotland and the UK.

So, it has been a roller coaster ride for the former Maclays employee, so did her legal background and training help her get through the turmoil?

She says: “Having a legal background perhaps makes you more conscious of what could go wrong. The old company never had employment contracts, which was horrible, so one of the first things I did was speak to Morton Fraser who were great and helped me deal with all my employment issues and also I introduced a share option scheme because I believe if you incentivise people with ownership of what they do they really work better.

“The first legal document people read often freaks them out because of the language, but I suppose my background helped me to understand the various legal documents I had to read and also to communicate with the lawyers as I have an insight into how they work. When the old company went into administration there was a lot of legal input at that point. I was on the phone to lawyers for five hours everyday and that can be quite daunting for someone who has never dealt with lawyers before.”

For a ‘life after law’ subject, Wetzel makes an interesting study. Usually people leave the law because they have become disenchanted with some aspect of their job, but Wetzel says she always enjoyed working in the legal arena and had events not set her on a different path she has no doubts that she would have continued to climb the legal career ladder.

“Had I not taken the reigns at the brewery then I would probably be training to be a lawyer now. I never did my diploma so I was never a qualified lawyer, but had I not gone back to Germany and not got pregnant I am sure I would be might be training now in  Glasgow. My mother’s accident was a major event in my life and I suppose it has shaped my life in a way. I have a saying, the day I stop whistling in the morning that is the day I have to do something else. Everyday I got the train into Glasgow and walked up to Maclays I always whistled. I was very happy working in law.”

Perhaps, there’s a lesson in there for any unhappy lawyers reading this. If you are not happy then open up a brewery – it certainly seems to be working for Wetzel and WEST.