Thank you to all of our customers who have supported us and are still coming to our restaurant to enjoy take-out beer. We are very excited to announce that we will be opening our doors and taps for onsite consumption starting tomorrow (Friday, June 5). Things will be running within some new guidelines, see below, and if you don’t have a reservation, we will remain open for takeout.
We will be open for 2 hour classes and all classes this week will be listed on our restaurant reservations page (please note that once classes are sold out, they will not show on this page).
When you brew beer, there are also a lot of things that can go wrong. These numbers above represent a best case scenario. If there are situations such as dumped batches, recalls or other business interruptions, these situations will eventually roll back and affect the cost of producing the beer.
Lessons Learned
I know we have some smaller brewers reading our posts, so I have some thoughts for brewers here.
First, it’s important to know your numbers. We still have taprooms a long way to go, but we are getting better and we are constantly trying to improve to better understand our numbers.
We’re still using spreadsheets to do most of our work, and we do it manually. If you’re using a production system that makes it more accurate and automated, then that would be a big help.
I think our taprooms pricing is sharp, especially if you consider us to be a smaller brewer with no institutional funding or professional ownership. There’s not a lot of room for error. We want to get people to choose us when they go to the bottle store at the right price.
We price our beer at that level and hope we can get to a reasonable taprooms price. But to do that, we had to triple our sales with essentially no marketing budget, which is no small task.
We were able to do that, and we’re at that point now, but for a lot of the last year we were losing money, and in a few months we made a lot of money. It was a long-term decision that we made to become one of the bigger craft breweries. It’s a very risky thing to do,
and getting through the last year or two taprooms hasn’t been easy. If your strategy is not to try to compete with the bigger brewers in the bottle store, then I would definitely leave more room in pricing to make more profit and a little room for mistakes. It’s scary that we’re doing this.
The scarcity of beer also has a big impact on what people are prepared to pay. We don’t intentionally jack up the price of any of our beers; our small-batch Recon beers naturally cost much more to make, so naturally the price will be higher. However,
if we want to make more money on certain beers and less on others, we can taprooms certainly raise the price of certain beers. Depending on the style of competition, this style may not be as competitive.
These are all things worth considering when deciding what beers you want to put on tap and what you want to charge.
Reservations are $8.50 per person and include a Core Series vertical sailboat upon arrival. If you do not arrive within 30 minutes of your reservation start time, your table will be available for other groups. Reservations are capped at 20 people per brewery per session,
We will operate taprooms in accordance with the government’s new coronavirus safety guidelines and strict hygiene standards. Please ensure that you wash your hands upon entry and respect social distances while waiting and in our restaurant.
Due to changing circumstances, we will only be open for reservations for the week.
On weekends we have food trucks in both restaurants.
If you are coming for a beer or just for takeout, please feel free to taprooms order. These legends are very much looking forward to returning to the game after a tough few months.
Cheers, and we can’t wait to see you at the restaurant this weekend!
Here’s the link to the taproom page.