Coronavirus Diaries (3/28): A Gigantic Update
Van Havig delivering to Huck Bales.
In this ongoing series, I have been posting the reflections of brewers and cidermakers as they deal with the unfolding COVID-19 coronavirus. In today’s post, Van Havig of Gigantic Brewing offers an entertaining and revealing report on how they’re managing.
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I’m just turning the whole post over to Van, the co-founder, with Ben Love, of Gigantic Brewing, a 4,500-barrel packaging brewery with a now-closed taproom.
Let's start with logistics. In the brewery, the brewers are still working somewhat. I'm paying them for five days of work this week, but they're only working two—on packaging days. They'll work three more packaging days in the next two weeks, but will have already been paid for it. With the new shelter in place rules, we're doing our best to enforce a 6-foot buffer between brewers, and so working the packaging line has gotten a little odd. Usually, we have two people packing cases and stacking them standing right next to each other. Now we're having the case packer slide cases "Old West cowboy style at the bar" down a 6-foot table to the case stacker.
We've decided to keep the tap room open for to-go sales. I absolutely understand that some find this to be a risk they'd rather not take with their employees, but as much as I may feel that we're a "family" at Gigantic, I most definitely am not anyone's father, and my paternalistic tendencies stop at telling adults what level of risk they should accept for themselves. So we've instituted the kind of social distancing measures that are now common. Only one person works in the taproom, and they stay behind the bar and distanced from customers. Only two "groups" (two friends, a couple, not a whole basketball team) of customers may be in the tap room at any one time - one actually choosing and paying for beer, and one waiting an appropriate distance away at a clearly marked line, but inside. We're encouraging cashless payment, and have taped a chip reader to the bar so there is no touching of anything by two people. To leave, we have the purchaser go around a big table, while the one waiting moves up to become the next purchaser. It's like the Virginia reel, or a square dance, but in the tap room. The bartender is doing a lot of sanitizing between customers.
Sales have been good in the tap room, which is exciting. And by good I mean 30% to 40% of normal sales. I have my fingers crossed that we can keep that level of sales in the tap room, but I'm concerned that when this thing really hits the hospitals, people may not want to leave their homes at all. Which is absolutely understandable.
Which brings me to home delivery of beer. Who really knew that you could do that in Oregon? I sure didn't. We got our website set up to take orders on Wednesday the 18th, and we're sticking with next-day delivery. We have a one-case or $50 minimum order, and are delivering in Portland and Milwaukie, sometimes the border with Clackamas. Right off the bat, orders have been good, say 20 - 40 per day—definitely worth it when draft sales are $0 for perhaps months. It's a lot of work, though. Between generating pick sheets, filling orders, generating a map and route and loading up, it's a couple hours of work. Then deliveries take 2 to 4 hours depending on the number and distances in between. We're finding that one driver can do between 12 and 15 deliveries and it's not so bad. Much above that and it takes a long time. I did 22 deliveries yesterday in about 4 hours. For the most part, it's me, my wife and Ben doing the deliveries right now.
So if you add up all our revenue streams—bottles out to distributors, tap room to-go, and delivery of bottles—we seem to be generating about 45% of our normal revenue. But we're working pretty hard to get that. The good news is that if we can keep this up even as things get worse, than I can afford to bring some people back to work after they take their vacation and sick pay. Hopefully we can use Workshare (an Oregon partial-unemployment program) or some of the federal unemployment benefits to do that.
That brings me to the various federal bills that have passed lately. I've never been in a position in which I've had to pay close attention to such things. I find it obtuse and confusing. It turns out the government doesn't send you a letter or email explaining how your company could benefit and how you'd go about accessing these benefits. What you read in the news (choose your source) isn't that helpful in most instances either. They just report that "loans will be available to small businesses." So when you try to find out about the particulars, there's just 50 articles about how "programs are available", with no real information that would be useful to a small business. This is where you really see the difference between small business and "small business." A business like ours (or even more so an independent bar), may have only one or two people who can look into the bureaucratic intricacies of a government program. However, government defines a small business as either one that employs less than 50 people (a company over 3 times our size), or one that employs LESS THAN 500 PEOPLE (that's over 33 times our size). Most businesses that size have accounting teams, perhaps a lawyer or a legal team, a couple layers of management, etc.(I'm not talking about a large independent restaurants here.) Those "small businesses" are more capable of accessing government programs because they can dedicate the resources to jumping through all the hoops. I'm driving a f*cking van around delivering beer for $50 a pop.
Thankfully, this is where the Oregon Brewers Guild (and other state guilds) and the Brewers Association are stepping in. They're actively using their contacts a pro bono legal professionals to distill this information so it's actually usable. It's very early days of this right now, and I still need to jump on some things and make some decisions to get started on these programs, but at least I'm not swimming alone in the pool right now. There have also been some law offices who are offering pro bono help with some of these things as well, so that's awesome. We'll figure it out eventually.
To end on a happy note, when I've been making beer deliveries to people and they offer me a tip, I've been suggesting they donate to the Oregon Food Bank instead. It doesn't sit well with me to accept tips when I'm an owner of the company. (full disclosure, we have a "tip the brewery" button when you buy beer—but we think it's pretty clear that the brewery is being tipped there.) That said, on my third stop yesterday someone offered a tip, and I mentioned the Food Bank. They said they'd send the money there instead, but you never know if people actually do it. About 15 minutes later I got a text with a photo of the donation screen for the Oregon Food Bank, and that person had donated $50! About 10 stops later, I dropped off beer to a guy who I'd dropped off to on Sunday and who'd tried to tip. When he saw me, he mentioned that he had donated $20 as a result, and then posted on Facebook about how he thought it was cool that I had suggested that. His friends donated another $60! A few stops later, and the previous story came up because I was feeling really good, and 10 minutes after that stop I got a text that they had donated $100! $230 to the Oregon Food Bank in a couple days just by mentioning it. It kills me that Oregon is one of the states with the highest incidence of food stress, particularly among children, and with unemployment soaring, people are going to need the food bank, regardless of federal assistance. Please donate.