Coronavirus at One: Reconsidering How to Connect with Customers
In this ongoing series, I have been posting the reflections of brewers and cidermakers as they navigate the coronavirus pandemic. This week we'll have a series of our regulars discussing the pandemic at one year. You can see other posts in the series here.
In the final report in this series, Matt Van Wyk of Alesong describes that brewery’s process of retooling their already-unusual model based on lessons from Covid. Alesong makes sophisticated, barrel-aged beer. The brewery took a page from the winemaker’s playbook, focusing on a bottle club and a smaller group of avid fans. Yet as Matt describes, Alesong decided, like many breweries during Covid, to add a tasting room to appeal directly to drinkers.
Light at the end of the tunnel is what I think about daily. I try not to look at the daily county and state 'confirmed and presumptive Covid-19' numbers (I've grown to hate that phrase), but how can I not? Much of the health of our business is tied to graphs, numbers, percent positivities, and so on. Now, as I've reported before, Alesong Brewing and Blending has survived this, hopefully, once-in-a-lifetime battle, fairly unscathed. Yet that wasn't by simply having good fortune. No, we had to grind, hope, pivot and have a lot of faith in our core customers, in our government and the aid they could provide, and in our own ability to not give up.
But here we are, with businesses and schools across the state starting to open up, not unlike the daffodils and crocuses (crocii??) poking through the soil outside my window on this early spring day. Much of this 'slow-down' has given my partners and I a chance to reflect. Reflect on what we've done in our short five years in business and how the next five years and beyond will look. We've already made several small changes, but a couple of big ones as well. The main thing we did in the last six months is accelerate our timeline for opening more front-facing, direct-to-consumer outlets. That is, we have a second tasting room.
We've always known that core customers (local community and club members) along with high margins over the bar is the way to success in this low-margin industry. Heck, the entire recent taproom explosion across the US is attributable to that knowledge. The pandemic confirmed that theme when our best customers came out to support us daily, sitting under a tent in the rain with a heater that barely provided a glimmer of warmth, just to make sure we lived to see another day.
Now, it's been widely reported that the brands that were already cemented in grocery stores and set up for multi-pack canning have excelled in this time of drinking at home, but a low volume/high dollar brand like Alesong doesn't fit into the same model. So it was our community, our club, and a few people around the state who were willing to pay for shipping that kept us rolling.
We started negotiating on the new space in downtown Eugene in August, solidified the space in November, and were ready to open around Thanksgiving—until we were frozen out by state mandates (and the wise safety decision of such a freeze). We had to cut staff hours, we had to continue the delivery, and we had to wait and hope. But through this winter we have already found new customers who had never visited our country tasting room. We have given current customers a closer place to visit, and we have continued to increase our club membership with members who are dreaming of sun-washed patio vibes. That all has given us hope that the light at the end of the tunnel is real, and that the mutations of Covid that we keep reading about, while real, are soon ready to be vanquished by the vaccine and, hopefully we can return to some sense of normalcy.
One thing that won't return is our way of operating our wine country tasting room. Once we secured our in-town tasting room, which is open daily to the public, we made the decision to convert our five-acre property outside of Eugene at the Southernmost tip of the Valley into a 'Visit by Appointment' model, called Guided Tastings. Not unlike what some wineries in Oregon and other states do, we hope to give guests an exclusive look into our patient production methods by providing a one-on-one tour and tasting with our Director of Hospitality. Now, members of our Blenders Circle have unlimited use of our patio and grounds, but we'll only be open there Fri-Sun and non members must reserve one of three time slots on Saturdays to start.
We're also hoping that this lower volume plan allows us to book private events and other group tours and visits. If you've visited our brewery, we don't have space for a full on wedding like some wineries do, but we can host other large gatherings, perhaps up to 100 people. That was next to impossible when we were open every day to the inconsistently visiting public, not knowing how to balance the number of visitors each day. This is all to say that we are very excited to alter our model slightly, but also terrified that we may have made a stupid decision and are leaving money on the table. However, having an exclusive tasting room experience is something we always wanted from the day that we started planning Alesong.
It likely would not have happened had it not been for the pandemic that forced us to stop and look at things more closely. We got through it, we're probably stronger now than before it started and we have a clear focus on what Alesong is and where we'll be headed in the future. I just hired our first employee since last May, and we have plans to add more staff in production and the tasting room. Things are happening and we will, as I texted my friend while watching my alma mater play in March Madness last night, live to play another day! Let's just hope we can soon do it with a maskless smile and a nod to better things ahead. Cheers to a non-pandemic world!