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A van with the Pour Brothers Brewery's logo outside the front of the brewery Tuesday. Photo taken on Monday, 09/09/19. Ryan Welch/The Enterprise
A van with the Pour Brothers Brewery's logo outside the front of the brewery Tuesday. Photo taken on Monday, 09/09/19. Ryan Welch/The Enterprise
Photo: Ryan Welch, Beaumont Enterprise / The Enterprise
A van with the Pour Brothers Brewery's logo outside the front of the brewery Tuesday. Photo taken on Monday, 09/09/19. Ryan Welch/The Enterprise
A van with the Pour Brothers Brewery's logo outside the front of the brewery Tuesday. Photo taken on Monday, 09/09/19. Ryan Welch/The Enterprise
Photo: Ryan Welch, Beaumont Enterprise / The EnterpriseCraft brewing, one of Southeast Texas’ newest industries, has been facing its own unique challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. This weekend brewers and customers came together as a part of a statewide initiative to keep the beer flowing into the future.
The Great Texas Beer Run, a promotional event of the Texas Craft Brewers Association, kicked off Thursday with craft brewers across the state taking to social media to tout deals, new beers and an awareness of the struggling hospitality industry.
The statewide campaign also coincided with the opening of Beaumont’s Struggle Street Co.’s new online store that allows customers to purchase new beers and old favorites for pickup later in the day.
Owner Scott Reeves said the cans set aside sold out in about 5 minutes after the site opened at 8 a.m. Thursday.
“We’ve had massive support from the community,” he said “We’re open twice a week now and I probably see the same people every time we are open.”
Although the brewery is only open 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays for pickup, Reeves said it has been able to retain about 50% of its usual business. That’s a rosier outlook than the 71% reduction in revenue on average reported by the Texas Craft Brewers Guild earlier in the month.
Even after bars and restaurants return to semi-normalcy, Reeves said Struggle Street would keep using the tricks his team has learned with online releases and the convenient point of sales shortcuts currently in use during the health crisis.
In addition to its orginal recipes, Reeves and company revealed this week that Struggle Street has been working on the All Together IPA developed by Other Half Brewing.
The Brooklyn, New York, brewery shared the recipe for free and partnered with a label company to help any brewer market the beer as a way to raise money for the hospitality industry. Brewers can use the proceeds to help pay staff, support the local service industry or for donations to hospitality workers’ relief funds.
Reeves said the proceeds would be used to help supplement the wages of his staff, which has been missing out on a large chunk of their usual wages because of the absence of tips.
Buckstin Brewing in Nederland also has a version of the All Together IPA, but its Great Texas Beer Run campaign differs from Struggle Street’s.
Open for just a little over five months, the Mid-County brewpub has benefited from its dedicated kitchen, selling pizza and cookie kit combos with their beers while developing a new menu for carry out.
Gabi Blanco, a co-owner of Buckstin Brewing with her husband Justin Buchanan-Lopez, said years of planning on a business model and an early investment in a small canning machine helped keep the doors open so far.
“We’ve had a great staff that is adaptable and helping us hold it all together,” she said. “It’s been 100% all because of them.”
Buckstin got most of its business on Thursday and Friday as people stocked up for the weekend. Blanco said she believed a lot of people were planning on heading out of town over the weekend or hitting recently opened beaches for a quarantine break.
She believed it was a sign of how eager people will be to finally escape quarantine and flock to bars and restaurants again — whether that was a good idea or not.
Buckstin’s current business also has the couple thinking about the future, including growth. Blanco said she had to have a conversation with her managers recently about how they would handle an uptick in food orders if their kitchen’s popularity outgrows the quarantine period.
“We talked about even hiring another person if that happens,” she said.
Pour Brothers Brewery in Beaumont also participated in the craft brewery campaign, offering deals on its canned beers and promoting its drive-thru. It currently is the only brewery in the region with distribution to local stores.
Neches Brewing Co. was open over the weekend and has been able to stay open almost every day during the lock down, but owner Tyler Blount said he and his crew weren’t able to find the time to participate in the Beer Run.
With time and resources tight these days, Blount said he felt it was better to focus on maintaining business as usual instead of trying to come up with new collaborations for the promotion.
“We’re still brewing beer and still have supplies, but we just haven’t been ordering a lot,” he said. “We’re still coming up with new beers and are selling everything we make. That’s the only thing we can do right now.”
One of those new ideas coming out soon will be an IPA called Elbow Bump. Blount said the brewery also is developing what might be one of the lightest beers the Neches crew has ever made.
An earlier repair to the brewery’s air conditioner a few months ago kept Neches Brewing from being able to invest in canning, but Blount said there was still enough support and local demand to staunch revenue loss in the short term.
Charles Vallhonrat, executive director of the Texas Craft Brewers Guild, said it was stories of innovation and resilience like the ones from Southeast Texas brewers that inspired the spirit of the Great Texas Beer Run.
He said the guild was pressed to find a way to not only help members keep afloat, but to bring awareness and advocacy to the industry across the state. Along with the collaborative promotion and fundraising efforts, the guild has continued to push the same type of legislative advocacy that led to to-go sales for breweries just last year.
“From a policy standpoint, we’re still requesting the ability to deliver and ship beer, as well as some tax deferment and label approval fixes, he said. “To its credit, TABC has already been working on an improved label cycle, so it isn’t as much of an issue anymore.”
Without the to-go sales legislation that became part of the code last session, Vallhonrat said around half of the guild’s members wouldn’t have been able to continue operations without some kind of intervention from the governor.
Moving forward, Vallhonrat said the coronavirus-related precautions will probably inspire efforts to help the industry strike more of a balance between in-person and to-go sales as a business model.
In the meantime, the online success of the Beer Run promotion helped inspire another way for the guild to help brewers. Because of the popularity of the designs made by Guerilla Suit, an Austin-area design agency, the guild has started selling Beer Run merchandise and is donating part of the proceeds to craft brewers designated by customers.
Vallhonrat said any Texas independent brewer can receive proceeds from the initiative. In addition, the guild has waived membership dues during the crises.
“Right now, the most important thing is keeping the community of information open and reaching out to everyone that we can,” he said.
jacob.dick@beaumontenterprise.com
twitter.com/jdickjournalism
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Pandemic promotion aids craft brewers - Beaumont Enterprise
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