Coronavirus at One: The Resilience of Beer
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.
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Today we hear from Gigantic’s Van Havig. Despite its name, Gigantic is a small brewery in Southeast Portland with a satellite taproom in the Montavilla neighborhood of Northeast Portland.
We’re a year into this and I feel like I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m sorry to say that all of my expectations but for a few have been met in the last year. When the lockdown started in March of last year, I estimated a minimum of three months. I also knew that things would get worse into the fall and the winter. Finally, I was pretty sure that the initial vaccine rollout would be rocky, and that neither I nor my employees could hope to get vaccinated before the second quarter at the earliest. But we now have a more complete vaccination schedule, and even if it’s optimistic, at least it’s a plan. Fortunately, no one at Gigantic has come down with COVID. We’ve had a few causes for employees to get tested, and we try hard to keep everyone healthy. And no we’re not vaccinated yet, and yes you can still be infected after vaccination. But I finally feel like we can make it through. So how the hell did we make it this far?
First, it turns out that small breweries are much more flexible than restaurants or bars. We make a much more durable consumable than they do, despite the absolutely excessive focus on beer freshness in the last couple of years.(Really, if your beer needs to be consumed within two weeks or a month of the package date to taste good, then you’re doing a terrible job of putting it in a can or bottle. It’s not the beer’s fault, it’s the brewer’s.) In my opinion, bars have been the worst hit in this pandemic. If people go to a bar mainly for the food, then we call that a restaurant. But bars are all about communal gathering—so they have taken a beating. Restaurants can at least sell to go food, but you only buy enough for one meal. And when people don’t want to leave their house for fear of infection, then that’s a problem. We breweries of course sell beer by the case, and here in Oregon you can buy three cases at a time, per person. So it’s pretty easy to stock up with minimal trips out of your house. I don’t think any of us realized this advantage when this all started. But in my mind it explains everything about why breweries were able to better survive this economic/epidemic crisis. Sure, delivery helps. But restaurants can do that as well and they haven’t fared nearly as well as we have. It’s funny, because it reminds me of the fact that for hundreds of years one of the main reasons people drank beer was because it’s safer than water. During this past year it’s been safer to pick up beer at the brewery than food at a restaurant—again due to the packaged durability of beer. Beer is also more affordable than something like wine. I hope the wineries have done OK, but I’m glad that we make the “everyone beverage.”
That’s not to say it’s been easy at Gigantic. In pre-COVID times, we were a draft-heavy brewery. Because we’ve decided to dig our heels in with refillable bottles (rather than switching to cans) we’ve frankly lost placements at grocery stores. So our barrelage was down about 40% in 2020 compared to 2019, whereas some small breweries in cans actually saw growth in 2020. That hurts. But we believe in refillable bottles for a number of reasons. We think the package quality is better, we think they’re environmentally superior, and most importantly, they help forge a relationship between the drinker and us. We really think that COVID has introduced a lot of people to refillables through to go beer, and once they get the hang of it, they like it. I think it makes customers feel like they’re part of a community even if they aren’t swapping stories at the bar or running into friends. So whereas we may have lost sales this year, I think we have gained more solid customers. That said, it’s going to take a while to dig out of this hole, and it’s made us really change our entire game plan.
Originally, [co-founder] Ben Love and I wanted to have a small(ish) brewery that distributed beer around the PNW and sent small amounts of beer wherever people would buy it. We thought we’d have a little taproom where people could try the beer. COVID has shown us just how important direct-to-consumer sales are, whether at the bar, to go or delivery. That’s what has kept us in the black. We opened a second taproom in August, and even with all the restrictions, we’re making a tiny bit of money over there. We think we’ll start doing really well over there this summer and fall. It’s made us realize that we should open a third taproom, and we almost locked in a place last week that would have been great, but it fell through. So we’re actively looking now.
People may be thinking that the taproom model is risky in a pandemic, and that COVID may be with us forever, and will we ever be able to hug again, blah, blah, blah. I look to history as my guide. Post-Black Death, Italians went back to greeting each other with kisses. The 1918 flu (H1N1) was more deadly than COVID, and it became one of two prominent versions of Influenza A, and only occasionally does it flare up into something dangerous. COVID won’t go away, but it will dissipate soon, and most likely mutate into a less dangerous pathogen. It’s the way in which natural selection works on viruses. You may think I’m being a pollyanna, but you can go back and read my first paragraph and make that judgment.
I’m just thankful that despite it all, I live in Portland, Oregon, where people have taken this disease seriously. Where our rate of infection is among the lowest in the country. Where despite what some people may think, we care about each other enough to wear a mask to protect our fellow Portlanders. And when the time comes this summer when vaccination rates will be high, where people will want to see each other over a beer.
And I’ll get to go to the pub again.