Taproom Closings/Restrictions during Pandemic

[thilton]

Hello Everyone,

We operate a small brewery and taproom in WA (in eastern WA, not yet near epicenter of virus). I'm interested to know what others are considering with respect to taproom hours (with the virus spreading and some schools and businesses closing). We haven't closed or limited hours yet. It may be that we have no choice (if we face mandatory lockdown and closure of bars and restaurants). We'll see.

Thanks,

Tim

[McGinn]

Macleod brewery in LA just closed from it. Hope everyone has enough brews to get them through.

[Weehe]

We are moving to to-go cans/crowlers only. Not sure on hours yet.

[TGTimm]

We're in NE Oregon. Take-out only for the pub. We can fill growlers. Pub and kitchen are running on a skeleton crew.

We're hoping that package sales will keep the brewery hopping. No kegs for a while, outside of a few for home keggerators.

[idylldon]

I'm in So Cal and we're doing take-out food and filling crowlers and growlers to go. Down to a small crew in the kitchen but we're still brewing.

Cheers,
--
Don

[efdbrian]

We have a brewpub, and like all breweries, restaurants and bars in PA we are doing take out only. No delivery yet. The chef switched to making family sized casseroles in the single use foil baking pans. We have 4-5 different casseroles available with different ones planned for each week. We are open for limited hours in the evening with 1-2 tap room staff there for order pickup and crowler fills. This weekend the chef put together a menu that includes breakfast bakes. Customers are able to order those now for pickup Friday or Saturday evening. Business is obviously slow, but we are all doing what we can.

[Blu Dragonfly]

Tap Room Slow Down

Brewpub owner here. We are located on a busy tourism route to ski and summer areas in NE New Mexico. We were able to cut to 50% occupancy on Weds then had to go to delivery or take-out only on Thursday. Our state health department issued a directive not to allow customers to use their own drink ware for refills so we've instituted a growler exchange. There's a box at the front door, guests drop their growler in there, we issue a fresh one. When the box is full, we glove up, clean and sanitize the drop offs and put them back into circulation.

I've had some rudimentary canning equipment for awhile, this is going to push me to finally get it out and start doing some canning to see if I can give us some more revenue lift.

Summer, by-far, is busy season in our village due to Philmont Scout Ranch being right down the road and a lot of summer camping and recreation in points beyond but losing the last week of spring break this week really hurt many businesses and the ski resorts in our region. Summer is consistently far busier for us than ski season is so we only keep two full timers aside from myself in winter and two part timers. We've cut our part timers loose for the time being and I'm doing anything I can to keep my two full timers in a job right now.

Rather than cutting back days right now, we are going to expand two days. During winter months we are open W-Sat. We are going to Mon.-Sat. this next week with split shifts, same number of payroll hours, but possibly increasing our revenue stream by opening two more days. We are a tiny facility, 3BBL system 1400' total under roof and a 1400' beer garden. We do a menu of BBQ and paninis and some New Mexican classics. I might try BBQ family packs next week as well and see what happens.

Everybody hang in there, this will hopefully be over soon.