There was a time—basically just yesterday, pretty much—when the best craft breweries didn’t stoop to selling their suds online. It was from a draft at select bars and retailers or you were out of luck. Due to the unfortunate circumstance of the coronavirus pandemic, that’s changing in a big way.
In just the last couple of weeks, great New York City breweries such as Threes Brewing, Grimm Ales and Evil Twin have finally made their products available online.
It’s not just about the product, it’s also about keeping people employed. Gear Patrol has more:
Grimm, which also offers deliveries and to-go ordering through Caviar and GrubHub, opened its first-ever webstore for statewide shipping. Threes, who were planning on launching an online portal later in the year before the outbreak, had a short headstart.
Joshua Stylman, Threes Brewing founder, says it has allowed the brewery to rehire employees they were forced to lay off. “[We said] let’s try to build an e-commerce business and a proper supply chain in just three days,” Stylman says. If Threes weathers the current situation and returns to some sort of normalcy, Stylman says online ordering is likely here to stay.
It’s not just breweries in New York, either. Gear Patrol goes on to mention North Carolina’s Burial Beer Co., and legendary California craft brewers including Monkish Brewing, Russian River Brewing Company and Alvarado Street Brewery have all “gone virtual” as well.
It’s ultimately all about quarantines enforcing adaptations. As Joshua Stylman tells Gear Patrol, “I think that’s the reality of small companies in and out of beer dealing with this right now. Necessity is the mother of invention.”
If you love your local brewery, look online. This is a new reality, and it seems likely many more beer and liquor companies alike may soon make their products available via the internet. We’re all drinking at home thanks to social distancing, but that doesn’t mean social drinking is dead.