At the brewery, we talk about the tidal wave. Its a term we coined in our second year by about mid-May and it referred to the dizzying amount of special projects, special events, dramatic increase in sales and extra things on the go we very suddenly started to experience. Every year since, we talk about where we are in relation to the tidal wave, i.e. “It feels like the tidal waves coming”; “Oh, I think the tidal wave’s hit”; or “I think we’ve made it through the worst of the tidal wave”; to eventually “We made it through the tidal wave!”.
This last remark is always one of both joy and melancholy. It is such an endurance test to get through for everyone at the brewery, but when its over it also means the end of our rapid growth and let me tell you growing rapidly has all the adrenaline rush of jumping out of an airplane. (Actually, I don’t know what jumping out of an airplane feels like, and have no real urge to experience it, but it seems like a good equivalent).
The funniest comment made every year about the tidal wave goes something like this: “This year we’re so much more prepared for the tidal wave”. Every year I say it in March, just before St. Patrick’s Day, which is to us the start of our busy season, and every year by mid-May I look back with a sense of wonder at the naiveté I must have had only 2 months earlier. To give you a sense of the extra stuff we’ve got on the go, here are a few general items:
• We’ve gone from running our bottling line 4 days/week, to 7 days/week (24 hours per day) and have had to start cancelling orders due to lack of bottling capability (Note to our sad customers – new bottling line should be installed by July)
• We’re brewing 24 hours a day 5 days a week and will begin 7 days very shortly.
• Lyndell, our special events and donations coordinator has gone from running about 15 events per month to about 50 events per month. Included in the list are some pretty cool festivals like the Dandelion festival in Kemptville, the Orleans festival, The Great Canadian Cheese festival in Prince Edward County, Mondial de la Biere in Montreal, Toronto Wine and Spirits, Beaches BBQ and Brew Fest, Ottawa Jazz Fest, Oyster fest in Ottawa, Perth Kilt Run, Vermont Brewer’s festival...and more, more, more!
• Sales at our wonderful, wonderful restaurants have jumped by 27% in 3 months and we expect another 30% growth by end of July.
This rapid growth impacts everybody. We’re all working faster, harder and longer to try to get it all done. I’m sure most everybody at the brewery could give you a list of the extra projects they have on the go right now, but here’s a small list of things I’ve personally got on the go over the next few weeks.
• Planning OCB week – I’m the co-chair again this year along with my good friend at Cameron’s, Jason Ellesmere.
• Hiring a new production manager, sales staff, delivery person, assistant brewer.
• Working through a major financing round to bring in a new brewhouse and more fermenters to try to keep up with this crazy growth.
• Talking to a few interested people about the possibility of expanding into Quebec (I’m sure wiser people than I would suggest I don’t divulge this detail, but I’ve never really seen the point in being too secretive on this sort of stuff).
• Being available for the media. The OCB’s PR person always asks me how we get so much media attention, and I always reply “by being newsworthy”, but Spring time seems to be a very good time to write about beer. CTV is here tomorrow, we’ve recently had great articles in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen and more, and all of this takes time to spend with the journalist. (not complaining!)
• Speaking engagements: Apparently some people think I’m worth listening to! I recently gave a seminar on sustainable brewing at Niagara College’s brewing school (actually Karen did a good chunk of the work and Jordan made it look good, I just pretended I knew what I was talking about), I’m speaking to Ryerson University’s Alumni this Thursday and will be talking at the Atlantic Beer Festival in Moncton on the 28th.
• Working on new projects is takes up a lot of time (and is incredibly fun). We’re working on lots of new Wild Oats releases, special collaborations for OCB Week, Toronto Beer Week and our Oktoberfest. We’re working on a brand new project that will be launched on our 5th birthday and will be ultra cool from both a sustainability and crazy beer perspective. We’re working with some really cool artists for a Halloween project that is going to be absolutely killer.
I’m looking at the list of other projects on the go and starting to feel overwhelmed, so instead of making this bullet point list go on for forever, I think I’ll just leave it at “Wow, was I ever foolish to think this year I’d be better prepared for this”. It seems that the more people we have working hard, the more things we can get into, so we just keep getting busier.
Showing posts with label beer sales. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beer sales. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Sunday, May 09, 2010
EU Auditors, sales meeting, OCB week
Another interesting week at Beau's...
I'm co-chairs of Ontario Craft Beer Week with Jason Ellsmere from Cameron's brewing and every Wednesday we meet (alternative weeks are face to face and teleconference) with our committee to review progress and set goals for achievement for the following week. Every 4th Wednesday is an Ontario Craft Brewers (OCB)executive committee meeting and this was both.
That means I spent a good 4 hours on the phone, updating the exec committee on OCB Week progress and then immediately getting onto the Craft Beer Week teleconference. My ears felt like they had been steamrolled by the end of the day.
Progress on Ontario Craft Beer Week has been phenomenal. All the OCB breweries are getting really involved and we're hoping to have an insane amount of programming, ranging from the very intimate events at tiny restaurants to much larger festival events.
From Vankleek Hill, to Barrie, to Huntsville to Ottawa and Toronto, there will be events going on all week. Its been a huge undertaking, but because we've got a great team, we're having fun and getting things done.
We had our first-ever quarterly sales meeting this week, too. In the last three months we've grown from a two-person sales team to a six-person team and our sales reps spend almost all their time on the road, so this was a great way to get all on the same page, go over all sorts of stuff there never seems time to go over and generally have some fun as a team.
On Thursday night we visited a few spots in Micheala's territory, including the Marlborough Pub, The Swan on the Rideau and The Red Dot. Then Friday was a full day session including hard core sales stuff, beer and cheese pairings, draught systems training and more.
Saturday was quite the day. We hosted a delegation from the European Union's organic certification body, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and Pro-Cert, our certifier. It was explained to me that the two organizations are trying to develop an equivelency for the two certifications, and we were chosen as one of the certified processing companies to perform a mock-audit on. So the European delegates spent several hours going through our record-keeping and testing our knowledge of the certification processes and regulations.
It was pretty stressful, but also pretty great - we're coming up to our annual recertification audit and a trial run was a good opportunity to get a free test on how we're doing. Not to mention, in our small way being part of a rather historic undertaking.
I'm co-chairs of Ontario Craft Beer Week with Jason Ellsmere from Cameron's brewing and every Wednesday we meet (alternative weeks are face to face and teleconference) with our committee to review progress and set goals for achievement for the following week. Every 4th Wednesday is an Ontario Craft Brewers (OCB)executive committee meeting and this was both.
That means I spent a good 4 hours on the phone, updating the exec committee on OCB Week progress and then immediately getting onto the Craft Beer Week teleconference. My ears felt like they had been steamrolled by the end of the day.
Progress on Ontario Craft Beer Week has been phenomenal. All the OCB breweries are getting really involved and we're hoping to have an insane amount of programming, ranging from the very intimate events at tiny restaurants to much larger festival events.
From Vankleek Hill, to Barrie, to Huntsville to Ottawa and Toronto, there will be events going on all week. Its been a huge undertaking, but because we've got a great team, we're having fun and getting things done.
We had our first-ever quarterly sales meeting this week, too. In the last three months we've grown from a two-person sales team to a six-person team and our sales reps spend almost all their time on the road, so this was a great way to get all on the same page, go over all sorts of stuff there never seems time to go over and generally have some fun as a team.
On Thursday night we visited a few spots in Micheala's territory, including the Marlborough Pub, The Swan on the Rideau and The Red Dot. Then Friday was a full day session including hard core sales stuff, beer and cheese pairings, draught systems training and more.
Saturday was quite the day. We hosted a delegation from the European Union's organic certification body, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and Pro-Cert, our certifier. It was explained to me that the two organizations are trying to develop an equivelency for the two certifications, and we were chosen as one of the certified processing companies to perform a mock-audit on. So the European delegates spent several hours going through our record-keeping and testing our knowledge of the certification processes and regulations.
It was pretty stressful, but also pretty great - we're coming up to our annual recertification audit and a trial run was a good opportunity to get a free test on how we're doing. Not to mention, in our small way being part of a rather historic undertaking.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Ghosts of Christmas Past
2 days ‘till Christmas and things at Beau’s are awesome! Crazy, that is; but that is awesome! I came in on the weekend to pitch in on production-type stuff like washing bottles, stacking ceramics on buggies and washing kegs to make sure we’d have enough beer for our deliveries and retail shop (which was a total zoo on the weekend).
Jen Brock, who has been working in our retail store (and booking dispensing units, filing, packaging, etc.) since June, came into work on Saturday to see me arms deep in the growler washing tub and said something like “I never thought I’d see the day…” She was that surprised to see me doing honest work instead of just hanging out with a beer in my hand [note to reader: I’m actually working while hanging out with a beer in my hand, it just doesn’t look like it].
It got me thinking of how much has changed at the brewery in such a short time…
Christmas 2006: We’d been open for 6 months. There were still just 5 of us at the brewery at the time and we didn’t sell anything other than kegs. We were still brewing out of Churchkey, too. We had heard about the Christmas sales spike, but we only sold to about 20 restaurants, so December was actually pretty quiet in terms of sales. The trips back and forth to Campbelford through snowy weather were tough and I think my brother Phil actually ditched the cargo van around this time during a delivery run through a blizzard.
Christmas 2007: By now we were brewing full-on in Vankleek Hill, there were 6 of us full time and Phil’s then fiancée (wife, now) helped out on the weekends. My sister Jen and her husband Kevin also helped out a lot, but we didn’t pay them yet (mind you, they drink their weight in beer). This was the first year we sold beer out of the retail shop – and it was insanity! We only had a little beer gun at the time, so fill rates were ridiculous – 3 dedicated folks could fill about 40 an hour and we ran out of new bottles, so we also had to clean them all before filling. Our little wash tubs could handle 8 bottles at a time – for about 2 hours when we would run out of hot water and would have to stop washing.
I didn’t see much of my family that year. We’d start filling at 5am,
get a little bit ahead before the store opened at 10am, and then we’d see our stock dwindle all day as we kept frantically trying to keep up with the pace of sales. At 6pm, when the shop closed, I’d go home for dinner with Nicola and the kids and stay till the kids were in bed at 8pm. Then, back to the brewery to start cleaning bottles for the next day. This would finish up at about 3am, and I’d go home, take a shower and get a solid 1 to 1.5 hours sleep before starting the day at 5am again. All of us were completely beat by the time we closed up shop on Christmas Eve.
Christmas 2008: This year there were 13 of us and it was the first year selling through the LCBO. We got some really good advice on planning for Christmas from Ryan (an LCBO employee) and started working on things well in advance. We now had our two-head filling machine, so one person could crank out 90 ceramics or 50 jugs in one hour (assuming someone laid them on the buggy in advance and someone else was packaging them). But holy canoly, sales spiked and things were wild.
Keeping up with orders – both filling and delivering were a huge challenge and once again it seemed like every night was a 4am one…then out for deliveries at 8am. We still only had one cargo van at that point, so most deliveries went out in minivans. This year was a bit more manageable and none of us could believe it, because we sold so much more beer than the year before, but we got through it so much better.
Christmas 2009: Its almost starting to feel like we know what we’re doing now! We’ve been running two shifts a day for the last 6 weeks, starting at 5am and finishing at 11pm – this last weekend we moved to round the clock filling. We’ve got enough staff to keep bottles on the move on filling and packaging and 2 full time drivers and a bigger truck + a cargo van. We’ve got 23 employees now and this weekend is the first time I’ve had to come in to help out in production. It’s a good feeling to walk in to brewery in the morning and see the orders packed and ready to go, people moving with purpose and generally the feeling like you’ve just walked into a beehive.
I can’t say that I miss the cracked fingers from spending 20 hours soaking in sanitizer, and I can’t say I miss working on only 2 hours sleep a night, but in some ways I’m nostalgic for that feeling that we were moving a mountain every single day. What has replaced that is an odd, rather comforting feeling that I can no longer save the day by my own effort. For us to get our orders out, our whole team has to put out the extra effort, which means I can sleep more and still make sure that the beer gets to where it needs to be. Not tonight, mind you (I’m in at 2am tonight, just like last night), but in general.
Merry Christmas. Thanks to everyone who stopped by the retail store to pick up some jugs or picked up a bottle at the LCBO. Your purchase of our beer keeps the lights on here, and I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate you choosing to spend your Christmas with us.
Cheers!
Jen Brock, who has been working in our retail store (and booking dispensing units, filing, packaging, etc.) since June, came into work on Saturday to see me arms deep in the growler washing tub and said something like “I never thought I’d see the day…” She was that surprised to see me doing honest work instead of just hanging out with a beer in my hand [note to reader: I’m actually working while hanging out with a beer in my hand, it just doesn’t look like it].
It got me thinking of how much has changed at the brewery in such a short time…
Christmas 2006: We’d been open for 6 months. There were still just 5 of us at the brewery at the time and we didn’t sell anything other than kegs. We were still brewing out of Churchkey, too. We had heard about the Christmas sales spike, but we only sold to about 20 restaurants, so December was actually pretty quiet in terms of sales. The trips back and forth to Campbelford through snowy weather were tough and I think my brother Phil actually ditched the cargo van around this time during a delivery run through a blizzard.
Christmas 2007: By now we were brewing full-on in Vankleek Hill, there were 6 of us full time and Phil’s then fiancée (wife, now) helped out on the weekends. My sister Jen and her husband Kevin also helped out a lot, but we didn’t pay them yet (mind you, they drink their weight in beer). This was the first year we sold beer out of the retail shop – and it was insanity! We only had a little beer gun at the time, so fill rates were ridiculous – 3 dedicated folks could fill about 40 an hour and we ran out of new bottles, so we also had to clean them all before filling. Our little wash tubs could handle 8 bottles at a time – for about 2 hours when we would run out of hot water and would have to stop washing.
I didn’t see much of my family that year. We’d start filling at 5am,
get a little bit ahead before the store opened at 10am, and then we’d see our stock dwindle all day as we kept frantically trying to keep up with the pace of sales. At 6pm, when the shop closed, I’d go home for dinner with Nicola and the kids and stay till the kids were in bed at 8pm. Then, back to the brewery to start cleaning bottles for the next day. This would finish up at about 3am, and I’d go home, take a shower and get a solid 1 to 1.5 hours sleep before starting the day at 5am again. All of us were completely beat by the time we closed up shop on Christmas Eve.
Christmas 2008: This year there were 13 of us and it was the first year selling through the LCBO. We got some really good advice on planning for Christmas from Ryan (an LCBO employee) and started working on things well in advance. We now had our two-head filling machine, so one person could crank out 90 ceramics or 50 jugs in one hour (assuming someone laid them on the buggy in advance and someone else was packaging them). But holy canoly, sales spiked and things were wild.
Keeping up with orders – both filling and delivering were a huge challenge and once again it seemed like every night was a 4am one…then out for deliveries at 8am. We still only had one cargo van at that point, so most deliveries went out in minivans. This year was a bit more manageable and none of us could believe it, because we sold so much more beer than the year before, but we got through it so much better.
Christmas 2009: Its almost starting to feel like we know what we’re doing now! We’ve been running two shifts a day for the last 6 weeks, starting at 5am and finishing at 11pm – this last weekend we moved to round the clock filling. We’ve got enough staff to keep bottles on the move on filling and packaging and 2 full time drivers and a bigger truck + a cargo van. We’ve got 23 employees now and this weekend is the first time I’ve had to come in to help out in production. It’s a good feeling to walk in to brewery in the morning and see the orders packed and ready to go, people moving with purpose and generally the feeling like you’ve just walked into a beehive.
I can’t say that I miss the cracked fingers from spending 20 hours soaking in sanitizer, and I can’t say I miss working on only 2 hours sleep a night, but in some ways I’m nostalgic for that feeling that we were moving a mountain every single day. What has replaced that is an odd, rather comforting feeling that I can no longer save the day by my own effort. For us to get our orders out, our whole team has to put out the extra effort, which means I can sleep more and still make sure that the beer gets to where it needs to be. Not tonight, mind you (I’m in at 2am tonight, just like last night), but in general.
Merry Christmas. Thanks to everyone who stopped by the retail store to pick up some jugs or picked up a bottle at the LCBO. Your purchase of our beer keeps the lights on here, and I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate you choosing to spend your Christmas with us.
Cheers!
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