Most years at Hop & Sting Brewing Company in Grapevine, St. Patrick’s Day kicks off the start of drinking season. Spring and warm weather are upon us, and people are ready to say goodbye to their New Year’s resolutions and say hello to a green cold one in our beer garden. But in 2020, St. Paddy’s Day became our first day of shutdown season.
Our business consists of two main parts: the draft beer sold at bars and restaurants, including in our taproom, and the canned beer sold in grocery and convenience stores. Overnight, half of our business evaporated. We were essentially forbidden from selling our draft products. Naturally, we did what any business would do that suddenly saw half of its revenue disappear. We panicked!
As dire as the situation seemed, it turned out there’s worse things in life than being stuck with too much beer. So, we put on our thinking (and our drinking) caps, and got to work. We created a growler club to encourage people to buy draft beer to go, sold do-it-yourself art kits combined with sixpacks and even managed to host an entire crawfish boil to go.
At the same time our draft business sank, our canned beer business boomed. Turns out, when everyone’s stuck at home, five o’clock comes a little earlier. We quickly pivoted to making more cans of our existing beers and adding eclectic new beers to the pipeline. But just like other breweries across the country who made similar moves, we rapidly ran into a shortage of aluminum cans. Printed can availability disappeared, and pre-wrapped cans ran dry. Our only option for some of our new beers was to wrap them individually — one by one. We had endless rows of blank aluminum cans. But even if the labels ran out, we’d write them by hand on name tag stickers if we had to. We hope that doesn’t happen, though; our penmanship is terrible.
Adversity has forced us to be creative, especially with the new beers we added to our existing slate. Our favorite release was also our first of the pandemic: She’s Intense, a triple dry-hopped double IPA. Rocking a bright pink label, it was brewed in collaboration with and benefits the Pink Boots Society. Pink Boots is a terrific organization that assists, inspires and encourages women alcoholic beverage professionals through their education. We are thrilled to be making another batch of She’s Intense with them, and we will be releasing it this month to celebrate Women’s History Month.
The Hop & Sting team is very hopeful that, in 2021, St. Patrick’s Day will once again be the beginning of better times ahead — with days reveling with all our friends, being able to celebrate and socialize together like we are all so eager to do. We love throwing huge themed parties and cannot wait to have live music and play charity bingo again. No matter what happens though, we’ll have a cold craft beer waiting for you. Cheers to that.
Andy Yelton acts as Hop & Sting Brewing Company in Grapevine’s taproom manager.
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