The longtime co-owner and operator of Left Hand Brewing in Longmont, Colorado, has seen many facets of the business over the past 27 years. As former chair of the Brewers Association board of directors, he’s taken a leading role advocating for independent craft breweries. In this conversation, recorded back in May, he shares perspectives on planning through crisis, adapting to new business realities, and getting people and businesses safely through this pandemic. As Told to Jamie Bogner.
CBB // This current pandemic environment has given us a new perspective on the interaction among brewpub, taproom, and production brewery, and the place of all these in a business mix for a brewery.
EW // We started off just packaging and distributing and driving beer around, selling it to retailers. That was the game, and there was no other game. You were a restaurant, a brewpub, or you were packaging. And there were only a couple hundred of us in the States working, so that was the way we did it. Over 27 years, the pendulum has certainly swung—we finally figured out we can legally sell pints of beer. Then it was like, “We don’t have enough room in here, so now we need to start expanding.” I think we’ve expanded our tasting room five times. It’s only like 2 percent of our volume, but it’s probably closer to 6 or 7 percent of sales in a normal time, and it’s probably low double digits in margin. It’s important to understand where your margin comes from. Straight packaging has always been a little bit tighter, margin-wise, and the first shakeout really was at least partially attributable to people overexpanding and not ready for distance-selling and shelf-life stability. That was that late 1990s, early 2000s time period when the number of breweries operating, over a five- or six-year period, went down for several years. Six months ago, if you told people that, they’d go, “Oh, yeah, that’ll never happen again.” I’ve always been of the mindset that the curves will cross again, and trying to predict when is like trying to predict the stock market. But it’s inevitable, just from a pure math standpoint. And it took something like this. We’ll see where the numbers show up, but if I were betting the over/under, I would bet that closures will exceed openings this year for the first time since 2000-whatever.