In 2012, when Kelsey McNair was writing the business plan for North Park Beer Co. (NPBC), he envisioned bottling would be an accessory to his taproom’s draft business rather than a primary revenue generator. His intent was to get a small amount of the beer he’d produce into 22-ounce bombers using a mobile-bottling service. He even placed his fermentation tanks so there would be space to accommodate the bottling line. Years later, his plans had changed only slightly. Large-format bottles were out and cans were in, but McNair’s master plan of selling most of his beer directly from serving tanks in his tasting room, while packaging just a small portion of a few select beers every month or so, remained intact. Then came March 2020, a pandemic, a stay-at-home order, and the need to reformulate his business model…immediately. So that’s exactly what he and his team did, and quite well, getting ales and lagers into cans, predictably releasing two-to-three new beers per week and offering statewide delivery options. Earlier this month NPBC filled its quarter-millionth can of 2020. The company has gone from canning 6% of its total beer to 74% and has doubled its average monthly wholesale volume by adding 100 new accounts. Canning is up a whopping 15 times from what it was before the pandemic, from less than 75 case equivalents per month to over 1,000. As the oddest, most impactful year the world could have envisioned comes to a close, we felt it a good time to ask McNair what it’s like running a brewery that looks very little like the one he originally drew up.originally drew up.
How were things going for NPBC at the beginning of 2020?
In the first quarter of this year, our taproom was the busiest it had been, and March was off to a great start. At the end of 2019, we invested heavily into our private-events business by building a brand-new bar on our mezzanine, and we were looking forward to a calendar full of parties booked over the course of 2020. When the first stay-at-home order hit, it felt like we had run straight into a brick wall at full speed. Before that happened, we were transferring one-to-two beers a week into serving tanks, and we already had a lot of beer in serving tanks. Our wholesale keg business dried up quickly and selling all of that beer in growlers and crowlers seemed unlikely. We knew that no matter how much we could sell, a lot of beer was going to be lost. We also had several fermenters filled with beers that were nearly ready to transfer. It seemed like the only logical way we were going to be able to make all that beer sellable was to start canning every drop. We were already on the schedule to run cans with Mobile West on March 26, and we ramped up that run from our typical case count of 70-to-100 cases to emptying four tanks, which filled just over 589 cases of cans, most of which we did not yet have labels for. We were already on the schedule to run more cans in April, so we filled another 939 cases that month, most of which were run between the 24th and 29th. Some of these canning days were 16-plus hours long and incredibly taxing on our team. Over time, we broke up the schedule and got into a rhythm of packaging two-to-three beers per week, which has been much more manageable.
In the beginning, how long did you think the pandemic might last?
When the pandemic first hit, we were seeing what the infection numbers were looking like in the areas hit the hardest, such as New York City.
I immediately started doing research on prior pandemics and how long they took to run their course. With that data, my gut feeling was that we were going to be dealing with a major change in operations for a minimum of 12 months, but most likely 18-to-24 months, and that our lives would never be the same again. I wish my gut had been wrong on that.”
Kelsey McNair, Co-owner & Brewmaster, North Park Beer Co.
What was the first thing you did following the March stay-at-home order?
Beyond the production side of things, my wife and I went into crunch mode and, in two days, we set up ecommerce systems that would support shipping statewide and local home deliveries. It was pretty clunky at the outset because we had to use multiple platforms to handle each sales channel. It was a huge bummer to have to furlough most of our taproom staff, but we were able to keep some people on and bring some folks back to help with the delivery and shipping work. Everyone had to quickly understand and implement logistics for packaging and deliveries, as well. The ability for our staff to be flexible has been incredibly valuable and everyone has been more than willing to do whatever job is needed.
What goes into your weekly can releases and how many beers have you released in 2020?
Doing multiple releases on a weekly basis has been a challenging process, but we’ve continued to dial it in and it has become much more reliable and routine. All of our tank turns are built around our weekly scheduled canning day. We can on Tuesday, but don’t release the beers until Wednesday because there’s a lot of work on the back end to get our social media collateral and copy done, and update all of our points of sale for shipping, delivery and menus. Out of 83 total batches released so far during COVID, over 50 of those have been brand-new beers. We’ve had to move away from repeating beers in the schedule because the sales trends indicate that our customers like to see us making new things all the time. We’ve even backed off on the frequency of releasing core beers like Hop Fu! IPA and our hazy IPA, Art is Hard. We do not make pilot batches of anything. We just go for it. I feel like I’m able to tap into my homebrewing roots more than ever, which is challenging but also fun, and I think our beer is better for it.
How important has it been to educate customers about the timing of NPBC’s releases?
For us, consistency with our release programming has been the most important thing. We’ve made some adjustments to the schedule that were designed to both streamline our efforts and also make sure that the beer is getting to our customers in a timely manner. For example, we work with GLS for our direct-to-customer shipments throughout the state and they are supposed to get a package from door-to-door within one business day. At the start, we were canning on Wednesdays and shipping on Thursdays and Mondays, but we found that, in some cases, the customers in obscure parts of the state wouldn’t get their beer until Monday. So, we backed up the schedule to do canning on Tuesdays and ship only on Wednesdays. Now, the beer pretty much gets where it needs to be before the weekend. Posts on Facebook, Instagram and our weekly newsletters have been critical to help keep our customers informed of what we’re doing and when we’re doing it.
Has canning on this scale been successful?
From a brand-building perspective, canning has been a massive success, and we’ve had a lot of growth in exposure across all social-media platforms. There’s been a fairly active thread in the BeerAdvocate Pacific Regional forum centered around our new releases. A lot of our growth in wholesale has been driven by inquiries from specialty bottle shops around the state telling us that their customers are asking for our beer. It’s really cool seeing NPBC being included in the beer community conversation outside of San Diego. On the flip side, the cost of canning with a mobile-canning company at this frequency takes a huge chunk out of our margins, so we plan to invest in our own canning line to make this work for us financially. We would have pulled the trigger already on a new canning line but some very high-quality used equipment has been coming to market recently. We hope to finalize a purchase before the year is through.
How will the events of this year affect NPBC’s plans moving forward?
Beyond COVID-19, we plan to continue to grow our production capabilities as we are now running at pretty much full capacity on our existing equipment. We already have some new tanks on order, which will fill out our cellar space, and upon arrival, we’ll immediately be at capacity again. We’re continuing to add wholesale off-premise accounts across the state, so once we can resume taproom operations at full capacity, we won’t be able to sustain draft demand unless we grow. This will absolutely be a normal way of running our business going forward, especially once we have our own canning line.