Today's #SmallBusinessShoutout features Smog City Brewing in Torrance! Today we spoke with owner Laurie Porter who talked about COVID-19's impact on the business, and what they're doing to pivot and make ends meet.
Here's some info from Laurie:
Smog City has 3 taprooms located in LA County, all three of which are now offering to-go sales only. The closure of our taproom has reduced business by as much as 60%. In order to maintain any sort of revenue on the retail side, we have launched home beer delivery in LA County and across the state. These two offerings on top of our to-go sales, allow us the ability to keep many of our employees working. It's been a challenging time but getting creative with what products we have to offer and how we can get them into the customers hands, has been a life saver.
We distribute beer through Stone Distribution from Santa Barbara to San Diego. On March 16th, all kegs orders were cut from our shipments to Stone, leaving us with a ton of beer in tanks that was slated for Coachella and Disney California Adventure and no where to sell it! We pivoted quickly releasing an IPA called Quarantine Machine IPA available only in crowlers and we haven't looked back since! In the last 6 weeks we've also released The New Normal and designed a 6 beer series of IPAs called Strange Times IPA, which will be releasing over the next 3-15 weeks at regular intervals. Our sales through Stone are down closer to 60% but luckily our beer in 6 packs has been a savior for us. Demand for year round beers SmogCityIPA, Coffee Porter and Amarilla Gorilla IPA have been on the rise.
The upcoming release of Kumquat Saison, our collaboration beer with Food Forward, drops on Monday and not only uses fruit harvested out of people's backyards across LA County (pre-covid harvested!) but we also donate 15% of the profit back to Food Forward to support them in their effort to provide food for LA's most vulnerable. At no time in Food Forward or Smog City's 10 years has this been more important and needed than now. We are actually using the Kumquat Saison to celebrate our 2020 Anniversary coming up next week.
Smog City also hosts a Happy Hour and beer tasting every Thursday at 6pm. We select two beers each week and do our best to create a relaxed atmosphere, adopting an temporary surrogate to hanging out in the taproom. Lots of Smog City locals and taproom employees join us for this event and it's so great to see familiar and new faces! all are welcome and having the beer we are tasting, is not required.
Click for info on Zoom Happy Hours!
Stay connected with Smog City and help us continue to support small and local business!
Website: www.smogcitybrewing.com
Facebook: @SmogCityBrewing
Instagram: @SmogCityBeer
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