“Without the three-tier system, guys like me never get to market,” Hugh Sisson, founder of Heavy Seas Beer in Baltimore, once confided. Indeed, the Brewers Association, the Boulder, CO-based organization that represents America’s small, independent beermakers, strongly supports an independent middle tier.
The distributor is often the unsung hero of the pipeline that spits out fresh beer in unlimited quantities and guises. The mere act of delivering the liquid is an unglamorous but necessary task. The Brooklyn Brewery in New York used to operate its own distributorship, the Craft Brewers Guild. In one year, they ran up $60,000 worth of parking tickets navigating the streets of the Big Apple.
Soaring 15 stories over surrounding Manhattan, Birreria is quite the commute from the street level for the local distributor.
A Good Partnership is Crucial
Jonathan Frye of Hop & Wine, a craft distributor in Vienna, VA, lists “narrow back alleys” and “winding staircases” as two of his least favorite aspects of the job. To haul product to the Birreria brewpub in center-city Manhattan (possibly the highest brewpub in the nation in terms of distance above the surrounding terrain), deliverymen need to take one elevator up 14 stories, then use a second elevator (specially built for this purpose) up an additional flight. Customers need to use these same elevators, so deliveries are scheduled early in the day, preferably before the 11:30 a.m. opening hour.
