Breweries once viewed home delivery as a hassle — now it’s a lifeline

With virus shutdowns, it’s a way for businesses to pay bills, employees.

WASHINGTON — When Denizens Brewing opened in 2014, it received a license allowing the delivery of growlers to customers within a five-mile radius from its site in suburban Silver Spring, Maryland. But with business focused on sales in the taproom and beer garden, and cans available in stores across the region, delivery was little more than an insurance policy.

“We just never used it because we didn’t need to,” Denizens co-founder Julie Verratti says. “The logistics didn’t seem worth the squeeze” on profit.

Since early March, however, Verratti has logged thousands of miles delivering cases of beer to front doors and porches across suburban Maryland. “I’m in the car four to five hours a day,” she says, “burning through a lot of books on Audible.” She never set out to become a delivery driver, she says, but every little bit helps Denizens hang on. “Are we making a profit right now? No. But we can pay our bills and pay the staff.”

Coronavirus-related closures have forced restaurants and bars to rethink their business models to find new ways of reaching customers. But the pandemic became a double whammy for brewers: Not only did they lose sales from those closed restaurants, which aren’t doing the same volume in draft or package sales, but they had to shutter in-house taprooms, which have become an increasingly important source of revenue in recent years.

Faced with declines on two fronts, some breweries have turned to a tool in their arsenal that most had never used or even considered: direct-to-consumer delivery.

Alcohol delivery can be a patchwork of laws, depending on jurisdiction. For Bluejacket in Washington, where breweries can deliver to consumers with no middleman, delivery became an experiment.

“We started looking into it as soon as we started canning” in 2018, says Greg Engert, the beer director for the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, which includes Bluejacket and other craft bars. But “there’s a ton of costs associated with delivery. I think there was a concern that, without proof