Some craft breweries back at tap
Here’s why these area beer-makers can legally do it
Some craft breweries in Central Florida are starting to come back to life under state rules that allow them to open because they also serve food.
Now, the beer-makers must try to recover from severe dropoff in business since Gov. Ron DeSantis banned them from serving customers onsite in March because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Recent orders from DeSantis have allowed restaurants and other businesses to open at 50% capacity.
“As long as we operate under the same guidance of restaurants, and we do have food service onsite, then we are good to go,” said Chris Rock, co-founder of RockPit Brewing, an Orlando brewery just south of downtown that opened early last year. It serves food along with beer.
According to an email sent by Rock to his customer base, a lawyer who works for the Florida Brewer’s Guild evaluated the executive orders and interpreted them to say that breweries could open, as long as they have a food truck or work with a neighboring food establishment.
In an email sent to the Tampa Bay Times, the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation confirmed breweries that operate with food onsite may also serve alcohol, as long as they adhere to the same safety measures outlined by the state for restaurants and other food establishments.
Those rules include indoor seating restricted to 50% capacity with proper social distancing, and outdoor seating is highly encouraged. There also is no seating allowed at the bars and staff must wear masks.
A majority of income for Orange County breweries comes from taproom and distribution sales, and even though most breweries got crafty by offering beverage pickup and online ordering during the ban, they have seen a significant drop in their sales numbers from before midMarch to phase one of reopening.
During the shutdown,
Rock kept RockPit in business by selling cans and growlers, which have a higher cost to the businesses than simply selling beer by the glass.
Because RockPit is such a new brewery, it has been hard for them to tell just how much the shutdown has been affecting its business, but Rock said he should have a better idea of where they fall after they have been open for a couple of months selling both beer and food.
“I just remember going in that day going, ‘what the hell do we do?’” Rock said. “We’re still selling a lot of beer. We’re still selling roughly 35 to 45 barrels a month. I do know for a fact that they [the sales] are down. But while we were open doing to-go, they [the sales] were down, depending on the week around 40 to 50 percent.”
Two other breweries, Crooked Can Brewing Company in Winter Garden and Ivanhoe Park Brewing Co. in Orlando, have reported losses of 70% to 80% of their sales.
“We were having a very good year in 2020, and we were having positive growth in both January and February,” said Robert Scott, a founding member of the Crooked Can. “But obviously the carpet got pulled out from under us with everything that happened.”
Bars, nightclubs and breweries were ordered to close on the day before St. Patrick’s Day, one of the most popular drinking days in America. It put an immediate halt to all the holiday festivities, along with spring break.
“Spring break here is usually our busiest time of the year, busiest month,” Scott said. “It was ironic that happened just at that very moment too, so it’s kind of a double whammy.”
These three breweries have a loyal customer base and each has said that they have had regular customers stop by to get growlers to support them. A about growler is a reusable container that customers buy and use to take their beer home.
“A lot of people come in and kind of indicate they are there just because they want to support small business,” said Glenn Closson, founder of Ivanhoe Park Brewing Company, which has a food truck onsite. “They’ll tell us, it’s like the fifth brewery they’ve hit that day just because they’re running around town to support everyone as they can.”
One such customer is Brian Kelly, a regular at the Crooked Can, which is part of the Plant Street Market that has several food vendors. Before the shutdown, he would go to the Crooked Can every week to drink beer there, and during it he became a loyal growler to-go customer.
“I try to go to all the local breweries, just trying to support them all,” Kelly said during a recent visit to Crooked Can. “To see the tables pretty much full is really nice to see.”
A visit on a recent evening found all of the outdoor tables at Crooked Can taken by people enjoying their craft beers.
The seating was appropriately spaced for social distancing.
The breweries’ return could be a step toward regaining a sense of normalcy, Rock said.
“We’re trying to open up so people can have a drink. … They want to feel normal again. I get why they’re so happy about this,” Rock said.
Rock is hoping to see more breweries open soon, although not all the customer feedback has been positive.
“There’s a lot of people that are still in the camp of ‘please don’t open anything until this goes away’, which in my opinion is a completely impractical way to do this,” Rock said. “We have to start opening things up again or the cure is going to be worse than the disease, and that’s gonna suck.”