Gongoozlers to host Halloween-themed trivia
NEW BREMEN — While Halloween is still 28 days away, with the calendar turning over to October, it might be time to start thinking of Halloween plans.
Look no further than Gongoozlers in New Bremen.
The brewery will be holding a “Boil & Bubble Trivia Trouble” event on at 7 p.m. on Oct. 29.
The trivia night will run for six rounds and feature Halloween-themed questions throughout.
Teams of one to four can participate and each team will answer 10 questions during each round with the last round featuring five questions. The brewery will be able to have at least 10 teams participate.
“If each person from their team wears a Halloween costume they get two extra points per team,” said Gongoozlers’ employee Leah Hartwig. “If you want to come at 6:30 p.m. and reserve your spot, we start at 7 p.m. It should be fun.”
Hartwig said she hopes that it will be an entertaining night noting that this is the first trivia night the brewery has done since the pandemic hit.
Gongoozlers will also be having a big event on the 31st to celebrate Halloween.
Owner James Hartwig said business has been slow since March because of the pandemic.
“It wasn’t like it was before the whole COVID thing,” he said. “It seems to be picking up a little bit here and hopefully that will continue.”
The brewery never did close during the pandemic and was able to fill growlers for customers. “Then we ran out of glass growlers and the whole country was out of them,” Hartwig laughed. “We had to go to plastic ones which we actually like better. You can bring those to the beach or a concert. The glass ones you can’t. Then there was a can shortage, so even if we wanted to get into cans we couldn’t. It’s amazing how many things interconnect in this country.”
Hartwig mentioned that they had considered bottling and canning their beer to sell right before the coronavirus started putting a damper on things nationally and locally.
“The people aren’t coming out like they used to. A lot of our customers and restaurants and bars they say it’s been slow,” he said. “We’re not canning or bottling anything right now. We’ll have to start doing that because if we would have been doing that before this hit, I think we would have been in a lot better shape. People were still buying alcohol, it just wasn’t at the bars and restaurants, it was at the grocery stores and gas stations. We were just discussing starting to do that before the whole COVID thing and of course that put a kibosh on it.”
Hartwig said he had a full brewing schedule that he had to set aside as well.
“I had the whole year laid out and then COVID hit and we were shutdown,” he said. “Basically we’re playing everything by ear at the moment.”
Since opening in September of last year, Gongoozlers recently celebrated their oneyear anniversary and Hartwig is hopeful that things can get back to the way they were.
“We’ve only been in business for a year and half of it was COVID. That’s the way it is,” he said. “Somebody said it can always be worse and they’re right. It could be.
“It will be nice when things get back to normal, if there’s going to be a new normal.”
Gongoozlers is located at 629 W. Monroe St. in New Bremen. They are open from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Thursdays, 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Fridays, 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturdays and 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Sundays.