Thank you so much for your patience!
Patience about what? Oh… just about everything.
Over the last few months we have had a bunch of surprises, delays, and a handful of… stnanks. And all of you have been so incredibly patient as we adapt to doing business in this new world.
We thought we should tell you about some of the issues we’ve had (a few of which were totally our fault) and what we’re doing to address them!
Things on our end:
- We’re still a tiny staff trying to keep up with brewing, canning, and shipping while simultaneously taking every precaution necessary (as we write this, two of our six employees are on voluntary quarantine after traveling).
- Along those lines, it’s really difficult to hire during a pandemic while making sure that we’re not introducing new vectors. We’ll be addressing this soon.
- We had three stalled batches over the last two months. That’s definitely Ricky’s fault. After a few weeks of research and two sessions of Narrative Engineering, we seem to have gotten all of that sorted out!
- We are brewing 22 times more than we were last year. That seems impossible, but it’s what our federal report says, so… yeah… we’re learning a lot.
- We are also really new to shipping product and we’re learning something new every single day.
Things outside of our control:
- UPS. UPS has been very good to us, but there seem to be regions of the country in which they play a sport with boxes of mead that involves throwing them from one moving vehicle to another. Or, possibly, setting boxes of mead out on the prairie and trying to snatch them up before a herd of bison tramples them.
Considering that a full case of our mead in a box can survive a five foot drop onto concrete, these are the only two possible explanations for what UPS is doing. - Also, as everyone should know by now, all courier services, from UPS to DHL to the US Postal Service, have much longer delivery times than usual.
- Can shortages. So many breweries are switching from kegs to cans that there's actually a shortage right now. Things have started to stabilize in the last few weeks, thank goodness.
- Freakin’ labels. We have had so many issues getting labels. The folks we’ve been working with have busted their rear ends to get them to us, but there have been nine occasions in three months where we had product in a tank ready to go and no labels for the cans. To address this, we’re now buying twice as many labels as we need for every order to keep a backstock.
- The Pandemic. People should probably know this by now, but there’s a pandemic going on, and it’s sort of upended the world.
So, in conclusion, thank you so much for your patience. We have continued to meet our goal of getting every order out within a week, but it has meant long hours and overtime for our tiny team.
And, if it helps, remind yourself that while our mead is lovely, it’s not an N95 mask, lifesaving medication, or hand sanitizer, so the extra few days won’t literally kill you.
