Cape Cod Beer Addresses Supply and Demand Issue
(Hyannis,MA) – Cape Cod Beer shares a memo to all their locals about their (good) issue of not being able to meet demand and how they are going to address it.
We’re here to answer the question on everyone’s mind:
What happened to all the Cans!?!?!?!
….and what are we doing about it!?
Like every good story there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that cans have been selling amazingly well. The bad news is that the sales of cans have FAR exceeded our expectation. We projected about 25% sales growth of beer in cans. Year to date it has exceeded 75%! Wow! So, admittedly we got caught a bit off guard. Now, because we brew at capacity for about 10 weeks out of the year, once we get “behind the 8 ball” there is no chance for recovery in the middle of the summer.
Right now the walk in is empty of cans, and most of the stores are running out or are already out. The next canning date where we will have more cans and enough beer to do a 2 day run is September 17 and 18. This is the best we can muster. It doesn’t make us happy, and we are sure it doesn’t make you happy either, which is why we are writing today.
How do we prevent this from happening again next year?! This is the key question we have been asking ourselves, and we have already put our minds (and money) to work on this. On August 17th we made a deposit on a 30 bbl brewhouse which will be delivered and installed sometime mid winter. With this brewhouse we will be able to brew the same amount of beer in HALF as many batches. This will pout way less pressure on the brewing staff. Currently we are brewing 16-18 batches a weeks which takes 2-3 brewers each day. In the summer of 2016 we will be able to the same with less. Or actually brew more with the same level of staffing. We are also committed to “ramping up” more and earlier in 2016. Together these two strategies *should* help us eliminate the outages we are currently undergoing.
Please know that Beth & I, and our staff all feel badly about leaving our retailers and you, our fans, without cans at the end of the summer. It was never our intention and we will continue to do everything in our power to make sure we avoid this type of scenario again.
Thanks for your continued support of Cape Cod Beer. We value it and are doing our best not to disappoint.
Cheers,
Todd & Beth Marcus
and the rest of the brew crew at Cape Cod Beer
