- When the coronavirus hit,
it was a bit of a weird time.
I remember sitting down in a meeting.
We had like 20 things on
our normal meeting agenda,
and we just took all of those off.
None of those were relevant anymore
and we just talked about
what we were gonna do
about this virus and this
situation, and we had no ideas.
We just looked at each other
and said, "We don't know
"what to do."
And that was meeting over.
And then a day or two passed,
we started getting used
to the new reality of what was happening,
and then we started focusing
on the parts of the business
that we could keep going,
and we switched into gear.
I'm Dan Norris, one of the
founders of Black Hops.
We've got a brewery in Burleigh
and one in Biggera Waters.
We started in 2016 and now we're one
of the biggest independent
breweries in Queensland.
So we brew probably around
30,000 litres of beer a week.
We distribute that across
our own taprooms, bars
and restaurants, independent
bottle shops in Queensland,
and major liquor retailers.
At the end of March 2020,
all bars and restaurants
shut down including ours,
and that represented about
half of our business.
We looked at doing a
direct delivery service
and within a couple of days,
we'd built what we call Supply Drop,
which is our local delivery app.
As soon as we launched
that, everyone jumped on it
and it was pretty successful from day one.
Our community was still at
home, still enjoying our beers,
and a lot of 'em were getting
really into home brewing,
and so what we did was Govs
released all of our recipes
and our group, the Black Hops
Ambassador Group on Facebook,
started brewing these beers
and so we made it easier
by giving them brew at home kits.
And they can brew our exact beer at home,
and they can also do it
as part of a competition.
The first one we've done is
Hornet, which is our IPA,
and when we get the entrants
in, me, Eddie, and Govs
will sit around a table, judge them all.
If they get a gold medal,
they'll get a little gold pin.
And if they get the champion
beer out of all of them,
they'll get a gold coin
and that coin gives them a
20% discount on that beer
for the rest of the year.
Yeah, the response from the
community has been amazing.
I think 130 of those were sold
in the last three or four weeks.
And all of these guys are
sitting around brewing this beer,
asking us hints and
questions in the group,
and then they'll come together at the end
and we'll judge the beers, and hopefully,
once the virus goes away,
we'll have an in-person event,
maybe a long way down the track,
and sort of crown some winners.
We are releasing some new
products that are more suited
to this environment and we had
about 900 full kegs sitting
there in various cold
rooms for us to distribute,
and not being able to sell the kegs
means they're just sort of sitting there.
So we're doing a range of
things to get them out.
One of the things we're doing is
what we're calling Black Hops Home Guard,
which is a service where
our customers can buy kegs
for their own systems at home.
We're actually just trialling a setup
where we're actually getting
the tap systems ourselves
and we're renting them out to customers.
So we've set that up as
an application process
and we're hoping to get a lot more
so people can start
drinking our beer at home.
We are your local beer maker.
We are Black Hops, We are Gold Coast.
