Growing Pains
I like to add a little visual to every post, and it might seem weird that I chose to go with an empty glass for a post entitled “Growing Pains”, so let me explain.
Backlash Beer, as a company, is about 9 months old. For all intents and purposes, we’re babies. It might not seem that way, because we came to market at a time when a lot of other companies were starting out as well. Relatively speaking, we’ve been around longer than some of those folks, but still, we’re newborns.
I’ve been aware of the term “growing pains” for a while now, and I never really gave it much thought. I figured growing means change, change can suck, therefore growing can be difficult (or in some cases, suck). It’s almost every business’s goal to grow and prosper, but the way you do that is really the tricky part. You plan for growth, but almost always (and I’ve confirmed this with other successful entrepreneurs), your plans mostly mean jack shit. Seriously — I look back on our original business plan and while it’s charming that we had a strategy, it’s hilarious how goddamn wrong we were about…well…pretty much everything.
I tend to be conservative in a lot of my business ventures — I guess you could call me risk-averse. I think it’s a good thing. It also means that I was completely caught off guard by the popularity of Backlash in these first 9 months. As a business owner, I became amazed by the potential we were showing; we get calls every week from distributors from all over the place. It’s actually really flattering. Despite that, though, I didn’t want to spread Backlash too thin. I wanted/want to make sure I understand the demands of Massachusetts before we branch out to any other territories.
Moral of the story is (and this is getting back to the picture above), we might be hard to find for a little while.
Which sucks. A lot.
We, along with the help of our distribution partners, have been doing a lot of work to get Backlash to all of you and to put it bluntly, our production has not been able to keep up with demand.
It’s not easy owning up to the fact that when you march into your local watering hole that has had Backlash in the past, it may not be there again for a few weeks — and that fucking sucks. But I’m here to own up to it.
We have been small batch and limited release in spirit since we debuted back in July 2011, so it’s not completely new for our beer to be “here today and gone tomorrow” However, with the incredible popularity of Declaration, we intended for the beer to be available year-round. A huge step for us. As a result, all you crazy people plowed through it faster than we could have imagined.
So let’s zoom out — why am I telling you all of this? Since day one I’ve tried to be as transparent as possible with our loyal followers. I only see it fit that if you have a hard time finding a bottle/draft of one of our brews for a few weeks, you at least know why.
I hear this phrase a lot: ”Well, that’s a good problem to have.” Definitely true… but it’s still a problem. An empty glass (which would otherwise be full of Backlash) in front of you is like a kick in the ass to me.
So to everyone — I’m really sorry. I’m working overtime to correct the problem and get new batches of Declaration and Groundswell out in the next few weeks, I promise. We’ll be brewing a whole lot more frequently now.
Until then, keep drinking good beer. I’ll be drinking a tall glass of humility and get-your-shit-figured-out juice while toasting to all of you awesome people.
Peace,
H
