Undoubtedly one of the greatest success stories in the history of Georgia craft brewing, Creature Comforts opened on West Hancock Avenue in downtown Athens in April 2014.
In March 2018, the company opened a new state-of-the-art brewery complex at the historic Southern Mill complex on North Chase Street — in large part to keep up with demand for its best-selling Tropicalia IPA.
In March 2020, though, just a month before Creature Comforts was set to celebrate its sixth anniversary, the founding partners, David Stein, Adam Beauchamp and Chris Herron, made the decision to shutter the downtown taproom until further notice, due to the pandemic.
Instead, they opened a “touch-less” drive-thru lane downtown for to-go beer pickup, and continued production uninterrupted at the Southern Mill brewery.
Recently, I talked with Herron, who serves as Creature Comforts’ CEO, and he explained how the company has been surviving, and even thriving in some ways, in spite of COVID-19, and the rapid demise of on-premise sales at bars and restaurants.
“The community has been extremely gracious,” Herron said. “One thing that’s been interesting is how our small batch and limited releases have had an uptick in sales with to-go. But on-premise represents about 35% of our sales, normally, and almost overnight, that went to zero.
“We did get an uptick in the off-premise, as I think everyone did. We had a really great Memorial Day. And, overall, we’ve done really well with Trop. It’s actually managed to grow as a trusted brand, and we’ve had some of our largest off-premise weeks ever over this period.”
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Herron also noted that the big thing that helped steer Creature Comforts though the crisis, especially early on, was the leadership’s habit of planning ahead for just about any eventuality.
“One of the things we do every year is this exercise of what’s possible,” he said. “We talk in terms of great success possibilities, like what if Trop just takes off? What challenges would it create? And we also talk in terms of really negative things, like what if the brewery catches on fire? Or what if a tornado comes through? Of course, we had never predicted a pandemic, but we were able to pull everyone together and make some plans.”
Because they decided to put in an order for enough cans to carry the brewery through August, they avoided a packaging shortage that hit in May. And unlike many other businesses, they decided not to lay off any of their employees.
“We really talked a lot about our values, and the one in particular was ‘people over product,’ ” Herron said. “We made the decision not to lay anybody off, and so as a result, everybody needed to go to work on figuring out how in the world we were going to do that and sustain the business. We came up with a lot of great ideas, and we were even able to keep our taproom staff.”
Asked about his thoughts on going forward into the summer and beyond, Herron said plans are underway to reopen the taproom — beginning with outdoor seating, and a new full-service model designed to make the space feel less like a hectic bar, and more like a community gathering place.
“We say Creature’s goal is not to be first to market, it’s to be best to market,” he said. “One of our values is ‘make it better.’ We’ve been working on a plan for reopening since May. We’re just not quite there, yet. We want to make sure that when we do it, we do it the right way. Our hope is that when we come out of this, people will think Creature did it as well as it could be done.
“I keep saying, if you don’t come out of this better than you went into it, then the cost was enormous. There will be financial losses. But if you come out of it better, it might be an expensive investment, but it’s just an investment. And we’re honestly excited for what’s next.”
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