AN IN-CIDER'S VIEW: DELIVERING THE GOODS IN QUARANTINE

DELIVERING THE GOODS IN QUARANTINE

>> JEFF NAIRN

It’s amazing to think through the last six months – yes, March was six months ago – and not be humbled by what has happened to our world.

Nathaly and I were talking about how swiftly our worlds changed during the second and third week of March. The first week of March, we were astonished by how fast the coronavirus ripped through Italy. The second week, we watched as it took hold here in North America. My family enjoyed a great day of skiing up at Whistler one weekend and the next week, the virus seriously took hold. That Saturday, Vancouver’s brewery tasting rooms, restaurants, and bars had one of their biggest days of the year. Some brewery friends recorded their biggest revenue days since opening. Sunday, Whistler shut down. Monday, the bars and restaurants shut down. Tuesday, we were in lockdown. The 24-hour news cycle changed as lockdown after lockdown was announced, Donald Trump held the most astonishing press conferences, and our Prime Minister’s wife was diagnosed with the disease. It wasn’t a 24- hour cycle anymore, it was hourly. And it was scary. 2020 was to be a big year for us at Windfall Cider. We doubled our sales in 2019 over 2018, and 2020 was going to be a breakout year–a The Windfall Wagon triple over the last year. Good fortune allowed us to front-run over half of our production for the year late in February, but we were now sitting on pallet after pallet of canned product and over 250 full kegs that we looked increasingly unlikely to be able to sell. No-one knew if the lockdown was going to last for a month, two months, or six months.

We’d gotten fairly close to the group that opened Container Brewing over the previous months: Terry, Dan, Katie and the rest of the team. My wife, Nathaly, and I had visited the brewery regularly since they opened in November and had good conversations about business that formed friendships. Their tasting room was now closed, their keg accounts were done, and there was no way of knowing how long their liquor store contacts would still be ordering their beer. We faced much the same prospect, as did every single small beverage operation in the province and across the country. The lockdown happened on a Monday. We had a home delivery option up and running by Wednesday, teaming up with ContainNathaly Nairn: bringing the cider to you

er Brewing, Sundown Brewing and later Powell Brewing. Deliveries included our cider, beer from the three breweries, and Girl Guide Cookies, which turned out to be a big hit! It’s hard to overstate how important this pivot was to our business, our family rhythm, and our sanity during that two-month lockdown. It certainly helped generate some much-needed cash flow for all our businesses and it gave us something to do every day besides home schooling our 10-year-old daughter. We came to a point of delivering two days a week as we divided the work between all the organizations. From nine to noon every day was home schooling, then putting together deliveries at Container. Our social bubble during those two months of lockdown included the skeleton staff of each of the breweries. Our favourite part of the day was being at home at 7 pm, cheering and making noise for healthcare workers. Our nook at Woodland and 10 th Avenue was particularly boisterous. A day of deliveries took us through most of the city and many outlying areas. We put a lot of mileage on as things ramped up over the first two weeks of our lockdown, and would eventually have two drivers on the road during peak days. I’ve talked to many people since things began to reopen. Those who were still commuting to their workplaces felt like they were moving around a ghost town. Streets were empty. Buildings were boarded up. On delivery days, we almost had the road to ourselves, but there were still some crazies on the road; speeding, U-turns, running lights and stop signs, you name it. Traffic decorum went out the window in those times.