The 2020 Pivot

Hello Loyal Reader(s)!

How to recap this strangest of years? It certainly didn’t go the way we had anticipated on December 31, 2019, but we are grateful to have made it (mostly) intact to the end of 2020. Both lucky enough to have 9-5s that allowed us to work from home, we’ve been doing so since early March. (If there’s a silver lining to the dark pandemic cloud, it has to be our new “commute”. 😉)

Unfortunately, we did have to say goodbye to both of our brewpugs, Zeus and Daisy. Still recovering from the pug-sized holes in our hearts, but love reminiscing about all the good times we had with those wrinkly-faced, fur balls. Like many of you, we transitioned to virtual events—HomebrewCon, judging, and tastings with good friends. A bit different from before, but nice to be able to participate in “normal” activities and keep in touch with the community at large. And of course, we have continued with our R&D. In lighter news, we had some lovely gold foil labels printed for our R&D series beers and learned how to play cribbage!

But our big push of the year was finding a home for L&L. Having always envisioned a small and nimble brewery, we found ourselves leveraging that mentality of flexibility a bit sooner than originally planned. Though anxious to get our doors open, we are also both quite risk-averse and always try to lead with logic and reason. When we wrote our business plan several years ago, our plan was to build a taproom-centric experience. Our goal has always been to create a community where lovers (and non-lovers) of Craft can gather to imbibe and socialize (with each other and with us). And while we are still fully confident that the taproom will always be an integral part of the Craft Beer landscape, we are also extremely excited and anxious to get our doors open so we can finally share our beers with you! Balancing those two motivations (in addition to how we can most responsibly and efficiently use our funding), has driven our approach to finding L&L’s physical home.

Having cast a much wider net in response to the events of 2020, we have been exploring and pursuing a much wider spectrum of options including: buying an existing brewery, an agri-tourism based model on rural farm land, and being a part of a larger “food hall” concept. Though these previous opportunities ended up falling through for one reason or another, we remain optimistic about finding a home in the New Year. We hope to be able to share a physical address for L&L with you real soon!

Until then… Mask up. Keep your distance. Wash your hands. And be kind to one another (and yourself). We’ll see you in the New Year!