Craft Beer Pivots for the COVID-19 Era

As the COVID-19 pandemic and its grueling economic ramifications continue into the early days of Summer, we’re seeing hardship continue to befall small businesses across the communities we work in (and beyond). Below we have one example of the resiliency of a small business in these times. We’re sharing it with you because resilient communities are integral to Replate’s work - creating jobs in every city we expand to, partnering closely with storied community organizations to support them in their work to create new opportunities for those who need them.

Pete Ternes, one of the owners of Middlebrow Beer Co. in Chicago, ran his business with an eye toward social justice well before the start of COVID-19. Now that the heart of his work—gathering community around craft beer and good food—is physically inoperable, he’s doubled down on his mission to create a restaurant that nourishes the people who grow and prepare its food as much as it nourishes its customers.

Pete talked to us about how Middlebrow has pivoted its service to support community through times of uncertainty, and why the global pandemic made him reassess his priorities. 

Tell me about the story behind Middlebrow, what has been your mission since you opened in 2011?
I started Middlebrow with my buddies Bryan Grohnke and Nick Burica. We were beer fanatics and we noticed this massive imbalance in our own consumption—the culture of fancy craft beer was so focused on luxury. And we thought, ‘This is just out of whack, we should be thinking about how we can bring balance to this industry.’ 

So we decided to open a brewery where we gave half of our profits back to charitable organizations in Chicago. We quickly found out that it’s really expensive to make beer and ended up donating more like 75 percent, or sometimes even 125 percent of our profits since our margins were so small. We were too embarrassed to give like 30 bucks, so we just gave out of our own pockets. 

Along the way we started developing a ‘beer identity’. We are focused on wild yeast fermentation and this farmhouse culture. That naturally led into the type of food we wanted to make, and after six years we signed a lease on a building to start a brewpub. Bungalow by Middlebrow opened at the beginning of 2019 and we have continued to evolve our charitable efforts. We’ve offered free breakfasts for students in Chicago Public Schools, we’ve supported striking teachers with sharply discounted pizza and beer. We have a program on site where we bring in apprentices from the far south and west sides of the city and offer them job training and support from social workers. These programs are still in their infancy stages, but we are continuing to donate and always working to grow our social efforts. 

Do you remember the moment when you realized that things were really going to have to change?
By late January, based on news I was consuming, I started thinking, ‘Okay, this is real.’ I knew it would inevitably disrupt us, but I still held out hope that nothing too bad would happen. A month later, things started getting more serious but we didn't see consumer behavior change until almost mid March. So in the meantime I wrote out a couple of new business plans. You know, what would we do if things were zeroed out entirely? We’d still have to pay rent.

I had the true apocalyptic version and then the less apocalyptic version, which is I think what we're living right now—this semi shut down situation where we can stay open but are not able to operate at our full capacity. 

Sometime in mid March it became clear that things were going to change in a big way. Our staff started getting anxious about how the customers were still acting as if things were normal—not through any fault of their own, our staff was just hyper aware of what was coming down the pike and they realized how much it affected them. They served 40 people a day at their tables, whereas each table only saw one server. Even before Governor Pritzker ordered closure we pulled the plug and moved to a delivery model. I thought that model would provide the most work for our staff so that they could afford to eat and pay rent. But very quickly, I think within a matter of days, we realized even that was too anxiety inducing. 

We shut down entirely by the week after that, and retooled to establish this grocery store pickup model, where there's contactless pick-up, and there's only four of us max in the building at once. 

That’s a really potent point—that ultimately their lives were at immediate risk so of course that needs to be the priority. 
Right. And they totally realized that before I did. I was so worried about their home economics, and they were like, ‘No, we don't want to get sick and die.’ And I was like, ‘Oh god, great point. Yeah, let's shut this down right now.’ 

I will say that my wife Polly, who's my partner here and runs the whole restaurant, wanted to shut down even earlier. I think she was very aware from the beginning. 

So what happened after that?
A combination of things. One is that we started hearing word that the government was going to come through with this generous package that would make some of my worries obsolete, so we could focus more on how to safely stay alive as a business. We didn't want to be hustling in a kitchen every night because that kind of behavior isn't conducive to keeping distance, so we decided to go with an online store.  

We launched pizza kits, which we can make in large quantities in the morning (one or two people can make 400 kits in a couple hours) and have them ready in a cooler for pick up. We added things we already made like sourdough bread and beer. We added the cultured butter we use and some farm vegetables—we essentially put together a take home restaurant and grocery store, and that extinguished some of our worry about making enough to pay rent. 

The other priority was preventing our farmer vendors from going out of business. We weren't the only ones not buying from them anymore, it was every other restaurant in town. And a lot of these awesome farmers built half their business model around supplying restaurants. One of the ways we did that was buying a ton of produce, repackaging it, and selling it to neighbors who were desperate for fresh food when they couldn't get it at grocery stores. Now we're buying 100 dozen eggs a week from Spence Farm and ramps from Mick Klug. We're going to be a CSA pickup for those farms and Green Acres out of Indiana. We've been talking at length with Green City Market about how we might be able to help them as a pickup site as well. We're slowly but surely addressing our main concerns—keeping our farmers and workers healthy and safe, physically and financially.  

How has this experience affected your day to day work?
It's probably equally as exhausting as it was before things changed, but in a different way. Eighteen-hour days have turned into 14- to 15-hour days, which frankly has been welcome for me and my wife. 

Now our work day is spread out since we’re minimizing shift overlaps. The bakers are working in the early morning and the cooks come to prep when they wrap up. Everyone is constantly changing gloves and washing hands, and that alone is extremely stressful. So it's a choppier day—the workflow isn't as efficient or smooth—but we've developed patterns and routines that help reduce anxiety and maintain a little bit of control.

We try to be really cognizant of when people's faces change. When we can tell that someone is stressed about something, we immediately chime in and say, ‘It’s okay, we don't have to do this. Don't worry about getting every order exactly right, don't worry about how much time you have to make a certain number of things, or if we run out of something in the store, or have to refund a customer. We'll figure out a way to make them happy and make them understand what's going on.’ It's a lot more focus on everyone’s mental health.

What have you learned about managing and taking care of a staff through this process?
I think the main thing is listening to what they say they need rather than what I think they need. I thought they were going to be worried about their finances, but they were wisely way more worried about their physical health. 

One thing that's been really nice about this is that none of our staff needs to come back now. They make enough money with unemployment to cover their costs. But we still reach out at least once every other day with a project, and our staff is always quick to say yes. They want to come back and see us, they want to be in the space. I think they see the work that we do as important, and that's encouraging. 

It gives us hope for when we start up again to know that they like working here—not just because it pays the bills, but because we created a wholesome, safe, happy, comfortable place. That's an easy thing to forget when you're busy running a restaurant. It's been laid pretty bare to me that being an empathetic boss is the highest priority and the money is secondary to that. 

How have you been taking care of yourself throughout this time? 
Polly and I have been going to sleep a little earlier and waking up a little later than before. We were sleeping an average of probably six hours a night, working from the second we woke up to the second we went to bed every day for years. We take every Sunday off now, which has been critical. We make food, lay around, read the paper, talk to family… We're basically taking care of ourselves by doing more normal things that normal people do, ha!

Our standard was in an unhealthy and exhausting place. So when we start back up again, hopefully we can shed some of the legacy decisions that created that unsustainable lifestyle. We don't have to open up exactly as we did before, we can rebuild in a way that's even better, and that's exciting to think about.

Thank you so much for sharing your story with us, Pete. Your commitment to supporting and uplifting your community is admirable. We can’t wait to see how Middlebrow continues to evolve  and shed light on the importance of social consciousness in the food industry.