The lockdown was sudden, abrupt but what else could have been done to contain the deadly coronavirus? With industries taking a blow of the pandemic, which is sweeping the world, the craft beer industry in India is now possibly on the brink of either shutting down or employing desperate measures to sustain.
It was recently reported that lakhs of litres of craft beer was let out into drains as craft beers stocks are going stale and the Twitterati seems to have found another reason to add a bit of humor to it. After a popular newspaper posted a Tweet on craft beer being let out into drains, there were comments from beer lovers like, 'Which drain', 'Bahut dukh hua….. bahut bahut', 'Why are they putting it in drains, organize langars of beer with social distancing', 'Why don't they home deliver, I swear I will pay the delivery charges too'.
At a time when liquor enthusiasts are facing tough times for enjoying a peg or two, this news is indeed a tough one for them to take in.
About 50-odd breweries in the National Capital Region (NCR) are staring at a loss of about one lakh litres of fresh beer. This is because, unlike bottled beer, craft beer or freshly brewed beer has a short shelf life and if it lies unconsumed, it has to be discarded. The cost of keeping it fresh keeps adding as the plant has to be maintained at a specific temperature and monitored daily.
Breweries did not anticipate the lockdown and were brimming to their full capacity. Brewers, who have been maintaining their stock since, are now beginning to feel that it's a lost game.
There's ale going stale in brewery tanks, production lines and supply chains that have been totally disrupted, hundreds of staff that could lose jobs and lakhs of rupees that are lying frozen in futilely paid excise duty.
Prateek Chaturvedi from the Ministry of Beer said that if the 50 per cent occupancy rule as stated by the Ministry of Home Department, has to be followed, there will be less people sitting at one time for beer, which means that 50 per cent less revenue. Everything, including rent and staffing, will be slashed or halved accordingly.
He was quoted as saying, "I'm currently sitting on about 12,000 litres of beer which comes up to close to a crore and a half in terms of revenue. If the beer gets spoiled in the next 4 to 6 weeks, I will literally be putting a crore and a half down the drain."
Meanwhile, in Goa, Susegado's founder, Aditya Challa who sells to 40 bars is fighting for a different cause. He says that all he could think of now is saving his employees' jobs.
He said, "I'm not looking at any profit from the business until the end of this year. But if someone came to me and said he will cover our rents, salaries of all the employees and keep them fed until the end of this year, I would take that deal without a question. We have been closed for business since early March now, but my main reason in keeping the brewery open is to keep operations open to the level where I can continue to pay the staff members their basic salary, because they have dependents too."
