Night Shift's most popular beers are Santilli, Whirlpool and Nite Lite, one of the few light craft beers available today. Night Shift recently opened up a brewery, bar and restaurant at 1 Lovejoy Wharf near the TD Garden and North End, where they will have at least one new beer on tap every week. If you're traveling with your dog, kids or are meeting up with friends, this is a great spot to enjoy the nice weather over a few beers. If you plan on taking a tour, don't forget your close-toed shoes.ĭuring warm weather seasons, along the Charles River Esplanade is their Owl’s Nest beer garden. Weekday tours are available through their events team. Tour hours are Fridays at 3, 5 and 7 p.m., Saturdays at 1, 3, 5 and 7 p.m. Their first location can be found a short ride from downtown Boston in Everett, where there's a taproom and also free brewery tours. Making the right decision has got a lot of variables to consider there’s not just one right path.Night Shift may have been officially founded in 2012, but the trio behind it, Rob Burns, Michael Oxton and Mike O'Mara have been homebrewing since 2007 as they worked the "Night Shift" working on their passion project as a side gig to their day jobs. “A brewery could self-distribute, go with a large wholesaler with a big portfolio or a smaller wholesaler with a very limited portfolio of smaller brands. “There’s not one solution that’s right or wrong,” he continues. “They’ve got knowledgeable salespeople and they’ve got all the efficiencies to sell craft beer extremely well. “In this day and age, large distributors have become extremely proficient at selling craft beer,” Storey says. Wholesalers have become much more adept at handling and selling craft beer, much more than they were in Harpoon’s early days - a time when many small brewers just starting out couldn’t even get distributors to return their calls. Distributing one’s own products means the brewer gets close to 100 percent share of mind.īut Storey cautions that self-distribution may not be the best option for everyone. “If it were a more geographically extensive market, without the density of population, the time between stops, the number of cases dropped per stop would probably be at a level that would make it unsustainable for us to operate,” Storey notes.Ī handful of single- and double-axle box trucks, as well as a couple of cargo vans, get the job done for Harpoon Distributing Co.īeyond operational efficiencies, there are definite sales and marketing advantages for Harpoon. They were three friends who loved beer and loved drinking. The company reaches a lot more retail customers over a much shorter geographic distance than in many other metro areas. 306 Northern Ave Boston, MA 02210 United States Map Overview Harpoon was started in 1986 by Dan Kenary, Rich Doyle, and George Ligeti. In fact, it’s the city’s dense population that provides a logistical advantage for Harpoon to manage its own distribution there. “But in the morning, in some cases, on some routes drivers are going against the traffic - outbound from the city and vice versa at the end of the day. “Boston is certainly a congested city, an old city, so the traffic patterns don’t conform to modern grids and the highways and infrastructure are old and stressed,” Storey explains. Having a home base smack in the middle of an urban center like Boston - Harpoon’s headquarters is in the city’s Seaport District - brings its own set of challenges. There are a lot of ways to get those, but if you can’t deliver on operational efficiencies, it’s probably not sustainable.”ĭistribution, he continues, is not a simple process of getting a keg or a case from point A to point B, but a complex suite of services that encompasses sales, merchandising, relationship management, troubleshooting, accounting and a host of other tasks. It’s an operation that requires operational efficiencies. “It’s actually its own independent enterprise and has to be managed that way. “It’s not simply an extension of brewing,” he says. He advises that any brewer pondering self-distribute (in states that allow it) must recognize that distributing beer is a completely different business than producing it and should operate as such. Someone who works on the distribution side doesn’t do things like packaging, brewing and filtering.” There’s no overlap between tasks on either side. “There’s spatial overlap, if you will, but is an independent entity. “It’s managed out of the same building,” Storey notes.
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