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I have been involved in a brewery in NORCAL, the Jack Russell Brewing Company in Pollock Pines. Great place. IT has been in existence for about ten years. The original owner sold it about 8 months ago to the general manager. At first we were all happy about the move, Ian was kind of an asshole and treated the brewery as his private playground.
At the time I was saying "It is better to dance with the devil you know than one you don't know". As soon as the papers were signed the new owners wife started to control things. Put up cameras, stop music events due to insurance reasons etc. Had their son(with no brewing experience)start telling Greg (the brew master since the inception) how to brew, what to brew and when to brew.
we stopped having events back in June. Too bad, it brought a lot of people in and introduced them to the beers.
They cut back on the number of brew festivals we were allowed to do (Our bread and butter and my function). Said they could not give that much beer away. Even though that is how we got accounts and placed out beers all over the west coast.
Due to the kids poor direction we could not fill orders.
So today we all had a meeting. Everyone involved was fired. Turns out they have not paid any payments and have run the company into the ground.
Of course Ian will call their note and the brewery will return to him, but that is long ways off. I figure with no brewer and stock on hand they have about six months or less. no one can just jump in a start brewing on the system and get the same quality. So all the retail and restaurant accounts will be gone.
So tomorrow we go up and clean out out all of our shit. (a lot of equipment is OURS). We have enough stuff to brew our own beers and recently got approved by the feds to do so. But now we have no facility to brew in, no bottling line etc and will have to hire that part out, cutting into our profits. we had a deal with Jack Russell (Both old and new owners) that allowed us to brew our beers there and we would trade the promotion of their beers for the use of the facility and line etc.
So sad freaking day round these parts.
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