Brewbound Podcast: Wrapping Up the 2021 Craft Brewers Conference

[00:00:00] Jessica Infante: Heading to CBC? Kick things off the day before Check Brewbound's meetup at Love City Brewing in Philly, Sunday, April 19th from 5 to 7 p.m. Connect with beer industry leaders, grab a drink, and catch up with Check Brewbound team. It's free to attend and walking distance from the convention center. Head Check Brewbound.com slash lovecity.rsvp. And don't forget to catch Check Brewbound team at booth 956 during CBC. How did the first in-person CBC go since the pandemic started?

[00:00:32] Zoe Licata: Stick around to find out. Hello and welcome to Check Brewbound Podcast. My name is Justin Kendall and I am the editor Check Brewbound and I am joined by two people I met in an airport, Jessica Infante and Zoe Licata. How are you two doing?

[00:01:00] Check Brewbound: Doing good, doing good.

[00:01:02] Zoe Licata: I mean, we didn't really meet in an airport, but we were all together for the very first time in an airport. We congregated for the first time in an airport. We said we weren't going to do it, and here we went and did it.

[00:01:16] Craft Brewers: I mean, look, there was a lot going on. There was Labor Day weekend. I was away. We'll get together for barbecue at some point, but we're going to have to find a place that has things that we can eat to. Barbecue and Celsius.

[00:01:29] Check Brewbound: Celsius. I'll just eat a lot of mac and cheese. That's normally how it goes. Perfect.

[00:01:36] Zoe Licata: We'll just hope that there isn't any bacon or pulled pork in that. Well, actually, I hope there is bacon and pulled pork in the mac and cheese. But why were we in an airport? We were on our way to CBC and Denver and now we're back and we're all theoretically alive, mostly. We've survived, you know, seeing old friends and late night parties and whiskey shots.

[00:02:02] Craft Brewers: I would call it survived, but not thrived. I'm not thriving. I had to take like a four hour nap yesterday afternoon. You know, that time difference, it's like only two hours and sometimes it's fine, but sometimes it just like fucks you up. And that is, that is where I am.

[00:02:16] Zoe Licata: I was on straight 4am wake up calls, apparently.

[00:02:20] Check Brewbound: Yeah, a lot of that. I think it's going to take like a week to go back to normal and be like a regular human being again.

[00:02:28] Craft Brewers: Yeah, that and like, you know, so we had brew talks, which we'll talk about in a little bit, but I always like to try to look nice for events in which people will see me acting in my professional capacity. So went to the old closet to check out my professional wardrobe. Oh, and it was bad. It was so bad, so bad. Like, oh, nothing fit. And if you follow my Instagram, you can see why that is because I basically decided to pretend I was Ina Garten for the entire pandemic and just baked and cooked a whole bunch of stuff. So today we are back and I am attempting to hop on the Weight Watchers bandwagon again. I've been paying for this app since I got married five years ago. Well, even before that, I've been paying Weight Watchers every month for like six and a half years. And I've really only ever actually used it for like probably like 18 of those months. And it's always effective, but we'll see what happens.

[00:03:21] Zoe Licata: I don't even know how to follow that, but other than my own, like, Noom journey was sort of blown up because Hazy's and, you know, all of the meat and barbecue. Yeah, but Noom is really working for you. It was.

[00:03:35] Craft Brewers: It's very successful.

[00:03:36] Zoe Licata: Yes, I need to get back on the walking the dog every day, which I still do, just not to my 10,000 step aspirational goal. So a lot of work to do post CBC on ourselves, apparently.

[00:03:52] Craft Brewers: We're on some personal journeys.

[00:03:54] Zoe Licata: Yeah, and the BA seems to be on its own personal journey as we could see at CBC because there was a lot of talk about diversity and inclusion and equity and mental health during CBC, which not usually the theme of it, but this was definitely it. And Bob Pease was calling for an awakening.

[00:04:18] Craft Brewers: Yes, and I didn't even realize that when I said I survived, but I did not thrive, that I was actually hearkening to the thrive movement that the BA was pushing during CBC, which was how they branded all of these DEI, mental health, better for you and wellness things. And I think they did a really great job at that. This is not to say the BA did not thrive. They may have, Jessica and Fante did not.

[00:04:40] Zoe Licata: And this was a lighter CBC. I expected this to be a lot bigger, actually. I think the attendance was somewhere north of 7,000, and that's about half of what it normally is.

[00:04:56] Craft Brewers: Yeah, and that's more than I was expecting to see. So good for them. I think I actually chatted with Bob a little during the last seminar I attended before I got a lift for the airport. And Bob said they were really happy with the attendance. And we talked about how, overall, I felt very safe inside. People were able to space out. Most people were wearing masks. So even though they weren't requiring proof of vaccination or negative COVID tests, it felt OK. It does not cover the social events outside of the official conference.

[00:05:24] Zoe Licata: No, and that was definitely a hodgepodge of mask wearing and not mask wearing and everything in between.

[00:05:32] Craft Brewers: Yeah, and the mask wearing was interesting because I'm always concerned that nobody recognizes me. So now that I'm at an event in which there's people that I have not seen in close to two years or have not met in person, I've only met over Zoom and now I have to cover half of my face, like it really made for me being like, oh, do I tell them who I am? Should I assume they know? Like, oh.

[00:05:57] Check Brewbound: Yeah, my entire collection of people I know in the industry has only been virtually. So it was very hard to keep track of who was who and remember if I'd actually met someone or not. It was, it was a lot.

[00:06:11] Craft Brewers: I feel like it's kind of dorky to wear your lanyard outside, but I almost always do if other people are because I think it's just polite. Yeah.

[00:06:18] Check Brewbound: And I had met several people from them, like recognizing my name on my lanyard. So I think that was very helpful. That's awesome.

[00:06:26] Zoe Licata: So how did it go for you, Zoe? This was your first CBC since you started covering the beer industry. It was also Jess's first CBC as a part Check Brewbound because of the pandemic. So I guess to both of you, how did it go? What did you think?

[00:06:44] Check Brewbound: It was a lot, I mean, in a good way, but it was fun and it was really cool to see people who I've only talked to online and through email in person for the first time and see actually, even though this was a smallish turnout from what you've said it normally is, to see how many people are actually involved in the industry is really cool to see. I didn't expect how hard it is to keep up on the social side with everyone, even as a young person, but it was fun.

[00:07:18] Zoe Licata: Don Bixle's liver persists. What'd you think, Jess?

[00:07:24] Craft Brewers: Yeah, I echo everything that Zoe says. I had a great time. It was great to see people. It was great to meet people that I talk to all the time, meet them in person for the first time. Zoe's like general takeaway of like, wow, I can't believe how big beer is. I usually get that at GABF. And Zoe, we'll get you there one day. But basically it's in that same exact building that we were in. But every session has what, like 15,000 consumers there? Like that's not even including the people from the breweries who are there to work. So...

[00:07:53] Check Brewbound: It just warms your heart a little bit.

[00:07:55] Craft Brewers: It warms your heart, yeah. Like it's exciting to see how the industry has grown and changed and evolved. And I've been in and around it for 11 years. Wow. It's so different from how it was, you know, when I had my first beer job in 2010. and I think for the best.

[00:08:12] Zoe Licata: Yeah, I much prefer CBC. I'm not a fan of the smashing the glass on Check Brewbound and screaming and all that comes with GABF.

[00:08:22] Craft Brewers: Oh boy. I think he just scared Zoe. Yeah.

[00:08:27] Zoe Licata: So lighter attendance, big on diversity, big on wellness. I mean, they were giving massages in the lobby under the big blue bear while the big blue bear watched.

[00:08:38] Craft Brewers: Did you take an iYoga class?

[00:08:41] Zoe Licata: Did I? Yeah. You were with me the entire time. So did you take an Ayoga class?

[00:08:49] Craft Brewers: No, I did not. I did not.

[00:08:50] Zoe Licata: So no chair massages, no rest for the weary. And speaking of the weary, Bart Watson, the chief economist of the Brewers Association, while he didn't have the good news of the past years, Bart's pretty optimistic for what's going to be coming in the next year. And he mentioned that BA Defined Craft is expected to be up seven to eight percent in volume this year, but that still lags behind 2019. So expect about a million point seven barrels of beer more this year. Not a bad comeback, all things considered.

[00:09:34] Craft Brewers: Yeah, Bart was predicting that when we're all together for the next CBC in Minneapolis in early May 22, he thinks we'll be topping 2019 levels again.

[00:09:44] Zoe Licata: Yeah, you said all time growth. We're gonna hold you to it, Bart. No pressure there. That was sort of the big takeaway I had of the first general session and you two stuck around for the second. Any major things out of that that we should sort of hit here?

[00:10:03] Craft Brewers: keynote speaker at the second general session was Richard Montanez, the former Frito-Lay employee who claims to have invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos and introduced the Flamin' Hot family to the execs at Frito-Lay way back several decades ago. So he gave everybody a speech on the power that you have as an entrepreneur and what it's like to keep your hustle and also what it's like to be different. It's a story that I think we've heard from a lot of entrepreneurs in the past year. And certainly, you know, a few founders of companies that you've talked to, Zoe, he talked about being a kid of Mexican descent, going to school with white kids and having, you know, weird stuff in his lunchbox that everybody else kind of looked at him funny for. But he shared one anecdote about how the you know, the first day his mother made him a burrito and everybody looked at him funny. And the second day she made him two and he gave one to a friend. And by the end of that week, she was filling his lunch box with burritos and he was selling them to his classmates for 25 cents. So I think that's a story that we've kind of heard echo even today with people from different ethnicities who want to create hard seltzer brands that really harken back to the flavors that they grew up with. So a lot of relevant stuff there, but you know, in true, 2020 and now 2021 fashion, either had COVID or was exposed to COVID. So he was doing the address remotely. He was, you know, at home and talked to everybody, you know, via Zoom and which was fine. We heard from him, we heard from Dr. J. Dr. J talked a lot about commensality, which I didn't think that my beer industry reporting career would teach me crazier vocabulary words than I learned in Catholic school, because nuns love words. But both Dr. J and Bart were packing their presentations with really, really fancy words. So commensality is really just the the general warm feeling that we get from getting together to sit down and share a beer. I believe in German, it would be called Gemütlichkeit, which is a great word too. So, and Dr. J just, you know, she's the, the BA's director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and she closed out the general session. So that's certainly the person that you want to get the last word in an industry like ours.

[00:12:10] Zoe Licata: And that was, and Bart's word of the session was liminous. Did I get that right?

[00:12:19] Craft Brewers: Liminal.

[00:12:20] Zoe Licata: Liminal. And it's omnibibulous.

[00:12:24] Craft Brewers: Yes, omnibibulous has changed. It is now omnibibulous. Sister Marion would be so proud to hear how many words I've learned since I've left her. Good graces.

[00:12:34] Zoe Licata: And so that gets to the transitory state that the craft brewing industry is in. clearly changed due to the pandemic. It's clearly changing in general as consumers shift where they buy things, what they drink. And there's a little bit of, I guess, crafts always have this cool factor, right? And maybe some of the shine is a little off at this point. Still selling a lot of beer, but shines a little off.

[00:13:04] Craft Brewers: I'm just going to spitball here but when you think about when craft got to be cool who thought it was cool well now those people are you know late 30s and 40s and you know have kids and. mortgages and dogs and careers and are like full grown adults now. Like you remember in the very early days of Facebook, I might be the only person that can actually share in this because I was in college when Facebook came out and you had to have a college account to get a profile. You had to have like a college email address, like all that. And then when they started expanding it and like your mom could get on and your little brothers could get on, then it was a lot less cool. Maybe Craft Brewers is just going through that same kind of thing. And the youth that are becoming of legal drinking age find other things cool because they see their older siblings or like God, even their parents are as core craft drinkers and they want to do something different.

[00:13:57] Zoe Licata: I kind of feel like that's where hard seltzer is. Like it had that couple summers where it was super cool, you know, and it was all the young kids doing it. And now your mom's showing up with it and leaving it in your fridge and you're like, what's happening here?

[00:14:16] Check Brewbound: Right before we left for CBC, I saw my grandparents and they brought a cooler and they had trulies in there. And what's that? Like the sea breeze, something like those really colorful, like fruity drinks that were really popular like a few years ago. Seagram's Escapes. Yes.

[00:14:35] Craft Brewers: Yeah. Those are also in my mom's refrigerator, but she's not buying them. I don't know how they get there.

[00:14:40] Check Brewbound: So it was definitely a little a sign of the times that my grandparents are the ones now that have caught on to the seltzer train. Okay, we need to discuss this. What truly flavors did your grandparents have? He had the berry ones, like he was all about the berries.

[00:14:57] Zoe Licata: So not the punch or the iced tea? No. No.

[00:15:01] Craft Brewers: Classic.

[00:15:02] Zoe Licata: Classic flavors, yeah.

[00:15:04] Craft Brewers: And at the risk of not having Justin have the same reaction when we found out how old your parents are, how old are your grandparents?

[00:15:12] Check Brewbound: They are in their lower 70s. Okay. I don't want to cause another crisis.

[00:15:20] Zoe Licata: Yeah, we don't need to hear that.

[00:15:22] Craft Brewers: Older than my mom. Wow, I can't believe your grandparents are drinking hard seltzer, dude. That's wild. Yeah, I was shocked.

[00:15:29] Zoe Licata: They got disposable income. These are the folks that Lester, the forgotten folks that drank that Lester tries to tell us about. Definitely. Well, speaking of transitory states.

[00:15:44] Craft Brewers: So we talked all about Gen Z.

[00:15:46] Zoe Licata: That's true. We had a brew talks. How was your first brew talks?

[00:15:50] Check Brewbound: It was fun. I liked it. I liked being on stage with everyone, doing something live. It's cool to actually be there and see people react to what we're doing in real life instead of just talking to a screen with you lovely people. To like see people live consuming our content was really cool. And I think our panels went really well. It was really fun discussions going on.

[00:16:14] Zoe Licata: Yeah, a big thank you again to all of our panelists for joining us from Sam at Dogfish Head and Dave and Steve at New Belgium and Carrie from Bells, T.O. Hunter from Crowns and Hops and then Mary Ann Karam from Coop Aleworks and Sonicard Seltzer. That was a lot of fun. Had a great time getting to see folks again. I admittedly was kind of spooked by the whole prospect, but, you know, we survived. I got swabbed yesterday, so we'll see how that goes as far as the COVID test. Also, I mean, it was great to sort of make Check Brewbound. I thought the MicroStar party was pretty killer for CBC. Lots of folks there. You two had a lot of the parties. I've seen a lot of the photos and videos from some of our friends sharing those. And the three of us hit Bierstadt the first night there.

[00:17:14] Craft Brewers: We did. We brought our fellow Brewbound BevNET Nosh colleagues along for the ride who dabble in the beer, but clearly not nearly as much as we do. It was great. And Zoe and I went back to Bierstadt on Friday without you. Sorry.

[00:17:28] Zoe Licata: You just can't get enough of the slow pour pills, right?

[00:17:33] Check Brewbound: Love the slow pour pills. Yeah, it's just that very instant worthy beer. So you gotta go back as much as you can't get all the angles and photos and everything, you know. All the boomerangs.

[00:17:44] Craft Brewers: Yeah. Yeah. I went out to Cohesion Brewing, which is in the farther limits of Denver to hang with our beer journalist colleagues, Kate Bernat from Good Beer Hunting and Chris Shepard from Beer Marketers Insights. And they had a similar kind of vibe, lots of very traditional Czech and German styles. And I am really into that. I'm obviously spoiled by living next to Notch Brewing here in Salem. They specialize in a lot of that too. it was really great to see such attention paid to detail on classic styles.

[00:18:14] Zoe Licata: And you got a lot of that at Prost too.

[00:18:16] Craft Brewers: Totally. Denver, what a beer scene.

[00:18:19] Zoe Licata: Yeah, especially for German style.

[00:18:22] Craft Brewers: I sound like everybody's mom, like, did you know that Denver has great beer?

[00:18:28] Zoe Licata: Yeah. That's pretty much it for CBC, unless you two have anything more there.

[00:18:34] Craft Brewers: No, two thumbs up. Highly enjoyed. Can't wait for Minneapolis. Was out there for Homebrew Con in 2017. Great city. I just hope it's warm.

[00:18:43] Zoe Licata: And next up for us, I guess on the travel circuit, Jess and I will be heading to the Beer Institute annual meeting later this month. And then we'll also be heading out to the NBWA annual convention in Las Vegas. We will be leaving Zoe at home for those.

[00:19:03] Check Brewbound: I may or may not like stage a coup and take over while you're gone. I'll put you in my suitcase.

[00:19:10] Zoe Licata: You can have it. You can take the reins, Zoe, and put me out to pasture already. But CBC, when we go, there's always something that happens. You know, it's like, No matter what, when we're trying to do an event, some news is going to break. Something's going to hit. We thought we had all our bases covered on the day that we took off. And then all hell seems to break loose. It's like in the morning, Boston Beer announces they're doing a Finnish long drink inspired RTD without the spirits. which interesting, I guess, category to get into that's ruffled a few feathers with other folks who are already making long drinks and Boston Beer is doing this without the gin. Which, okay, that's one of the things I do not understand right now with Boston Beer, is they're going after a lot of these drinks in a way that takes away the very things that the consumers of these drinks want. And it's like the hard Mountain Dew without caffeine or sugar, and I get why it doesn't have that, but if I'm drinking Mountain Dew, that's what I want, you know?

[00:20:32] Craft Brewers: Do you think anybody drinks Mountain Dew for funsies?

[00:20:35] Zoe Licata: People who are not my age, or maybe people who are my age still do. I don't know. But yeah, I think there are plenty of people who drink Mountain Dew for fun, but I don't know that this is ultimately going to speak to them in the same way. And that's what I don't understand. And then, you know, we have this long drink inspired RTD. And what is a long drink? It's a Finnish cocktail that consists of gin, grapefruit, soda, and tonic. The Finnish government commissioned this drink to be made in the 1950s. I think it was 1952 before the Olympic Games in Helsinki. They wanted to have a cocktail for people there. That's what they came up with. And Boston Beer is going to start making this. They call it a Bevy Long Drink, which is funny because Deschutes, when they launched Modified Theory a couple of years ago, which was like this mixer, you could either drink it straight or mix it with other alcoholic beverages. they called it a bevy as well and I just thought it was kind of funny that that word has sort of risen from the dead or it maybe it wasn't dead but you know it's made a comeback there but here they are getting into this other space and it's hard to bet against them but it feels like they are just fighting upstream on some of these things. And then, you know, I say it's hard to bet against them. And that's when the news hit later in the day that due to all the uncertainty in the hard seltzer segment, they were going to pull their financial guidance, which they communicated in July. And they're expecting write-offs related to hard seltzer inventory. And that came on the same morning that I believe it was the CFO from Constellation Brands had said that they're also expecting additional write-offs related to Corona hard seltzer. So basically hard seltzer is a shit show, right?

[00:22:47] Craft Brewers: Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, like talking about this right now, this feels like it was five years ago and it's not even a week ago, but.

[00:22:54] Zoe Licata: It really does.

[00:22:55] Check Brewbound: The Bevy launch especially confuses me because there's already so much confusion on the consumer side between like, what's a hard seltzer? What's an RTD? Like I asked some of my friends this weekend, or I told them that they're truly didn't have hard liquor in them and they were confused. They're like, what is it? It says alcohol in there, right? And I was like, yes, there's alcohol, but there's not vodka in that drink. And so there's still already this like consumer confusion about what these things are. And so I think they're going to group all of them together. And so I'm not sure what a new like launch like that is going to, what new consumers are going to take that? And isn't it just going to be the same group that's already in all these other similar hard seltzer areas?

[00:23:40] Craft Brewers: Yeah, it's a great call. You know, I have asked my friend similar questions to be like, well, what do you think is in here? You know, depending on what they're drinking. And the other thing is they don't care. Like they really don't care. They're just looking for booze and bubbles and a little bit of flavor. Yeah. But I remember drinking a high noon made by E&J Gallo wineries. It's a vodka based RTD canned cocktail, like a canned vodka soda. I remember having one, you know, at a bar in Salem where I live and it's saying canned vodka soda. And then I remember coming in for my Check Brewbound job interview and being like, well, what's the difference? What's going to happen? I don't know if Justin remembers this, but I was like, what really is the difference between this drink and a hard seltzer? And then the next summer, sure enough, High Noon changed their packaging to say hard seltzer. Cause they think the consumer was able to wrap their head around that a little bit. I kind of have a hunch that hard seltzers are really just a stepping stone to spirits-based RTDs once those get more popularity and more market access. They're popular in other parts of the world. If you read any UK-based fiction, you'll encounter characters who drink canned gin and tonics all the time. you know, truly is going to the UK and Ireland, and it'll be interesting to see what happens. Like that market already has like a pretty robust canned cocktail situation. Do people need to take a step backwards and go to hard seltzers? We'll find out. But, you know, as part of the deal with Beam Centauri, Boston Beer is also launching a Sousa tequila branded RTD that's either malt or sugar based, but doesn't actually have tequila in it. So clearly this is a theme for them. I don't know. I mean, to me, it seems kind of wild to create a drink that is entirely based around containing gin and not have that drink have any gin. I also have been personally victimized by gin in part thanks to the Boston Beer Company. When I was wrapping up my tour guide days, they were brewing a batch of a finished satie. And so the brewery would just not really smell like juniper, which I'm sure was polite if you were less hungover than I was. I really like the smell of gin on a hot day.

[00:25:44] Check Brewbound: Yum.

[00:25:46] Craft Brewers: Look at me, all class all the time.

[00:25:48] Zoe Licata: And I mentioned this, I say that hard seltzer is a shit show, but year to date, it's still up 15.3% in dollar sales in the off premise. It has a 10.4 share of the beer category. its dollar share has increased 1.7% this year, but it's, you know, in the red over the last four weeks and it didn't meet projections. And you've got two of the five or six biggest players in the segment saying they're taking inventory hits on this. So it's not unfair to say that there are issues here and that whatever projections were out there, it hasn't met that.

[00:26:33] Craft Brewers: Yeah, it's maturing. We're watching it grow from insane like upstart growth driver to slightly normalized segment in the category. And the market forces around us are wild and unstable. And yes, last year was just so weird and so crazy that this year comparing the two is not really possible.

[00:26:57] Zoe Licata: And honestly, last year probably aged the segment faster than it ever would have before. It probably aged it. I don't even want to put a year on it, but I'm guessing it's at least a handful, you know, three to five years of growth in one year. And maybe that helped burn it out. And the on-premises return and hard seltzer under-indexing in the on-premise probably plays into that as well. So you have a lot of things hitting at once and then no wonder beer companies are, you know, fighting tooth and nail to stop equalization of tax rates on ready-to-drink spirits-based products that are of a lower ABV because They see this and they know this and Boston Beer, the reason that this finish long drink is probably a malt based product is probably because the tax rates are cheaper. So there you go. That's probably the the reason, you know, we bitch about gin not being in there and then fighting upstream. That's got to be it.

[00:28:09] Craft Brewers: Yeah, it's the tax and the market access. It's a lot easier to get something to a lot more places if it doesn't have a hard liquor in it.

[00:28:16] Zoe Licata: Right, you don't have the challenges of working through control state on that.

[00:28:22] Craft Brewers: I would just like to give one shout out to the reader who commented on our Facebook post about Bevy, that she thought the packaging was slightly off and was confused as to whether it was a refreshing citrus drink or feminine hygiene products.

[00:28:36] Zoe Licata: Oh boy.

[00:28:37] Check Brewbound: Accurate comment, I would say.

[00:28:39] Craft Brewers: Right, right. I put it in my Instagram story and like 20 of my former colleagues responded to it laughing, so.

[00:28:45] Zoe Licata: Well, there's that. Yeah. Anything else of the last week or so that we should cover?

[00:28:52] Craft Brewers: Alligash is moving to Florida, which they had teased last year, did a one-time drop in the market in last May. You know, they had been there from 2002 to 2010 and left. So if you're in Florida and enjoy beer offerings of the Alligashian variety, you're in luck. Zoe had a story about Great Notion becoming a partner of the Portland Trailblazers.

[00:29:15] Check Brewbound: Yes, and there'll be another story coming soon. That's a bigger look at Great Notion, which is the Portland based brewery. And their focus is basically entirely on direct to consumer shipping and like more modern, like they like to call it marketing. They have an app, they have a video game. So they're kind of a cool company. And this is the latest partnership by them. So we'll be more on them coming soon.

[00:29:41] Zoe Licata: And then we've got stories on vaccine mandates, what it's going to mean for Craft Brewers. Maybe not a lot. After talking to Bart, it sounds like you said about 1% of breweries would likely be affected by President Biden's call for the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration to develop an emergency temporary standard to require employees of 100 or more employees to be fully vaccinated or require weekly testing for unvaccinated workers. big push to get people vaccinated by the president there. And what it means is still to be determined. We're going to find out more in, I think, about two weeks on this. A lot more questions than answers and probably legal challenges ahead for this. But we'll be tracking that. And as I said, Bart, digging through the numbers, said his back of the napkin math told him about 1% of breweries, though that might be 10 to 15% of craft employees. So that just tells you sort of skewing to the larger employers within craft, obviously. Anything else before we go?

[00:31:02] Craft Brewers: No, it was fun. It was good to see everyone.

[00:31:04] Zoe Licata: Final words on CBC?

[00:31:06] Craft Brewers: It's good to see you guys, really. I think that was my favorite part.

[00:31:09] Check Brewbound: Yeah, that was the main takeaway is that We all get along in person, too, and we need to do it more often.

[00:31:18] Zoe Licata: That is a powerful statement and warms my black heart. That's our show for this week. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks to our one man audio team, Joe. We will be back probably sooner than later. Thanks for listening.