Bars Need to Get Political--Their Livelihoods may depend on it.

Bars Need to Get Political--Their Livelihoods may depend on it.

So while it’s hard to find any cans of our summer seasonal Tammy Shandy left in stores, we do have some extra kegs of it that we’d like to sell before it gets too cold for shandys.
This conundrum reminded us of a problem we’ve had since the get go—It’s HARD for us to sell #progressive beer in bars. Before we explain why, let’s harken back to the beginning.
The story of #progressivebeer is basically a story of a few independent liquor stores in Madison and Milwaukee giving us a chance and proving to us that we could actually bring progressive politics into our business without killing it, and then expanding throughout the state when Democrats asked us to deliver beer closer to them.
We took another big step forward when the statewide grocery chain Woodmans started carrying us, and low and behold, just yesterday we got an actual display section at the Woodmans in Waukesha--the heart of a Wisconsin Republican stronghold!
Our presence throughout Wisconsin means that there’s little pictures of President Biden on beer cans most everywhere in the state, reminding the confused and manipulated that he indeed won the election. There are also little maps on beer cans across the state (Fair Maps IPA) showing how Republicans gerrymandered Wisconsin and twisted our state into something unrecognizable to voters who grew up with Tommy Thompson as our governor.
We’re proud of all of this, but let’s get back to the one obstacle we definitely have not overcome—selling our beer to bars.
It’s tough to sell our beer in bars, for obvious reasons.
People, especially Wisconsinites who tend to avoid conflict, tend to talk politics at home but try to avoid getting into it with the guy sitting next to them at a bar.
We get it, but what a beautiful thing it would be for bar owners, who are seeing declines in customers now that the delta variant has started to rear its nasty head in Wisconsin, call a spade a spade and admit that the anti-science, anti-intellectual horse manure coming out of the Republican Party has kept half of our state from getting vaccinated and that these low-vaxx numbers allow the virus to flourish, keeping many people away from indoor public spaces, and thus pushes many bars, once again, to the brink of bankruptcy.
Wouldn’t it be great if every bar in this state made it mandatory to provide proof of vaccination to drink?
It seems like a novel concept until you realize that it’s already happening on both U.S. coasts and in most of the advanced countries around the world.
So while this is definitely a long-winded way to say we need to offload some of our seasonal kegs, we’d also love to see bars become more political, because their livelihoods actually depend on it.
If you know a progressive bar owner who wants to make a statement about what it’s going to take to revive their entire industry, tell them we’ll sell them some Tammy Shandy for 25% off and have them private message us so we can put them in touch with our distributor.
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