Donations
We get hundreds of requests each year to donate beer or gift cards to charity. Most are generic form-letters. While we believe charity is an important part of our role within the community, our general response to these types of inquiries is no. And here’s why…
Limited Resources
People think the beer business is booming and that we are sitting on piles of cash. That may be true of a handful of places like say…Treehouse but, as the largest non-distributing brewery in the world, they are the crazy exception not the rule. Our tiny operation pays its bills but that’s pretty much it. Both owners work 80+ hours per week so there’s not extra time to parse what are essentially SPAM requests.
Serving Our Community Already
We have several events each year where we work directly with Windsor Locks Social Services to address specific needs right in our community.
Operation Reinbeer ~ We get wishlists from a few families in town & facilitate the collection of everything on their list in a fun way, offering discounts and entertainment to participants!
Back Pack Pack ~ We buy a bunch of backpacks & our customers load them up with school supplies in exchange for a beer discount.
Beer for Veterans ~ We offer a discounted price for customers to buy a beer for a Veteran (we donate the remainder). We keep the coupons in the taproom and offer them to Veterans who come in to cover their first round.
We’ve also hosted several Cancer Treatment fundraisers, and an Art Auction to benefit the local food bank. Which is all to say, we have limited resources and several existing programs that help us give back to the community. We aren’t able to support many other inititives until we grow a good bit larger.
Cause that Matter to Our People
Aside from our In-House programs, we prioritize causes that are important to our staff & our regular customers. Email and letters from strangers are effectively SPAM. But “It’ll be good exposure” they say. Sadly “good exposure” doth butter no parsnips.
Ways We Can Help
While we don’t donate beer very often, we do offer discounted Rental Fees for chartible organizations who wish to host events in our space. This is a small way we can offer something of value (space rentals are pricey these days) while covering the baseline labor costs with beverage sales. In certain circumstances, we may be able to waive the fee entirely.