The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our world upside down, with small businesses being hit especially hard. This is a pivotal time for SMBs, and the way they respond to the pressure will determine how their business runs for years to come. Many companies are taking this difficult situation and turning it into an opportunity. In our Positive Pivots series, we’re diving deeper into what these innovative businesses have done, and what lies beneath the surface to produce this kind of creativity and resilience.

This week we spoke with Manny Coelho, Owner of Lithology Brewing, to learn about his company’s response to the pandemic and how building a sense of community is keeping them positive — and helping to support other small businesses affected.

What is Lithology Brewing?

Lithology Brewing Co. is a licensed New York State Farm Brewery located in beautiful downtown Farmingdale, NY. As a Farm Brewery, we use at least 60% locally harvested New York ingredients for our beer, including hops, grain and our very own yeast strains. You could consider us a micro or even nano brewery as we typically only brew 4 barrels a week.

How did COVID-19 affect your business?

The majority of our income comes from our tasting room — we are pretty well known in our community having earned awards from the New York International Beer Competition in 2016 and 2017. The Lithology Brown Ale took home a Bronze Medal in 2015, and a Silver Medal in 2016. The Red Ale won a Gold Medal and Best Red Ale, the LI Detector Double IPA won a Silver Medal, and Lithology Brewing won Best Long Island Brewery in 2017.

When the stay-at-home order came down we lost not only a main chunk of our revenue when our tasting room closed but also the sense of community we had established. We stopped seeing our regulars, and I had to let go of my bartenders and brewers. I now do most of the brewing, operations, delivery, etc. myself.

What did you do to pivot during this unusual time?

The first thing we did to pivot our business is switch to delivery and curbside pick-up beer. We are still improving — we are working out an arrangement with UPS for overnight next day shipping of our product throughout New York.

We quickly realized we were missing the bar conversations, and we also noticed our other small business friends were struggling. So, we started reaching out to friends and local artists that would usually play in our tasting room, and we had them play on our Instagram and Facebook Live accounts during virtual happy hours. We include a link to Venmo or some other way for viewers to support our local artists and to fundraise for our community organizations.

Beyond live music we started hosting virtual Bingo Sunday where we come up with fun topics you would talk about if you were sitting at a bar. We were so excited when the NY Brewers Association asked us to host a virtual happy hour introduction and tour as well — we gained new followers there for our own happy hours.

All of this has resulted in an uptick in our social following as well as steady sales through the pandemic.

How are you involving the rest of the community?

After getting our own business in order, we still wanted to do more. So we reached out to the other businesses in Farmingdale. We partnered with Main Street Pizza to start selling Beer and Pizza kits. We are hosting a virtual Barre and Beer class — our community can join via Zoom to hold a pint of beer in different yoga poses. We are giving a virtual tour and introduction of the brewery for an LIU college alumni group soon as well. We are continuing to reach out to more of our community members so stay tuned on Instagram @lithologybrewing to follow along!