Good on ‘em. Moosehead is sending beer to soldiers in Afghanistan.
Moosehead Breweries, based in Saint John, N.B., is sending more than 1,700 cans of its Moosehead Lager to Canadian troops stationed in Kandahar, after some of them specifically requested the suds.
Moosehead spokesman Joel Levesque said the beer would be shipped to Afghanistan from Canadian Forces Base Trenton in three rounds, with the first leaving in the next week. Another shipment will leave at the end of October, and a third will be sent in November.
The beer will be tapped on special occasions only - and soldiers will only be allowed to enjoy a cold one when they’re off duty.
Levesque said military officials contacted Moosehead requesting to buy the beer, though the brewery is working out an arrangement to donate it.
“We’re pretty proud of the fact that they’re specifically asking for Moosehead,” said Levesque.
——
Hook and Ladder almost crashed and burned.
But even as dot-commers were making millions, Rich couldn’t cover his costs. For a while, he kept his job at Bayer and took two-hour lunches to call on accounts. But he finally quit his biotech work in 2000 to concentrate on the beer business. The next year, his brother, Matt, left his $60,000-a-year technology job and signed on to help.
Hook & Ladder won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival that year, but the company never provided enough money to live on. “I would go to bed at 11 or 12 at night, exhausted, and wake up at 3 in the morning thinking, ‘How am I going to pay for this and that?’ ” Rich recalls.
Defeated, the brothers moved back to suburban Maryland. Rich got another biotech job and signed on again as a volunteer firefighter. But Matt went to business school, at the University of Maryland, with plans to figure out the beer business.
Hook & Ladder started up again in May of last year, after Matt graduated, selling the same beer but in a different way. Rich quit his biotech job (again) and joined Matt full time. Once sold in six-packs, Hook & Ladder is now distributed only through bars and restaurants, on tap, which is a better way to get people to try a new beer. With several dozen accounts in the Washington-Baltimore area, sales may reach $250,000 at the end of this year, says Matt, 30. Even after donating to firefighter charities, the brothers are earning what they did at their tech jobs.
Leave a Reply