{ Way back machine. 1st birthday party, March 2019 }

It’s amazing what a crisis can do. The opportunity to learn, refocus, exploit new opportunities and to dream are all positive elements to situations that can often just seem so hopeless. My own experience with cancer nearly 20 years ago gave me this same opportunity, and the fact that Ancient Fire even exists is because of what side of that crisis I decided to play on.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been crippling for families, businesses, cities and states. The whole of our country has all been mixed up by it. We are very much at the beginning of our experience with this virus and its impacts, and that is precisely when we need to be looking at where the opportunities are. What can we do differently, and better?

We’ve learned a lot in the last 3 months. We’ve had the opportunity to look at our business model and figure out what worked and what didn’t, and while we were able to pivot to Take Out quickly and easily, everything else we lost definitely didn’t help us to try and continue to grow our brand. Scaling back to a skeleton crew (just Margot and I for the first 8 weeks) definitely reminded us that we’ve grown a bit since we started out that way in 2018, and two people can’t run this business by themselves anymore! We are so thankful to our staff and our entire community for helping us get here, it sure hasn’t been easy!

With re-opening here in NH set to enter phase 2 on June 15th, we’ve ramped up our planning for supporting dine-in again. That said, we won’t be opening for dine-in inside or outside the week of June 15th. We need a little more time to get ready as well as a couple weeks to work on changes from what we’ve learned. Margot and I are also going to take a little break before we jump right back in to things.

So, we are still asking for everyone to be patient with us. We will be back, it will be better than it was before and we really appreciate all of the support we have had with Take Out and Direct Shipping orders up to this point. Folks that really want to help us should continue to use these options. This allows us to put money in the bank, pay our staff and keep the production ramping in the right direction to support all the thirsty mead and cider consumers out there.

So what’s the plan?

We expect to re-open for dine-in both inside and outside the week of July 6th. We will announce more details on what kind of seating and offerings will be available as we get closer. It will be reservation based and there will be all kinds of rules we all have to follow to keep ourselves safe and Ancient Fire in compliance with the Manchester Health Department.

In the meantime we have a number of upcoming releases including, You Cyser, You Brought Her and Leaping Off  The Ledge. At the end of the month, and right before the July 4th holiday, Sweet Burn Dude! and Station 7 come back! So, while we get ready we are still keeping the mead flowing!

Over the next couple of weeks several two person teams from our staff will be making new batches of mead from the Hawaiian honeys so that we can bring back favorites like SHE-nanigans, Orange You Happy and Tai Fighter as well as release new meads from them like Colada Love and some yet to be named! Everyone on the team is rolling up their sleeves to get product moving, re-envision the tap room and make sure we are ready to have you all back!

THANK YOU!

Margot & Jason