How Level Beer Dug into Its Home Market

Instead of looking for new territories to sell its brand, Portland’s Level Beer looked to its hometown to better serve consumers. Already listed as one of the largest taproom breweries in the state of Oregon, Level Beer announced its third taproom location in the city recently.

This space should get the brewery — which opened in 2016 — near production capacity and shouldn’t change anything with its current distribution, but co-founder Geoffrey Phillips did say it prevents the brewery at this time from looking into any new areas of distribution.

That may be helpful though as margins across the bar are much better for financial stability. The brewery has seen good growth over the years, producing nearly 5,000 barrels — almost double what it was making in 2018.

READ MORE: How to Design a New Business Plan for Facility Growth

Creating a third space in the city meant using what the first two locations were able to show the Level team, Phillips pointed out.

“We’ve had a lot of time to plan for these things at our other locations, so it was mostly a matter of looking at what works and doesn’t at those two locations,” he said​. The brewery did not add a production space to the new facility as it is purely a taproom location although a ​permanent food truck ​called ​Nacho’s House​ is available on site to have a food element.​

Level 3 — the brewery’s name and image are very video arcade heavy in style — will fit right in the middle of the other two spaces.

“Level 1 is a very expansive space, while Level 2 is more intimate,” Phillips explained. “Level 3 has a pretty large patio space and is by far the largest indoor seating that we have provided. This is the first location with bar seating and gives the ability for some adults to sort of separate themselves from families with children.”

The brewery made the best of not being able to get permitting by the city done before the summer patio season began though.

“We didn’t want to lose out on all the nice weather days, so we did pop-ups in the parking lot to generate a little bit of revenue while we waited,” Phillips said. “We knew the city was slow, but we were not prepared for how long it was going to take to just get our building permit.

“We thought we were going to be open most of the summer, but we just sat waiting for permits.”

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