On Monday, we will reopen our four tasting rooms in San Diego and Santa Barbara Counties-- counties which began allowing onsite eating & drinking last week. To some, it feels like an appropriate time to do so. Others still need more time—and that’s OK. Fundamentally, we appreciate that facets of this situation can be intensely personal in nature, and responses can understandably run in different directions right now.
A message from our Founder & CEO Jacob McKean:
We’ve publicly and privately supported single payer health care for quite some time now. As a growing business, we’ve had to deal with privatized health care every step of the way. As an entrepreneur, I had to take the terrifying step of giving up my health insurance when I left my last job in order to start MT. When we opened, I had to navigate the immense difficulty and expense of buying health insurance for a small company. And as we’ve grown, we’ve had to cope with the absurd costs and complexities of providing health insurance to hundreds of people across multiple states.
To our fellow small business owners and operators,
We are tremendously proud of what we've built at Modern Times over the last six years. We've become a multi-state juggernaut in our industry, with production north of 68,000 barrels in 2018—over 800% of what we’d initially projected to produce in our 5th year, which is, to use a technical term, bonkers. In short, we've reached a scale that requires a new approach, and—rather than involve traditional private equity or other large investors—we’re choosing to give our fans a chance to invest in the company that they’ve done so much to help build.
WE HAVE CIDER! We’ll be sharing the first offering from this new batch of fermented radness in January’s online special release sale, but we wanted to share a bit more about our cider-making inspiration, process, and plans for the future with all of you fine denizens of the internet. We had Luke, our Barrel Program Manager & all-around good dude, write out some thoughts. Here’s his rundown:
