Shutdown slows meadery startup

The Leaky Roof Meadery is stuck with Todd Rock in a hard place.

With 40,000 pounds of honey waiting in the wings, activity at a Buffalo meadery planned by Rock and partners is nil and at the mercy of a federal agency that was used as a poker chip in a national game of budget hold’em.

Roughly 450,000 federal employees were furloughed for 16 days before Congress reached a late-night agreement Oct. 16 that avoids a default on its debts and temporarily funds the government. Among those sent home during the first half of the month were staff members at the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which processes requests for new craft brewery licenses and approves new product labels.

Rock said Leaky Roof was just days away from receiving its federal license.

“Usually, the TTB has to review licenses within 90 days; that is its review period. We were at day 100 when the shutdown started,” Rock said, adding he believes the agency already was understaffed before the shutdown due to the growing number of craft brewery startups in recent years.

“We have all of our raw materials. We have construction finished on our facility. All of my state, city and county licensing have been completed,” Rock said, noting payroll for the startup is costing $8,000 per month. “I’m considering laying my employees off and shutting our doors until the government gets back in order.”

On Oct. 17, furloughed employees were slated to return to work, though the issues that led to the shutdown have yet to be resolved. The deal struck by Congress funds the government through Jan. 15 and raises the debt ceiling until Feb. 7.

Rock, who also works for another Springfield startup, White River Brewing Co., said plans for two first-year fall seasonals could be scrapped given the inevitable backlog the agency’s staff will face as they reported back to work. He said White River had sought approval on its fall beers in August, but with no approval in place, the business is in a similar pickle.

Rock said he was told around the first of September the Leaky Roof license would be coming soon, after he answered a few clerical questions for agency staff.

“It’s very stressful and very unfortunate because we have been working on this for a long time and we went from being days away to interminable delay,” he said two days before a budget deal was reached.

Given the likelihood of a backlog of licensing requests to wade through, Rock said his production timeline is up in the air.

“I have no way of knowing how this is going to affect us getting started,” he said. “We can’t even call them. No one answers the phones.”

Given the 85,000 Internal Revenue Service employees, 2,200 Small Business Administration staff and 12,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors, researchers and management, the business community in the Springfield area has been impacted in large and small ways by the government shutdown. The furloughed workers include many of the estimated 2,500 federal employees in the Springfield area, according to the Springfield Business Development Corp. Ryan Mooney, senior vice president of economic development for the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce and leader of the SBDC, said it was unclear how many of the local federal workers were furloughed, and officials from the Missouri Department of Labor and Missouri Economic Research & Information Center could not provide local or statewide estimates by press time.

However, the government gridlock has not impacted everyone as severely as Rock and Leaky Roof.

Mother’s Brewing Co. Director of Sales and Marketing Jeremy Wicks said the downtown Springfield brewery didn’t have any new recipes in the hopper.

“All of the beers that we have coming out soon received federal approval quite some time ago. We happen to be at a point where we don’t have anything new coming out that has been held up by the shutdown,” Wicks said via email.

On the lending side, Guaranty Bank Small Business Banking Officer Micah Scott said he has only been inconvenienced by the shutdown. With Guaranty Bank operating as a preferred SBA lender, it can still upload new loans on the SBA’s electronic loan processing platform, dubbed E-Tran.

However, he said loan-servicing actions such as payment modifications and defaults are processed manually and couldn’t be completed with the local SBA branch closed. The office already had downsized to a single employee, Branch Manager Suzanne Stearman, following the July retirements of SBA specialists Brent Jones and Janice Bowman.

“If I have a question on a loan, I can usually call and get a quick answer,” Scott said, adding he hasn’t needed to service a loan since the start of October. “I have had one case where I would have liked to ask (Stearman) a question, but she wasn’t available. There has been some impact but not much.”

For Rock, the situation is an eerie reminder of a different kind of government intervention that last year stopped cold the meadery plans.

In November, Rock and business partners Andrew Steiger and Jhett Collins were laid off when their employers at Hellbender Meadery in Rogersville were charged with synthetic drug distribution one week before production was set to begin.

“This is two years running,” Rock said. “We’re back in that same situation where we don’t know what’s going on and we’re not able to open.”

Hellbender’s assets were frozen as part of the case, which was why Rock sought $250,000 in financing from his parents and to build on their land in Bolivar. Similarly, Rock had ordered 40,000 pounds of honey needed for the production of mead last year in Rogersville.

“As far as I know, the honey is still out there sitting on that hill,” he said.[[In-content Ad]]