A year ago, Strike Brewing Company expanded to a second location — a taproom in Campbell, which complemented the homegrown craft brewer’s San Jose location.
In addition to its two taprooms, the 6-year-old brewery provided bars and grocery stores with kegs and bottles of beer, switching out styles almost weekly.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit and Jenny Lewis and her team had to switch overnight from bottles and kegs to cans, from frosty glass mugs in-house to curbside pickup. Now the once-bustling San Jose taproom serves as a makeshift storeroom, and A-frame wooden tables are stacked two high against the wall.
Year-round brews include Two Seam IPA, Double IPA and Triple Play Triple IPA, as well as their award-winning Colossus of Clout Red Ale and Big Wall Imperial Stout, filling about 800 cases a week. Most of the beers' names give a nod to baseball; co-founder Drew Ehrlich was a pitcher for Stanford University’s baseball team.
We caught up with Strike Brewing co-owner Jenny Lewis to see how the brewery has dealt with curveballs in the past six months. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jenny Lewis
- Title: CEO/co-founder
- Company name: Strike Brewing Co.
- Age: 36
- Hometown: Los Altos
- Residence: San Jose
- Family: Husband, Ben; two children, ages 7 and 4; and dog Yazzy
- Education: B.A. and MBA, Rice University
- Career path: After completing my degree at Rice University, she returned home to the Bay Area and was an early employee at a bakery chain called Satura Cakes. She helped open six retail locations in the Bay Area and Honolulu. She decided she belonged in the food and beverage industry and wanted to eventually start her own company. In 2009, she left Satura, married Ben, and got her MBA at Rice and worked on the business plan for Strike Brewing. In 2011, she returned to the Bay Area and started Strike with her partner Drew Ehrlich. They opened in Strike Brewing 2014 and added the Campbell location in October 2019.
- Company headquarters: San Jose
- Company description: Independent craft brewery and taproom in San Jose and a satellite taproom in Downtown Campbell
- Employees: 12
How are you doing?
I'm just canning away over here. That's pretty much all we can do right now. Still very little kegs shipping out, but we're just canning every drop we can make, so we're doing OK.
We're coming up on our six-year anniversary. We always celebrate it in October. Although we can't have our normal huge anniversary bash this year, we're releasing a whole bunch of beers leading up to it, one a week, so we're right in the middle of that. … Every Friday, we're coming out with a new beer leading up to what would have been our big anniversary party.
How’d Strike Brewing get started?
After college, I came back home and started working for a startup bakery chain called Satura Cakes. I was one of their early employees.
I helped them open three bakeries in the Bay Area and three in Honolulu, so I got a lot of experience in the food and beverage industry. I like to say that I basically did everything for them that I do here at Strike. I never touched the baking, and I don't touch the brewing, but I help a little bit with everything else.
That's how I got my feet wet in food and beverage. I did that from '05 to '09. During that time, I picked up home brewing, and I met my now-husband and his best friend, who became my co-founders.
In 2009, I left the bakery job and went back to grad school, and I worked on the business side of Strike while Drew (Ehrlich), my other co-founder, stayed here and started learning more about professional brewing. …
We started contract brewing, and we got up and running at the very, very end of December 2011. It was a contract brewing company with the full intention of building our own brick-and-mortar facility. We were able to raise the money to be able to do that, and we opened the San Jose location in 2014.
Tell me a little bit about these beers, how you come up with the names, and the flavors.
Along with our head brewer, Ryan Bridge, and Alayna Mills, our assistant brewer and operations manager, its a collaborative effort with the whole team.
We've all come up with names over the years. … We're releasing new beers all the time. Most of our beers have a strong baseball reference to them, but it's not obvious. Drew and Ben met playing baseball, so we have a strong baseball background.
(Recently) we released our wet hop lager called Rained Out. … We're (also) seeing Pop Fly and our Fall Ball Hazy.
Jenny Lewis has seen her in-brewery sales plummet. The tables that once held patrons are stacked up against a wall. Individual mugs which patrons use on every visit, sit idle on a wall. Strike's overall sales are down but solid. Co-founders Jenny Lewis and Drew Ehrlich formally founded Strike Brewing Co in 2011 and opened the San José brewery and warehouse taproom on S.10th Street in October of 2014. The second taproom located in downtown Campbell opened October 2019. The year round beers at Strike Brewing Co. include Two Seam IPA, Double IPA, Triple Play Triple IPA as well as their award-winning Colossus of Clout Red Ale and Big Wall Imperial Stout.
How has the pandemic affected Strike Brewing?
The second it happened, we had to furlough all of our bartenders and taproom manager. There's just no telling when taprooms will be back, and that's a huge part of our business. It's still a bummer. We're still not open.
We're able to do curbside, but it's not what the taprooms would have been doing. We had been excited to see what Campbell would have done this year. It would have been our first summer with the new Campbell taproom open. We just opened it last October. It was supposed to be our new thing to see what it would have done, but oh well.
We veered entirely into cans. We aren't kegging barely anything, just not knowing what's going to happen. We just do curbside cans to go. It's a total change, and we lost a bunch of revenue, but we've made it work.
Before the pandemic, how many employees did you have?
We were right at 20 when this all hit, and the difference really is the bartenders and taproom manager. Now we're open for only a third of the hours we used to be. We only need one person to run curbside rather than two or three on a Thursday or Friday night.
Is there anything that you've learned about yourself as a business owner through all of these changes?
The fact that we're a pretty nimble, small team, we can make changes on a dime. We're lucky that we already had our own canning line in-house and we don't have to work around bringing in an outside person to help us with that. That was something that we've had in place for a few years, and it turned out to be a great benefit during this time. I wouldn't say there's anything hugely new, just that I'm impressed with what our team's been able to do.
barrels of beer produced companywide in 2019
| Rank | Prior Rank | Business name |
|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | Lagunitas Brewing Co. |
2 | 2 | 21st Amendment Brewery |
3 | 4 | Gordon Biersch Brewing Co. |