When Daniel LePage went to work at Creature Comforts in November 2017, “Trop mania” was at its peak.
Many store owners didn’t even put Creature Comforts Tropicália IPA on their shelves; instead, they doled out six-packs one at a time to customers who knew to ask.
“We were running two packaging shifts, five days a week,” says LePage, the brewery’s quality director. He joined the company shortly before production moved to a new larger facility. “A lot of times [beer went] off the canning line and directly onto a truck.”
Amid that sort of demand, shelf life wasn’t an issue. Tracking sales, the brewery knew that most customers drank the beer 10 to 14 days after it was packaged. “We had consumers tell us they’d never liked IPAs before Tropicália, they’d never had a beer like Tropicália,” LePage says. “I think we execute it extremely well. But, honestly, what they were tasting was fresh beer. This is what set the beer apart. As we scaled, and as we started adding new accounts, we knew this had to be front and center of our minds.”