What's up with St.Pats?

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Freon12
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What's up with St.Pats?

Post by Freon12 »

I have been at the web site a couple of times and they are close out selling DME and discontinued al the grains.


?????
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Mesa Maltworks
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Evidently, you missed this on their site...

Post by Mesa Maltworks »

Hey Freon!

I found this explanation on their site:

"Discontinuing Ingredients-
We will discontinue all ingredients including malt, extract, hops and yeast. I expect some inventory to last until November (A container of Bud malt arrived in late August and a container of malt extract in early August.) We will continue to reorder yeast until the extract and grain run out. This decision was most difficult because our roots are in brewing and many of the ingredients we sell are unique in North America, not to mention homebrewing ingredients are still a very significant portion of our sales and are still growing. However, I need space, time and energy to continue to expand the business in other directions.

We will continue to sell brewing equipment to both homebrewers and commercial breweries and in fact will be adding products in these areas.

We have decided to discontinue the CellarCraft Wine kits. These are truly wonderful kits but our focus is now in other areas.

St. Pats grew dramatically during the boom of homebrewing in the early 90's, followed by modest annual double digit growth through the late 90's when the industry declined dramatically. Our most significant period of growth began in early 2000 and by early 2001 we began making substantial changes to accomodate the growth and also to control it. Those included renting a warehouse and then building the new warehouse including mezzanine level, UPS/St. Pats software integration, 80' of packaging conveyor, 2 more work stations, two more internet terminals, commercial palletizing and material handling equipment, and online freight calculator. In addition we curtailed walk-in hours, instituted minimum orders, and eliminated US Postal shipping due to the inefficiency of postal (international, AFO, and FPO postal orders require considerable paperwork and delivery to the post office). We systematically eliminated all but one brewing ad by early 2002 in an attempt to control growth. We also eliminated many profitable products (honey, agave, soda and liqueur extracts, most chemicals, some grains, amber and dark extract, many home bar supplies, all glassware, most books, most whole hops, and all of St. Pats merchandise). We increased minimum quantities of some products, dry malt extract for example, to enhance efficiency. In spite of these changes, it became increasingly apparent over the past several months that even more streamlining was needed which lead to the decision to drop all brewing ingredients. We are deeply appreciative for the support of our customers and regret the inconvenience these changes may cause."

Bummer ! I steered many a brewer their way due to them being one of the few on-line sites that seemed to always be reliable, offer fresh, high quality malt lines and supply unique ingredients.

Eric

PS: Ya planning on coming down to brew soon?
Freon12
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Joined: Tue Aug 28, 2001 8:27 pm
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Yep

Post by Freon12 »

e-mail me again, I had my address book destroyed by an idiot(me).

Steve
s.mangum@insightbb.com
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