After a temporary closure, limited take-out to reopening with outdoor and now indoor seating, it’s been a winding road for Martha’s Exchange restaurant and brewery in Nashua.
Head brewer Greg Ouellette said the restaurant was initially closed for the first couple of weeks immediately following the shutdown of dine-in services on March 17. After that, they started offering take-out service with a limited menu for three days a week.
During that time, they would sell cans of beer in bundle specials with the meals, but they weren’t producing new beer for the most part.
“We were working through the old inventory pretty much,” Ouellette said.
He said they did brew a couple new lagers in April which came out last week, but other than that, production had slowed to a halt.
One of the things that helped was a manual canning device they purchased just before the pandemic struck, Ouellette said. That way, they could start to package some 16-ounce cans, crowlers and growlers to go.
Staff was reduced from about 25 to about eight, including the head chef, general manager and about half a dozen others.
Ouellette estimates the take-out orders were enough to pay the rent and utility bills and keep some of the wait and kitchen staff paid. Still, business took a big hit.
“It was a drastic downturn,” Ouellette said.
While they sell a handful of kegs to other restaurants, such as a house white ale for Tuckaway Tavern in Raymond, they do not generally sell retail cans in stores.
Some other breweries have turned to packaging beer to make up for lost draft sales in taprooms and restaurants. Ouellette said Martha’s Exchange is primarily a restaurant and the housemade beer is not made at a scale meant for large-scale distribution.
Ouellete said they got back to their normal schedule, open seven days a week, as soon as outdoor seating became available on May 18. And they worked with other downtown restaurants to get the city to limit street traffic to one lane so they could expand the outdoor seating space, which includes about 33 tables in front of Martha’s Exchange.
Around the same time they started outdoor seating, the company got some money from the Small Business Administration’s Payroll Protection Program, which was good timing, Ouellette said because it helped them hire back most of their crew.
They’re now offering 50 percent indoor seating with every other booth and about a dozen free-standing tables. Ouellette said it’s first come, first served.
The new lagers released last week are the Brauhaus Pils (5.4 percent) and Summah Bock (7 percent), which in the past they made with German barley. This year, they were able to make it with local barley from Morrill Farm Dairy in Penacook.
“We’re hoping to come out with a new IPA next week,” Ouellette said.
He said the new IPA will have some unique hops, but they haven’t finalized the name yet.
One legacy of the pandemic is a slowly growing presence of the restaurant’s housemade beers in other area stores.
For their business model, Ouellette said it would be more for the sake of marketing, but they’re playing with the idea of stocking some shelves with their canned beers. The first store to carry it was the Tuckaway Tavern butcher shop, which has cans of their house white ale.
Martha’s Exchange restaurant and brewery is located at 185 Main St., Nashua.
Got brew news? Send it to Ryan Lessard at ryanlessard@gmail.com
