They closed the beaches, so we went to Riverfront Park. Turns out they closed that too. We parked the car under a towering oak tree, which cast a rare patch of shade over the cracked concrete lot on the eastern edge of North Charleston’s old naval shipyard. We had meant to jog, but having been given an excuse not to, we had beer on the brain.
So we sat in the car with the air conditioning whirring, and scrolled through Instagram to see what was still open, parsing the pandemic’s small-business carnage in real-time from the other side of the screen—just like everyone else these days.
“Not knowing what’s coming is for sure the hardest,” Jaime Tenny said with a wry laugh. The co-owner of COAST Brewing Company was working the loading dock on the first truly hot day of Lowcountry spring. She waved when we pulled up, the brewery’s chain-link fence separating us. Over Tenny’s shoulder, inside the old brick Navy building that COAST has called home since opening in 2007, sat a pallet of beer marked for to-go orders.
“I spent all day yesterday on the phone,” she said. Not taking orders, of course; COAST does that online, via a Spartan e-commerce page slapped together after South Carolina’s governor banned the state’s bars and restaurants from serving customers in-house.
No, Tenny’s calls were with the bank, the credit card company, the suppliers, “anybody I have outstanding money with.” Keeping a brewery open one phone call at a time: also like everyone else these days.
“If this were it, and in two weeks we were back up and running, well, alright, no harm, no foul,” she told me. We circled the stack of beer like sparring partners, trying to locate my order while maintaining a social distance.
“But if it’s like a month, then it starts changing into something else.”
