We are going quiet for a while. This is the honest version of why.
Bear State was never short of good notices. Imbibe put our bottle next to Blue Bottle’s and Stumptown’s. Gear Patrol counted us among five cold brews fuelling a city three thousand miles from our door. At one point we outsold Stumptown six to one at a single retailer, which we mention here because we are never going to get another chance to.
None of that is a business. A business is the boring arithmetic underneath it — the cost of a bottle, the cost of getting it cold to somebody, and whether enough people buy it often enough to cover both with something left over. Ours did not. We knew roughly when it wouldn’t, and we kept going for a while anyway, because the coffee was good and the notices were nice and it is remarkably easy to mistake attention for demand.
That is the whole lesson, and we would rather write it down than pretend it was something more romantic. Cold brew in 2016 was an expensive drink to ship and a cheap drink to copy. Everyone with a cold room and a distributor arrived at once. We were small, we were good, and being small and good is not a position — it is a stage you are supposed to pass through quickly.
So: the last bottles have gone. The roasters we curated are still roasting and you should still buy from them. The subscriptions are closed. There is nobody to be cross with and nothing to litigate.
We are not going to do the thing where a company posts a photograph of an empty warehouse and calls it a journey. It was four years, it was genuinely fun, several thousand people let us choose their coffee for them, and that is a better outcome than most ideas get.
The kettle goes on tomorrow the same as it did today. That part was never the business.
Thanks for drinking it.
