So this post is to inform you all that Top Shelf Cookies will be selling our tasty cookies on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in the beautiful city of Boston during Sam Adams' awesome For Love of Beer Festival this Saturday! You should totally go, the weather is supposed to be unseasonably warm for a November weekend. If you don't go, you will find yourself sitting around in winter with no Netflix in the queue, knowing you WASTED a perfectly good Saturday in unseasonably warm November. Don't live life with regrets, my friends. Buy your tickets here
For those of you that have been following Top Shelf Cookies for awhile, you know that I love to throw beer into my cookies, specifically Samuel Adams Beer. One of the questions I get asked most often by fellow food entrepreneurs and customers is "How did you get in with Sam Adams?"
Let me start off by saying, beer cookies weren't a part of the business plan. I had a Guinness cookie, wasn't perfect but it worked (it's better now) and I just planned on stuffing a lot of chocolate in stuff and hoping the people would like it. Truth be told, I did know someone at Sam Adams. I knew her from having Bruins tickets. Just a regular at my pregame hang out. I knew she worked for Sam Adams, but never knew what she did. Basically, pregame - it's not for talking shop. So Jennifer, she saw Top Shelf Cookies kind of come to life. She had mentioned to me that Sam Adams had a program for small food and beverage businesses that I should look into when I got started. So last year during a pregame, I was excited to tell her that I was set up and all official. A few days later, someone from Sam Adams contacted me and asked me to make 200 pumpkin beer cookies to have at an event at the brewery in a couple of days. What had been planned as a night staying away from my computer and kitchen - quickly shifted into "How in the hell am I going to make this?" mode. I was like the Bruins in the last 10 minutes of Game 7 vs. Toronto. I scrambled at the last minute and I figured it out. A couple days later I arrived at the brewery with 200 Harvest Pumpkin Ale Chocolate Chip cookies. Since then, I have written recipes using Old Fezziwig, Cold Snap, 26.2 Brew, Summer Ale and Fat Jack. I've got something up my sleeve for Christmas. Its been a really good time making these cookies, I very much enjoy doing it. I'd love to create more recipes in general, but being a small operation sometimes I need to create based on request. So, I'm always really grateful when they come calling because the business is great, but it allows me to be creative.
I'm also happy to be a proud participant in the Brewing American Dream Program This program was started by Samuel Adams in an effort to help small food and beverage businesses get lending and coaching. I'm happy to say I've taken advantage of both. I can tell you, I feel so grateful for this program and the wonderful people that work in it. Running a small business is difficult. Getting my first loan is affording me to take advantage of some really exciting opportunities for this upcoming holiday season. I feel insanely lucky to have Sam Adams as a customer and even more lucky to have them as a supporter of my little cookie business.