The Packie to celebrate six years in business with new beer festival
By Mya Blanchard
To celebrate The Packie’s sixth anniversary, owner Jon Pinches will host a beer festival on Saturday, July 1, from noon to 4 p.m. at his Hooksett location, for local craft breweries and eateries to showcase their brews.
Admission is free. The day will include food trucks, games, raffles live music and, of course, beer samples from local brewies.
The idea to establish what is now The Packie (a Massachusetts slang term for a package store — a place to buy beer and wine) came from Pinches’s girlfriend, now wife, Sarah.
“We’d been in some beer stores up in Canada and she thought it would be a really cool idea down here. … I’d been going to those stores my entire life, so it hadn’t really occurred to me that those were unique at all until she pointed it out,” Pinches said. “The surrounding states were going through big craft beer booms and New Hampshire was kind of lagging behind.”
Pinches said his passion for craft beer stems from his college days studying business at Arizona State University, where he would frequent the now bought-out Four Peaks Brewing Co. in the city of Tempe.
After a relationship ended while he was working at a Chili’s in Wyoming, he began looking for managerial positions at other locations, eventually finding himself in Massachusetts.
“I was the front-of-house manager as well as backhouse for lots of different places and got introduced to what was going on in Mass. craft beer, and just loved what I was seeing,” he said. “That’s where I got the name [The Packie], from living in Mass. for several years.”
By the time Pinches lived in Manchester, he felt New Hampshire was ready for a craft beer boom of its own.
“I decided … we’d better get on it, and the timing was perfect,” he said.
The Packie, which sells craft beer, cider and mead, held its grand opening in July 2017 and moved to its current Second Street in the summer of 2020. About two and a half years later, Pinches opened the second location in Hooksett.
“It was always part of the five-year plan … [and] I figured by this point we would be ready for it, so we really wanted to hit that goal.” Pinches said of opening a second location. “We were a little worried with the pandemic or at least coming out of the pandemic … because if you own a to-go beer place then the pandemic wasn’t good for you and you weren’t running properly. But now that we’ve come out of it, sales have started the other way … [and] it still seems like the right climate, and we needed the extra revenue from a second place to be able to keep surviving. If you’re not growing, you’re stagnating.”
In past years, The Packie’s anniversary has been celebrated with smaller-scale celebrations. Three or four different breweries would be invited and given a two-hour time slot to showcase their beers. This year, eight breweries and one meadery will be present, each likely bringing two beverage sample options.
“We always want to celebrate the anniversary. We’re so enthused and just grateful for what our customers have done for us,” Pinches said. “If this festival does well for itself, which I think it will, then yeah, absolutely every year we’ll do it.”
The Packie’s sixth anniversary beer festival
When: Saturday, July 1, noon to 4 p.m.
Where: The Packie, 88 W. River Road, Hooksett
Cost: Free admission
Visit: thepackienh.com
Featured photo: Courtesy photo.
