The demise of Ópalo

It's been almost two months since Ópalo closed its doors and I think I'm finally ready to talk about it. Hopefully, briefly. I don't want to dwell on the past, but I think talking about it will prove useful to those of you looking to do something similar.

Those of you who read the last post about Ópalo will remember that we wanted to do a lot. Beer, food, wine, cocktails, tastings, pairings, events, the whole shebang. Don’t get me wrong, it all sounded great, especially if you’re a beer geek. There was barely anything like it in Spain, let alone Madrid.

The problem is, not only wasn’t there anything like it, there also wasn’t that many of us beer geeks to pack it every day. Now, when you tell people that, the answer tends to be that you just need to create your own customer base by teaching people about beer. Well that’s fine and dandy, but it’s easier when you have pockets deep enough that you’re unperturbed by not making ends meet for a looong while.

Doing as much as we did just accentuated the problems. Let’s face it, when you go all out this way, you need more space, more employees, more stock, more work and more time than if you start smaller. Which of course brings us back to more mula, which of course takes us back to having enough paying customers through the door.

We clearly oversized it and overestimated our welcome.

In case that wasn’t enough, at the beginning I was the only person there that actually knew a lick about beer. Mind you, I had some knowledge about beer and beer styles, but barely any when it came to operating draft beer systems on a commercial level. Learning that was a hell of a ride, let me tell you.

Even so, even if I like to toot my own horn and say that I knew something about the beers available here in Madrid, nothing can prepare you for that fateful moment when all the distributors in Madrid catch wind of the fact that there’s a new craft beer place they can try to sell their product to. You suddenly get accosted by these wonderful people (no sarcasm here, I love them -most of them) who send you their catalogues at least once a week, in the hope that they may get an opening in a pretty saturated market.

I want to take this chance to thank the nice people who created Untappd, Beer Advocate and RateBeer. I honestly don’t know what I would’ve done without you. I’d probably still be stuck with cases of [insert the beer you most despised beer here], even now.

Sure, it may sound like a lot of work to do on the beer side of things. Being an owner however, there were a few other things to be done. Even if you decide to leave the organization and day to day operation of the place to someone with more experience in the restaurant sector (which is a veeery bad idea), you still need to deal with finance, marketing, legal and labor issues yourself, not to mention supervision.

If that sounds like a lot, try adding your day job to that.

Me after "the decision". I'm hiding my big ass smile, but you can tell I'm happier.

Having a 9 to 5 (or in this case more of an 8 to 6) seriously hampers your ability to supervise a restaurant. You’re not there for deliveries, nor can you really be there when the bar closes at 1 a.m., which are two of the most important times of the day. You try to come up with a hierarchy, guidelines, policies, instructions, checks and balances… and expect that people will do their job. Yeah, it seems that I am an idealist and a humanist, what can I say. Who’d a thunk it.

All this can spiral out of control pretty fast and you’re left putting money in there in the hope of getting shit back into control, but the bottom line is, if you’re not there, there’s a very good chance it’ll never really work the way you need it to in order to turn some sort of a profit.

Out of cash, my business partner and I decided to pull the trigger and get out after a year (not going to say quit while we’re ahead, that just wouldn’t be true), and I can honestly say, we’re much happier for it. Poor, sure, but happy.

So ends this brief story of a beer bar. I hope it serves as a cautionary tale for those of you that wish to enter the business, instead of scaring you off… but then again, it’s still Halloween.