“Initially we thought it might be better if we posted it on Facebook [to] say, ‘Hey, send us a direct message if you’re a brewer and want to do [a Resilience beer],’” says Wilkey-Gregory. “It was on a Friday afternoon when we posted that. On Saturday morning, our social media manager called me and said we have hundreds of messages from breweries—he’d answer 10 and then he’d get out and there would be 20 more. They were literally coming in faster than he could answer them.”

To keep things organized, the events team created a Formstack, which included a sign-up form and enabled them to keep track of which breweries were participating, how much they were planning to brew, and how much they hoped to donate.

“It was a bit shocking,” Grossman says. “Within a few days, I think we hit 400–500. It was like wow, maybe we could get to a thousand. Every day it was very exciting [to see] the number of people jumping onboard.”

The number was both invigorating and daunting—particularly so for Country Malt Group. The company had prepared for the possibility that a fundraiser launched by someone as integral to the beer industry as Grossman could become a colossal and costly endeavor for a raw materials company. But they signed on anyway.

“There was discussion, like this could be really big,” Kambeitz says. “We still said yes, we will support it 100%. Any brewery that wants to brew the beer and donate all the proceeds can have their malt ingredients provided by us for free.”

Country Malt Group would go on to send almost 3,000 bags of malt—roughly 73 metric tons—to around 200 breweries. Altogether, Kambeitz estimates the cost of everything came close to $120,000.