Creature Comforts Launches Get Comfortable 2022 and Partners with Bell’s Brewery
Creature Comforts’ flagship community giving program, Get Comfortable, launches its 2022 season on February 8. We are thrilled to be partnering with Bell’s Brewery for the 2022 Get Comfortable season. Bell’s serves as the fourth brewery partner following previous collaborators Sierra Nevada, Allagash, and Russian River. A champion of sustainability, diversity, and the arts, Bell’s made a natural fit for our next Get Comfortable brewery partner.
In 2022, Creature Comforts will collaborate with Bell’s to brew a Cold IPA. The beer is brewed with locally grown Carolina Gold rice and features Centennial hops from Bell’s selected lots as well as Simcoe, Cascade, Strata, Amarillo, and Mosaic to create a layered hop profile that is classic and contemporary. Hoppy, crisp, and dry, the Get Comfortable Cold IPA presents a tropical, citrusy, and dank hop character with a unique balance, which is the hallmark of the Cold IPA style. 100-percent of the profits from this release will go directly into the Get Comfortable Fund.
“It has been an absolute honor to work with this world-class brewing team and I had a blast helping bring this beer to life,” said Andy Farrell, Bell’s Brewing Innovation Manager. “This is an incredible, community-driven initiative that will have an enormous impact on so many. This style has really taken off and I am looking forward to sharing our take on it.”
With our core belief that good companies are good citizens, we created Get Comfortable in 2015 in order to make serving simple for customers and business peers. The program’s mission is to channel the generosity of many toward Athens’ greatest local need, which is why, in addition to 100-percent of the profits from the collaboration beer sales, Get Comfortable merchandise also contributes to this work, as well as the contributions of local business and private foundations.
In keeping with our core value of “Make It Better,” we undertook a new approach to our flagship philanthropic program in 2022. In preparation for this year’s program launch, Creature Comforts approached the Get Comfortable Advisory Council and tasked them with identifying a singular area of focus for a multi-year commitment. Under the guidance of this group, we selected literacy, specifically third-grade reading proficiency, as the multi-year impact area for the Get Comfortable campaign in Athens. The program’s funded agencies will work to increase third-grade reading proficiency from 20-percent to 60-percent within the Clarke County School District.
“Literacy is more than just an educational issue,” said Matt Stevens, Creature Comforts’ Senior Director of Strategic Impact. “Studies show that the prevalence of early literacy has either positive or negative long-term effects: contributing to increased employment and economic development on the one hand, or predictive of poverty and incarceration on the other. While Get Comfortable has historically focused its efforts on local relief programs, our Advisory Council and focus group this year encouraged us to shift our energies further upstream—to development and prevention initiatives—in the hopes that an earlier, hyper-focused intervention would produce more lasting effects.”
The 2022 Get Comfortable season kicks off with a panel discussion hosted by UGA’s Willson Center featuring Creature Comforts and Bell’s on February 8 at 3:30 PM at UGA’s Delta Innovation Hub. Immediately following the panel, Creature Comforts will host a launch celebration in its downtown Athens taproom at 5:00 PM. Additionally, on February 19 at 2:00 PM as a part of the Songs for Humans event at the brewery’s taproom, Creature Comforts VP of Culture, Fenwick Broyard, will host a series of introductory up-close-and-personal interviews with the Executive Directors of the 2022 Get Comfortable agency partners. For more information on Get Comfortable and updates on the 2022 program, visit www.GetCurious.com, and to learn more about Bell’s, visit www.bellsbeer.com.