Happiest Hour
Becky Hayslett and Aaron Galwey Pour with Purpose through Barplicity…
Got a significant event coming up? Planning a Halloween party or a baby shower or a big wedding reception? Lots to put together, especially if you want to host a full bar for your guests, not a simple task with all those forms to submit and laws to learn. If you need help, a Redding couple offers a bar service that can transform the complexities of drink-serving to utter simplicity.
Thus, Becky Hayslett and Aaron Galwey call their business Barplicity.
They will come to you with a hand-built bar on wheels. We’re talking an elegant, finished-wood bar with wooden counters, lamps hanging from a wooden ceiling. They also bring to you their expertise. They know what to bring, how much, and they never run out of ice. All that stress that would have been yours is now in well-practiced hands, for in their day jobs they deal with high degrees of stress.
Hayslett and Galwey both have a law enforcement backgrounds. “She’s a criminal intelligence analyst and I’m a lieutenant specialist, and we both work on our statewide cannabis team.” You might be surprised to know how they compare the stresses of apprehending suspects to those of navigating the logistics of hospitality. Galwey rates weddings as more stressful than fighting crime. “As stressful as it is, chasing somebody through the woods with a gun or kicking down doors, it is a different level of stress to try and make sure that you don’t mess up someone’s special day.”
That’s his partner’s biggest fear. “I treat every wedding I go to like it’s one of my own kids’ weddings, because I know how special it is, and you only hopefully get one wedding day, and if you have that one wedding day, you don’t want anything to go wrong,” Hayslett says. “Aaron and I have a lot of internal pressure. Only after we get everything set up and everything’s flowing, can we take a deep breath.”
Then everything’s fun. Fun for guests, the families, fun for the barkeepers.
As Barplicity, Hayslett and Galwey serve fun locally to such community events as Taste of Redding, Brews by the Bridge and the Redding Beer and Wine Festival. They also answer the call for drinks from clients farther out in Northern California, from Etna to Lake Tahoe, and occasionally into Oregon. They publicize on social media, but guests at events have become clients, impressed by their bar.
Galwey built the large bar and three others for Barplicity. The large bar came first, built on an old car trailer out of leftover wood from a family guest house project, and accented by sheets of vintage tin salvaged from the demolition of the Redding Rodeo horse stables, resulting in a unique look. Shed elk antlers added ambiance, decked on the back wall and crowning the taps.
He says that after serving a bridal show, a sudden spurt in business necessitated more bars, but none were as popular as the large bar. “By the end of last year, it was, ‘Hey, we want your big bar. We want a big bar. We want a big bar,’” he stresses. “It got to the point where we started to turn down work because people liked what we had created.”
Though Barplicity has serviced fun events for only a couple of years, its owners have enjoyed dispensing hospitality and drinks for far longer than that, developing and sharing their expertise with friends, family and new friends. “We liked to fly fish, and we would mix cocktails on the river,” says Hayslett. “Pretty soon, other boaters would come over and they’d be like, ‘Hey, can I have one?’ We love to host, and it kind of grew from there.”
One pre-Barplicity Halloween, these well-known boating bartenders took to the land, towing a small trailer decorated for the spooky night and loaded with liquor. While the kids trick-or-treated, the adults served drinks, first to other adults on the trailer, then to any adults herding little monsters and princesses on sidewalk. After that, someone in their social circle said they should do this for a side job. It’s common for him to receive a text message saying, “Hey, I wish you were out here having drinks with us on the river right now.”
He tells of a joke of dream he has. “We’d love to open a fishing lodge, and I would call it the Gravel Bar, because that’s where everyone gets together and starts telling stories and having drinks and hanging out,” he says.
Alluding to the camaraderie he’s known for many years on the river, he adds, “We’ve had terrible days of catching fish. But if you’re with the right people and the right food and the right drink, it’s never a bad day.”•
Barplicity Mobile Bar • (530) 515-6005
www.barplicity.com • Find them on Instagram
