What Began As Summer Jobs

In 2006 Killpack was a sophomore in high school when he decided to take a job as a busboy at the newly opened Claws Seafood House in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. “I joined the restaurant industry because I was looking for a supplemental night job that went with my day time pool lifeguard gig during the summer months,” shares Killpack.

June of 2007 was the summer before Anderson’s junior year in high school. He just wanted a break from the 105-degree heat, putting up exterior electric with his dad. His football trainer introduced him to the restaurant owner, Jeff Hamer, founder of the Fins Hospitality Group (FHG). Hamer, nicknamed the “Big Oyster” due to his love of oysters and the fact that his license plate happens to read Oyster1.

Family at Fins

The Fins Hospitality Group (FHG), respectfully named for Hamer’s first restaurant that he opened in Rehoboth, Delaware in 2005, has grown to include five restaurants and two breweries. Hamer’s philosophy of success? Family. According to their website, “Every employee, past and present, is a part of our family.”

With a company like that, both busboys stuck around. According to Killpack, “I have worked my way up pretty much through every role possible in the company up to this point <as head brewer.> As the company was growing, I was getting older. That meant working my way into roles with more and more responsibility.”

And for Anderson, “In between day one and now, I worked my way up through the back of the house, cooking in various roles, and upon graduating college, into a management role at Claws Seafood House, eventually becoming the general manager.”

From Restaurants to Breweries

Anderson recalls that he was working on ordering alcohol for the restaurants. Hamer approached him with his plan of opening more restaurants and the need to keep the beer/liquor costs tight. At that moment, according to Anderson, he told his boss he might as well build his brewery. Hamer asked him to research a rough estimate, and by 2015, their beer was on tap at Fins Ale House, the first brewery of FHG. With its success, Big Oyster Brewery was built along King’s Highway in Lewes, Delaware, giving the company more space to expand and be creative.

But opening a brewery wasn’t just an economical move. Hamer had toyed with that same idea but never had a group of grown-up busboys to make it happen. His real motive: “I wanted to pair great beers with great seafood. There are a lot of breweries that pair beer with burgers or steaks, but back in the day, it was common to enjoy a beer with your oysters. I wanted to bring that back and show that beer really is versatile and can go wonderfully with all types of cuisine.”

Bring in Andrew Harton, the one with some brewing experience. “I was an avid homebrewer since my Sophomore year in college, and I eventually became an Assistant Brewer for Iron Hill Brewery, and later a Lead Brewer. I met Jeff Hamer in 2015 through a mutual friend who told me he was interested in installing a small brewery in one of his restaurants.”

Harton recognized what was special about Hamer and FHG from day one. “The culture is what first caught my eye. At FHG, and the Delaware beaches in general, it is very relaxed, personable, and friendly. FHG also offered more creative freedom and independence, two characteristics I look for in a job. I was hired as a Head Brewer and recently transitioned into a Director of Brewing Operations Role.”

So how did Killpack and Anderson make the final jump from busboys to working in the brewing industry? “It was pretty much a coin flip between Red and me for which one of us was going to brew and which one was going to make sales,” shares Anderson. His flip landed him as Director of Sales at Big Oyster Brewery, and Killpack began to apprentice with Harton. Killpack states, “I was managing for the company as Big Oyster Brewing was coming together, but then I got the chance to take off the managing shoes and put on the brewer’s boots and work in the brewery with Andrew. Best move I ever made!”

Busboys to Brewers and Beyond

After just four years since its opening, Big Oyster Brewery ranked as the second fastest-growing brewery in America in 2019, according to the Brewers Association. So how to maintain that success?

For Killpack, “I’d like us to continue to serve our local market with a great product that people enjoy. As long as we are doing that, I think we are on the right path.”

For Anderson, “We’ve got some loyal supporters and a little bit of notoriety, but there’s still a ton of space for us to grow and expand into the craft beer market both locally and nationally.”

As for Hamer, the one who started it all with just a simple oyster house on the shore, “I think it is very important for us to have a shared vision between all of our people. We look at what grabs our interest, and we look at what the market is asking. Then we put two and two together and go for it. Our team loves beer and is very creative, really you need to let them do their thing, and good things will come. I hope to see the localization of beer continue. If people continue to drink local and support their local businesses, there will be plenty of customers to go around.”

The shared vision Hamer envisions is clear. A focus on the locals. Tourist season on the Delaware shore only lasts for the summer. Still, as any busboy knows, it’s the fantastic year-round residents that give their support, no matter the season.

The post Big Oyster Brewery: From Busboys to Brewers appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

Needless to say, it’s a tough time for craft brewers in Hawaii.  

 “Our major revenue centers come from on-premise sales, either direct from our tap room or distribution to other bars and restaurants,” Lanikai Brewing Company Co-Founder, CEO and Brewer Steve Haumschild said. 

“For the first time in my 20-plus year career as an entrepreneur and 5-plus years in craft beer, I was not able to guarantee hours to my employees.” 

But the always-innovative Haumschild, known for his uber-local business strategies and brewing philosophy, didn’t like the idea of sitting on his hands during the shutdown. He was losing sleep over having to trim down his business and reduce his employees’ hours. He tried different methods of fundraising, including tip-matching. He worked with local legislators to get direct beer delivery to consumers temporarily approved. Still, it was not enough to support the brewery’s bottom line, and it became clear that he would need to do something different – drastically different – in order to keep his doors open and his staff employed.   

One thing that struck Haumschild about life in the new “pandemic” world was grocery shopping. People dash into stores to get what they need, bundled up in face masks and doing their best to remain six feet apart. Speaking with farmers, whom he typically works with to source fruit and other ingredients used in his beers, he discovered that their community supported agriculture programs, or CSAs, were growing exponentially – so much that a lot of them couldn’t keep up with demand. 

“I am sure nobody will be able to get out of their minds what it feels like to walk into a grocery store wearing a mask and trying to get out of there as fast as possible,” Haumschild said. “CSAs were on an overnight rise.”

This realization gave birth to a unique partnership. In early April, Lanikai Brewing Company opened its doors to multiple farms and CSA programs, turning its then-empty taproom into a pickup hub for fresh produce. With farms unable to meet the demands of all the deliveries, customers could come into Lanikai Brewing to pick up their produce – and perhaps buy a couple beers to go as well. 

Before long, the brewery was offering pickups three days per week, allowing them to bring more staff back on board and offer more hours. Food trucks, which usually post up outside the brewery, were invited to come back on these pickup days. 

“Consumers are coming into our tap room for produce and fruit which supports our local farmers, buying beer to go which supports our brewery staff, and grabbing dinner to go which supports our local food trucks,” Haumschild said.

It gets better. At first, the brewery was merely a pickup location for already-existing CSAs, a way to help out farmers and draw in potential to-go beer business. But the side hustle didn’t stop there for Haumschild. 

When he learned that the farmers still had excess product – extra crops that would normally be sold to local restaurants – he decided to create his own CSA, Keo and Company, to help sell the surplus. On its website, Haumschild has aggregated all the products one might find at a farmer’s market – produce, eggs, coffee, tea, jerky, and honey, among others – and is now offering them through the scope of the brewery. Customers can log on to the site and place an order that will then be delivered to their door in a cashless transaction. 

The genius in the arrangement, among other things, is that Lanikai Brewing’s employees are the ones who compile and deliver these boxes, which can also include a beer order. In this way, Haumschild has diversified his business, providing his employees with more hours from delivering, packing, sorting, and even harvesting, while at the same time expanding his reach as a brewery in lockdown. 

Leading by example, Haumschild is showing others that business can indeed be community-driven, connected, and sustainable – all it requires is a little flexibility, a little patience, and a willingness to think outside the box.  

“We are growing at an exponential rate, and if we continue, we will not only be able to provide hours for all of our staff, but potentially hire more,” Haumschild said. 

“Just because we are hurting does not mean we cannot help other people. While we have always prioritized our employees, partners and community, during this time we have done everything we can to support them however we can.”

The post How Community Supported Agriculture Helped One Hawaiian Brewer Adapt appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

Relocating to a forlorn part of the city was a significant risk. The craft beer craze was still years away, and the idea of a brewery being an engine of economic development was a relatively untested model in most U.S. cities.

“We thought this was Milwaukee’s year, and we were really excited.” – Russ Klisch

The brewery, now a local landmark, has helped the neighborhood become a vibrant city district. The on-site tour usually welcomes more than 80,000 guests on an annual basis, making it one of the most marketable brewery tours in the country. Production capacity in the last couple of years has risen to more than 45,000 barrels of beer per year.

Up until a few months ago, the hardships and uncertainty of building a world-class brewery seemed like a distant memory.

“We thought this was Milwaukee’s year, and we were really excited,” says Russ Klisch. “We were supposed to have the Democratic National Convention and the Ryder Cup, besides festivals like Summerfest and the State Fair. We were looking forward to being in the spotlight all summer. We even had the Milwaukee Bucks looking like they were going to win the NBA Championship.”

As the weather began to warm up, 2020 was shaping up to be a great year.

“Tomorrow’s gonna be awesome,” read a March 11th tweet from Lakefront Brewery, posted with a flyer for their Belgian Quad release party.

That same day, news began to circulate that the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

Just 26 hours later, Lakefront Brewery tweeted that it would be closed until further notice.

“It all happened really quickly, and we reacted fast because we had to,” says Russ. “We have a big place here, so I knew closing might be necessary after I read a report that was forwarded to me that talked about other cities and the steep rise in cases there. There wasn’t too much information about it, but for me, I didn’t want to wait for other people to tell us to close to do the right thing.”

Doing the Right Thing 

Since closing its restaurant and tour to the public, the brewery has adapted its business to a post-quarantine existence. Part of this new normal involves launching public awareness initiatives.

“The closest thing to royalty Milwaukee ever had has been beer barons, so everybody is used to looking up to breweries,” says Russ. “Breweries are an obvious part of the community, and that’s why it is important when we have social issues like this virus come up that we brewery owners do things that are good for the neighborhood.” One of these good deeds involved giving away beer and steins to 3,000 healthcare workers during Milwaukee Day in April.

Russ is quick to admit that even after retooling the brewery, the situation is far from optimal. Then again, he reasons that having some pieces of the business functioning is better than a complete shutdown. “We’re doing curbside delivery of beer, which was complicated to get started because our laws weren’t set up for this kind of crisis,” says Russ. “The restaurant is only for carryout right now, but the limited menu is really popular and has been selling out. We also talked about having a virtual tour with our guides, but it’s like doing stand-up comedy without an audience. It’s just not the same.”

However, Lakefront has been producing another type of digital content during the pandemic: how-to videos. The first installment features executive chef Kristin Hueneke demonstrating techniques for baking Lakefront Lager Bread. “People are looking for things to do at home, right now,” says Russ. “These videos give them some fun ideas, and it also reminds them that our product is still around.”

Other challenges include dealing with perishability issues, supply chain setbacks, and maintaining equipment that does not hold up well when in states of disuse.

In terms of what the future holds, Russ continues to be optimistic. “I plan to still be here months from now and reopening is probably not going to be like the end of Prohibition, where all of a sudden things open up and everyone flocks to the bars,” he says, “but when the time comes, we will be here in whatever way we can be.”

Undoubtedly, the Three Stooges will be there, too, and maybe not wearing masks.

The post Lakefront Brewery’s Big Year, Interrupted appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

When Trouble Began Brewing

When news about the coronavirus got more serious in March, Trubble started seeing a slip in sales. But the brewery, which has two locations in Fort Wayne, both of which serve food (although its main location has a more extensive menu), was already taking measures. There were signs posted about hand washing and they were doing regular updates about sanitation with its employees.

“We had come up with about two to three contingency plans when the governor suspended dine-in services,” says Keli Hankee, co-owner with her brewmaster husband, Chad.

That order, which has since allowed for carry-out and delivery from restaurants, began on March 24. In a proactive move, Trubble had already laid off its 18 employees so they could start collecting unemployment. “We told them that if sales justified it, we would begin hiring them back,” says Hankee.

Still Selling Beer, Filling Growlers

With sales now down at the brewery, which in pre-virus times had regularly scheduled events from trivia to live music several times a week at its main location with numerous outdoor events on its pet-approved patios, Trubble decided to sell beer during limited hours Monday through Sunday. For a while, it was still filling growlers, and after a temporary halt at the end of April — “we were concerned about the number of COVID-19 cases expected to hit Indiana,” Hankee says —  started doing this again May 1. The brewery has been spraying customers’ growlers with a bleach solution for 30 seconds and rinsing them before refilling them.

The brewery also sells crowlers and crowler cans, and although it doesn’t have a canning machine, it’s using twist-off crowler cans, which Hankee calls a lifesaver. Trubble is charging customers $2 per can (on top of the beer), which covers its costs.

Adding Family Meals

Food sales then shifted to the weekends, as customers were allowed to carry out food or have it delivered Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. In addition to its regular menu of rice bowls, loaded fries and burgers, Trubble added family meals like meatloaf, mac and cheese, and lasagna to give people a better value per meal cost and reduce their contact when ordering out. The meals have been a hit.

Orders come in through the Toast app, but Trubble recently halted carry-out temporarily for the same reason it stopped filling growlers, although it’s offering select delivery with no charge to those who live within a 2-mile radius.

Giving back and going forward

So how has Trubble adjusted to these constant pivots? Surprisingly well, says Hankee, who even admits that at times it feels “relatively easy.” Before the virus she had to worry about promoting beer and food specials, beer releases and nightly events. Her biggest focus now is promoting online ordering through social media and other channels. Through its Facebook page, Hankee has started a vlog to keep customers up to date on Trubble’s happenings, and the brewery is hosting live music events where musicians play to a virtual audience, encouraging customers to buy its beers so they can sip to the beats at home.

Although the message is more streamlined and the community has been supportive, Trubble has had to slow its beer production, and its food and beer sales have taken a major hit.

“Like other breweries, our biggest cash flow is April through September, and we have to bank money in the summer to keep paying our bills in the winter,” she says. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, sales have been cut by 75 to 85 percent.

Staying As Positive As Possible

But they’re getting by and giving back to their employees and the community. Hankee set up a GoFundMe account for her employees and has already distributed funds to its employees. And recently, Trubble started its Pans for a Pandemic. Every week, 5 percent of its revenues is donated toward food ingredients, and the Trubble culinary team creates a hot meal for those on the front lines. The community can nominate a group for these free meals.

As of press time, nine employees have been rehired, and Trubble is looking to increase that number in the next two weeks. Until then, Hankee is continuing to explore new ways to find business and stay as positive as possible.

“I’m just trying to stay focused on what we can do and not worry about the future – too much,” she says.

The post Trubble Brewing Faces Trouble Head On appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

So instead of drinking alone, tune in to any of the programs brewers are offering since you can’t hang out at the pub, attend a concert in person or take a tour these days.

Longing for an opportunity to enjoy watching a sporting event with a beer in hand? It doesn’t make  for a game, but Stone Brewing of Southern California is sponsoring online happy hours with the San Diego Loyal professional men’s soccer team. A series of Friday afternoon Instagram sessions features a coach or player talking with a brewer and fans who tune in. Assistant Loyal Coach Carrie Taylor, the first female coach in the United Soccer League, appeared in one, taking questions from the audience such as one complaining that team jerseys are needed in women’s sizes. Taylor responded  “I agree. I’ll see what I can do.” Asked about her favorite beer, she replied “cold.”

Stone had just formed a partnership with the expansion club to sell beer at the stadium and cross-promote. The pandemic halted the season after two games, so the sessions became a way to keep fans engaged, explains Stone founder Greg Koch on Instagram. Koch also goes on Instagram with Beers with Greg.

Tune in to stonebrewing.com/events for the Stone Brewing and SD Loyal Happy Hour; or for the Sessionable Saturdays with Greg.

And while we’re in Southern California virtually, we can also watch art and music events hosted by Boomtown Brewery of Los Angeles. Since it can’t currently host events in its taproom, Boomtown has been hosting art demos and a DJ playing music from her apartment you can dance to. One Saturday evening an artist showed how to make wearable art. “Virtual is the only thing these days,” says Managing Partner John Rankin.

And brewers are offering more than music and sports and even events you can participate in from your living room. Over on the East Coast, Hellbender Brewing Company of Washington, DC is featuring two weekly events you can take part in: Wednesday evening open mics and Thursday evening trivia, events moved online from the taproom. “We’ve had people come down and perform rap. It’s mostly singing. Someone played trumpet. We’ve had ukulele players, even stand-up comedy,” Evans says.

It helps that Hellbender CEO Ben Evans is a musician who takes the first 15-minute open mic spot. Evans comes from a family of musicians. He plays guitar. When not singing, he plays harmonica. “I was self-taught. In early college, I got a guitar, started teaching myself. He acknowledges he also learned some from his multi-instrumentalist brother. “I just sort of really enjoy playing guitar as a stress release.”

And since performers can now play from their living rooms, participants come from all over the country, as opposed to strictly the Washington area (including Evans’ brother in New York). Same with his online trivia, where participation is not limited by the number of people who can fit in his taproom. To take part or just listen in.

And wherever you are, if you want to burn off some beer-induced calories, you can join the Bikes & Beers Social Distance Ride. In normal times, Bikes & Beers teams up with brewers around the country. Cyclists pay an entry fee, do a ride on a given day of a chosen length, then enjoy two beers from the partner at the after-party along with a bag of swag. Part of the proceeds support local bike groups.

While hoping to return to standard rides this summer, a virtual ride is going on in April and May that you can still sign up for. Ride as much as you want on your own time at a safe distance from others outside, or on a peloton or exercise bike in your own home. Record your mileage, get a package and two beer tokens from any participating brewery, among other gifts. More than 200 breweries are involved.

By early May, about 2,500 riders have signed up, says Bikes & Beers President Sam Accardi. He wants to get back to regular rides by July. But if the lockdown continues, the virtual ride may be extended past May. Pedal over to check it out.

And who says the pandemic means you can’t enjoy a tasting or brewery tour? The New York State Brewers Association is sponsoring Virtual Craft Beer Tasting Experiences. The first one, hosted the first Saturday in May, featured four 90-minute Zoom tasting sessions at $65 each, each one inviting you into a different brewery. To keep it intimate and a discussion possible, attendance was capped at 100 per session and it sold out, including 35 who got a discount for attending all four. The association arranged to ship via UPS the two 32-ounce beers to your residence the day before so you could sip it while the brewer helps you understand what goes into it. The brewer then takes you through a virtual tour of the brewery, followed by a Q&A. The second beer is to enjoy later. The program was designed for couples, in case that sounds like a lot of beer to drink at once, says Association Executive Director Paul Leone. “We made sure the beers people got weren’t typical ones they could always get.”

“If we do a series of these, it may make up for all the beer festivals we had to cancel this year,” Leone says. “We don’t know how long these things will have legs. We’re going with it as long as we can. We may do pairings with New York cheese and beer” or with chocolate. “We have tickets on sale now for the next one.” Check it out at, here.

And in Chicago, the creative Beer Temple taproom and bottleshop will also send you a package of beer to enjoy during its weekly Facebook live events. Everyone drinks the same beer at the same time during the discussion. “I get feedback. They can ask questions,” owner Chris Quinn explains.

Quinn says “we usually have a theme (such as ) adjuncts: all sorts of adjuncts in beer for different reasons, including traditional ones such as corn” and newer ones. Another theme involves “great craft beers the industry was founded on: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Stone IPA, Allagash White.”

Beer Temple will deliver the beer in advance to parts of the city; suburbanites who want to participate can pick the stuff up. “We might reach out a little more” and deliver out of state, Quinn says.

“I’ve learned people still really want to have a sense of community and drinking craft beer is a very community-oriented thing. We intentionally have it on Saturday nights because we want people to relax and not think of anything important. We found there’s a large range of knowledge base. We  have had people who have never been to a beer tasting ever and a couple regulars who are yeast scientists and another who is a champion homebrewer. They probably know more about certain aspects of the beer than I do. It’s kind of fun to have everyone together.”

The post Thirsty for Social Interaction? Try an Online Web-BEER-nar appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

While being a brewery owner was not a specific life goal of his, Sharad knew he wanted to stop travelling for his job as an executive at Samsung in New Jersey every week. He wanted to put down roots in his wife’s hometown of Milwaukee and to be present in raising their 10-year-old son. This became a possibility when Sharad started talking with an acquaintance named Randy Sprecher, whose brewery that shares his last name is the oldest craft beer operation in Wisconsin. Randy was looking to retire and Sharad knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that he couldn’t pass up.

On the surface, Randy and Sharad couldn’t be more different. Randy was born in 1947 in Oregon and grew up in rural Southern California. Sharad was born in 1972 in the state of Punjab, India, where the men in his family worked in the equivalent of the secret service for the Indian Prime Minister. Their differing histories make for an interesting intersection made possible by the craft brewing industry.

How It All Began

Randy started his brewery after being fired from Pabst in 1984. He worked his way through city and industry politics to secure a former tannery building in Milwaukee’s historic Walker’s Point neighborhood along a canal of the Menomonee River  in 1985. Randy wanted to create beer like he had tasted during his time in the military serving in Germany – styles like Vienna lager and hefeweizen that didn’t exist in Milwaukee at that time.

Craft brewery marketing in 1985 was a far cry from today’s constant social media onslaught. Randy’s hope was that word of mouth would be enough. He said, “People would come just to see what was going on. I’d say, ‘there’s the tap, help yourself.’” That’s how tours were run in the early days of Sprecher Brewery, with patrons sampling products and Randy enlightening them to the challenges of building a brewery from scratch. He would show them his vats and other equipment, most of which was recycled from the dairy industry. As business grew, Randy was continually expanding his operation into other parts of the building.

Sprecher Brewery moved to its present location in nearby Glendale in 1994 as the original brewery building was battling erosion caused by its canal-side location. As Sprecher has grown throughout the years – not only through its beer, but also through its famed root beer and soda lineup – the brewery has become a steadfast member of the family of companies that Milwaukee is known for.

A Milwaukee Icon

Indeed, Sharad sees Sprecher Brewery as something that Milwaukee should be known for even further. It was important to Randy that the brewery remain in independent local hands. Sharad also sees the potential of what Randy built for the craft community stating, “If we can keep it independent and Milwaukee based, but grow all over the country and the world – hey, more good comes for everybody.”

Just as Randy learned the trade of brewing through working in various departments at Pabst, Sharad is making comparable efforts at Sprecher, coming in early every morning to take in the sights, sounds and understanding of what it means to own a large craft brewery. You can often find him taking video of the operation, knowing that the facility is in use and therefore benefiting the company, its employees, and the customers.

Challenges are also something that Randy and Sharad have in common when it comes to the brewery. When Randy started his brewery in 1985, he had to battle the brewing giants of Miller and Pabst to get his beer on shelves and at certain venues and events like Milwaukee’s annual Summerfest music festival. While distribution challenges still remain in the craft beer industry today, it seems that Sharad will have tests of his own in this new era of craft beer. Certainly, he didn’t think that less than two months after his purchase of the brewery that a global pandemic would force his brewery to suspend tours and scale back taproom operations in charting an unknown path forward.

A New Legacy

Future challenges aside, the sale of Sprecher Brewery represents the changing of the guard in Milwaukee craft beer from the first generation to the next. This is emphasized by the fact that Milwaukee, and all of Wisconsin, finally has a large brewery owner of color, something that had not been attempted in Milwaukee since the 1960s. Undeniably, it is something to celebrate that in a new era of brewery consolidation where macros are snapping up micros, Sprecher found a way to remain independent.

As for how Sharad feels about taking the helm of Milwaukee’s oldest craft brewery, it’s something he embraces. On his first day he found Randy’s old business cards in his desk, something that Sharad says will remain where he found them as a nod to the brewery’s founder and everything that came before him. “I believe it’s a big responsibility on my shoulder to carry that legacy of good quality products,” Sharad remarks. “When he started, there wasn’t great beer made or craft beer at all in Wisconsin or anywhere, and he just made this great beer. Now we’re going to continue that.”

The post A New Era of Craft Beer in Milwaukee appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

The bill amended state liquor laws to authorize the sale of refrigerated high-point; beer stronger than 3.2% alcohol by weight (4% ABV) . The bill made it legal for craft breweries to serve cold beer in taprooms.

Prohibition was repealed nationally in 1933, but Oklahoma remained a dry state until 1959—even then, it retained one of the most restrictive liquor laws in the country.

“When the laws were written, they were written into the state constitution,” said Ross Harper, Owner and Founder of Angry Scotsman Brewing in Oklahoma City. “You could only change them through popular vote. So, for effectively 60 years, the Oklahoma liquor laws stood unchanged.”

Taproom Takeover

Restricting breweries from self-distributing high-point beer—restricted taprooms—restricted the kinds of experiences and events that breweries in other states consider normal. With the new law on the books, that all changed. A similar bill, Senate Bill 792 eventually reformed the whole system in 2018, the 2016 bill served as something of a placeholder that paved the way for the taproom takeover .

“I would say that law change really had an integral effect on the growth of craft beer in the state almost immediately,” Derek Duty, Director of Sales and Marketing for Anthem Brewing Company said. “You really saw the public interest start to elevate, as folks were getting around to see and learn more about the breweries and brewers in town, what they offered, and to offer up more support.”

“Oklahoma craft beer culture has come a long way very quickly,” Harper said. “If you look back in Oklahoma four or five years ago, there were maybe a dozen breweries at most. Now, there’s over two dozen in the Oklahoma City greater metro alone.”

Perhaps connected to the fact that there are so many breweries pop up so quickly is the phenomenon of brewing as a sharing industry. In Dick Cantwell’s 2013 book, The Brewers Association’s Guide to Starting Your Own Brewery, Cantwell said, “The collegiality of our industry is in fact envied by those in other artisanal industries who value individual over collective success.”

Cy Henley, Head of Brewing Operations at Anthem, echoed Cantwell’s remarks. “I’ve never been one to hide recipes or anything. I don’t mind sharing information, because I feel like—and most people feel this way—that if you drive quality in your beers, it just increases sales for the craft beer industry.”

Unique to the craft beer world, aside from the attitudes one finds, is this opportunity for customers to tour breweries and see how their beer is made, an added experiential benefit of the new legislation.

“You get to smell it; you get to see the work it takes to make beer,” Anthem’s Duty said. “You can walk around this place and watch everybody do what they do. We don’t want it to be a separate thing, so even with our renovations—that was one piece we were pretty adamant about—we want it to still feel like, ‘Hey man, when I go there, I’m in the middle of beer being made.’”

Living Your Best Beer Life

Vanessa House Beer Company—also in Oklahoma City—was started by a few buddies who lived and homebrewed together on Vanessa Drive in Norman while attending the University of Oklahoma.

Vanessa House might not exist had the taproom laws not changed.

“Under the old laws, you needed that big investment, because you had to attack distribution really hard—since you didn’t have the ability to do the taproom,” says Andrew Carrales, a co-owner of Vanessa House, “And we really wanted to open a brewery.”

Ross Harper said he probably wouldn’t have started Angry Scotsman had the laws not changed. “From a production, old-law mindset, you had to go big or you weren’t going to see your returns,” he said. “With the taproom, there’s a lower bar to entry, because you can put in a smaller system, be a little more artisanal.”

While the increase in breweries in the Sooner State suggests the new law’s success, the full measure of meaning cannot be gleaned by numbers alone. The reality of taprooms in the state indicates a radical shift from the ways of the past, but perhaps the shift takes us back to a more distant past (when people never left their hometowns and beer was all local)—perhaps the best things from beer culture’s collective past remain.

The post Oklahoma Taprooms Start A New Draft appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a degenerative neuromuscular disease that slowly robs people of their ability to walk, talk, and even breathe. There are few effective treatments and no known prevention or cure. The Smiths, along with daughter and Bale Breaker Brewing Company Co-Founder Meghann Quinn, founded Ales for ALS to raise money through beer sales to fund research aimed at finding treatments – and ultimately a cure – for ALS.

Family Concerns Spark Action

Over the years, Cheryl watched numerous relatives succumb to ALS, including her grandfather and father. Along the way, she learned that her family carries a gene that causes ALS, explaining that this gives descendants a 50 percent chance of contracting the disease.

In 2011, Cheryl’s brother Scott Hanses was diagnosed. 

“That was what finally woke our family up, and we said we’ve got to do something,” Cheryl says.

In 2013, the Smiths founded Ales for ALS. 

“We needed as a family to get out in front of the disease,” Cheryl adds. “We were always reacting to another diagnosis.”

A Program Rooted in Hops

The family decided to leverage their unique position as hop producers, along with their craft brewing industry connections, to make the biggest impact possible in fighting the disease. Instead of simply donating money or holding a fundraiser, Quinn suggested involving brewers through the family’s hop-growing roots. 

“My family has been harvesting hops since 1932,” Quinn says. “We have a passion for hops. It’s in our blood, it’s in our DNA.”

Ales for ALS goes full-circle, from the Smiths’ hop fields to craft beer lovers’ glasses across the country. Each year the Smiths work with hop supplier Yakima Chief Hops to donate a unique hop blend to participating brewers. Brewers agree to brew a beer and donate $1 from each pint to Ales for ALS. They can brew whatever style of beer they want.

As co-owner of Bale Breaker Brewing Company, Quinn eagerly took the lead with a hop-forward brew. 

“Now we have an avenue to share our message with more people,” she says. 

Brewers Celebrate Unique Ingredients

Many participating brewers also choose beers that proudly display the flavors and aroma of each year’s hop blend, which is created by some of the most respected brewers in the industry.

Every fall, a rotating group of brewers meets at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company’s Single, Fresh, Wet & Wild Hop Harvest Festival in Chico, California, to sample various hop varieties and determine the Ales for ALS blend. Yakima Chief then produces commercial quantities for spring distribution to brewers.

Personal Ties Help Spread Program

The Smith family initially had modest goals for Ales for ALS, but the program quickly grew beyond their expectations. They found a surprising number of breweries with personal connections to ALS, either through an employee who was suffering or who had loved ones with the condition. 

After the first year, “we were getting brewers from all over the country, and all of them had a story,” Mike Smith says.

For Thiel, the program tapped a cause that he had championed for many years, and was magnified by the news that his high school sweetheart Beth Hardesty had been diagnosed. 

“Finding out that my friend had ALS changed things,” he says. “I felt helpless.”

Brewery Brings the Fight Home

As a brewery owner, Ales for ALS seemed like the perfect way for Thiel to regain some control and make a positive difference. In late 2019, Ghostfish released Resilient Dry-Hopped Tart IPA using Ales for ALS hops. 

At the same time, Thiel discovered that close relatives of two friends from his hometown of Findlay, Ohio, had been diagnosed and he resolved to make an even bigger difference. Thiel reached out to Findlay Brewing Company about collaborating on an Ales for ALS event that would raise both funds and community awareness.  Findlay Head Brewer and Co-Owner Aaron Osborne agreed, and Thiel got to work on the paperwork and logistics to legally serve Resilient in Ohio. 

The event was an outstanding success on all levels. 

“It was shoulder-to-shoulder and elbow-to-elbow,” Thiel says.

In addition to educating friends and neighbors about ALS, and the toll it takes on those who suffer from the disease and their families, it raised much-needed funding for Ales for ALS’s fight. Resilient was so popular that customers finished off every last drop well before the end of the event. 

“The bartender said, ‘You could have sent double what you sent and we still wouldn’t have had enough beer,’” adds Thiel.

Making an Impact from Coast to Coast

On the East Coast, Mighty Squirrel Brewing Company in Waltham, Massachusetts, joined Ales for ALS after taproom employee and ALS activist Andrea Sheehey pitched the idea. What they didn’t know at the time was that Sheehey’s family also has the gene that causes ALS. Sheehey has lost numerous family members including her father to the disease. She has yet to be tested for the gene and faces a future of uncertainty. 

“The fear is there,” she says. “I can’t change my fate but I can do as much as I can to cure ALS.”

After recruiting Mighty Squirrel, Sheehey helped brew the beer and even got to name it. She christened the imperial IPA Ales for DAD in memory of her father, whose initials were coincidentally D.A.D.

“It was my proudest moment after working in the industry for eight years,” Sheehey said of the beer release. “It means more to me than anyone could ever imagine.”

For Sheehey, Ales for ALS also offers a fantastic conversation starter in the taproom and at festivals, to educate people and connect with individuals who have been impacted. 

“I never really knew how deep this was,” Sheehey says, astounded by the number of people who have shared their personal stories. 

Thiel agrees, viewing Ales for ALS as a catalyst to get people talking about the disease and to put them in action.

Funding Research to Conquer Disease

All funds from the program support the ALS Therapy Development Institute (ALS TDI). ALS TDI works to find treatments for ALS, with the ultimate prize being a cure. Founded by the family of a patient, the institute is the largest nonprofit dedicated solely to ALS research. 

“We thoughtfully chose to partner with ALS TDI because of their research capability,” Quinn says. “We need to end this disease.” 

With the goal of attacking ALS from every angle, ALS TDI has found preliminary success with several treatments, including one drug heading into stage two trials.

For those impacted by ALS, however, progress can never move fast enough. 

“ALS [research] is seriously underfunded,” Thiel says, and he appreciates Ales for ALS’s impact on closing that funding gap. In just six short years, Ales for ALS has already blown past its initial lifetime goal of raising $750,000, topping $3 million in 2019.

Distinguished Breweries Drive Continued Growth

The number of premier breweries that participate also shows the strength of the program. 

“The fact that it keeps growing as it does and we retain the high profile brewers that we do – it just amazes us,” Mike Smith says. He counts breweries such as Russian River Brewing Company, Founders Brewing Company and Bell’s Brewery as supporters, and notes that virtually every participating brewery returns.

The program only looks to become stronger. After distributing over 10,000 pounds of the Ales for ALS hop blend to 193 breweries in 2019, they expect over 230 participants in 2020.

Sheehey hopes to make a significant contribution to that growth by recruiting more Massachusetts breweries. Her personal goal is to net 41 in 2020. 

“My goal is 41 because that is the age my father died,” Sheehey explains. “My goal is to make an impact. I want to make this the biggest year ever.”

Currently, breweries in 35 states participate, with more joining every year. This means that more and more craft beer drinkers can grab a pint knowing they’re supporting a good cause while sipping craft brews with friends. 

“I have always believed that beer is a mechanism for bringing people together, to share experiences and the company and presence of other people,” Thiel says.

Ales For ALS Brings Hope for the Future

Ultimately, Ales for ALS means creating a better future for people suffering from the disease and those who care about them. 

“With what’s been going on at ALS TDI, we have hope,” Cheryl Smith says. “To be able to say we have hope is not something that has ever been associated with ALS.”

Find a full list of Ales for ALS breweries on their website www.a4als.net.

The post From Hops to Hope – Ales For ALS Fights Fatal Disease appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

This brewery focusing on fruited, canned sour ales had to find a way to get their esoteric brews into the hands of Ohio drinkers without taproom sales or a wide existing distribution footprint. And that meant shipping beer directly to customers.

“We were already working on this before the announcement came through,” says Urban Artifact co-founder Scotty Hunter.

As soon as they saw the virus begin impacting the West Coast weeks prior, they set in motion plans to ship beer if necessary. That allowed them to mail their first orders to Ohio residents just days after Ohio taprooms shut down.

(Related: What Can Brown Ale Do For You?)

Ohio has over 300 independent breweries, and they’re all scrambling to adapt to life without taproom or keg distribution sales. As of this writing, around 70 are offering home delivery within an immediate geographical radius. A handful, however, are shipping directly to customers across the Buckeye state, and it’s pointing a way forward for post-Coronavirus sales.

Cooperative Laws Help Brewers Weather Pandemic

“Ohio alcohol laws are relatively permissive compared to some other states,” explains Justin Hemminger, deputy director of the Ohio Craft Brewers Association. “Having the ability to deliver directly to customers—which was already permitted by the state [before coronavirus]—made this quick pivot possible for our breweries.”

In the small college town of Athens in rural southeast Ohio, that ability is a gamechanger for Little Fish Brewing.

“In a small town, we already have a tough time selling all the beer we make,” says Sean White, co-founder of the brewery specializing in mixed-fermentation and barrel-aged beers. “It seemed like we should be hitting every possible medium we could, so we started shipping immediately.”

(More: How To Support Our Local Breweries During the Pandemic)

While they’ve long packaged their mixed-fermentation beers, their IPAs, lagers, and other typical craft styles have generally been taproom-only pours. To ship those to customers, they had to accelerate an idea they’d only discussed before the virus.

“It was like, hey, let’s get that crowler machine we’ve been talking about,” says White with a laugh.

Customers can now order any Little Fish draft beer right along with the bottled rarities.

Logistics of Shipping Beer

Both Urban Artifact and Little Fish are working with UPS to deliver their beers around the state, but a Columbus-based craft brewery experimented with offering beer around Ohio on their own.

North High Brewing deputized their sales reps around the state to act as delivery drivers. Because several of those reps were stationed in other cities—Dayton, Cleveland—they didn’t have easy access to North High’s limited-edition beers, so only six-packs of the brewery’s core beers were available to be ordered in most locations.

“For Columbus customers, we basically said if it’s in our brewery, we’ll sell it to you,” says brewmaster Jason McKibben.

Inventory dropped pretty quickly around the state, and North High ultimately pulled back direct delivery to within their home market in the state capital.

“I had to basically put everything that was in tanks and ready to package into cans,” explains McKibben. “Our distributor has our cans statewide, so we decided to let them keep grocery stores replenished.”

Niche Avenues

Little Fish and Urban Artifact say that in addition to providing a revenue stream, shipping has also allowed them to get more difficult-to-sell products into the hands of curious drinkers.

“This is allowing us to move smaller batches of beer that are more niche and might only have 50 or 100 people who want them,” says Hunter. “People are ordering a lot of stuff they wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. We’re seeing a lot of shipments going to rural areas where we don’t have distribution.”

(Related: The Curb Economy: Craft Breweries Rise to Pandemic Challenge)

Both breweries believe they will continue shipping to customers in some form even after taproom restrictions are lifted.

“It will evolve, but we’ll probably see greater interest in remote beer clubs,” says Hunter.

At Little Fish, shipping has changed the brewery’s strategic planning.

“We were seriously pondering a satellite taproom in a metro area before this because it’s always been harder than we wanted to move our products,” says White. “It’s possible shipping lets us get where we want to be.”

As the closure has dragged on, other Ohio breweries have started shipping as well, including Branch & Bone Artisan Ales in Dayton and Jackie O’s in Athens.

“We were hesitant at first to start shipping because we didn’t want to disincentivize people from visiting us as a destination brewery,” says White. “I’m starting to get the inkling this might actually encourage people to come down here. I anticipate we’ll continue to ship beer forever now.”

The post Ale Mail: Craft Breweries Deliver Beer Direct to Customers During COVID-19 appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

Some breweries are taking this link a step further with an unexpected agricultural addition: farm animals. Breweries are raising cows, goats, pigs and other livestock in order to revive the land, reduce waste and educate the public about the ecosystem that pairing livestock and lagers can create.

Jester King Brewery’s ‘Prince of Goats’

“Hi, I’m Peppy. People call me Farmer Peppy. Or just, you know, Prince of Goats.”

That’s Sean “Peppy” Meyer, the resident farmer and goat herder at Jester King Brewery outside Austin, Texas. When he was hired in 2018, his only stipulation was that he be allowed to bring his goats with him. Brewery founder Jeff Stuffings agreed.

“We all moved into the goat barn together for a year,” says Peppy, who lived with his 20 goats until this last summer. “I’ve since moved off the farm and have been reacclimating to humans. I’ll be moving back into a small trailer on the farm soon, because it’s kidding season. We’re expecting about 25 babies.”

Peppy thinks American farms lost something when animal husbandry became industrialized.

“If you want to have a sustainable program, then it’s a necessity to have animals. We replaced animals with machines, and it’s just been empty ever since,” he says. “It makes the job a lot easier when there’s mutual understanding and respect. The animals receive a better life, and we receive the products they yield, such as fertilizer and milk.”

(READ: Established Craft Breweries Plant Rural Roots)

Fresh Milk and Beer Sold Here

Speaking of milk, Stone Cow Brewery near Barre, Massachusetts, is operating a brewery on a working dairy farm that’s been owned by the same family for more than 80 years.

Molly DuBois’s grandfather bought the farm in 1938, and his descendants have been milking cows here ever since. Molly and husband Sean, along with her brother Will Stevens and his wife, Shayna, manage a herd of 200 dairy cows and operate a brewpub. There aren’t too many breweries where you can walk out with both a six-pack of beer and a pint of fresh, raw milk.

“There’s not a lot of money in wholesale milk,” says Molly. “We can get maybe .13 to .15 cents for a pint of milk at wholesale, but in the taproom we can get $5-$8 for a pint of beer. The brewery has saved not only our farm, but our way of life. We didn’t want to be the generation to stop milking cows here.”

Her husband agrees.

“Molly’s grandpa bought this farm from a family who had been farming here since 1749,” says Sean. “We have 1,000 acres that have been farmed by two families in 260 years. We inherited something we feel is pretty special.”

Pigs and Pils

Wooly Pig Farm Brewery in eastern Ohio sits on 90 acres of mixed pasture and woodland draped over a few small hills. The owners raise a rare Old World breed of pig on the property.

Founder Kevin Ely has taken frequent trips to Franconia in Germany during his brewing career. He first saw Mangalitsa pigs on a bicycle tour through the region years ago.

His sister-in-law, Lauren Malenke, is a large animal veterinarian. She was able to identify the shaggy Eastern European breed from his photos. Lauren and husband Aaron, along with Kevin and his wife, Jael, all noted the similarities in terrain between Franconia and eastern Ohio, and Kevin recalled how many rural and small-town breweries in Germany had raised pigs to help get rid of spent grain. They decided their new brewery should carry on the tradition.

Wooly Pig raises about 30 pigs, and Aaron is responsible for their care.

“We also have about 30 sheep, a couple horses and a llama,” he says “Oh, and a goat named Hoppy Phils.”

(VISIT: 2020 Great American Beer Bars)

Brewery Livestock Reduce Waste

At Wooly Pig, every bit of waste from the brewing process goes to feed the Mangalitsas.

“They do really well with basically all organic waste streams generated from the brewery,” says Ely. “Some other animals can be more finicky, but pigs are more robust and flexible. Seeing those old breweries in Franconia, as the spent grain was being shoveled out, it would be shoveled right into the hog barn.”

“Other farmers sourcing grain from breweries, they have to pick up several days at a time, and have vehicles and containers for it,” says Aaron Malenke. “I basically have it at my disposal.”

“We’ve built our brewery around being able to feed our pigs all of our spent grain, all of our weak wort, all of our spent trub and yeast, our spent beer,” Ely says. “This makes it viable for us to be doing what we’re doing on this farm without a wastewater treatment plant supporting us. And we’re eliminating the impact of vehicles and fuel.”

Wooly Pig is tailoring the size of its animal herds to the amount of waste the brewery is producing. If the brewery grows, they’ll expand their livestock program to match it.

While cows can’t tolerate quite as much spent grain as pigs can, Stone Cow is dividing its grain among the herd of 200, which is otherwise grass-fed.

“Spent grains are amazing to put in a cow’s diet,” says Sean DuBois. “They produce more and better-tasting milk. You’ve extracted the majority of the sugar, and you’re leaving them with all the good stuff.”

At Jester King, spent grain goes to a local Wagyu beef farm, but Peppy has another plan for how animals can reduce the environmental impact of trucking.

“We’re getting mules. It’s going to be so badass,” he says. “They’ll help with transportation by hauling stone and other stuff. Hauling kegs. Unlike vehicles, they won’t compress the soil.”

Breweries Raise Livestock, Revitalize Land

Peppy is just as passionate about the role of livestock in reviving mismanaged farmland and prairie.

“The majority of America was once a prairie developed by bison, and we essentially exterminated them,” he says. “It’s up to us to move these domestic animals through now.”

Prairie grasses grow up into the sun but also down into the soil, he says. When animals eat the foliage above ground, it stimulates the grasses to expand their root structure, which provides a setting for a rich ecosystem of microorganisms in the soil and prevents erosion. The plants and the soil sequester carbon.

“Take away the animals and the roots die, and all that carbon blows off in the wind,” he says. “If you take away that mammalian presence, it just falls apart.”

By carefully managing the grazing pastures for his goats and, soon, sheep, Peppy can help redevelop land that was damaged by industrial agriculture for decades.

There’s another obvious agricultural benefit to pairing livestock and brewing: free fertilizer.

“Every week I harvest three wheelbarrows of manure from the goat barn,” says Peppy. “That’s gone into our planting beds.”

While feeding spent grain to livestock removes carbon emissions from waste management and transportation, the benefit goes in the other direction as well at Stone Cow. The barbecue restaurant attached to their taproom serves grass-fed beef and vegetables grown right on the property.

“You’ve heard of farm-to-table,” Sean says. “We like to say we brought the table to the farm.”

Additionally, Stone Cow’s food is cooked over wood responsibly harvested from their land.

“It’s a pleasure for me to be able to go out before the sunrise and pick some cauliflower and then that evening see people drinking our beer and eating fire-grilled vegetables,” Molly DuBois says. Stone Cow hopes to begin making cheese with their milk soon as well.

Ambassadors for Responsible Farming

All three breweries see their four-legged charges as a way to educate beer lovers about responsible farming practices.

Peppy corrals the curious among Jester King’s couple thousand visitors each weekend to teach them about the regenerative agriculture of the animals.

“I’ll stand on a table and yell the farm tour call,” he says. “‘You want to come learn about farms? Also, there’s really cute goats.’ And that’s when everyone stands up and is like, ‘Hell yeah, I want to drink a beer and pet a goat.’ Then I’ve got 50-100 people for an hour. I try to explain as much as possible about agriculture and how we got separated from the land.”

While much of this education is purely informative, Peppy also lets folks touch and interact with the goats.

“It’s fun to watch the larger goats interact with children in such a delicate manner,” he says. “They sense it’s this little human, and they have to be gentle.”

The Wooly Pig team uses its livestock to help educate the public as well.

“The pigs really do make this place family-friendly,” Malenke says, echoing thoughts shared by the Stone Cow crew. “People want to see the new piglets. They want to feed squash to the llama. That all helps. Most people haven’t been on a real working farm. It’s not just a petting zoo.”

The brewery also hosts a kids’ weekend every summer with additional animals from neighboring farms. It all helps drive home how natural it is for farming and brewing to be linked (and for families to be present for both). Even other farmers can learn from this.

“We have farmers who come into the brewery all the time who are raising pigs, and they’ve never seen a Mangalitsa, and they’re not used to seeing pigs on pasture,” says Ely.

(TRAVEL: Visiting Fairbanks, Alaska, for Craft Beer)

Brewery-Raised Livestock ‘Living Their Best Lives’

At Wooly Pig, Kevin Ely is as passionate about raising animals in a responsible way as he is about brewing authentic German lagers.

“We’re raising these animals in as respectful a way as possible,” he says. “Lots of space, ample feed and clean water, shelter. They’re living their best lives. It’s an integral part of how we manage to operate our brewery and farm in a remote space.”

“Lots of space, ample feed and clean water, shelter. They’re living their best lives.” Kevin Ely, Wooly Pig Farm Brewery

“We need to find a way that these animals are treated with honor,” says Peppy. “Historically, this was known to be a sacred being.”

The brewery’s founder is onboard with Peppy.

“We want to develop an ecosystem that can be a model for the state, the country, even internationally,” Stuffings says.

“We work hard as hell, but it’s special,” Peppy says with a laugh, before adding a thought that could apply to all three trailblazing breweries: “This place is a massive rebellion against the mundane.”

The post Livestock and Lager: Breweries Raise Animals and Agricultural Awareness appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

COVID-19 Affects Beer Events

In Florida, COVID-19 precautions became necessary during Tampa Bay Beer Week. Cigar City Brewing’s Hunahpu’s Day and Green Bench Brewing’s Foeder For Thought – two events that have grown to attract crowds of hundreds of people from all over the globe – have both been canceled in collaboration with the guidance of local authorities. “We have decided this is the most responsible action to take for our loyal customers, our employees, the craft community and the city of Tampa,” Cigar City Brewing posted when canceling the event.

Green Bench Brewing’s closing statement echoed that of their cross-county brewing brethren. “While we have to cancel for now, we hope to be able to take this time to create something even bigger for the following year. This feels a bit surreal to write, and we’re just so sorry we have to make this call.”

(Related: Brewery Business Coronavirus Resource Center)

Reassuring The Public

Brewers are acting to reassure their communities that they will remain open and are operating to the highest standards of cleanliness. Brewers are, by practice and necessity, people who clean regularly to exacting standards. Austin, Texas brewer Jester King also reassured their community and closed with a note about the mission of craft breweries. “We hope to withstand any decline in business this may bring by conscientiously following these measures and keeping the spirit of Jester King alive in these challenging times… We want Jester King to continue being a place to get away from the stresses we endure each week to gather over world-class food and beer with friends and family.”

Adjusting Services

KettleHouse Brewing in Missoula, Montana hosted their FishOn! Catch and Release Party, but to adjust for folks who were taking precautions against COVID-19, the brewery offered a pre-order and pickup service. The brewery allowed patrons to pre-order their beer, and “A KettleHouse manager will deliver the beer right to your car upon arrival with a valid 21+ ID.”

KettleHouse has since announced the close their taproom until further notice.

Cincinnati, Ohio’s Fibonacci Brewing is offering patrons drive-through and delivery service. The brewery said in a press release, “When Fibonacci opened in 2015, there was already an existing drive-thru from the previous floral shop. With the impending outcomes of coronavirus, they have decided to officially open the drive-thru window for pick-up.”

(More: Beer Styles Built for Surefire Cellaring)

According to Fibonacci co-owner and President Betty Bollas, “We understand the severity of the issue and that not everyone can be in a public setting right now due to age or medical condition. Some of our favorite customers fall into this category and we want to offer another way to serve them and include them. We have been using specific precautions in our taproom and this is just another way for us to serve our customers.”

Chicago’s Hopewell Brewing listed on their website that they will operate “to-go sales only until at least March 30th” in adherence to an order given by Illinois’ governor on Sunday, March 15 aimed at limiting the spread of the disease.

Milwaukee’s Lakefront Brewery announced their Beer Hall, Restaurant, Tours and special events will cease operations until further notice. “It’s crucial that our city gets out in front of this health crisis,’ said Lakefront Brewery President and Founder, Russ Klisch. “We only have one chance to end the transmission of this virus.’” Lakefront, who distributes beer in 30 states and six countries, assured the public that operations will continue and “there will not be a shortage of beer to buy wherever Lakefront is available.”

Doing Right by Employees

Meanwhile, Massachusetts-based breweries Trillium Brewing and Tree House Brewing have both posted that they have asked workers who can stay home to do so, but they will be paying their workers while operations are limited. “We know many people are reading this and facing the same tough decision – one we never expected to face – and our hearts are with you,” Tree House co-founder and head brewer Nathan Lanier wrote on Twitter. “We find solace in knowing wholeheartedly that we are doing the right thing and at the right moment.”

Supporting The Beer Community During COVID-19

As breweries and many other small businesses are facing difficult times, the action of supporting your local brewery may change, but the spirit remains the same.

(Community: The Coming Economic Challenges Facing Craft Brewers)

Most importantly, if you’re sick, stay home. This cannot be understated. Follow the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health authorities by washing hands, not touching faces, and sneezing into a tissue or elbow.

Buy Beer

It seems like a simple gesture, but that is how breweries make money. If possible, buy beer for a friend or family member, too. No one is sure how COVID-19 is going to play out, but supporting a brewery goes further than simply drinking from their taps. Many breweries already sell beer to go, where possible. If you can buy that beer at a fine beer store or bar/restaurant that serves growlers then that supports two businesses. These retailers are banking on enthusiasts’ demand for fine beers and they could be hurting during these times as well.

Buy Gift Cards

This is like investing in a good time with friends and family in the future while helping your favorite beer purveyor in the present.

Buy Brewery Gear

Many breweries have been affected by COVID-19 precautions and more people staying home. Supporting a brewery like this reminds the community about them and helps remind the community about the brewery and their place in the community.

Beyond buying beer, as Jester King alluded to, it is about keeping the spirit alive during this time of heightened awareness. Whether you do this at home or in a brewery is up to you.

Everyone is navigating uncharted waters right now in reacting to COVID-19. Craft brewers are doing their best to reassure their community, and the community can reassure their craft brewers that we will support each other during COVID-19 just like always.

The post Helping Our Craft Brewing Community During the COVID-19 Pandemic appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

Though the mistake sounds preposterous now, the year was 1997, and Carol was one of the very few female head brewers in the country. Today, Stoudt says of The Lancaster Dispensing Co., “They’re still a lovely account of mine but that was funny,” and notes that otherwise she’s very rarely tripped over gender assumptions in the 33 years since she opened Stoudts on her family’s land in rural Adamstown, Pennsylvania, 63 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

Carol Stoudt Announces Her Retirement

Sadly for the millions of fans she’s developed since launching in 1987 as one of the very first female brewmasters since Prohibition, that bar, along with all others across her sales territory, will stop selling Stoudts beers once it runs through any remaining inventory. In February, the 70-year-old announced she would mostly retire from brewing and shut down Stoudts, save the minuscule quantities she’ll continue to make for the Black Angus Restaurant–also located on the property and owned and operated by Ed since 1962.

“I won’t be working 80-to-90 hours a week,” she says.

Stoudt says sales of her traditional German- and English-style beers have slowed in the past few years. And she really wants to start traveling more for pleasure (especially domestically) and spending more time with her five children and their kids.

(More: Why I Love to Cook with Pilsner Beer)

“I really have to take one day at a time. I love to cook, perfect recipes, read. I haven’t had time,” she says, noting that she’s spent a lot of her recent hours giving press interviews.

Queen of Hops

Those interviews would have more than likely included a question or two about her role as the self-titled “Queen of Hops”–one of the original and most famous female leaders in craft beer. To show how increasing numbers of women gradually entered the industry after she did, she credits Oregon malt innovator Teri Fahrendorf for starting the Pink Boots Society in 2007 to empower the working women of beer and observes that she herself was one of the first women to judge the Great American Beer Festival® Competition.

Now, she says, “I think it’s almost 50/50. … I’m glad more women who have passion for beer go into it. It’s nice to have a balance.”

The Best Part of Craft Beer is the People

Looking back at her overall experience in the industry, the former kindergarten teacher says though she does love educating beer lovers on flavors and styles, the best part of her career has been the people.

“I love the passion of the people that make fabulous beers and the people who’ve enjoyed them over the years,” she says. “I really think there was a lot of personal growth for me. I enjoyed being around all ages and applauding the beers they’re making.”

(Related: Female Brewing Pioneers and Innovators Talk Gender Equality in Craft Brewing)

Always active and rarely one to reflect wistfully on the past, Stoudt says she’ll probably pop up at beer events now and again. She’d like to sell her 30-barrel brewing system or rent the space and equipment to another brewer. She’ll hang on to her two-barrel pilot system for the restaurant but doesn’t know yet how much beer she’ll make or which styles, though she suspects she’ll keep brewing certain classics like Golden Lager, Pils, American Pale Ale, Gearshifter IPA and Fat Dog Stout.

“I do love beer and its people. It makes me smile. It keeps me young.” Carol Stoudt

She does know that all of her brewers have already found new jobs and her sales manager is staying on, for now, to help wind things down and maybe take on a new role at the family complex that will continue to house the restaurant, plus the German bier hall, antiques mall and bakery. He could produce beer events or work directly under Stoudt if she decides to eventually contract brew or boost production, just a bit, beyond the restaurant.

She does hint that she’d like to keep supplying beer to McGillin’s Olde Ale House in Philadelphia. It’s her longest-running account and one of the oldest continuously operating bars in America. Not only does the tavern advertise that it sells more Stoudts on draft than any other pub in Pennsylvania, but it also doesn’t hide the fact that the brewery makes its three house beers, McGillin’s Real Ale, McGillin’s Genuine Lager and McGillin’s 1860 IPA.

“I would love to keep serving them,” Stoudt says. “Can you imagine someone being that loyal?”

Not long after Stoudt announced her retirement, Pennsylvania craft old guard Sly Fox Brewing announced the release of a Stoudts collaboration beer called Black Lager packaged in a plain 16-ounce can. Brewed to honor Stoudt’s legacy, the collaboration suggests that one might get chances to drink her beer through similar endeavors with others going forward.

“I mean, I do love beer and its people,” she says. “It makes me smile. It keeps me young.”

The post Craft Brewing Pioneer Carol Stoudt Discusses Retirement After 30-Plus Years appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

“I really didn’t know what direction to go in,” Swanson, 32, says. “After he passed away, it really put things into perspective where you just realize that anything can happen at any moment.”

It was one of those cinematic and cliche “What do I do now?” moments. Looking for a job that would help, however slightly, fulfill a deep void, Swanson began sending resumes out to local breweries. Jester King, a local Austin brewery specializing in farmhouse-style beers, was the first to respond and the craft brewing world is lucky for the cosmic coincidences that paired them together.

Averie Swanson’s Rise at Jester King

The fact that she fell in love with mixed fermentation didn’t surprise Swanson. She graduated from the University of Houston with a degree in biology, so she already possessed a proclivity toward obsessive note taking and experimentation.

“I’m drawn to the exploration of mixed culture,” she says. “In some beer, you can pitch one type of yeast and more or less know what the final product will taste like. Using mixed culture, there’s an unpredictability. I like to call it a ‘collaborative engagement with organisms.’ That’s interesting to me.”

Working at Jester King seemed to be a perfect marriage of this continual pursuit of experimentation and creative autonomy. Swanson can recall the exact day — it was her mom’s birthday — that she felt she’d found her proverbial calling. It was a day spent at the Jester King doing the manual labor of love that so often goes unseen in the world of craft brewing.

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“We probably started at 2 p.m. and ended at 2:30 in the morning,” she says. “We were all working really hard, drinking good beer, and having a good time. At the end of the night, we were eating pizza off cardboard boxes because we didn’t have any plates. It was one of those unique experiences where you’re surrounded by very kind, very smart people. It was just a vortex of creative energy.”

Over the course of Swanson’s tenure, the Austin outfit became a critical darling, commercial success, and certified beer geek destination in the years since it launched in 2011, and Swanson’s tireless work ethic and attention to detail no doubt contributed.

“[Averie is] highly respected for her talent, as well as her academic approach and accomplishments,” says Tim Adams of Oxbow Brewing Company in Maine, another brewery that specializes in mixed fermentation beers. “She’s given great presentations; she’s accredited. She’s regarded as an international authority of mixed fermentation beers. We’re so happy we’ve been able to work with her as much as we have.”

Always the traveler, Swanson has brewed beer in the mountains of Japan and the Italian countryside. In fact, her reputation as a brewer might only be surpassed by her reputation amongst her friends. She’s equal parts adventurous and outgoing, with a tendency to get introspective; She can seem intimidatingly inquisitive and bright, but is quick to laugh and there lies an accessibility in her voice.

“Averie has a universal charisma,” says John Laffler, co-owner of Chicago’s Off Color Brewing, who often appears on Swanson’s Instagram feed. “She’s one of my favorite people.”

“She is so much fun,” says Adams. “She’s open-minded. The way she approaches the world and her art, there’s this kind of trifecta of adventure, intelligence, and being fascinating to talk to.”

Swanson found herself traveling the world and drinking in everything it had to offer. But even when a person is doing what they love and is surrounded by people who share that same energy and enthusiasm, there comes a time to pump the brakes and reassess where the vehicle is headed.

(More: Denver Beer Co Participates in State of Colorado Pilot Program to Capture and Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions)

And so for the second time in her beer life, she found herself evaluating who she was and where she was going. For Swanson, it all added up: Her long-time, long-distance boyfriend lived in Chicago; She’d just passed her Master Cicerone exam in 2018; She had become one of the industry’s more widely-respected voices. The wind was at her back.

In 2018, she left Jester King and Austin behind, and moved to the Land of Lincoln.

“I knew if I took the risk and left, I’d have a lot of momentum,” she says. “It felt like it was the right time for me to quit and move and make a change.”

Her New Chapter in Chicago

She took almost an entire year off to get acclimated into Chicagoland, particularly the food and drinks scene, and to a climate much different than the one she’d lived in her entire life. Then one day, she walked into a brewery.

The way Half Acre founder Gabe Magliaro tells it, the story sounds like a western: Wyatt Earp rolling into town, but instead of a badge and a six shooter, Swanson was carrying a recipe book and an idea. The two spoke in Half Acre’s Lincoln Avenue taproom about her ambitions for Chicago, creatively and professionally, and how her new project–named Keeping Together–can exist within the walls of Half Acre.

Keeping Together essentially allows for Swanson to execute her creative and brewing vision through recipes of her own creation. Magliaro was more than happy to be able to provide Swanson with space within the walls of his own brewery.

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“We’ve known [Averie] for a long time and had a deep respect for who she is as an individual and what she was hoping to accomplish creatively,” says Magliaro. “From all angles, up and down, this is good. Just to be around [the Keeping Together project], to observe what she does, we are very fortunate.”

Keeping Together, which came together in the early summer of 2019, is energizing to Swanson. She’s not working 80 hours a week. She’s been able to reevaluate what she wanted her own life to look like. She’d been jaded with the current state of beer and Keeping Together is her response.

“Beer culture has become something I’m less interested in,” she admitted. “Ticking beers, not interested in enjoying the beers, or the company they’re in while they’re drinking those beers. This is my personal response. I want to make beers that are small batch, enjoyable. I’m making them here in Chicago. There will be a little distro, but if you want to enjoy them, come to Chicago and drink them with us.

“I’m not trying to make serious beer. I chose 750 mL bottles less for the larger volumes and more for the reason that they’re more likely to be shared. I want them on the tables at dinners with friends,” she says. “I enjoy the idea of sharing. It’s not intended to drink [the] entire bottle. It’s something that should be shared.”

(More: Craft Brewers Find Flavor and Flexibility with Rice)

In typical Swanson fashion, she chose to make her grand re-entrance into the beer world overwrought with splashy releases of high ABV bombs in the most antithetical-to-that way: by making a 3% ABV table beer called The Art of Holding Space. All jokes aside, it’s perfectly Swanson, says Magliaro.

“The beer is not a huge exclamation point,” he says. “Everything is intentional for her. She wanted to invest in nuance and subtlety—come out with a bang without having the beer be incredibly loud. [It] says everything about how she wants Keeping Together to be. This is the type of liquid she wants to make. She’d rather them exist peacefully within someone’s day.”

“[The Table Beer] is a bold and interesting choice,” notes Laffler, perhaps Swanson’s most ardent cheerleader. “It’s one of the things I respect about her. It’s a style most people won’t give a f*** about. The trends she’s looking at aren’t mainstream trends. The Chicago brewing scene is very current, very trend following. For me, having one more of those people who goes against that, who is good at it, and who I love? I’m very happy.”

“I’m very fortunate to make the beer I want to make in the way I want to make them,” Swanson says with characteristic modesty. “There’s not a huge risk. It’s a dream come true.”

The post Brewer Averie Swanson Starts a New Chapter in Chicago appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

But something about the hard seltzer trend seems different, perhaps even risky to ignore. This is a whole new animal, a marked departure from what brewers are accustomed to. Faced with a tsunami of growing demand and more competition than ever before, many craft brewers are forced to operate outside their comfort zone–to adapt and evolve to meet the rising tide of requests for this bubbly, flavor-kissed craze.

Of course, with any new trend, there are naysayers, those who scoff at the notion of hard seltzer. After all, it contains no grain or (in most cases) hops–though brewing methods can vary, essentially the process involves dissolving sugar into boiling water, fermenting the sugar into alcohol, and infusing flavoring and carbonation after the fact. Seltzers are also gluten-free and relatively low in calories–two factors driving beer lovers’ changing tastes.

A Big Divergence

For most hard seltzer doubters in the industry, the qualms are philosophical.

“Seltzer just feels like a big divergence from some of the principles that made craft beer special in the first place,” says Chris Winn, co-owner and “chief high five officer” at Tradesman Brewing in Charleston, South Carolina. “It’s almost like we’re forgetting some of the lessons we had to learn 30 years ago, about pivoting and doing something different and unique instead of chasing trends. Craft as an industry did not get to where we are by copying the big brewers.”

Instead, Winn suggests brewers may be better off to “focus on the things you do really well and make you stand out.”

For Bill Eye, co-founder and brewer at Bierstadt Lagerhaus in Denver, that means only crafting and serving Old World-style lager, styles that take a significant amount of time and attention to detail.

“People coming to Bierstadt, they know we believe in a very traditional approach: lager, in a beautiful glass, made by people who have tried to bring the German beer experience to the U.S.,” Eye says. “We were flabbergasted by the amount of care and respect beer gets over there.”

“Whatever it is you put your name on, that has to do with what you as a person or company believe in. And I don’t believe in taking sugar and dissolving it in water and calling it brewing. I don’t believe in handing something like that to a customer with the same enthusiasm as a well-crafted helles.”

The Early Hard Seltzer Adopters

But for some small and independent craft brewers embracing the hard seltzer trend, the transition was much more natural.

“Back in 2008, we started making nonalcoholic sparkling water just for ourselves – we called it ‘skaqua,’” says Dave Thibodeau, president and co-founder of Ska Brewing in Durango, Colorado. “After 12 years, we just love having something with bubbles in our hand most of the day.”

Late last year, Ska took this a step further, introducing canned hard seltzers in a mixed 12-pack throughout their distribution network.

As a self-proclaimed “beer guy first,” Thibodeau admits he had “some trepidation” venturing into hard seltzers, but realized he had to “look outside my own selfish interests, and not just be a purist and brew only what I want but what our customers were asking and looking for.”

“These are customers we might not otherwise have, and now they’re sharing the experience of our taproom and our community.” – Dave Thibodeau

And for Thibodeau, seltzer is no further removed from beer than other recent trends.

“When some brewers are going to Walmart and filling their cart with Fruity Pebbles for their next IPA, I don’t see how you can dis on seltzer,” he says.

Tackling controversial styles is nothing new for Upslope Brewing Company, based in Boulder, Colorado. When the brewery debuted its flagship Craft Lager in 2011, few in craft beer were focusing on anything like that–yet. Then in May 2019, Upslope introduced its Spiked Snowmelt lineup of hard seltzers. The two brands are now the craft brewery’s top products, with each commanding relatively equal production volume.

“There was a way worse response when we put out Craft Lager than when we did seltzer,” says Henry Wood, the brewery’s vice president of sales and marketing. “We heard, ‘Congrats, you made Budweiser,’ as if there was this disappointment we made a lager.”

“But thank goodness we did, because that was one of the last unexplored spaces for craft beer when ABV was growing and IBU was going through the roof,” Wood says, referring to the past trend of ever-stronger IPAs. “We said, ‘What happens if we go another way?’, and everyone in this company has benefitted from that.”

(MORE: Is 2020 the Year of the Low-Cal IPA?)

Brewing Hard Seltzers: Simple Ingredients, Hard Process

While the ingredient list for hard seltzers may be straightforward, some brewers have found making one still presents significant challenges. A thin window for fermentation and a relative lack of flavors to mask flaws behind translates to many a test batch going down the drain.

“It was easily the hardest fermentation process since our first original beer batches,” says Jack Diebolt, co-founder and head brewer at Diebolt Brewing Company in Denver. His first attempt at brewing hard seltzer “was uncharted territory, and it simply wasn’t fermenting out. We couldn’t tie up a tank with something that wasn’t fermenting, so we had to dump it.”

“Managing fermentation and yeast health is one of the greatest challenges with beer, and seltzer’s ingredients don’t provide any nutrients for yeast,” says Mitch Steele, brewmaster and chief operating officer at New Realm Brewing in Atlanta, which he co-founded in 2017 after nearly 30 years in the industry.

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New Realm offers draft variations on its house-made hard seltzer in its two restaurants–the second location is in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

“Finding the fermentation protocol that works so your yeast stays healthy and gives you the results you want is a challenge,” Steele said.

Widening the Aperture

While many craft brewers making hard seltzer acknowledge it may not be their own first choice of beverage, they see the need to cater to its growing demographic, both from a business and community perspective.

“It’s all about widening the aperture of your customer,” Wood says. “Now people can come into the Upslope taproom who are gluten-free or don’t drink beer, when they used to go to a bar or restaurant for their office happy hour.”

While Steele admits that offering a seltzer remains “a very philosophical debate” for his team, he still acknowledges its necessity.

“I know a lot of brewers have flat out said they won’t make a seltzer, and good for them–I respect that,” he says. “But from the point of view of our restaurants, we have customers who want a drink that’s not beer, and Georgia state law does not allow us to offer outside products.”

And for Diebolt, it’s simply a matter of ensuring that alternative is a product of your own making.

“This is the first time in our brewery’s history that we’ve been able to offer anything dramatically different from beer that we make in house,” Diebolt says. “People come here to taste our creativity, so I’d prefer to offer them something we make.”

Ska’s Thibodeau has seen firsthand the draw of seltzer for new customers.

“In the tasting room [the other] night, about three-quarters of the people drinking seltzer I didn’t recognize – and I know our regulars,” he says. “These are customers we might not otherwise have, and now they’re sharing the experience of our taproom and our community.”

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Whether they choose to make a hard seltzer or not, most craft brewers concede that each brewery must decide for themselves.

“Are people freaking out when you go to bar and one person gets wine, one gets beer and another a vodka soda?” Thibodeau asks. “There’s not much difference, as long as they’re all sitting at a table having a good time.”

Even Eye agrees.

“I’m not here to tell people not to drink or make seltzer,” he says. “Drink what you like, it’s not a moral judgement.”

“The best expression of what we do is people drinking our beer without having to think about what went into it. At the end of the day, the most important question the customer should have to face is, ‘Do you want another?’”

The post Craft Brewers Explore Philosophical Debate Around Hard Seltzers appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

“Culturally, beer is a part of us,” says Denise Ford-Sawadogo, co-owner and general manager of the brewery. “My husband [and head brewer/co-owner] Leo is from West Africa, where there is just a wealth of culture.”

Ford-Sawadogo acknowledges that in West Africa, it’s traditionally the women who do the brewing. But her husband is a chef by training and has a vast knowledge of the fruits, plants, herbs, and ingredients that are unique to that part of the world. Ford-Sawadogo was born in Brooklyn, the first in her family to have been born outside their native Jamaica, and grew up on Long Island in a household dominated by kitchen smells of hibiscus and coconut.

“We and our beer are very inspired by our culture,” she says.

For evidence, look no further than Baobiere, a golden ale from Montclair Brewery which is a mainstay on tap and is packaged in cans. Baobiere is brewed with fruit from the baobab tree, a tree native to parts of Madagascar and Africa, and is often referred to as the “Tree of Life.”

“Only Leo would know about [brewing with] that fruit,” she says, laughing.

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In fact, the brewery’s beer menu is typically full of beers that reflect their upbringing from Hibiscus Dream, a pale ale brewed with the flower. Kingston Porter is a beer named for Jamaica in honor of Ford-Sawadogo’s family history.

Denise and Leo recognize there aren’t many Caribbean or West African natives in the U.S. craft brewing world, but Denise says that motivates them to make sure everyone feels welcome and comfortable coming into the brewery.

“We pride ourselves on making our guests feel comfortable,” she says. “We are appealing to larger audiences.”

Montclair Brewery’s Black History Month Beers

Staying true to their vision to connect with culture through craft beer, Montclair Brewing is releasing a series of beers for Black History Month that pays homage to some of the black Americans that created lasting cultural legacies. For the husband and wife, Black History Month is a chance to “openly and proudly honor all the great accomplishments that people of African descent have contributed to the world,” Ford-Sawadogo says.

“We are aware of these great accomplishments all year round, but February gives us the platform to elevate the message.”

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Sawadogo created Tubman Railroad Strawberry Ale as a nod to Harriet Tubman’s favorite snack. The brewery is also releasing a beer honoring Larry Doby, the second player to break the Major League Baseball color barrier when he was signed to the Cleveland Indians in 1947, a few months after Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He spent the years at the end of his life in Montclair.

“Doby is a historical figure,” Ford-Sawadogo says. “He is not as well-known as Jackie Robison, but there are tons of achievements. Plus it is the Negro League 100th anniversary this year. We thought this is the year to honor someone from that league.”

Other beers Montclair Brewing is offering during Black History Month are the Motherland, a gluten-free beer made with sorghum, a traditional style of beer brewed in Africa, and the MB Pecan Stout, which connects the history of African-Americans and pecans. A former slave, known only as Antoine, is regarded to have developed the technique used to grow pecan orchards.

The husband and wife duo have also planned to honor their culture by hosting a series of events featuring weekly acts that celebrate music of the African heritage like reggae, hip-hop, and calypso. Ford-Sawadogo believes that music, like beer, can connect people.

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“We think our music helps [bring people together],” she says. “Musicians have a following, so they come into our brewery and get introduced to craft beer. For many people, it’s their first time in a brewery. It’s an opportunity for us to tell them about what we do.”

Music and beer can be the bridge between people who may not typically be seated at the same table, taking in a culture that might not be their own.

“And whether you’re a person who goes to breweries on weekends or if you’re a person just coming to see a band you like, we want everyone to feel welcome,” Ford-Sawadogo says.

In many taprooms, the beer can inspire the culture within the walls. At Montclair Brewery, the Sawadogos are intent on making the opposite true.

The post Founders of Montclair Brewery Celebrate Culture Through Craft Beer appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

The impacts of wildfire on California’s breweries are numerous. These businesses face immediate threats like property and product damage, reduced tourism, and the inability to deliver beer to bars, restaurants and retail customers. Longer-term impacts include costly increases in utility expenses, insurance, and preventative equipment. These threats create difficult operational challenges for small and independent craft breweries.

Destructive and Deadly California Wildfires

According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, more than 3 million acres burned over three years, at least 150 people died, and more than 35,000 structures were damaged or destroyed.

Seven of the most destructive California wildfires on record occurred in the 13-month period between October 2017 to November 2018 — this includes the Camp Fire, the state’s deadliest on record (the same fire that deeply impacted Sierra Nevada Brewing’s community, sparking Resilience IPA).

In 2019, the Kincade Fire burned more than 77,000 acres in Sonoma County; Saint Florian’s Brewery, named for the patron saint of firefighting and co-owned by a firefighter, remains closed because of damage.

According to CalFire, the three-year cost to the state of California for the suppression of those wildfires was an estimated $1.49 billion. The damage to California’s economy is much higher–AccuWeather estimates it to be over $665 billion.

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Topa Topa Brewing and the Thomas Fire

Those are big numbers, and it can be hard to envision how they impact individual communities and businesses. For Jack Dyer, co-founder of Topa Topa Brewing Company based in Ventura, California, it was the Thomas Fire that changed the brewery’s approach to business.

“What some folks didn’t realize is that the Thomas Fire burned for over a month, so it was a prolonged event, made worse by the mudslides in Montecito,” Jack says. “The first night of the Thomas Fire, it came into Ventura hard and fast. I got to the brewery very early that morning, and the town of Ventura was chaotic. I watched as homes and apartment buildings on the hillsides went up in flames.”

“I watched as homes and apartment buildings on the hillsides went up in flames.” Jack Dyer, Topa Topa Brewing Co.

At one point, the brewery in Ventura and taprooms in Santa Barbara and Ojai were all endangered simultaneously.

“As the fire burned on towards Ojai and then SB [Santa Barbara], we kinda had a strategy in place of how to deal with things logistics-wise, but it was a tough time as a business owner, feeling for all of our employees’ safety as well as our customers,” he explains.

The fiscal impact of the Thomas Fire for Topa Topa Brewing Company was an estimated $150,000 in lost revenue, from losses at the taproom to road closures impacting distribution.

Power Shutoffs Plague California Breweries

The risk of power outages is among the most direct wildfire impacts a brewery faces. Loss of power during the brewing process potentially forces breweries to dump batches of beer, rendering them unable to meet sales orders.

No utility company has received more ire for its reaction to recent wildfires than Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E). In 2019 the company implemented a policy of Public Safety Power Shut-offs (PSPS). According to PG&E, a power shut-off can be triggered by multiple weather factors including low humidity levels and high winds, a potent combination that fuels wildfires.

PG&E’s power shut-offs had a major impact on Russian River Brewing in 2019. The Kincade Fire came within one mile of its new Windsor, California, brewery location, in the heart of the evacuation area. The brewery spent eight days non-operational and lost an estimated $340,000 in revenue.

Additional power shut-off alerts after the Kincaide Fire required the use of a generator to keep the brewery operational. Generator rental costs to operate a brewery of their size grew into the tens of thousands of dollars, and inspired the brewery to consider purchasing their own expensive generator system in 2020. Co-owner Natalie Cilurzo says the cost would be difficult to manage but says, “I don’t believe we have a choice.”

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Wildfires Motivate California Breweries to Explore Energy Independence

Topa Topa Brewing Co. is looking into adding solar panels and back-up batteries to the tasting room and brewery locations, in part, because of the wildfire impacts they saw at Russian River. The brewery’s newest tasting room was designed with the addition of solar power and solar panels already in mind.

“We can and will do more to stay energy independent, and have plans to add solar to our roof here in Ventura to help us deal with extended power outages related to climate change,” Jack Dyer says.

The brewery has also joined Clean Power Alliance, a new energy provider in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties providing renewable green energy. They have already seen increases in utility costs as those companies are forced to offset the expense of fire suppression and prevention, but by joining this alliance they will be supporting efforts for stable, long-term renewable energy development, and a reduction in current energy greenhouse gas emissions.

Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Chico has been on the forefront of implementing sustainable brewing practices in its efforts to achieve energy independence, prevent operational interruptions that might cause lost batches, and also create less strain on the energy grid.

As far back as 2006, the brewery was one of the original business partners in PG&E’s ClimateSmart and Biogas recovery program. Sierra Nevada uses equipment to capture the methane output of its operation which is then blended with natural gas, and reintroduced as energy to be used by the brewery. The brewery has a similar recovery with 100 percent of the CO2 emissions and relies extensively on solar power.

Preparation is the Best Defense

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. is the third most-advanced producing craft brewery in the United States and the brewery’s success has afforded it opportunities to invest in state-of-the-art sustainability equipment. But for smaller breweries, asking tough questions about their current state of readiness can help them mitigate and prepare for the impacts of future wildfires. California craft brewery owners who’ve already been forced to confront wildfire events strongly recommend preparing for emergency situations now.

“Failing to plan is planning for failure,” says Topa Topa’s Jack Dyer. “Putting a solid plan in place to deal with natural disasters if and when they happen is critical for doing business here in California.”

Russian River Brewing Company’s Natalie Cilurzo echoes Jack’s advice that planning is the best defense.

“Failing to plan is planning for failure.” Jack Dyer, Topa Topa Brewing Co.

“Be prepared for power outages via backup sources like batteries, solar, and generators that are large enough to ensure there is no loss of product and which allows you to continue brewing,” she says. “Make sure you have a good insurance policy in place that covers things like business interruption for lost revenue even if there is no fire damage. Practice emergency evacuation drills with your staff and have SOPs to follow in the event of a power outage or an emergency. Plan for the worst-case scenario and everything in between.”

In 2020, California breweries of all sizes are beginning to incorporate natural disaster planning into their operations. New technologies in sustainability are helping companies and the State of California prepare, but having a plan for emergencies appears to be the first step for breweries and all businesses confronting the reality of potential wildfire impact.

The post Repeatedly Under Threat, California Wildfires Force Craft Breweries to Plan for the Worst appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

When they revamped their branding in late 2016, the owners of Drekker Brewing Company–brewer Darin Montplaisir, president Mark Bjornstad, engineer Mason Montplaisir and CFO/Head of Nerdery Jesse Feigum–could have chosen historic or Nordic beer label imagery to complement their new digs. The spacious and sun-drenched former locomotive repair shop in Fargo where they brew is older than the state of North Dakota. They named it Brewhalla, a riff on the name for the Old Norse hall of the gods.

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And they certainly could have had their pick of artists to design their branding. Drekker is plugged into the local art scene, welcoming creative types during seasonal indie craft markets, a bustling Christmas market featuring local makers, and monthly Creative Mornings sessions featuring TED-style talks, art projects, and networking over artisanal coffee.

Instead, they chose Punchgut, an introverted scribbler and gig poster master who prefers to let his work (a gleeful mix of the macabre and the adorable) and his eclectic resume do the talking. The artist works in a cocoon of deconstructed pop culture imagery and bad taxidermy in a Fargo garage studio. He’s been named-checked in “High Times” and “The Wall Street Journal.” His work is featured in both “The Art Of Modern Rock” and the Disney film “Sky High.”

“He’s more like the anti-gallery guy,” says Bjornstad, who is cheerful and garrulous

with a Seth Rogen-esque chuckle. “We were dreaming up this brand identity that was kind of 90s skateboard punk with pogs and some death metal influence, and a kind of pop culture, Trapper Keeper vibe. Punchgut was the only person that we thought could pull that off.”

Intense Collaboration Between Brewery and Artist

This rapid-fire volley of cultural touchpoints and vivid imagery is the way Bjornstad and Punchgut communicate…usually via text, often at 2 in the morning, but occasionally in an off-the-cuff session in the office tucked under the Brewhalla rafters. That’s where each beer starts as a recipe and collection of words and images that Feigum and Bjornstad scrawl onto a whiteboard. One of their first collaborations was on a chocolate milk stout called Milk Maiden.

“‘It’s ‘The Sound Of Music’ – but she’s dead’” says Bjornstad, recalling his instructions to Punchgut. “Use the colors of Swiss Miss.”

Punchgut obliged, creating a smiling fräulein in shades of cocoa and baby blue. She’s a skeleton, naturally.

Not every artist could follow this image-packed shorthand. But Punchgut is into it.

“My brain starts churning on this stuff,” he says. “And they knew exactly what to feed me to get me going.”

Every step is collaborative. Sometimes Feigum and Bjornstad have a concept nailed down and Punchgut just pops in the final piece of the puzzle. Sometimes Punchgut pitches an idea that spins them off into a different direction. Sometimes they hash it out together, alternating between keeping things bold and being deliberately contrary, like when they pair adorable beer names like Tickle Monster with creepy images.

“I love contrast, and I think that’s why I work great with Drekker; we do this kind of funny, wink-eye stuff that also has a lot of dark imagery in it — but also a cute side to it.” says Punchgut. He grins. “And it angers the right people.”

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The entire office laughs. Just a few minutes before, Fegium looked up from his computer and read them a note from a customer who wondered if they knew that a “666” was lurking within a beer label.

They do indeed. While there are undercurrents of darkness (and teenage dudeness) present in most labels, there’s also a higher purpose at work here, both in the beer and in the branding.

“We want you to be challenged by the weird beer, we want you to be challenged by the strange artwork,” says Bjornstad. “We’re not trying to create everybody’s favorite beer. We’re trying to challenge what beer can be. We think it would be a mistake for us to put that much context into the beer and then not encourage the customer to find something weird or ugly or strange on the outside. We’re trying to create experiences.”

Punchgut routinely hides little Easter eggs –Illuminati symbols, occult references, conspiracy theories – for die-hards to find. Characters move from the background of one label to the forefront of another or pop up in gig posters, stickers or a kitschy blacklight poster. It’s all part of the sprawling beer universe they’re building together.

“They’re creative on their end with brewing and we’re creative on the labels, so it’s one of those few times where it’s a 100 percent team effort,” says Punchgut. “They’re always open for experiments.”

Punchgut’s Label Art Connects Drekker’s Beers

Each label stands alone as its own work of art. But the artwork also sorts the beer into its designed place in the Drekker Brewing Company hierarchy.

“We talk inspiration, but also where it has to fit within the brand,” explains Bjornstad. “I’m trying to envision what beers is this going to be alongside, if it’s part of a family in our portfolio.”

For example, their juicy New England-style IPA Ectocasm and double IPAs Cuddle Buddy and Freak Parade are stylistically similar beers. So the labels are similar as well, bursting with neon colors and elaborate monsters.

Ongoing beer series are stylistically similar too. The labels that grace Drekker’s sour beer series become fuller and more complex as the beers do. Brain Squeeze beers are brewed with lactose and sea salt. The artwork for these fruity, creamy smoothie sours features oozing, dripping, candy-colored brains against relatively subdued background.

“We want you to be challenged by the weird beer, we want you to be challenged by the strange artwork,” says Bjornstad.

The wild ales of the Slang du Jour series are complex and dessert-like, inspired by sfogliatella pastries, cinnamon and maple sugar-infused blueberry pancakes and brewed with graham cracker crumbs for luscious key lime, cherry and bumbleberry pie flavors. The central figure is enveloped by swirling lines and whipped cream airiness.

(Related: 9 Artists Using Beer to Create Fine Art)

For Chonk, a rich sundae sour, Bjornstad envisioned equally decadent artwork — “a drippy, stretchy, oozing river of syrup all over the place.” An appropriately rotund cat surveys the scene.

Sometimes the art even revives a beer. Bjornstad penned the recipe for Pizza Toots, a New England-style IPA, as a groan-inducing “sacrificial beer” to test the new Brewhalla brewing system. It made the grand opening line-up as a one-off, but Punchgut wasn’t too impressed with the artwork that the owners tossed up on the menu board in a pinch. So for Christmas, he sent them a present – a new label.

“I sent it out to everyone like, ‘Guess what we’re gonna re-brew!’” Bjornstad recalls, sotto voce. “And it’s just one of the most fun, lighthearted, cute labels we’ve ever done. We get comments about that beer all the time. I’ll be at a coffee shop and the label will be cut out and stuck on the back of a laptop.”

Punchgut’s Beer Art Attracts Attention

The DIY stickers and Punchgut’s connections introduce a new audience to the Drekker brand, and to craft beer in general. Many make a pilgrimage to Brewhalla to find the source of the intriguing beer label artwork.

“New customers come in and express awe and excitement when they see the menu boards behind the bar,” says Ali Belfiore, a Drekker beer slinger and graphic designer. “Our repeat customers are always looking forward to what Punchgut will create next.”

Drekker ships beer to the 35 U.S. states that allow it, so beer fans that can’t make it to Brewhalla check the full line-up via social media. Many now follow the artist on Instagram for a sneak peak at new beer labels.

“I like to see Punchgut along his creative process,” says Kat Verley of New Town, North Dakota. “He will post his label art in succession, so you can see how he works from start to finish.”

Other than the occasional complaint about 666 depictions, few people seem to mind the dark imagery. Which is good, because it’s an integral part of the brewery’s brand. The owners of Drekker Brewing Company had Punchgut paint a giant grim reaper mural in the event space at Brewhalla for the same reason that they feature similar imagery in their beer labels.

“Some places put, like, a culture quote on the wall. We paint a reaper mural,” says Bjornstad, chuckling. “It has a very simple meaning for us. We’re just trying to live this amazing life with experiences that build us up and bind us together, trying to live faster than the reaper. It’s coming for all of us, so live the life you want to live now.”

The post Hidden Symbols, Easter Eggs and the Dark World of Drekker’s Beer Art appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

But there’s often another, more personal component to their efforts to protect rivers, streams and lakes: Beer brewers and drinkers enjoy spending time on the water when they’re off the clock. Whether rafting, water skiing, tubing or fishing, clean water and a healthy ecosystem are critical to those recreational opportunities. And when it comes to recreation, few activities trump trout fishing among brewers’ favorite pastimes.

That’s why so many craft breweries have used beer as a vehicle both to educate the public about trout conservation and raise money for organizations that protect trout habitat. From coast to coast, small and independent breweries have found creative, substantial programs to bring the worlds of trout conservation and beer together for the betterment of local waterways. Here are a few ways small and independent breweries are protecting water and even raising trout near their own taprooms.

Upslope’s 1% For Rivers

“I was an avid fly fisherman in another life; now I’m too busy,” says Henry Wood, director of sales and marketing for Boulder, Colorado-based Upslope Brewing Company. That love of fishing cold rivers throughout the West, though, continues to be at the heart of Upslope’s partnership with freshwater conservation non-profit Trout Unlimited (TU).

Through its 1% For Rivers program, Upslope donates one percent of topline sales from its Craft Lager to the Trout Unlimited chapter in states where the beer is sold, allowing the money to flow to local conservation projects. The program is now in its tenth year, and Wood says it generated roughly $25,000 for TU in 2018.

“Protecting cold water fisheries protects water for us, for people, for beer, for wildlife. We can’t survive without clean water,” Wood says. “I believe that TU has a bigger mission than just fish.”

As for why Upslope chose Craft Lager as its designated TU beer, Wood says that’s simple: It’s the beer you want to drink when you’re fishing.

“It’s what you want in the drift boat all day. It’s so sessionable. We have had some younger members of TU who are like ‘What about a pale ale? What about an IPA?’ But I can’t crush five IPAs and still steer the boat.”

Heirloom Rustic Ales’ Trout In The Taproom

Not many brewery taprooms have fish tanks, and still fewer have a 55-gallon tank full of 100 fledgling rainbow trout. Naturally, that tank is a conversation starter for visitors to Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Heirloom Rustic Ales, where head brewer and cofounder Jake Miller is more than happy to wax poetic about his hopes and dreams for the small fish living inside. Once they’re roughly a year old, Heirloom plans to hand them over to its local Trout Unlimited chapter for release into the nearby Lower Illinois River. All that is contingent, though, on Miller keeping the trout alive.

“I studied fish in college, so I went in super confident, like ‘We’re gonna have this tank and it’s gonna be badass,’” Miller says. “And then, oh my god, I went on a business trip for two days and I came back and probably a third of my fish were dead.”

Ammonia levels in the tank had spiked dramatically while Miller was gone, a not-uncommon and perplexing issue among people raising aquarium trout. Through hours of daily work and monitoring, Miller was able to correct the water chemistry and stabilize the tank, though he still frets over the trout as though they were puppies.

To educate the public about what the aquarium represents, Heirloom has incorporated the Trout In The Taproom program, a spinoff of TU’s Trout In The Classroom program, into brewery tours. Each tour wraps up in the taproom with a 10-minute discussion of the tank, focusing on how regulatory changes in Oklahoma—like controversial EPA permitting loopholes and agricultural waste from new chicken-processing plants—can damage local waterways.

“It’s trying to get people who would otherwise never hear about these issues at least get some sort of conversation started,” Miller says. “They’re here for a beer, but I’ve luckily been able to talk about these things. People have no idea we even have trout in Oklahoma. It’s been really cool to see a whole bunch of conversations in the taproom even spin off from the one that I’m having. So hopefully my fish freaking live.”

If all goes according to plan, the same small trout Heirloom’s visitors watched while sipping a saison will be swimming through the Lower Illinois later this year.

Five & 20’s TimberFish Partnership

Craft breweries are often more than just breweries; they’re community gathering spaces, music venues, and if Westfield, New York-based Five & 20 Spirits and Brewing has anything to say about it, maybe commercial fish farms.

The family-owned brewery, distillery and winery has partnered with a local agricultural technology company, TimberFish, to install a first-of-its-kind aquatic farm on the brewery’s property. TimberFish’s technology essentially uses waste from the distilling and brewing operations combined with wood chips from felled trees to grow a sustainable biomass that feeds trout, catfish, yellow perch, freshwater prawns and other types of fish. Eventually, the hope is to scale the program in such a way that the nutritionally beneficial, sustainably raised fish could be sold to grocery stores or restaurants, sequestering carbon and making use of manufacturing waste in the process.

“Six, seven or eight years ago, I never expected [to see] myself talking about recirculating aquaculture. We’re located on a farm, so we don’t have municipal wastewater. Our options [for our waste] are either land application at certain times of the year, or having it hauled away—both of those have cost. Here, you’re creating a value added product out of it,” says Mario Mazza, general manager and vice president of Five & 20. “You can actually generate a revenue stream with this rather than incurring a cost.”

TimberFish founder Dr. Jere Northrop says increased attention to climate change, sustainable seafood and local agriculture has generated interest in this technology, which he hopes will be implemented on a global scale. A renovation and expansion to fully enclose the hoop house and 8-foot-deep concrete tanks at the TimberFish facility at Five & 20 is set for this summer, and would make the facility capable of producing a million and a half pounds of fish each year.

“In the summer when we have pint nights or events, we do tours of the system. I think people expect a few buckets and 55-gallon drum out back,” Mazza says. “It’s wonderful to try to get people to do things that are good for the environment, but if you make it an economic driver, you hopefully get widespread adoption.”

SweetWater’s Stack A Fish, Stock A Stream

If stocking streams with healthy trout could be as easy as drinking beer, wouldn’t that be a beautiful world? For Atlanta-based SweetWater Brewing Company, it is almost that simple. The brewery launched its Stack A Fish, Stock A Stream initiative three years ago as a visual way to connect SweetWater drinkers with fish conservation.

The premise is easy: Stack three specially designed SweetWater cans so they form a fish, snap a picture and post it to social media with the tag #fishforafish, and SweetWater works with local TU chapters to repatriate trout to their natural habitats. Initially, that program partnered with Trout Unlimited, but has grown to also include tagging tarpon with Bonefish and Tarpon Trust. All part of their annual Save Our Water campaign, SweetWater has donated over $1 million to partner organizations TU, Bonefish and Tarpon Trust, Coastal Conservation Alliance and Waterkeeper Alliance.

“Last year we turned our seasonal can, Mosaic IPA, into the brook trout stackable can. We, specifically with those cans, helped Trout Unlimited repatriate some native brook trout in streams,” says Jake Pickett, SweetWater’s partnership marketing manager. “So instead of dumping stock hatchery fish into the river, they take native trout from other parts of the river into parts of the river that might need some native fish. That’s so they can impact the river in a more sustainable way.”

A search for the hashtag #FishForAFish shows beer lovers have responded to the program in a big way, snapping photos of their stacked cans in rivers, on boats, and alongside actual live fish they’ve caught—and released.

These varied brewery trout programs all have something in common: They illustrate breweries’ creativity when it comes to community involvement. While trout themselves may seem like a very specific cause, these breweries’ efforts also touch on sustainable food systems, clean and safe wildlife habitats, outdoor recreational opportunities, and more. Best of all, beer lovers can support those important causes just by raising a glass.

The post Hooking Up: Craft Brewers Combine Passions for Trout Conservation and Beer appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

“What better way to build awareness than to put it on a beer,” says Pat Rains, co-founder and head brewer of Gate City Brewing Company. “Atlanta is one of the leading cities in the country for human trafficking and some of the statistics are staggering,” says Rain

Gate City Brewing Company created the beer with three goals: inform people about human trafficking, raise money to stop it and include information on its label to help victims escape.

The beer label has facts about human trafficking in Georgia and a hotline number to call for help.

Pat Rains says he was inspired to create Freedom Fighter IPA by a friend in the local rotary club who’s active in the anti-human trafficking movement.

“It is happening all around us,” says Rains. “It is happening in our communities here in Atlanta and all over the country.”

The beauty of the craft beer industry is its hyper-localism. Perhaps more so than many businesses, small and independent craft breweries are uniquely tuned in to their communities. The FBI ranks Atlanta as a known hub for human trafficking, particularly child sex trafficking. Experts point to several reasons: Atlanta’s busy international airport, its prime location as the hub of the Southeast and the fact that it’s a nexus for several interstates. It’s a statistic that surprised and inspired Rains to create Freedom Fighter IPA.

(READ: An Emerging Crop of Community Supported Breweries)

“The first step is really bringing awareness to an issue,” he says. “The conversation has to start somewhere and we believe there is no better way to have a conversation than over a craft beer.”

Delta Air Lines has been active for years in the fight to end human trafficking. When Delta heard about Freedom Fighter IPA, Gate City’s project expanded in a big way.

“There are reported to be more people living in human trafficking and modern slavery today than at any point before in the world,” says Allison Ausband, senior vice president of In-Flight Service and leader of Delta’s Executive Steering Committee Fighting Human Trafficking. “Although human trafficking can be a dark topic, there are millions of stories we can help end in freedom. Delta refuses to turn a blind eye. We are honored to partner with businesses, like Gate City Brewing Company, who share that bold mission.”

“The conversation has to start somewhere.” Pat Rains, Gate City Brewing Co.

Delta is making Freedom Fighter IPA available on all flights in January with proceeds going to support charities that work to end human trafficking. Flights include a special in-flight announcement to tell travelers about the beer.

(READ: Two Brewers, Two Towns, and the Unpredictable Kincade Fire)

Gate City Brewing Co. also held a fundraiser featuring Freedom Fighter IPA with all proceeds going towards fighting human trafficking. But that’s not enough for Rains. He is taking the fight to the places where victims are most often found.

“We will be rolling out cans in many hotels across Atlanta in January,” says Rains.

In addition to Delta, Gate City Brewing has partnered with the Georgia Hotel and Lodging Association to get Freedom Fighter IPA into hotels.

“With hotels and airports being a focus on the fight against human trafficking, we have focused on these two areas first,” he says. “We would love to see Freedom Fighter IPA creating awareness for a serious issue in as many places as we can get it.”

Rains talks more about the motivation behind Freedom Fighter IPA in the video below.

The post Craft Brewery’s Fight Against Human Trafficking Gets Boost from Delta Air Lines appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

The new ownership structure was gaining traction in the U.S. at the same time as scrappy young breweries were hard at work paving the way for a new course of American manufacturing centered around craft beer, as well as producing exciting new experiences for U.S. beer lovers.

ESOPs exist through a trust that purchases company shares and distributes the stocks to employees. These shares are given to the employees and remain in their ownership until they leave the company and reap the benefits as a part of their retirement plan. These shares become available in a variety of scenarios, most commonly when an existing owner is looking to sell their stock and relinquish control as part of their succession plan.

Since the craft brewing culture is built around a shared ethos of hard work, ingenuity and independence, a number of craft brewery founders saw turning more control over to their hard-working and passionate employees in the form of ESOPs a natural fit.

(More: From Conflict Zones to Craft Beer: Imagine Nation Brewing)

Brewery ESOPs and Company Culture

Prior to establishing a brewery ESOP in 2015, Odell Brewing’s founders, Wynne, Doug, and Corkie Odell owned 98 percent of the brewing company. As the three founders began to think of their own retirement and what that would mean for the direction and ownership of Odell Brewing.

“We liked the way that the company operated and acted and we wanted to avoid a transaction that would compromise that—that was our most important priority,” explains Wynne Odell. “Then we realized that really the best way to ensure the culture is maintained was to hand some of the company to the people who helped build it, which moved us in the direction of an internal transaction.”

Odell’s founders met with their executive team to gauge their interest in assuming ownership of the company. “The three executives were definitely interested in playing a part in the future ownership of the company but they weren’t in a position to buy 100 percent of the company; nor did we want to give up 100 percent of the shares,” recalls Wynne. “The six of us then realized that maybe we could spread the wealth more widely.”

Odell’s founders and executives began working on a transaction that would benefit the entire company. In 2015, Odell executives bought a controlling interest of shares (51 percent total) with their founders each retaining 10 percent. The remaining 20 percent was distributed to the brewery’s workers in the form of an ESOP making it the largest single shareholder of the company.

Harpoon Brewing went through a similar succession of ownership in 2014; Harpoon is now part of Mass Bay Brewing Company, which operates as an ESOP.

“We loved the idea of employee ownership for all kinds of reasons,” explains Mass Bay Brewing Company President Charles Storey, who was with Harpoon as the brewery formed the original ESOP. “We felt very strongly that our team wanted a transaction that ensured the company’s independence and that shares would not become held by a strategic buyer like a big global brewer, or a financial institution like a private equity fund.”

Harpoon leadership also knew employee ownership was a great opportunity for workers to enhance their own economic situation while strengthening teamwork.

“The culture of an employee-owned company is the best,” explains Mass Bay Brewing Senior Financial Accountant Jennifer Pratt. “Everyone is working together to make the company the best it can be. Employee owners are looking for ways to save money, develop relationships, enhance the culture and make it a workplace employee-owners, and others, enjoy coming into.“

ESOP as a ‘Natural Step’

The learning curve to implement ESOPs can be a long and arduous path. Talks of Alaskan Brewing’s 2012 ESOP transaction began over a decade prior to implementation with efforts to educate their future co-owners.

“The best metaphor that was put to me was, ‘How can you play the game when you don’t know the score?’” explains Alaskan Brewing Founder Geoff Larson. “Our takeaway in 1999 was that our staff needed to become more familiar with the business. So we started doing more open book discussions with our employees about what drives the finances.”

Since then, Alaskan Brewing has diligently shared its profit-loss statements, balance sheets, as well as the various challenges and plans for the company on an annual basis. Larson says that deliberate communication helps demystify the processes and allows the employee-owned company to thrive.

“I was an employee when our ESOP was announced,” recalls Harpoon Cellar Manager Aaron Moberger. “At the time I had very little knowledge of what employee ownership meant; I didn’t even know what ESOP stood for! But it seemed like a unique and special opportunity for all of us. When some people first hear about the ESOP, they think it sounds like the impossible free lunch. In some ways the ESOP is like a free lunch because the company contributes to the ESOP to buy shares on behalf of the employees—employees don’t contribute money of their own. However, the value of the shares is based on company performance and it is our responsibility to make sure that value grows.”

(More: How Art Helped Convince Post-WWII America That ‘Beer Belongs’)

Strengthening Employee Involvement

It’s this unique combination of transparency and sense of responsibility that lead brewing companies to naturally pursue ESOPs.

“I think the ethos, culture of craft beer make it the perfect industry for ESOPs to work really well with their light- to medium-scale manufacturing,” explains Deschutes Brewing’s CFO Peter Skrbek. “Our team has a tremendous amount of pride for what we do every day, and that has existed long before employee-ownership. ESOP was the next logical step. The change is that people are very cognisant now that they better understand how we’re valued as a company from an ESOP perspective; how their actions affect that evaluation and the value creation process within the company and the outcome that we all have as joint owners in this enterprise.”

“…you don’t wait for someone else to pick up the trash in the parking lot, you do it yourself.”

“I’ll never forget when Gary Fish, our founder, said that being an owner in this company means that you don’t wait for someone else to pick up the trash in the parking lot, you do it yourself,” explains Deschutes Executive Assistant Angie Anderson-May. “I think about that every time I do something outside of my job scope and, sometimes, that literally does mean picking up trash from the parking lot. At Deschutes Brewery, I feel that we all pitch in, even when the work is uncomfortable, because we realize that when the business thrives, we all thrive.”

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Employee-ownership strengthens involvement. Like Deschutes, Odell Brewing made sure that the workers would be the principal communication vehicle for the ESOP through an employee-led committee.

Odell introduced an idea incubator through their ESOP committee for employees to freely share their ideas which go through vetting by the ESOP committee. This collaborative process has lead to some big changes including Odell’s recently announced wine program.

“That has been a huge thing to come out of our ESOP,” notes Wynne Odell. “We could have done it before, but now with the ESOP I think people do feel a greater responsibility for the future of the company and not just what we’re doing on a daily basis.”

Even today, young breweries continue a tradition of shared information and influence and are working ESOPs into their business models. Modern Times, for instance, adopted the ESOP structure after just three years in business. Modern Times Communication Manager Dan Reeds says the early adoption made sense since many of the people who had been with the company since day one will someday benefit substantially from the effort they put in.

(Seek the Independent Craft Brewer Seal)

“We also have a young median age among employees,” explains Reed. “Meaning that an atypically high amount of the equity we’ll eventually payout will most likely end up starting new businesses and career ventures rather than going solely into retirement funds.”

Employee-ownership solidifies the independent spirit of craft breweries. The same independence that help progressed American craft beer since its inception.

“Back in the 1980s, the idea of starting a brewery was a far out idea,” reminds Mass Bay Brewing President Charles Storey. “It required a certain spirit of independence and desire to go it alone that has always been a part of our DNA. I think that our ESOP is a reflection of our values and beliefs. Easier options would have been to sell shares to a strategic buyer or financial institution, but we would have lost a portion of our independence. I think that preservation is reflected in our decision and our value and belief system over the years.”

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On October 23, 2019, a fire broke out about 13 miles northeast of the family’s home and their original Bear Republic brewpub. County residents had been on edge each time hot autumn winds blew since 2017, when wildfires destroyed thousands of homes, killing 22 people in the nearby Santa Rosa. Now the dry wind was back.

Norgrove first learned about this latest wildfire as he flew home from meeting with a distributor in San Diego, the day after the Kincade Fire started. From the window, he saw the huge plume of smoke rising east of Geyserville.

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Norgrove remembered fighting a fire there over a decade ago. His had been the first fire engine in, during a time when the brewer felt split loyalties between Bear Republic Brewing Co., the brewery he founded with family members, and his commitment to the volunteer fire department. His brewpub, fire department and home were clustered in Healdsburg, a small town in the agrarian Russian River Valley.

Eventually, when the family brewery became his primary commitment, Norgrove left the position he’d taken as the town’s fire inspector. But he kept his firefighting gear, radios and ID.  “Technically, I’m just part of the auxiliary now,” he says. Nevertheless, as a trained first responder, while his family packed to evacuate from the approaching Kinkade Fire, he realized that he knew the warren of country cul-de-sacs around his home better than any outsider. The thought weighed on him.

Rich’s wife, Tami, remembers grabbing her piece of the couple’s matching luggage. “I had an inkling that his things were in my bag as I was loading the car, but I said to myself, ‘It’s ok, because he’s coming with me.’ And then he said, ‘I’m not coming with you.’“ Rich bade her goodbye as she and their son hurriedly heeded the evacuation order. Driving south to safety without her things, she added clothes shopping to her emergency to-do list.

During the first 24 hours of the mandatory evacuation, as police went door to door, Norgrove got a visit from a battalion chief he knew. The chief asked if the brewmaster was staying put, and got a yes. “His response was ‘Okay. Don’t do anything stupid,’” says Norgrove.

As the local firefighters cycled out after the first 48 hours of battling the firestorm, mutual aid began arriving. Norgrove greeted engines from hundreds of miles away, out of Anaheim, Long Beach and Encinitas, California. He confirmed that the maps they were using had some wrong road names, and that potential escape roads shown on the maps no longer existed.

As the fire swept over the nearby ridge, burning several structures within a mile of his house, Norgrove began to either extinguish or call in spot fires that exploded when embers fell on dry vegetation.

He painted signs indicating sources of water to pump and labeling dead-end roads. He contacted neighbors, getting combinations to locked pasture gates so they wouldn’t have to be cut by firefighters. He pumped water from his swimming pool to protect nearby oak trees. He stayed glued to the CalFire radio dispatches, his escape vehicle at the ready.

Eventually, the winds shifted. The wildfire swung away. Except for a few homes and businesses on the edge of town, Healdsburg was spared, thanks to hundreds of firefighters from around the western USA.

But the Kincade Fire wasn’t finished. Next it swept towards the town of Windsor.

(More: An Emerging Crop of Community-Supported Breweries)

When the Brewery Takes a Back Seat

Brewer Aron Levin, a full-time firefighter with the Sonoma County Fire District, had just come off of an almost 96 hour shift as acting battalion chief. He sat down to dinner with his wife and brewery co-owner Amy Levin on the evening of October 23. The couple were about to take a short vacation from both the fire department and their brewery, St. Florian’s, named after the patron saint of firefighters, in their home town of Windsor.

“Then I saw my phone — I get alerts of different fires in the area and saw one in Geyserville — I went right to my radio and turned it on,” says Aron Levin. “I heard them say it was going to be an extended fire — they weren’t going to catch it.”

Amy Levin remembers hearing about fuel conditions as Aron turned on the scanner. Knowing what the report meant, she gathered his gear. “And I threw everything at him and gave him a kiss, cause I knew he was heading to the station.”

After swiftly staffing extra engines that night, Aron Levin played multiple roles in the weeks-long battle — from a turn fighting the fire with an engine company, back to acting battalion chief and then to a command team assignment at the fairgrounds base camp. “I was committed to the fire for another couple weeks, and then I came home just after everyone was released from evacuation back into Windsor.”

Meanwhile, Amy Levin had taken their two sons and their dogs to stay with family south of San Francisco. The brewery was left behind unattended, power interrupted, beers neglected in their tanks.

“Unfortunately the brewery just takes second fiddle,” says Aron Levin. “Once she was out of there early and safe, we were good,” he continues. “Then I stayed committed to the fires. And the brewery wasn’t even much of a thought at that point just because you couldn’t be in Windsor, you couldn’t come here, couldn’t do anything.”

The evacuation allowed first responders to create lines of defense for the town as a whole, rather than being driven by last minute rescues of people who were in harm’s way.

The Kincade Fire turned out to be much less destructive than the lethal Tubbs Fire two years earlier. There were no fatalities, compared to 22 deaths before. While the acreage burned was larger, just 374 structures were lost, compared to 5,643 destroyed in 2017.

Aron Levin credits the difference to the 200,000 people who left. He says that Norgrove was able to assist firefighters due to his training, but that generally, failing to evacuate becomes a liability to the community.

“I can’t fight fire at your house because I have to go deal with the guy who stayed in his house, so it takes away from the firefight,” he explains. “To know that a fire is coming towards your house and your stuff, and to pick up and leave before it gets there — to try not to think about it, just go — that took a lot of courage on everybody’s part.”

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Kincade Fire’s Lasting Impacts

Two of the three Bear Republic breweries are back in production after the Kincade Fire.

The original Healdsburg pub, shuttered for four days, lost its refrigerated food, but reopened. [Due to unsuccessful negotiations with the building owner, the Norgroves had already announced that the 24-year-old brewpub would close for good in November.]

In Windsor, the Levins weren’t so lucky. Though the town escaped a direct hit from the flames due to the lines maintained by firefighters, St. Florian’s Brewery suffered extensive damage from toxic smoke and ash. Ceiling tiles, production supplies and the beer in the tanks were lost.

“A hygienist came in, took samples from the surfaces and said it all needs to be cleaned,” says Aron Levin. But, he explained, due to the heavy demand for specialized cleaning, people in Windsor would have to wait their turn for services.

The brewery was still closed as of mid-December.

On Bear Republic’s final day in their Healdsburg location, patrons at the pub’s goodbye party toasted Cheryl LaFranchi, the rancher who’d fed her cattle with Bear Republic’s spent grain for 24 years. Her ranch was destroyed by the fire. Norgrove had brewed her a benefit beer to help LaFranchi replace her truck.

For Norgrove, the takeaway is that communities can do better preparation. In cooperation with their local department, he hopes his neighbors can become trained volunteer firefighters, maintain better defensible space around their structures and improve the egress for fire engines. And he values another lesson. “You just remind yourself every single day, you gotta give people hugs.”

The post Two Brewers, Two Towns, and the Unpredictable Kincade Fire appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

(VOTE NOW: Great American Beer Bars 2020)

“The quality when you get a beer that’s perfectly conditioned and perfectly served,” says Arnott, “When that’s done right the level of that beer drinking experience is better than any one I have found.”

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Community Supported Farm Breweries

Family-owned Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery of Waterford, Virginia, is thriving as a community-supported farm brewery. Owners Bonnie and John Branding got the idea while observing agriculture during the five years they lived in Germany. Upon returning to the States, the couple decided to buy their own 30-acre farm in Northern Virginia.

(More: There’s No Taste Like Home: Booming Beer Agriculture Supports Local Brewers)

The land was first farmed in 1832; the brewery, originally a barn, dates from then. The Union Army burned it down during the Civil War but it was rebuilt in the 1870s. The taproom was built in 1920. The Brandings try to operate the place like an 1800s European farm brewery. Last year, the family planted about 18 acres of wheat for the beer. They draw the water from a well on the farm. Wheatland Spring also buys ingredients from other nearby family farms. A fall release consists of a smoked sweet potato beer with root vegetables grown on a farm across the street.

“We look at what is coming out of the ground next and that determines our next beer,” Bonnie Branding says. “It takes almost a whole year (from planting to brewing). That’s why the CSA model seemed sensible for us,” she explains.

As a community-supported farm brewery, Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery offers a program called Fork & Rake. “All the money raised goes directly into farming activity,” Bonnie Branding asserts. About 60 people joined this year.

There are four levels of membership, ranging from $150 to $700 a year, that boast perks like special access to beer release days, growler fills, and discounts on glassware and clothing sold at the brewery. At the higher “Land Steward” membership level, the brewery names you “an honorary land steward” to a plot of their cropland; you’ll get a map showing you “your” land.

Wheatland Spring’s highest membership level is “Barrel Patron,” which not only assigns you your own barrel, but allows you to work with the brewer to design a beer. Only three Barrel Patron level memberships are offered each year; they sold out fast in 2019.

Across the Potomac in Adamstown, Maryland, Mad Science Brewing Company at Thanksgiving Farm is also a community-supported farm brewery. Founder Brian Roberts started his taproom because: “My wife told me to get a hobby.”

“It originally started as crowdsourcing, like Kickstarter. But I came up with this instead,” says Roberts. “That paid half our start-up costs. The rest came out of my pocket.”

At Mad Science Brewing Company, everything has scientific names, including its two levels of membership: Elemental ($350) and Radioactive ($180). Members get growler fills, discounts on merchandise, and special access to events, including an annual picnic in October.

“Everybody brings a side dish. We provide the main dish. Everybody gets free drinks,” Roberts says.

People tend to sign up around holidays and birthdays.

“People buy memberships as gifts,” Roberts says. “We get the most around Father’s Day and Mother’s Day.”

(Related: New York Farm Breweries are About Local Agriculture, Not Location)

Breweries Create CSAs Collaborating with Local Farmers

A little further north, near Philadelphia, Tired Hands Brewing Company of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, produces small batches of beer sourced with local ingredients. Tired Hands collaborates on its CSA with other local farms on a 10-week summer program. Show up at the taproom once a week in between July and Labor Day and you get a four-pack of Tired Hands’ latest beer. Additionally, each week Tired Hands gives members a fresh loaf of bread baked in its Brew Cafè; plus two cheese blocks, fresh fruit and vegetables and occasional goodies like pasta sauce and tomato jam from partner farms. Participants paid $760 plus a three percent processing fee in 2019.

The 4-year-old program gets between 10 and 25 takers a year, says program administrator Rob Berliner: “We get a good mix of new faces and familiar ones.”

You get the beer of the week, but Berliner says no one has ever complained about the selection.

“Consumers are excited to get whatever they get and try it all out. It’s the spirit of discovery that drives them,” he says.

A law in New York state designed to boost local agriculture offers farm brewery licenses to breweries who source a certain percentage of their ingredients from New York state farms. Big aLICe Brewing in Long Island City, New York, started as a CSB but is now open to the public. All patrons can enjoy farm-grown products. In addition to buying hops and other ingredients from in-state farms, “we use quite a lot of honey from our own rooftop hive and we work with rooftop urban farms” for chili peppers, maple syrup and coffee, head brewer Jon Kielty says.

(More: Florida Breweries Utilize ‘Fresh From Florida’ Label Once Reserved for Oranges)

CSAs and Breweries Work Together

Some small breweries, like Yolo Brewing Co. in West Sacramento, participate in a way that doesn’t directly include beer. They serve as a pick-up point for veggies from the Center for Land-Based Learning. CSA members collect a weekly veggie box Tuesday evenings at Yolo, which helps boost Yolo’s business (some CSA members stick around for the brewery’s Tuesday night trivia).

“A couple people will stay for a beer or fill up a growler.” says manager Peter Halldorf. CSA members even get a discount on growler fills.

(More: Engrained Brewery Sows Organic Mindset and Reaps Rewards)

Community-Supported Brewery Models Without Farms

An Oregon public house has taken the CSB in another direction. 7 Devils Brewing Co. in Coos Bay uses its “iPint” program to support its concert series. About 300 beer lovers a year buy an iPint (short for investor pint) for $125. Members get a card entitling them to one “drinkable dividend” beer a week all year. If you can’t make it during a given week, you can loan the card to a friend, says manager Carly Otis, as long as both of you are of legal age.

The money raised is earmarked for the concert series in 7 Devils’ public house and covers most of the bands’ fees. The place hosts about 100 shows a year, bringing in a variety of local and out-of-state performers playing everything from rock to country to Celtic to gypsy jazz.

“Some folks just drink their pint; others bring their family for dinner,” Otis says.

A brewery that opened in 2019 in Auburn, Maine, adopted the CSB approach to fund its operations. Side By Each Brewing Co. offers members several options. The idea is to get people to pay in winter for a year of vouchers for beer. That keeps money flowing during the slow season and keeps people coming all year long. Members get other perks, including growler fills from the pilot system not available to the general public.

About 40 members signed up the first year, says co-owner Ben Low. People who joined later got a prorated share. Annual memberships range from $425 to $1,400, but Side By Each is learning that offering six-month memberships makes the program more affordable.

“One thing we learned, which wasn’t really surprising, is that (membership) is a pretty big chunk of change for someone to put down at once. By doing a six-month share, we can reduce costs for people,” Low observes. “If they’re happy, they can renew another six months.”

Side by Each raised $50,000 of its start-up costs through its Founders Community members. Those “Founding” members get lifetime discounts and other perks.

“We find that CSB members will put their growler on the counter, have a pint or two and make their decision. We’re also happy to provide a taste,” Low says.

Side By Each generally doesn’t give brewery tours to the public–“You can see the brewery from the tasting room,” Low notes–but he and his partner will take members backstage. “We’ll let them see ingredients, walk them through the brewing process and taste some beers in process along with some finished beers,” Low explains. “Kind of educational for them but also fun.”

In this age of conglomeration, by joining a CSB, you are supporting your local brewery while getting something in return. You also may be supporting your local farmers who are under the same pressure in this age of corporate farming. Without your local farmers, life would be much tougher, if not impossible or more expensive, for your local brewers.

The post An Emerging Crop of Community-Supported Breweries appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

From Conflict Zones to Community Change

Fernanda Menna Barreto Krum and her husband Robert Rivers worked in conflict zones including South Sudan, Lebanon, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia for two decades. Fernanda’s background in trauma psychology led her down a path to help people. Native Montanan Robert left home when he was 19 to build houses in Tijuana, Mexico for the community with a local nongovernmental organization (NGO). The two met in Romania training for an organization called Nonviolent Peaceforce, which aims to protect civilians against violence.

“We’d both had symptoms of PTSD and secondary trauma, burnout,” Fernanda says. “We needed a solid break from that work at that time. And we were together enough that we felt that we wanted a home base — that we hadn’t had for a long time.”

In Brazil, where Fernanda is from, they discussed their plans for the future. How could they settle down, but still make a difference?

“We were having a beer and talking about opening a retreat center,” Fernanda says. “We wanted to continue the work we were doing in the way of sharing our experiences with other people.”

They knew if they opened a retreat center alone, it might not be enough to keep them afloat. They needed a project that could sustain such a center’s educational programs and community outreach. Beer in hand, Robert had an epiphany.

“He looked at the beer and was like, ‘How about a microbrewery?’” Fernanda recalls. “It wasn’t the beer itself, it was the idea of opening a public house where people could sit around a table, enjoy sipping a beer but connecting and talking about the challenge that we as a society and humanity face, which is what is important to us.”

They put together their business plan, started doing their homework, and purchased homebrewing equipment.

“We had never done anything like this in our lives,” Fernanda says.

They decided to open Imagine Nation in Robert’s neck of the woods, Missoula, Montana. Fernanda says the area’s open-mindedness and hundreds of existing nonprofit made it the right choice for the brewery model they envisioned.

(More: Denizens Goes ‘Bock to the Future’ to Brew Recipe Found in Smithsonian Archives)

Social Change on Tap

They opened the Center for Community Transformation, a cozy 500-square-foot classroom with a chalkboard, chairs, tables and projectors. Sure enough, the Missoula community has embraced Imagine Nation Brewing and its Center for Community Transformation.

“Four and a half years ago, we started with two events booked in the evenings,” Fernanda says. “Then we started growing to three and four.”

Now, Fernanda says they book that space six days a week on average, including in the afternoons.

When an organization wants to utilize Imagine Nation for an event, she takes the time to help them plan.

“I sit down with each one of them and we build a program and we brainstorm how to maximize the hours they’re there. What’s an activity or program they can offer while we’re raising money?” Fernanda says. “It’s a really open canvas and people are excited about it.”

For example, the brewery recently hosted an event for the Free Verse Project, a nonprofit that engages incarcerated youth by giving them writing workshops. The fundraiser at Imagine Nation is a session of the teachers reading the children’s pieces.

“People would look at each other and just really be touched and moved by it, realizing what’s going on out there with these children,” Fernanda says.

At another fundraising event, refugees performed as a band in support of Soft Landing Missoula, an organization that welcomes refugees families in Missoula and helps them settle in.

“It was a beautiful mixture of culture and celebration and integration of refugee families with the Missoula community,” Fernanda says. Now, it’s an annual event.

(Related: ‘Being Nice Isn’t Enough’ for Temescal Brewing. They Take Action)

“Imagine Nation Brewing not only offers an incredibly friendly community space where, it must be noted, the brews can’t be beat, but Fernanda and Robert also offer our nonprofit and peacemaking community a kind and experienced sounding board for navigating the very real challenges we all face,” Mary Poole, the executive director for Soft Landing Missoula, says. “Being in their space and interacting with this incredible couple gives me strength and determination in my own path and that we are all in this work together. It is a feeling that is incredibly special and always uplifting.”

That commitment extends even farther into the Missoula community. It’s been important to Fernanda that the brewery be an open, welcoming space for anyone who needs it.

“Imagine Nation Brewing has been such a wonderful partner in hosting our outreach events,” Andy Nelson, operations administer on the board of the Western Montana LGBTQ+ Community Center says. The last Sunday of every month, the organization hosts a “Queers and Beers” event at the brewery. “The Center has always had a presence with a table of resources and volunteers there to assist with questions for folks needing information. The Gay Health Task Force is there as well offering free HIV, syphilis and Hepatitis C testing for anyone that is interested.”

Every month, Andy and his organization dream up new ideas for bringing in new people, like trivia night, speed friending, Drag Bingo, and a “WarmGiving” event where attendees can bring warm clothing to donate to the local homeless shelter.

The brewery partners with one organization each month for an event called “Taproom Dialogues.” Rather than being in the Center, it’s hosted in the brewery’s taproom, so anyone and everyone can be a part of it. The organization chooses the topic, and a facilitator fosters discussion among a panel of two to three people, with the opportunity for patrons to get up and their own opinion. “That’s how we build civil discourse,” Fernanda says. Topics have ranged from climate change, mental health, refugees and more.

(More: Montana Brewery Inspired by Careful Artistry of Bonsai)

A Better World Through Brewing

Ultimately, Fernanda says she hopes their Center for Community Transformation can be a place to spark connections and engagement around issues that can better their community, their well-being, and the planet. In the war zones they’ve worked in, Robert and Fernanda learned about the importance of finding that middle ground of networking.

“Helping people go beyond what they’re already doing and enhancing their ability to do even better – that’s been the first goal with the space,” Fernanda says.

And that philosophy is apparent from the murals of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the outside of the building to the enthusiastic staff on the inside.

“We don’t hire only taproom servers or a brewer,” Fernanda says. “We hire humans that have some connection with the community work and that mindset.”

Fernanda hopes to help to implement similar programs in public spaces all over.

“I think there are ways of maximizing your public space that you already have, and the community that already goes there, to make that even more impactful besides being a space to sit and have a good beer and connect, or entertain themselves,” Fernanda says. “If other businesses or other public houses would think and implement a little bit of [our] model, I think we could impact communities even more than we already do.”

The post From Conflict Zones to Craft Beer: Imagine Nation Brewing appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

“If conquest had gone the other way, we’d have 150 different categories for chicha and one for European beers,” says Belstock, co-founder and brewer for Denver’s Dos Luces Brewery. Dos Luces specializes in the indigenous Central and South American beer styles of chicha and pulque. Most beer drinkers haven’t even heard of these styles—and if they’ve heard of chicha, it’s likely connected to sensational stories about the role of mastication in the beer’s production.

Chicha is made with corn, and until about half a century ago, the starches in that corn were converted into fermentable sugars through the enzymatic work of human saliva. That’s no longer the case, but Belstock still gets asked if he chews the corn for his beers. His typical response epitomizes his sardonic sense of humor.

“No, but I’ll spit in your beer for a dollar.”

Reclaiming America’s Ancient History

Dos Luces Brewery was founded not only to preserve the heritage of chicha and pulque, but to establish both as distinctly American styles. The brewery was founded by Belstock and Sam Alcaine, professor of fermentation science at Cornell University. It opened in Denver’s South Broadway neighborhood in 2018.

“Our mission is to change the way people think about beer,” explains Belstock. “We want to use American ingredients and styles from before European conquest and make them a part of everyday beer culture in the United States.”

Belstock spent over a decade working for Coors and then Miller followed by three years at Boulder Beer Company before starting Dos Luces. His interest in ancient American beers initially came from his father.

“My goal eventually is that if you walk into a great beer bar with a lot of taps and they don’t have a chicha and a pulque on draft, they’re doing it wrong.”

“My dad was living in Peru in the late ‘60s while serving in the Peace Corp, and he drank a lot of chicha and told me about it when I was growing up,” he explains. “When he was having a beer, he’d pour a little out for [Incan goddess] Pachamama, which is the tradition in Peru.”

Alcaine is the son of Salvadoran and Cuban immigrants, and, as Belstock explains, specializes in “fermenting things that are not intended to be fermented.” The two tried their first pulque together when they found a can in a liquor store in Chicago while both were working for Miller.

“It was pretty bad,” Belstock says with a laugh, but it got the wheels turning.

Pulque, a Priestly Aztec Drink

Pulque is an ancient Aztec drink brewed with corn and sap from the maguey plant, a type of agave. The drink was a sacred beverage in Aztec culture.

“Pulque was reserved for the priesthood and for special ceremonies,” explains Belstock. “It was considered a gift from the gods. If you were about to be sacrificed, you got two cups of it before you went.”

Despite being brewed for thousands of years, pulque nearly went extinct in its homeland. The Austrian colonists who took over Mexico during the American Civil War actively disparaged the drink and made it all but illegal. Fortunately, the drink has seen a resurgence over the last five years in Mexico.

“Pulquerias have been popping up in Mexico City the way craft breweries have here,” says Belstock.

In addition to the Colorado blue corn malted for Dos Luces by nearby Grouse Malt House, the brewery uses maguey sap from Villa de Patos farm in Mexico. To harvest maguey sap, the farm cuts a hole in the bottom of the plant and collects the sap overnight. Over about 30 days, this will yield enough sap for one batch of pulque at Dos Luces. This slow collection process brings a good deal of native microflora along with it, and the brewery has harvested its house bacterial culture from the sap.

Chicha, the Peruvian Homebrew

Malted blue corn forms the base of the brewery’s Chicha as well, and the malting process provides enzymes that make it unnecessary to use human spit to brew the beverage. Chicha is an ancient Incan beer from Peru, and while it had a ceremonial role much like pulque, it wasn’t reserved for the elites.

“It’s never been that uncommon to brew chicha in the home,” explains Belstock. “It was much more of a common person’s drink.”

That homebrewing heritage protected chicha from the extinction pulque nearly suffered.

“Chicha never really went away,” reports Belstock. “It’s just been limited to the mountains primarily and made mostly in people’s homes. Since the time of the Inca, you would put a flag in front of your house indicating that you had chicha available for sale.”

While historical chicha used the notorious chewing method for acquiring conversion enzymes, techniques have modernized. Belstock says even traditional homebrewers in Peru are using sprouted or malted corn now.

From Ancient Beverage to Modern Beer

Belstock is passionate about helping people appreciate the long history of chicha and pulque, both of which are a bit sour and mildly spiced.

“With both of these beverages, the history goes back at least 3,000 years based on pot shard evidence,” he says. “But the Inca and the Aztec don’t go back that far. There were cultures that predated both of those cultures that made beers from corn and maguey, respectively.”

While that history is rich and worthy of attention, he stresses the importance of not treating these styles as mere historical artifacts or quaint diversions.

“When we treat these as curiosities and historical anachronisms, then that pigeonholes them. It makes them interesting other things rather than being part of our culture, which they should be.”

Making these beers part of our American drinking culture requires public education, and that often happens one drinker at a time. A lot of people who walk into Dos Luces have never heard of the beer styles they produce.

“We have a lot of people who come in and just see the word ‘brewery’ and don’t know what we’re doing,” says Belstock. “They’ll come in and say, ‘I’ll have the IPA.’ Well, we don’t have an IPA, but let me tell you about what we do here. There are a few who will walk out at that point, but most people who try it do like it.”

He says the experience people have inside the taproom is generally superior to those tasting the beers elsewhere, because the education component is so important. He also leads educational tasting classes to increase public understanding of his beers.

“My goal eventually is that if you walk into a great beer bar with a lot of taps and they don’t have a chicha and a pulque on draft, they’re doing it wrong,” he says.

Dos Luces has also collaborated with other Latinx-owned breweries likes Atrevida and Border X to bring attention to these and other Latin American brewing traditions.

Doc Luces: Two Lights

Belstock’s chicha is named Inti after the Incan god of the sun. His pulque is named Metzli after the Aztec god of the moon. Those two lights, or “dos luces,” are guides for this brewery making ancient beers for a modern audience.

“Those are the two lights in our name, but we also like to say the light of the past is showing the way for the light of the future,” Belstock reflects. “We’re taking inspiration from the past to create something entirely new.”

The post Two Ancient American Beers Light a New Path at Dos Luces Brewery appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

“My family was proud of it,” she says, remembering.

The occasional batch of plums collecting fruit flies in the young Czech-American’s closet was only the beginning. Sandi Vojta would realize her childhood dream by opening Prairie Berry Winery among the stunning South Dakota Black Hills in 1999. She opened Miner Brewing Company down the hill from the winery in 2013, along with a Sioux Falls location in 2018. With a hint of wanderlust to point her in the right direction, Vojta claimed her calling and hasn’t looked back since.

Family Tradition Rooted in Wine-Making, Distilling

As a child, Vojta found plenty of room to explore and run around on her family’s farm in the Upper Midwest. This is where she learned to make wine and distill with her dad and brother–a family tradition five generations strong.

“It was something to do as we were pretty much in the middle of nowhere,” she says.

Initially, Vojta set out on a career as an environmental chemist. She soon met and married her husband, Matt Keck. The couple found themselves in Portland, Oregon, during the mid-90s, where they chose to see the world volunteering in the Peace Corp.

Once stationed in Tanzania, the 1998 United States embassy bombings which killed more than 200 people caused great family panic back home urging them to cut their globe-trotting short.

Less than a year later Vojta made a chokecherry beer while developing plans for the winery at her South Dakota kitchen table with Keck and her dad, Ralph.

“It was meant to be, and I have no regrets,” she says.

Leaving travel in her rearview for a life filled with community and good cheer, Vojta set her brand in motion.

(MORE: Mining Town Breweries Dig Deep Into History)

Miner Brewing Co. Offers a Taste of the Black Hills

Prairie Berry Winery is Vojta’s “firstborn” and is perched atop the hill. A short stroll down to Miner Brewing Company, you’ll fall in love with what she likes to call her “middle school kid.” On the other side of the hill there is a separate fermatory dedicated to her sour program.

“My team is actually cross-trained between the winery and brewery and are fluid,” Vojta says.

This is one brewmaster who certainly devotes a great deal of love to her “kids” and it shows.

In an area where the great outdoors commands your attention with national treasures like Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, Miner Brewing Company offers a taste of what South Dakota’s Black Hills community is all about. From the local hop farms she annually contracts with, Native American farmers and foragers from which she sources fruits and grains, right down to the beef she buys from cattlemen who feed their herd her spent grains, Vojta embraces such a fruitful village in this beautifully rugged part of the world.

“We have amazing support,” she says. ”People know where the good beer is at.”

She also believes in supporting local artisans and local performers: “When it’s snowing outside it’s so cozy to grab a pint and curl up to some fine music. When warmer months come along, it’s about that outdoor stage between the winery and brewery.”

(Related: Heroes of the Brewhouse: Here’s What Brewery Workers Actually Do)

Sandi Vojta’s Love for Fermentation

These days Vojta indulges in a bit of soul searching. She enjoys reading books in the vernacular of enlightenment. She’s also turning to the trusty standbys of her trade like “The Art of Brewing.”

“My brain swishes in fermentation.” Sandi Vojta, Miner Brewing Co.

“I am the type of person who has six to 10 books open at the same time,” she explains.

(Brewery Near You: Brewery Finder)

Ever hungry to explore more, she admits she has her eye on distilling: “Never say never,” she says.

“My brain swishes in fermentation and is on a spectrum between winemaking and brewing. It’s all fermentation,” she says.

You could say Vojta is always focusing on the proverbial hills ahead of her, subscribing to the sentiment that life is to be lived in the name of good cheer.

The post Sandi Vojta Keeps Family Tradition Alive in South Dakota’s Black Hills appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

Shuff is the owner and general manager of three bustling local brewpub operations: DryHop, Corridor and the newly-opened Roebuck Pizza which is conveniently located right next door to DryHop in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Corridor is located a mile away near Wrigley Field. They also plan to open a fourth location, Crushed by Giants, right off Michigan Avenue in spring 2020.

With three bustling brewpubs to-date and another one in-planning, Shuff’s neighborhood brewery bet seems to have paid off.

Shuff’s Chicago Brewpubs Have Different Identities

When you talk to Shuff about his Chicago brewpubs, it’s like talking to a proud father. Each of his brewpub children is a vibrant, popular neighborhood spot.

DryHop was the first and focuses on primarily new-American food and popular American hoppy beer styles. Corridor focuses on pizza and with Belgian-inspired beers. The newest, Roebuck Pizza, also focuses on pizza along with European-style beers that pair perfectly with thin-crust pizza.

Shuff sees each as their own independent operation: “Every brewpub is one of one.” There is no overarching parent brand.

“People value uniqueness and novelty,” says Shuff. “They don’t get excited about chain restaurants [in their neighborhood].”

(Find a Brewery Near You: Brewery Locator)

The result is three distinct brands with their own decor, aesthetic, staff and brewery team.

The one consistent thing you’ll see across all three is the lack of TVs. That’s a purposeful move on Shuff’s part; he wants each of his brewpubs to be a local gathering spot for the neighborhoods they serve. He even selects his new buildings based on convenience inside neighborhoods, even if it means paying a little more for the space.

Competing Against Restaurants, Not Breweries

Shuff says that he doesn’t consider his Chicago brewpubs to be competing with area breweries. Instead, he’s competing with neighborhood restaurants and bars. He wants to be the Lettuce Entertain You–the popular restaurant group that started in Chicago–for brewpubs, and the beer is his competitive advantage. Casual diners, families, and hardcore beer fans alike are all a part of his target audience.

(More: Form & Function: Brewery Visits with an Architect)

None of his brewpub locations distributes its beer and that’s intentional. It means customers have to come to the breweries for the experience. The ability to get an upscale meal paired with expertly-made, award-winning beer–Corridor won gold at the 2018 Great American Beer Festival in the Other Belgian-Style Ale category — made in the tanks behind the bar is a competitive advantage for Shuff’s brewpubs.

Adding in the ability to sell crowlers to-go and releasing a select-amount of highly-desired one-off IPAs at the brewery boosts sales further and helps differentiate these brewpubs from their restaurant-only colleagues.

The Motto: Trust Your People, Don’t Micromanage

Overseeing three popular businesses in three different locations can be overwhelming.

“There’s this constant dilemma of wanting to do everything,” Shuff says.

To ensure things stay on schedule and save Shuff from sleepless nights, his brewpub business operates in a decentralized model that empowers the staff at each location. There are five people at the “corporate” level. The rest of the employees are wholly unique to each location and operate independently from each other. Each brewpub has its own general manager, chef, and head brewer; Shuff gives each the operating autonomy they need to succeed. It also ensures that brewpub has its own flair and distance from each other.

(Related: Chicago Brewery’s Wild Trip Down a Hazy IPA Rabbit Hole to GABF Gold)

“[I’ve learned] that the world keeps churning without our involvement,” Shuff remarks.

Hiring and empowering good people, differentiating with beer, and appealing to each neighborhood the brewpubs operate in seems to be an effective business model. No brewpub cannibalizes the sales of the others because beer lovers see each as an individual concept.

The testament to this has been the success DryHop has seen since its sister operation, Roebuck opened up literally next door. The two share a wall but so far, that doesn’t seem to negatively impact sales. Shuff says the sales at DryHop have actually gone up since Roebuck opened.

The continued success and sustained growth of each brewpub is a testament to the concrete business plan Shuff follows. While opening up a fourth brewpub in the coming months might stress out some business owners, it doesn’t seem to bother Shuff. Could a fifth be on the way soon?

“Four is the current active focus,” he says. “Anything more than five or further lives on the spreadsheet.”

The post Greg Shuff is Building a Chicago Brewpub Empire appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

No, they aren’t serving Japanese-style beers here. Co-owners Graham Hart and Keela Smith are carefully crafting beers with flavors that can only be coaxed out by focusing on the details and keeping things small, just like their bonsai-designing counterparts.

“It’s about being able to carefully manipulate as you go because you see how it’s growing and how it’s doing,” says Hart. “It’s not about growing bigger, it’s growing stronger.”

(Chart: Easy Tips for Beer and Pizza Style Pairings)

Bonsai Brewing Project, located just north of downtown Whitefish, is thriving as it goes into its sixth year of business. Like its namesake, the brewery has been very intentional about its growth.

From Homebrewer to Sierra Nevada Beer Camp

Although Hart bought his first homebrewing kit from a local coffee shop when he was 18, it wasn’t until his mid-20s when his dad asked for a homebrewing kit for Christmas that the idea really gained legs.

“We made a batch of beer together and it came out pretty good, but he was just too busy and didn’t really have time for it. I thought it was great though,” Hart says.

From there, Hart tweaked and grew his homebrewing system for several years before quitting his construction job with his dad and going to work at a local brewery. That brewery started growing and packaging, which prompted Hart to pursue his own brewery. With the help of a winning video entry that sent him to a “beer camp” put on by Sierra Nevada, Hart was off and running.

“I couldn’t even begin to list how much stuff I learned in three days of being there,” says Hart. “Also, we road tripped there and went to something like 48 breweries in 21 days. The amount of stuff I saw – it’s unfathomable how much I learned in that small amount of time.”

Building a Brewery in Their Hometown

Whitefish natives who are currently engaged, they knew home was where they wanted to be.

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“There was only one brewery in town that had been here since the 90s,” says Hart. “We really wanted to do something here, but we didn’t have the ability to do it full out.”

Hart says most of the plans he saw for breweries called for at least $1 million in startup funding, but he kept scaling the plans down until a nano brewery operation seemed workable. That’s when he found an abandoned kitchen in the local mall. It was only 1,000 square feet–and the mall was only 20 percent occupied–but the rent was affordable at $600 per month.

With the help of a Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $3,000 more than their $15,000 campaign goal, they opened in the space in early 2014. Hart and Smith credit being lifelong locals with getting people in the door initially.

Then Hart and Smith were dealt a curveball: the mall declined to renew their lease after the first year; a bigger tenant wanted to lease the space. They had only started getting traction and making some money, and suddenly they had just a couple of months to find a new place.

(Related: Going ‘All In’ Pays Off for Montana’s Lewis & Clark Brewing Co.)

They went back to a place they’d previously wanted to lease but hadn’t been able to afford only to find out it was no longer available for lease–it was up for sale. A family friend ultimately bought it for them.

“The deal was he’d let us buy it in the future for what he put into it and apply all our rent toward the eventual purchase price,” Hart says.

The friend had also offered to invest in a bigger facility, but ultimately Hart and Smith decided to stay small. Two years later, they were able to purchase the building from him and get their own mortgage.

Bonsai Brewing Project Intentionally Stays Small

Bonsai Brewing Project has grown to producing 400 barrels a year. Although Hart says the current facility could double that number, his current plans are to top out at 500-600 barrels a year.

“That would be perfect for us. I’m the only brewer, so that’s my limit. Once it gets higher than that, I’d have to bring more people in and it would change the whole plan,” Hart says.

“Part of the reason we’ve been fairly successful is that Graham and I are both so hands on,” Smith says. “We’re on the floor a lot. We’re constantly drinking the beer. We’re constantly engaging with our clientele, and I think that’s a big benefit.”

Bonsai Brewing Project keeps 10-12 beers on tap at any given time, with at least five rotating taps that are constantly changing. A summer favorite was Let a Thang Go, a habanero and ginger blond soured on sundried mangos in white wine barrels. There was also a barrel-aged gose called Sea Walk, a mildly tart wheat ale with coriander and sea salt.

Hart and Smith’s mission remains focusing on the details, not simply trying to grow as big as they can. Instead, they’re making small moves that are carefully calculated to yield very specific results, just like the Bonsai artists from which they draw their inspiration.

The post Montana Brewery Inspired by Careful Artistry of Bonsai appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

Meet The Larimer

Pennsylvania native Matt Lindenmuth’s journey into craft beer began when he pushed West. But at the time, it wasn’t for beer.

Lindenmuth, now commonly known as the Larimer, first traveled west from his hometown of Kutztown, Pennsylvania, to compete in the X Games. That’s right. The adrenaline-seeking event that includes double backflips on rollerblades, a maneuver first attempted by Lindenmuth and now respectfully called the “Double Lindy.”

After a day of competing against one another, the athletes found common ground over a glass of beer. That soon led to some homebrewing.

Now, standing in his own brewery and reflecting back on those days, Lindenmuth relates craft brewers to his fellow X-Gamers.

“There’s a lot of similarities. The two worlds are very comparable — a sense of camaraderie,” he says.

Lindenmuth takes a sip of his own brew and continues, “The craft beer world is a total community–welcoming with open arms. We are competitors but we are always helping each other. I immediately felt at home. It reminded me of my days in the X Games. Everybody cared about each other. Yes, we were always competing but at the end of the 30-minute show, we were checking on all our injuries and hanging out.”

(READ: Before Mott the Lesser, There was the Legend of Kate the Great)

Life After the Games

When the days of the X Games came to a close for Lindenmuth, he spent a year not knowing what he was going to do with his life. “From 12 to 32, my life was the action sports world. I never believed it would come to an end.”

Then he read “Brewing Up A Business” by Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione and with the knowledge he learned in homebrewing, he started his first brewery, Saucony Creek, in Kutztown.

But the West called again. This time for the beer (and maybe a girl). Lindenmuth found himself in Denver where he fell in love with the craft beer scene. It was there he began contract gypsy brewing and The Larimer was born.

Who is The Larimer?

General William Larimer Jr. was an 1800s military general, state senator and entrepreneur. He dabbled in all sorts of jobs from acquiring stone for the Pennsylvania Turnpike, managing a Conestoga wagon line, organizing a coal company and even establishing a wholesale grocery. As he pioneered West, he founded the capital of Colorado. He was also an abolitionist, fighting to end slavery and fighting to increase women’s rights.

Lindenmuth first heard of this renaissance man from a friend.

“He saw a lot of similarities between us. We both have a pioneer mindset; wanting to push the envelope and discover new things,” he says.

Seeing that Lindenmuth was immediately drawn to the idea of “The Larimer,” his friend offered to sketch up a logo.

The bearded general that adorns hats, shirts, cans and now a building in South Philadelphia was brought to life as a modern rendition of the 1800s General Larimer.

Holding true to the principles of the General himself, Lindenmuth continued the entrepreneurial task of gypsy brewing, making connections all across America.

Heading Home

Lindenmuth originally settled on finding a permanent brewing home in Denver. But Lindenmuth’s heartstrings were pulled back to his home state. Leaving the adventures of the West behind, Lindenmuth shifted his sights on Philadelphia.

“I loved Denver and still visit frequently, but I needed to get back to here,” he says.

You can now find Matt Lindenmuth serving up beer at his own brewery called The Larimer in the Chester neighborhood of South Philly.

“I brew in the morning and then stand behind the bar all day,” Lindenmuth says as he offers up one of his most recent beers, Domestically Challenged Pilsner.

“There’s a lot of change happening here in Chester. It’s a rebuilding community. So it’s incredible watching folks from two different ends of the spectrum share beers and conversations and realize similarities. It’s very romantic watching the whole thing unwind in front of me,” he says.

(COOK WITH BEER: Soft Pretzels with Pumpkin Ale)

A Certain Fan Base

The location choice for the Larimer? Essential. Just a few blocks from the Major League Soccer Philadelphia Union Stadium, the Larimer has become the official tailgate spot for the Sons of Ben fanatics.

“It is incredible to see this place transform on game day,” Lindenmuth says.

The Larimer even has a sideline table for four in the stadium. Lindenmuth offers up these prime seats to fans for them to enjoy one of his craft beers while watching the game.

“The soccer crowd embraces that they are the fifth forgotten professional sport in America.”

The Larimer is proud to be represented at the Union stadium. With connections in Denver, Lindenmuth hopes to one day expand into the Colorado Rapids stadium, continuing his pioneer efforts to bring craft beer into the world of soccer.

The Spirit of General Larimer

To pay true homage to the unsung hero of General Larimer, Lindenmuth and his girlfriend found the general’s gravesite in the Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh on plot No. 1.

“We took some beer and just stayed for a while,” he says.

Since taking on the Larimer, Lindenmuth has done his best to embody the entrepreneurial spirit of General Larimer. He often says, “My dreams are bigger than my pockets.”

Lindenmuth is taking those big dreams one step at a time.

“I am patient. It’s not going to happen overnight,” he says.

Who knows if he will have a list of accomplishments as long as the Larimer, but if he has learned anything from the general, it’s certainly worth trying.

The post The Larimer Pioneers Path from X Games to Craft Brewer appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

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Lakefront Brewery’s “My Turn” Beer Series Puts People First

One of the most personalized one-off beer programs in the industry spawned organically when Russ Klisch, president and co-founder of the 32-year-old Milwaukee brewery, took a page from the Good Boss book and asked his employees for help. Klisch had noticed more one-off beers entering the market and wanted Lakefront to get involved. But something about the trend didn’t sit right.

“I felt like these beers were all [representing] one personality, a head brewer that liked one specific style,” he says. Wanting to do something different, he fielded suggestions from his employees.

“They were all over the place,” he says.

Instead of picking just one, he decided the brewery should try them all, and every employee would take ownership of his or her idea. Not just the brewing team, either, but the entire full-time staff, from the back of the house to the front.

Since 2012, Lakefront has released 31 My Turn beer series brews, with styles ranging from Baltic porter to Mexican-style lager. Every full-time employee eventually gets a turn, and they usually know it years in advance. The order is decided by seniority, with some flexibility baked in to account for the seasons. For instance, an easy-drinking kölsch just tastes better in summer weather. When it’s their turn, employees work with head brewer Luther Paul to create the recipe. Ideas are never shot down.

“We never tell them what to do,” says Klisch. That’s because Lakefront wants “to promote [its] people. There are no test batches. We want the beer to show the personality of the individual.”

(READ: 10 Craft Beers Under 140 Calories)

My Turn Beers Reflect Tradition, Cultures, Personalities

One of the most recent My Turn beer series beers was inspired by catering sous chef Anai Sigala’s favorite family get-togethers, El Día de Reyes — Three King’s Day. Working with Paul, she developed a beer that recalls the hot chocolate she and her family drink with slices of rosca de reyes cake every year on the holiday. Her Mexican hot chocolate ale, named “Anai” of course, pours dark-brown and rounds into shape with notes of cinnamon, nutmeg and chili.

“I just felt like you’re never too old for king cake and Mexican hot chocolate, but we love to drink [beer] in Wisconsin, so why not,” she says.

The My Turn beer series is more than an opportunity to showcase family traditions. Both the Anai and the Arturo–a Mexican ale created by Lakefront’s sous chef–were Mexican-inspired beers that spoke to their creators’ Latino identities.

“It’s important to keep doing My Turn; you get to see how diverse we all are in our tastes and, hopefully in the future, [you’ll see] more of our unique cultural tastes, too,” Sigala says.

Logistics coordinator Terrance Tolliver agrees.

“When Lakefront came up with this idea…we had half the employees we do now [currently there are 70 full-timers on staff]. It’s cool to see the next employee get an opportunity to create a beer that tells people a little about them,” he says.

That opportunity allowed Tolliver to choose a lighter style beer when it was his turn. The Quad Cities native admits that he grew up consuming Bud Light and Miller Lite before he began to get into craft beer at Lakefront. When it was his turn, he and Paul developed a German-style kölsch that not only stoked his nostalgia, but also hit the market in 2013, before the traditional style resurfaced in popularity.

(VISIT: Find a U.S. Brewery)

‘Junk’ Beer’s Silver Lining

Over the summer, Lakefront had to recall bottles of “Junk,” one of the My Turn releases, after discovering the beer contained wild yeast from the cherries that it was brewed with. The yeast was continuing to ferment, causing carbon dioxide to build up in the bottles, and that meant the bottles could burst. The beer itself was still safe to drink, but the brewery issued a recall as a safety procedure and offered refunds.

“It was a bummer, but I am glad that we jumped in front of [the issue],” explains Lakefront Brewing’s export manager and social media manager, Andrew Jungwirth, the employee who worked on the recalled beer. Jungwirth’s nickname is “Junk,” and that’s how the name of the My Turn beer, a kettle sour with cherries and cherry blossoms, came to be.

“Junk sold really well, but we couldn’t keep the bottles out there on shelves and issued a voluntary recall,” he says.

Despite the wild yeast, Junk beer was anything but. The beer earned a silver medal at the International Beer Cup in Japan, a country that Junkwirth is fond of and pulled inspiration for the beer.

When the Spotlight is On You and Your Beer

Kristin Heuneke, head chef at Lakefront, had her turn in 2018 and used it to create a smoked maple weizenbock that was inspired by more than just her love of food.

“I had a lot on my shoulders because I was the first woman to have a My Turn in years, and I didn’t want to produce some sweet and fruity beer,” she says. “I wanted something that was strong and in-your-face.”

She chose to brew a smoked beer.

“After years of running a high-volume kitchen in a male-dominant industry, it felt like a great representation of who I am and most of the women I know,” she says.

She knew that creating a smoked beer would be risky, though.

“Not many people, even craft beer aficionados, are fans of smoked beers,” she says.

But the final sign of approval came from Paul.

“He isn’t a man of many words. So his smile and nod were enough to tell me I chose a good style,” she tells us.

Her “Kristin” beer, an 8.2% ABV smoked weizenbock, ultimately reminded her of pancakes with bacon. That was precisely the effect she was seeking. Thick from the wheat in the grain bill, a little sweet and aromatic from the maple and smoky like cooked bacon from the addition of smoked malts.

“Voila! Breakfast in a bottle,” she exclaims.

As for what My Turn means to her, Heuneke doesn’t mince words.

“Everyone counts down the days until they can make their beer. And when it is your turn you have three months where you feel like a star,” she says. “It’s like getting your golden birthday and tenure wrapped into one.”

The post Lakefront’s ‘My Turn’ Beer Series is One-of-a-Kind Employee Perk appeared first on CraftBeer.com.