Session #75: Making beer & making money

The SessionChuck Lenatti at Allbrews hosts The Session #75: The Business of Brewing. He’s looking for comments and observations from those who have first-hand knowledge about the complexities and pitfalls of starting a commercial brewery.

Nineteen years ago this week Daria and I sat down at the bar in Armadillo Brewing on Sixth Street in Austin, Texas, and ordered beer. The brewing tanks were right behind the bar, so close that the bartender had to step around the brewer, who was drawing a sample from the mash tun. The brewer proceeded to squeeze an eye dropper of iodine into the sample to see if starches in the grains had converted to sugar (and the wort was ready to boil). Basic homebrewing stuff, but something I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen in a commercial brewery.

But how was the beer? Lousy, but not infected. The guys behind the bar, apparently owners, had a copy of Steve Johnnson’s On Tap: A Field Guide to North American Brewpubs and Craft Breweries in hand and were talking about where they might open their next brewery.

When we checked a year later Armadillo was out of business. Eventually, another owner gave brewing a shot in the same building, opening Katie Bloom’s Irish Pub. That didn’t work, although Katie Bloom’s continued to operate after selling off the brewing equipment. One time when we were in Texas we drove by and the storefront was vacant. Today Pure Ulta Lounge “brings the excitement of Miami’s South Beach” to 419 E. Sixth Street.

The beer was better at the Armadillo than Babe’s: The Brewery in Des Moines, a large downtown restaurant that added a brewery because . . . actually, I’m not quite sure why. Every beer we tried there was buttery, and some of it was sour as well. A pleasant level of diacetyl is one thing. This was something else.

As we admired the duct tape used to repair a tear in the fabric of our booth we listened to a customer at the bar. He was leaving town for an extended trip and talking about how much he’d miss the beer, because he knew he’d find nothing he liked as much while traveling.

The Brewers Association’s Guide to Starting Your Own BreweryCoincidentally, Babe’s was located at 417 Sixth Avenue. However the lesson here is not to avoid opening a brewery in the 400 block on a Sixth street. It is to know what the hell you are doing and be careful who you listen to. In announcing the topic this month Lenatti wrote, “Making beer is the easy part, building a successful business is hard.” Yes, it’s important to understand that there’s more to the business than brewing beer. But you really need to know how to make great beer, and then to assure it is great clear to the consumer’s glass.

The best advice I can offer somebody thinking about opening a brewery is don’t. But if you must, consider reading The Brewers Association’s Guide to Starting Your Own Brewery (revised edition) before doing anything else. [See disclaimer below.]

The Table of Contents should convince you. The updated version ships in June and both Brewers Publications and Amazon are taking preorders now.

*****

Diclaimer: Brewers Publications published three of my books — For the Love of Hops, Brew Like a Monk, and Brewing With Wheat — so we have something of a relationship.

‘Native ales’ and ‘Spokane Style’

Christopher Staten writes about “native ales” in the current DRAFT magazine (March/April, “25 Unexpected Getaways” on the cover). Even though the tagline here reads “celebrating beer from a place” I have to pause when considering his conclusion.

But in terms of the big picture — that “what story will they tell in 200 years?” question — native beers have the potential to define the American craft beer industry’s legacy.

That’s bold.

Although Lakefront Brewery’s Wisconsinite is made with all Wisconsin ingredients this is really a story about yeast.

Case in point: Vinland One. For the series’ first release, [Mystic Brewing founder Bryan] Greenhagen isolated a yeast strain from a Massachusetts plum he bought at a local farmers market. Called Winnie, the wild yeast imparts plum, mango and touches of spice to the saison base, giving it character more akin to wine. Technically, One isn’t an ale or lager; it’s something unique. Greenhagen’s also working on developing yeast cultures from blueberries in Maine for Vinland Two, slated for release this September, and berries and grapes from a family farm in Vermont. While the lack of local ingredients suited for his recipes (mainly noble hops) prevents him from brewing a complete native beer, his use of local, wild yeast makes Vinland exclusive to his region.

“Biodiversity can help us make our own unique beer,” he says. “Even though we work within the Belgian tradition, how can we bring that back to make things that are actually distinctive and, in some cases, beer you couldn’t make anywhere else?”

Hold that thought.

Now consider the news earlier this month that No-Li Brewhouse in Spokane, Washington, successfully lobbied for the “term and beer classification Spokane Style.” Spokane Style beer must be brewed and packaged in Spokane by Spokane residents and use all ingredients exclusively to the region (meaning from within 300 miles).

So just what is ‘Spokane Style’? “Like the Matrix, no one can be told what Spokane Style is”, said [co-founder John] Bryant with a laugh, “but you must taste.”

“When you pride yourself on using only the finest ingredients and the greatest attention to detail”, said co-founder and Head Brewer Mark Irvin, “you know what Spokane Style is. You can taste it.”

Can you taste it?

Why?

Does it matter?

These, in fact, are the questions I’ve been asking here for more than seven years. Maybe it’s time to get serious about finding some answers.

Micro-malting: Is ‘local’ a good enough reason?

Is there a future for local malts in beer?

I don’t have a clue, but a story in Modern Farmer suggests micro malt houses could work.

Andrea Stanley, part of the husband-wife team who owns Valley Malt, is starting a craft maltsters guild, and estimates there are five more coming in New York state alone.

“This isn’t just a flash in the pan,” says Stanley. “It’s a real industry.”

They’ve got tiny staffs, and even tinier margins. (Colorado Malting Company, for instance, produces 13,500 pounds of malt a week, compared to the 15.6 million put out by Rahr, one of the country’s biggest malthouses.) But these micro-maltsters are hoping to be the Davids to the Goliaths of the massively consolidated U.S. malting industry.

And hey, why not? It happened with beer.

“In many ways this parallels where craft brewing was in the ‘70s, when we had less than 40 small breweries in country trying to make something different. And today we have thousands of small breweries,” says John Mallett, Director of Operations at Bell’s Brewery, in Kalamazoo, MI, who is writing a book on malt. “We’re starting to see these [malting] entrepreneurs asking a lot of questions, and trying to start something up, and it’s an exciting time.”

John Mallett is a lot smarter than I am, so I’m going with whatever he says. (The book he is writing will be the fourth in Brewers Publications’ ingredients “brewing elements series” — my hops book was the second.)

Notice that Mallett doesn’t say it will be enough for these malts simply to be locally kilned. They’ll need to be in some way special, because local maltsters can’t compete on price and the “taste of local” can be ephemeral. The new wave of regional hop farmers (meaning those not located in the Northwest) face the same challenge.

Perhaps Modern Farmer will publish a story about them next. The magazine just hit the newsstands this week, leading to an amusing review in the Wall Street Journal: “Glossy Acres: A Magazine’s Lush Take on Farmers.”

Think of it as Gourmet crossed with Dwell and sent to “Green Acres,” as veteran editors from Manhattan’s largely livestock-free magazine world try to tap into the interest in back-to-the-soil living.

Put another way, doesn’t seem like they are targeting drinkers of “regular beer.”

Session #75 topic announced: The Business of Brewing

The SessionChuck Lenatti at Allbrews has posted the topic for The Session #75: The Business of Brewing. He’s looking for comments and observations from those who have first-hand knowledge about the complexities and pitfalls of starting a commercial brewery.

Like sandlot baseball players or schoolyard basketball junkies, many amateur brewers, including some beer-brewing bloggers, harbor a secret dream: They aspire to some day “go pro.” They compare their beer with commercial brews poured in their local pubs and convince themselves that they’ve got the brewing chops it takes to play in the Bigs. Some of them even make it, fueling the dream that flutters in the hearts of many other home brewers yearning to see their beer bottles on the shelves at City Beer or their kegs poured from the taps at Toronado.

Creating a commercial brewery consists of much more than making great beer, of course. It requires meticulous planning, careful study and a whole different set of skills from brewing beer. And even then, the best plan can still be torpedoed by unexpected obstacles. Making beer is the easy part, building a successful business is hard.

Back in the late 1990s, Daria and I wrote the “Microbreweries You Never Heard Of’ Column for Brew Your Own magazine. Some of the breweries we wrote about — such as Left Hand Brewing, Weyerbacher Brewing and, Saint Arnold Brewing — turned into major successes. Most, at least, are still in business, but there were a few less than brilliant choices. Remember Stone City Brewing in Iowa?

I think it is as important to observe what the survivors did right as the others didn’t do right.

(To participate in The Session, write a post on the topic May 3 and drop Chuck a note.)