If I Owned a Brewery - Part 5: Tours

Last week, I was given a tour of Pedernales Brewing Company, here in Paradise. As I chatted with the owner, Lee Hereford, I asked about regular tours. He told me there wouldn't be regular tours.  He wanted to focus on growing the brewery, and thought that civilians might distract him from that focus. I hadn't really thought about it that way, but it makes a certain amount of sense.

Meanwhile, in Dallas, Micheal Peticolas of Peticolas Brewing Company thinks about it this way:

For me, this is the entertainment industry, and if someone cares enough about my beer and my brewery to come down here, I want them to have a good time, that's all I really care about. When I do these tours, I actually want to connect with people, and talk to people, and let them know about me, about the brewery, talk to them about the beer. As a result, I do my tours on a much smaller scale, between 30 and 50 people, typically. I want everybody that comes down here to have a full mug of beer, get a chance to talk to me, if they want to talk to me, actually hear about the beer-making process, if they want to hear about the beer making process. It allows me to connect with people, I don't advertise, I don't market, I try to make my consumers my marketers. 

Again, that makes a certain amount of sense. If you want people to ask for your beer, you have to get them to sample your beer, and a tour is a way to do that.

Desperate Measures Brewing Logo

So if I were to open, say, Desperate Measures Brewing Company™, I think I would lean towards tours. I want people to have my beer in their hand. I would probably do it up like Rahr & Sons, with a band and local non-profits selling food.

I might even do daily tours. Every day at 6 pm for two hours. Certainly I would do weekly tours. Probably Saturday afternoon. (Although, I did see a sign in Arizona brew pub that read "Free Brewery Tours Every Sunday After Church." I could see a tour on Sundays at 1 or 2 pm.)

I would certainly want them to buy t-shirts, pint glasses, and (someday when the law is changed) a couple of bottles to take home. Maybe then they would ask for my beer at the local pub or store.

And, yes, I do own the domain name for Desperate Measures Brewing Company, just in case Satan and I ever open a brewery.

If I Owned A Brewery - Part 4 - Employee Appreciation

If you read my review of Black Star Co-op last month, you'll remember that they play their employees a living wage, so there's no tipping.  Nice idea, right?

Well, here's another idea: Employee Appreciation Night.

If I owned a brew pub I would do what the owners of Brewery Vivant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, recently did. They had a Employee Appreciation Bonus Night where 100% of the restaurant profits on food, drink and merchandise sales are being given back to the 35 employees as a bonus. There is some no doubt complicated formula that takes the number of hours worked to determine how much each employee gets.

That should put some smiles on employee faces!

If I Owned a Brewery Part 3 - Going Green?

Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and New Belgium Brewing Company make a point of telling folks that they are running their breweries in the most sustainable ways they can.  Steve Dresler, Brewmaster at Sierra Nevada, appeared on the Brewing Network's Sunday Session, to talk about sustainability ,as has Geoff Larson and Plant Manager Curtis Holmes of Alaskan Brewing Company, Jayne Lewis from Mountain Goat Brewing in Richmond, Australia.  The owner of (512) Brewing Company, Kevin Brand, packages his beer in kegs only to reduce single use packaging usage.

Sounds good, right?

Then they put the beer on trucks and ship it around the country.  (In his interview on the Sunday Session, Dressler said Sierra Nevada ships as much as possibly by rail, which has a smaller carbon footprint than trucks.)

Horst Dornbusch wrote an article for the Brewers Association, The Economics and Carbon Footprint of Long-Haul Beer Transport which examines the problem. "Many brewers nowadays are trying to reduce the carbon footprint of beer inside the brewery, but perhaps it is also time to focus on the carbon footprint of beer outside the brewery," he writes.

This echoes some thinking I've been doing the last few years: why buy ice cream from Vermont, when the stuff from Brenham, Texas, is just as good? Should I really be buying strawberries from Mexico in January, or wait until Summer and get strawberries from Poteet?

Earlier I wrote about keeping my market small, and that, to me, makes a brewery greener than one that uses solar panels.

If I Owned a Brewery Part 2 - Marketing

Here in Paradise, Wineries are a big tourist draw.  There are10 wineries in the area, and two winery associations: Wine Road 290 for the local wineries; and Texas Wine Trail that lists all of the wineries in the Texas Hill Country, including the 10 along US Highway 290.  On any given Saturday, hundreds, if not thousands, of people "winery crawl" from place to place.

A few years ago, Blue Mountain Brewery in Afton, Virginia, appeared on the Brewing Network.  Owner/Brewer Taylor Smack talked about he was trying to make his winery less industrial and more agrarian, and try to capitalize on the wine tourists.  He talked about growing hops and barley to use in his beers.  I thought that was a damn fine idea, and began thinking about a brewery like that in Texas.

Wouldn't it be great, I thought, to open a brewery along Wine Road 290 that grew the barley and hops that is used in the beer? Or at least some of it.  Sierra Nevada is making estate beer, so why not me?  (Besides the fact I'm not a farmer and don't want to be one.)  The place I envisioned looked a lot like the Stone Brewery in Escondido, California, complete with a restaurant out front, mixed with Oskar Blues' farm outside of Longmont, CO.

Now I read about some breweries in Upstate New York have joined together to create a Beer Trail, Finger Lakes Beer Trail Marketing & Tourism Association.

Maybe great minds do think alike.

Oh, and my State Representatives would get all the free beer they want.

First in a Series: If I Owned a Brewery

[This is the first in a series of posts about how I would run my brewery. I am not a business major, nor do I play one on TV, so I could be completely full of shit.  Please feel free to comment and let me know exactly how stupid I am.]

I like the idea of a local brewery. The closest one to my house is Real Ale Brewing in Blanco, and I can find most of their package lineup in the stores around town.  I can find them on tap in a couple of places, but their special barrel ages series never makes it out here.  And that's understandable I suppose. This place isn't a hotbed of barrel age enthusiasts.

The original owner of the brewery picked Blanco as his location so he could concentrate on San Antonio and Austin as his main markets, and he worked those markets for years. Recently, Ben E. Keith Distributing Company picked up Real Ale for statewide distribution, but Real Ale still self-distributes here.

It's a good distribution model, and a historic one as well. Most Texas breweries, especially those before Prohibition, serviced the local area only. Kosmos Spoetzel, of Spoetzel Brewing Company in Shiner, had a 75 mile distribution limit. It wasn't until the 1960s that Shiner made it to Austin, and was embraced by the local counterculture. When I was at the University of Texas, that was the beer of choice, and as UT graduates have spread across the country, so has Shiner beer.

Lately, however, Shiner beer hasn't been as ubiquitous around here as it has in the past. Back in 2009, Shiner announced their Mesquite smoked beer, Smokehouse, would be released on June 1. By the time I left for NHC in Oakland on the 9th, it still hadn't made it here. I did, however, find a 10 case display in Albuquerque on the 10th. It was the last week in June before Smokehouse arrived in my town, just an hour from Austin. In otherwords, for three weeks you could not buy Shiner Smokehouse anywhere between Austin and Albuquerque!

Similarly, it is impossible to find Ranger Creek, Rahr and Sons, Austin Beerworks, (512) Brewing, Independence Brewing, Circle Brewing, Thirsty Planet Brewing, Live Oak Brewing, and Southern Star Brewing here in either bottles or kegs, but most of them have taps in San Antonio, Dallas, and Fort Worth. (Jester King Brewing does distribute here, and I just saw them in the local HEB megamarket. Ben E. Keith brings us Saint Arnold beer. Three or four of the breweries are distributed in other states.  A couple of them are only distributed in Austin, and I'm okay with that, as you'll see below.)

I saw Southern Star Buried Hatchet Stout in San Diego and Tucson, for crying out loud!

I realize that a small start up brewery can't afford to self-distribute to every small town in Texas. They have to have trucks and employees, and the state does everything it can to prevent small breweries from growing.  And even if you get a distributor, it doesn't mean that the beer will get on every shelf in the area, or even one shelf in the area.  The distributor can buy the rights to that beer and never sell a drop; just to keep anyone else from getting the rights and cutting into the sales of the light lager produced by their main Multinational licensor.

So if I owned a brewery here's what I'd do:

I would be in every mom and pop store in town.  I would be in every local chain in town.  (State and National chains almost always require a meeting at corporate headquarters to decide whether or not to carry the product.  What Texas brewery can afford to fly out to Bentonville just to try to get into Wal-Mart? Yes, you might get into the regional HQ of a large chain, but if the HQ isn't in my town, forget it!  They can come to me and beg me to sell to them.)  I'd be in every bar in town.  Once that was done, I'd move to the next town, then the next.  Depending on the location, I'd have a 70-150 mile distribution range.  You want a bottle of my GABF winning beer and you live 300 miles away?  You gonna have to come to me.  And I wouldn't cross a state line.  Who needs the expense of multiple label approvals?

Unrealistic?

Almost certainly!  That's how regional powerhouses like Lone Star and Pearl Breweries worked it, and they are both gone, sold to Pabst, a company without a brewery.  But it works wonderfully well for New Glarus Brewing Company.