Field Trips: Lessons From the Road

Before he raised more than a million dollars of investment and plopped it all down to found Modern Times Beer in San Diego, Calif., Jacob McKean spent the last few months of his master’s program doing pretty much what everybody does: dreaming and scheming about all the things he’d do when he got out of there.

Granted, the master’s program was actually a job at Stone Brewing Company—“a hands-on master’s,” as McKean says. But when he left Stone after two years of working under “more or less the perfect place to learn how it’s done and how it’s done right,” he had a pretty good idea of what Modern Times would look like. So he took his idea all over town, visiting dozens of breweries in San Diego and asking them to disassemble his dreams.

“You can never ask enough people to be completely confident,” McKean says. “The reality is that there’s no one way to do any of this stuff. All you can do is patch together as many pieces of information as you can into your best approximation of a good answer.”

It’s easy to take collaboration in the world of craft as fate; as the natural outcome of combining thousands of people who all agree that their job is The Best Thing Ever. But collaboration is more than just a chance to have fun and drink beer with different backdrop. With each brewery visit comes a chance to combine mutual obsessions. Because, if craft beer’s going to reach what Pete Danford, regional sales manager at Victory Brewing, calls the “unwritten goal” of a 10-percent market share, brewers need to perfect the process. “That 10 percent of market share, it’s not gonna happen if we’re all going our separate ways,” Danford says. “There has to be connection on the path we’re headed.”

And the best way to accomplish that? Field trips. “[We’ve done it] a million times,” says Matt Quinlan, production manager at Long Trail in Vermont. “Very, very frequently. I’ve been here for about 20 years, visiting breweries for all 20 of ’em. Basically whenever anybody will let me in the door.”

“I wouldn’t compare it to school because school sucks,” says Alex Tweet, senior brewer at Ballast Point. “It’s like the very end of college when you’re actually learning the stuff you care about that you’re majoring in. It’s like that every time you go to a brewery, because you can learn the stuff you want to learn about.”

As the industry’s grown, breweries have taken to sending entire staffs—or at least whole departments—on planned, funded trips to other breweries to check out how things are done, share best practices or just to simply drink and talk beer. Generally, the trips stay local, within the constellation of area breweries that make up a brewery’s support staff. Recently, the Founders production staff took the highway from Grand Rapids, Mich., up to Galesburg, Mich., for a tour of the Bell’s production facility. The guys at Long Trail drove two hours up to Switchback Brewing Co. to check out the new bottling line their neighbors to the north had installed.

New Belgium instituted a program a few years ago that it calls “Ranger Ride-Along,” where new employees join sales staff in the field to learn more about the marketplace. The program mandates that, as part of the trip, the newbie has to check out at least one other brewery. On a trip to Kansas City a few years back, Andrew Lemley, now the “VIP manager” at New Belgium, and the sales rep, Adam Satz, were driving past the Boulevard Brewing Company, when: “[Satz] called one of his contacts, and one of his brewers spent the better part of the afternoon showing us around, serving us beers and showing us the ins and outs of things,” Lemley recalls. “We went into their barrel room, and tasted Tank 7 [Farmhouse Ale], which I fell in love with, and haven’t fallen out of love with.”

Then there are the cross-country pilgrimages that often revolve around industry events. When the Great American Beer Fest dawns every year, it serves as an excuse for hundreds of breweries to see how Avery, New Belgium and their scores of Coloradan cohorts do things.

For example, getting the scoop on the equipment that works and the stuff that doesn’t “keeps suppliers on their toes,” Quinlan says. Brewers end up finding new ways of doing things, like the hopback at Ballast Point that acts as both a filtering mechanism and a catchall for brewery waste. And, most importantly, the trips offer a chance to pick the brains of the people who’ve been doing this for a while, and the imaginations of those who haven’t.

Like the time Dave Geary, founder of the eponymous brewery in Maine, hosted a brewer from the nation of Georgia who’d come to America on a trip organized by an international brewers organization. The Georgian went to five breweries, from Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, Mo., to … well, Geary’s. “[He] didn’t speak a lot of English, so we didn’t have long-winded conversations into the night,” Geary says. “But you know, I think if brewers ran the world, we’d all get along.”

And for the smaller brewers—Georgian and American alike—those visits become a chance to find inspiration through aspiration.

“I hope it’s like looking into a time machine,” says Ballast Point’s Tweet of going to bigger breweries. “When I was at Sweetwater in Atlanta, I saw tanks there that are going through the roof. Literally and figuratively. They have their roof designed to put tanks through it. They have a cold box the size of most breweries. They have a canning line as big as most breweries. I’m looking at this stuff, like, Dammit, this is gonna be us in three to five years.”

For New England Brewing Co. owner and brewer Rob Leonard, that feeling came from a trip to Odell Brewing Company. “They’re gritty still, they’re not a big show-offy brewery,” says Leonard, who traveled to the Colorado brewery from Connecticut.

For Portsmouth Brewing Co.’s head brewer Tyler Jones, it was New Belgium: “New Belgium was effing gorgeous.”

And for nearly all of them, it’s Sierra Nevada. “Sierra Nevada is like mecca,” says Adam Avery, president and brewmaster of Avery Brewing Co. in Boulder, Colo. “They’ve got friggin’ fuel cells. They’ve got 50 acres of hop fields. Ken Grossman’s my beer hero.”

“Having the reactors to create their own methane, to run their own hydrogen fuel cells,” Jones says. “They’re completely off the grid.”

Which means that when the Sierra Nevada guys repay the favor, it means all the more. “We get nervous when a bunch of guys from Sierra come out,” says Danford, of Victory. “And when people like them come out, that really means something to us. We respect them so much. We pattern our business model after theirs.”

Not that the field trip needs to be planned. It helps, sure. But the pop-in is still very much a part of the industry. “Jackie O’s [in Athens, Ohio]—I’ve always loved their beers, and they stopped in,” says Leonard, of New England Brewing. “And to me, it was like an honor, like, Wow, you guys want to try our beers?”

“Whenever I’m somewhere new, I’m gonna check out whatever brewery’s around, just to check it out,” says Heather McReynolds, a brewer at Sixpoint. “In New York, we have a lot of brewers pop by and just say hi. In that way, we’re getting good feedback from them.”

Although, as the industry gets older, that sort of thing’s getting a little more rare. “In the early days, you’d kind of just show up,” Engbers, of Founders, says. “It wasn’t as organized as it is now. It really goes a long way if, in the middle of something, someone calls and says, ‘So & so just showed up.’ We all have a responsibility to our businesses, but if somebody shows up from across the country, you don’t want them to leave with a bad taste in their mouth.”

For people like Engbers, now in his 15th year at the helm of Founders, the visitation process ends up a little more one-sided. As they get bigger, breweries tend to play the role of host more often, spending time showing younger brewers how they made it work; in other words—though not a word many in the industry would use—mentoring. “It’s mandatory,” Avery says.

At a time when craft beer continues to flourish despite falling beer sales in America—craft expanded by 11.2 percent in 2011, amidst an industry-wide dip of 1.2 percent, according to a September study by Technomic—the veterans of the industry are as apt to share their processes as much as for means of celebration as self-preservation.

Because while craft beer’s share of the market continues to inch upward, the number of breweries continues to bubble over. As of August, craft breweries numbered higher than at any time since 1890. Three-hundred-fifty of them have opened since June of 2011. And for the breweries that survived the 1990s, there’s a dangerous sense of déjà vu on the boil. “With all the new startups, we need to make sure the young guys hone their craft sooner than later,” Engbers says. “The last thing you want to see is somebody put all their money, heart and soul into something and a year later close the doors. That’s gonna put a black eye on the industry.”

So for many brewers, that longstanding policy of always-open arms may be born out of camaraderie, but it also comes from the desire for strength in numbers. “I feel like no matter whose beer that is—whether or not we made it—that beer is mine,” Avery says. “If we’re just trying to boost that 6-percent craft share, every beer reflects on craft beer in general. Why fight over the table scraps when there’s a whole big pie up there?”

Which makes it a jarring—if not unsurprising—thing when brewers aren’t as apt to fling open their book of secrets. “There are some breweries out there in the craft world that are a little bit more private than others,” Danford says. “And yeah, I understand it. It’s the way they run their business and their business model.”

Engbers agrees there is some need for secrecy. When Founders first started, the brewery embraced transparency. Today, after nearly falling into bankruptcy, their lips, books and doors have tightened a bit. “We’ve got a handful of beers, like our Breakfast Stout and Kentucky Breakfast Stout, where we used to have brewers coming in all the time and being like, ‘When do you add the coffee? What are you doing with the chocolate?’ And we’d be fairly open with it. Then, with the successes of those two brands, there seemed to be a gluttony of other chocolate coffee beers that were barrel aged, and we were like, This kinda sucks.”

“I think there are cycles in all business. People are gonna be all open, and then everyone’s gonna be hush-hush as people are looking for new trends, like, What’s the next thing that’s gonna hit?” Engbers continues. “Some brewers are extremely open with their processes and their ingredients, and then there are some that are hush-hush. That’s all individual.”

“One percent are hesitant to share,” says Portsmouth’s Jones. “It’s a bummer. … It gives you a sour taste you don’t get from 99.8 percent of breweries.”

The caveat to Geary’s quote about everybody getting along if the world were run by brewers? “Except In-Bev. Except [CEO] Carlo Brito.”

But the impasse remains: As the pressure grows, breweries will face the choice to either pull closer or pull, ultimately, apart. “Our friendly little pond has some sharks in the water now,” says McKean, of Modern Times. “We’ll see if people like me are proven right, and transparency and camaraderie are the right things, or if it becomes a cutthroat business like anything else.” ■