millstreambrewing.com

Last night I had quite a good time sampling out my beer at the Marion Hivee. This is really something we need to do more often, but don’t. People really enjoying meeting the brewmaster, and many people think they have had our beer, but actually have not tried it since I took over the brewery. They are often quite surprised by how good our beer is.

I enjoy telling people i’m the brewer. Many of them look at me incredulously, and seem to think that i’m far to young. Where did this notion that brewers are crusty old men come from? I find it quite bizzare. But then most peoples preconcieved notions about beer are pretty far off from the truth anyway.

One group of people actually thought it was us that went out of business. They said they heard that the Millstream Brewing Company in Solon went under. I think that is pretty indictive of how little many people are here know about the local brewing scene. Well I guess there really is not much to know, but it still shocks me when they get it wrong.

Also at the tasting event was John Leinenkugel, one of the three Leinenkugel brothers. After the event I had a chance to have him sample our beers. I have to say, he seemed quite impressed. Infact, his interest in talking to me really perked up after he tried my beers. He said they are very clean beers, which is always a good comment to hear. After that we had an enjoyable but short conversation.

Of couse the first thing I asked him about was whether they still made Leinenkugel’s Northwoods Lager. This is probably the best beer they ever made, and it is getting hard to find. He said that yes, they did plan to do away with it someday, but that it was the brewmasters favorite beer, so that won’t anytime soon. But their barrelage on that brand has gone from 10,000 to only 6000 bbls a year. Not a good sign!

I asked how his new product, Leine Amber Light was doing. He said sales were flat, but he really believed that the low calorie categorie was a market that was going to grow dramatically in the future. I am no fan of that category, but we agreed that it was one that micro’s should be present in. If people are going to count their calories, then at the very least we can provide a beer that doesn’t taste exactly like carbonated water *cough* michelob ultra *cough*.

He said that they were looking to break even for the year. This made me feel pretty good, because that is what we are looking to do this year. August/September were not very good for sales, though the last month has been doing very good. He said that the Leinenkugel Creamy Dark was doing very well, and was definately a success. I told him I thought it was a pretty good name (though i’m no real fan of the beer) because to call it Leinenkugel Dark Lager (which is what it is) would be an instant failure.

Overall I found him to be a really great guy. I was particularly surprised when he refered to an aisle stack of Miller and Bud products as the ‘evil empire’. It really made me laugh, as I would have thought that would be verboten, considering that Leinenkugels is 100% owned my Miller (and Miller is now owned by the South African Brewing conglomerate). He seemed to be really just like any other microbrewery owner, and we completely agreed that we all have to work together as much as possible to grow our market to 10% market share. Well John said 5%, but he agreed that microbrewers holding a 2% share of the beer market is untenable. Imports, remember, hold a 17% share of the market, and budweiser alone has a round 50% of the market.

On Saturday at 5pm, I will be at the New Pioneer Coop in downtown Iowa City doing another tasting. I invite you to come help me grow this market, one taste at time.

Yes, that is what we are becoming. My back is sore from bottling.. lets see… 365 cases of soda pop. Multiply that by 24 bottles in case, and I single handedly took 8760 bottles of root beer and cream soda of the bottling line today. WOW. It looks like this year we may actually produce more root beer than beer. We don’t even market it, it just sort of grows on its own. When I first started working here, I think we only produced about 500 barrels of root beer. This year we should break 1000 barrels. It provides a steady income for us.

However I do not want this place to become a root beer factory. Yes that is something that is said around here when we have trouble making beer, in a sarcastic fashion. Root beer is easy to make, but it has a very thin profit margin. Real sugar is incredibly expensive, and it is what makes our root beer so very good. But it makes our margin so small, that there is no real hope of selling our root beer outside the state, as the margin left to a distributor is not particularly pleasing. Especially so with the huge margins that are made of corn syrup derived soda’s. Yes it really does cost only penny’s to make the Coke or Pepsi in a twelve pack that you pay 5$ for. More importantly, Root beer does not earn us enough money to pay for the expansion of equipment that will be required to keep expanding our output of it. Making that much more beer however, would really put us in the money!

So we keep making it, but we do not spend any advertising money on it. Plus, I didn’t go to pop school. There is no mystery in making root beer, and it really does not hold my attention. I’m not in this for the money, although getting paid is nice, i’m in it for the fun of creating good beer. It so happens that making good beer is extremely challenging, and that is what I like. So i’ll leave it to the Jones and Sobe of the world (who are all owned by huge companies now, Pespi owns Sobe) to make pop.