Craft Beer Entrepreneurs Then and Now

I am working on an article about brown ales, so naturally I reached out to Pete Slosberg, founder of Pete’s Wicked. For those too tender in years to recall this beer, it was a founding-era brown ale. From the mid-1980s. As a testament to the distance between these eras, note that Pete’s, powered by a brown ale, was at one point the second-largest craft brewery in the U.S.

Like many of the founding-era entrepreneurs, Pete was a homebrewer. He came to beer because brewing it allowed him to see an empire stretching far beyond the realm of light lagers that comprised the whole of American brewing in the 1980s. As was also common in that period, he was more businessman than brewer. Here’s a passage from our interview that reveals both how different the terrain of craft brewing was then (all blue-sky possibilities) but also how he related to beer, as a market opportunity rather than a sacred artifact:

“We had to make a world-class product. And beer—we didn't talk about the product. Beer wasn't on the horizon then. It was just an agreement to maybe start a company doing something. Second was, let's try to find an industry that is a new industry rather than getting into a crowded field. So if we're as smart as we think we are, we probably have a higher probability of standing out in a smaller field than trying to compete with a lot of incumbents in the market. So we didn't know what that new market was going to be, but that was the goal. And the third goal was: we'll treat the product with reverence. Everything else was irreverent. We wanted to make noise, we wanted to have fun. We wanted to have a sense of humor. We wanted attitude. I think people bought brand as much as the liquid.”

At the time, this view, that beer matters less than the brand, that a beer company is principally an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a potential boom, would have been as unpopular as Pete’s decision to contract-brew his beer. But I wonder if there’s not some wisdom in the lack of preciousness in this view that’s relevant to our age. It’s the beer-as-widget approach, anathema to those who live and breathe the vast and delicious world of beer. But should it be anathema?

Craft beer has broken into the culinary mainstream. Most of the people drinking beer are not the beer geeks who fueled the segment’s growth a decade ago. The early craft brewers understood that their customers were not obsessives, too. People had no idea what these styles were, so brewers met them where they were. They reached out and coaxed customers. Pete, in a story I’ve heard from most of those brewers in the 1980s, spent a lot of time in supermarkets pouring samples.

Today the script is different: small-scale brewing is closer to bust than boom. Brewers are not focused on opportunity so much as survival. But in one way the eras are similar. In building the market for craft beer, small breweries have grown beyond the beer geeks. Most of the people who drink craft beer, as in Pete’s era, are not fanatics or even fans, really. Perhaps thinking of beer as a liquid widget would be a helpful reframe in reaching what is now the center of the craft beer consumer base—those who aren’t especially fired up by craft beer. It may pain people to think of craft beer this way, but for a lot of people, it is just a widget.