Though it also happens to be true, I love to joke that it took me many years of craft beer drinking to begin to identify the nuances of flavor profiles and appreciate even the most basic technical brewing details. Practice, practice, practice.
I knew my strengths, interests, and desires, so I gladly handed over the recipe formulation first to Simon and then Anderson Valley and focused on what I did have in the early years: my idea, my intellectual property.
UNNN-fortunately, even there I made some nearly catastrophic mistakes related to trademark issues that would come back to haunt me, brutally and expensively, year after year. Finally, in our fourteenth year, I can say that I’m nailing down all our intellectual property issues. Yes, there’s the current disco-dance group and biker-gang controversy, and the Evangelical Christian homebrew club ripping me off… but I’m working through it. In the beginning I was basically winging it, much like everything else.
When I started, looking up existing trademarks without a lawyer’s aid meant heading to the public library. An intellectual property non-profit served the San Jose area for reduced fees, but the San Francisco public library was free, and on a BART (the subway) line. An eleven-by-seventeen-inch laminated paper sign sat between two computers — U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Database.
At the time, I didn’t know the difference between trademarks, patents, and copyrights. It took me years to straighten out which was which, even having worked as a paralegal. Considering that I could not afford a lawyer, I jumped on the computer. I’d received a free introductory information packet from the non-profit, and I learned I needed to file for a trademark, not copyright.
From today’s Internet: A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination of words, phrases, symbols or designs, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others (uspto.gov). Your trademark is your brand, the name that’s front and center on your product — what it’s called, how it’s referred to in the marketplace. Most importantly, I thought, I had to protect the He’brew name, though I didn’t think Shmaltz Brewing or even Genesis Ale6 needed to be protected. Who the hell would threaten “Chicken Fat Brewing Company”?
The Torah seemed pretty safe haven for beer names as well. I did every search I could think of on the fledgling Internet. Nothing came back for “He’brew” and “beer.” I searched the Yellow Pages and called Information, and then I went on the U.S. P.T.O. database. Nothing matched, so I figured, Great, I’ll pay the $275 and put in an application.
File under “Do as I say not as I did” and get your intellectual property straight from the beginning. Here’s a little something to get you started, but seriously, unlike in 1996 when I screwed this up the first time, now just hit the U.S. P.T.O. website and get your act together. But here’s an appetizer.
REGISTER THE ENTIRE LABEL OR JUST THE NAME “CONEY ISLAND” AS A TRADEMARK.
Trademark: A trademark is how merchants or manufacturers (i.e., brewers) present their product or brand to the market. This could be a word, phrase, symbol or design — or a combination of these elements. Register the trademark(s) for your company’s property with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, either as an “intent-to-use” when still in the planning phase or as an “in-use” mark if it has been sold in commerce. After this is done, no one can use your trademark or a confusingly similar trademark to sell their goods. Unlike copyrights, trademarks do not have an expiration date — they just need to be filed with the P.T.O., in continuous use, and renewed once every ten years.
REGISTER JUST THE ARTWORK AS A COPYRIGHT.
Copyright: From an image to a book to a theatrical performance, a copyright protects the “original work of authorship” from being copied or drawn from by other people. The owner is the only one who can give permission for the work to be reproduced. Limited exceptions to this exclusivity exist for types of “fair use”, such as book reviews and song clips. Copyrights do have an expiration date after which the product is free for the world to copy. You must file your copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Patent: A patent is the protection of a physical invention, whether a machine, a design style, or a chemical compound. Like a copyright and a trademark, a patent is simply to protect your invention from being copied by other people. Patents must be registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office and the also have an expiration date. Only the patent holder can give permission for their invention to be copied or drawn from. There are three types of patents: 1. Utility — for machines, processes, or manufactured products; 2. Design — a new/original design used on a manufactured article; 3. Plant — used for a new variety of asexually reproduced plant.
TRADEMARK: Company brand and product names, logos, slogans, colors (The Chosen Beer, Albino Python, Maker’s Mark wax drippings)
COPYRIGHT: Original works of authorship: painting/book (Coney Island Lager Freak Face, Rush “Tom Sawyer”)
PATENT: Physical inventions (none from Shmaltz; nearly 500,000 applied for by others in 2009)
By the way, Ideas cannot be copyrighted, trademarked, or patented.
About a year after I started, when I began distributing down in L.A., I sold the beer to a little kosher grocery on Pico in West L.A., and the manager says, “Oh, is this you too? Did you change labels?” Another guy had a different beer he’d been producing for nine months called He-brew.
If my stuff was irreverent and a little corny, this stuff was downright schlock: “He-brew Is-Real Good Beer.” A foil-printed Jewish star framed a picture of the guy’s bearded mug beneath a “Chai” baseball hat, and he was wearing sunglasses and sporting a gold Star of David around his neck. He’d gotten a small brewery to relabel one of their lightest beers for him. He was doing exactly what I was doing — contract-brewing.
I was dumbfounded. How had I missed him? I called around desperately, and finally got a trademark lawyer to give me a few minutes of free advice. She told me there’s two databases — the trademarks “in use,” and those with “intent-to-use.” I’d only used one of the two computers in the library. I had no idea there was any difference.
So I went back and searched again. Like a punch in the gut, I found not just the guy in L.A., but three other people in the U.S. with intent-to-use marks for the name “Hebrew,” all of them ahead of me in line.
Was my pride most bruised for not being as clever and original as I assumed? Or was my true concern the fact that my life savings were suddenly at risk of being even more jeopardized than it already seemed? I still haven’t decided if this legal wrinkle seems fair or reasonable. When filing an intent-to-use trademark, the person has to sign a statement claiming a “bona fide intention” to use it in commerce. This reserves a position in the lineup of registrations, and as soon as the product is sold, the rights and registration go back to the original date of the intent-to-use filing, regardless of possible delays and extensions. It could be years that one party does not use the actual mark (as in this case), but even if someone else starts using it and creates a brand and a product line, the registration will go to the intent-to-use filer.
Like so many contract brews at the time, the Is-Real Good Beer just seemed to disappear. I never heard from him, and on my next trip south, the account said he’d just stopped showing up.
Before folding, he’d been third in line for the trademark. The number two Hebrews turned out to be a New York chef at a corporate dining room and his childhood buddy, a bartender. On a personal trip that became an emergency business trip, I met one of them at his workplace in Manhattan, where I discovered they hadn’t even made any beer yet.
Their slogan was “Hebrew — The Beer You Can’t Pass Over.” I’ll admit a little shtick-jealousy. Theologically, their punchline spoke the truth, referencing the ban on drinking beer during Passover, because of the sprouted grains and the yeast used in brewing. Still, I thought mine had more chutzpah. For a hot minute, we kicked around the idea of entering a licensing agreement, but nothing came of it.
But the guy who was number one in line for the name quickly emerged as my biggest headache, by far. I’d started the process of creating my business plan to raise money, and it was clear I needed to straighten out the trademark issue. If your brand is constantly in jeopardy and you’re guaranteed to have legal challenges, it makes it very difficult for potential investors to trust you with five, ten, or fifteen thousand dollars of their hard-earned money.
This guy had a full-time job at a national telephone company, and he sold used brewing equipment out of his garage in Atlanta on the side. He had a beer he called Evan’s Hebrew, with a picture of himself inside — what else? — a Jewish star on the label. He had a big, bushy mustache and a Welcome Back, Kotter Jewfro. He’d contracted with an Atlanta microbrewery to make a few kegs of his beer, a rather forgettable golden ale, from what I’d heard. He’d applied for trademarks for both Hebrew and Evan’s Hebrew. This guy ended up being the most expensive, and one of the most painful, thorns in my side.
We had a series of exasperating conversations over the phone. He claimed he and his “backers” had big plans for Evan’s Hebrew that included contract-brewing in Puerto Rico to trim costs. They had professional baseball players lined up as corporate spokesmen. Cruise ships and grocery chains and extensive business plans, yadda yadda yadda.
Of course none of this had happened yet, but he would not give up on his claim. “Everything is in the works,” he said. Back and forth, two, three, four times and more over several weeks. By this time I had a handful of investors lined up, with cash commitments that depended on me owning this trademark. Everyone loved the concept. There was no way I was going to part with the name.
I tried to reason with him. I pleaded, Evan, you’ve got one keg label, and it’s a photocopy. I’ve spent two years of my life and all my life savings creating this product and spreading this brand across several markets. Cut me some slack here.
But he wouldn’t budge.
I started to freak — I had all my money, and so much of my self-worth, tied up in this thing. I saw no way to get it back without raising money and expanding the product line. In that final conversation, we were literally screaming at each other.
“YOU GOTTA GIVE ME FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS.”
YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR MIND. I’LL GIVE YOU TWO GRAND.
It was brutal and pathetic, our haggling back and forth over an asset with zero true value to anyone other than us two. I was exhausted, inexperienced, and had no more fight in me. During the last bout I finally buckled, banging my fist against the support beam of my little loft office in frustration and resignation. Eventually I spit out, Fine, I’ll pay you thirty thousand, but I need five years to do it.
He said, “Fine. I want five grand up front and I’ll agree.”
I started working with a lawyer, a friend of a friend of Tracy’s dad who ran a boutique law firm in San Francisco. His client roster included companies like Lucasfilm and venture capital startups. Bill had already given me a lot of free advice, so I wanted to at least use his firm for creating the corporation, processing the financing paperwork, and finalizing the trademark agreement. Even with the additional cut-rate deal he kindly offered, the invoices added up to fifteen or twenty thousand dollars.
Through investment banker friends-of-friends, I got copies of the business plans for Pete’s Wicked Ale and Sam Adams, when both made their initial public offerings. With one other generic business-school-type template as a model, I managed to cobble together my own business plan for Shmaltz Enterprises. One potential investor said it was “the most amusing and entertaining business plan” he’d ever seen. He did, however, decline to invest.
Compared to navigating the travails of the beer world, I found writing the business plan to be surprisingly straightforward. In fact, I found it to be pretty fun. In contrast to crying out for attention from my wholesalers and butting heads with retail buyers, spouting off one-liners about perceived marketing advantages and untapped Jewish markets demanded skills I’d already honed.
Crowing about the media success and visualizing a whole line of beers and other products under the He’brew brand (soda, coffee, tea — anything “gourmet, kosher, and microbrewed”) flowed easily. After floundering through CMYK and other previously unimagined technical demands of four-color process printing, and having survived the federal government’s alcohol bureaucracy, raising money proved to be one of the smoothest, most satisfying projects I’d accomplished. Much like with the PR success that came so much more easily than any profits from beer sales, I noted to self that perhaps I should be in the business-plan-writing business, rather than the beer business. One of my investors even said straight out that he was offering money this round, but mostly to see what I did with my next venture after Shmaltz met its likely-limited destiny. I took the comment as a compliment and deposited the check.
I wrote the text of the business plan, explaining that my vision was somewhere between a Jewish community organization and a business. I got contributions from Tracy’s father, my mother’s friends, a few of my friends’ parents, and three business guys I hadn’t previously known who were very active in the Jewish community. Some had names on museums and Jewish community centers. Others were guys I played quarters with in high school.
The prospect of taking money from close friends and family was absolutely terrifying. Up until I started the company, I had never missed paying a credit card bill. I never spent more than I had in the bank. Never threw down the credit card for rounds of shots at college bars, or splurged on concert tickets I knew I couldn’t cover.
Now here I was, totally broke. I’d spent the last of my dad’s life insurance policy money. But I did have this idea and product that people still loved talking about. At beer festivals, people were total fanatics about it: “It’s a milliondollar idea! You’re a marketing genius!” Customer is always right, right? It just made me more frantic: There had to be a way to make this business work.
FROM THE FIRST SHMALTZ BUSINESS PLAN, 1999
I’d begun shopping for investors at the end of summer, 1998. By the spring of 1999, I started depositing the checks. My plan was to stop working on the side and to hire a salesperson who could help me expand the business. With a full-time salesperson, I assumed we could sell at least five, if not ten times more beer than I could by myself. I’d been so distracted with marketing and merchandise, learning the whole business at the same time as I was doing it, that I figured a full-time, focused, dedicated rep would push me way “over the cusp” of profitability.
I also wanted to put out a second beer style. I had to pay the trademark guy, and I paid Tracy for her work on the label art and the logos. From there, I would start to pay myself, whatever salary I could afford.
My goal was to raise $135,000. The linchpin of the entire deal came when Anderson Valley agreed to invest $35,000 in the form of profit sharing on future beer sales. The fact that I had them in the deal was my biggest selling point, by far. Ken had a successful business, and he knew what he was doing. I mean, this guy turned a little retirement project into a world-class boutique operation. He agreed to invest five dollars per case out of future beer sales, up to $35,000. At that price, he would cover his cost and throw the extra profit back to me as an investment.
For the other hundred thousand, one share cost forty-five hundred dollars. Most of my investors bought one or two shares — my close friends Jim, John, and Robert, who would go on to become my salesperson (I did manage to get that back to him after I canned him), and Mike, one of Rob’s banker friends, who had cash to spend on projects that interested him. Ben and his parents bought a few. Tracy’s dad bought one each for Tracy and her sister Amy. Our longtime family friends Robin and Don bought two, as did a couple more of my mom’s friends. The dean of the medical school bought one. One of my more-experienced angel investors bought one share, another threw in ten thousand dollars’ worth, and a third, a local philanthropist and wildly successful businessman, bought in for twenty grand.
The plan intended to get me to break-even within a year. By the time we signed the final paperwork, I’d probably spent nearly half the money. Looking back, I can’t believe how fast I dropped all that cash into the business, especially given my later experience of even more frugal bootstrapping, when I moved the production east and introduced six-packs.
Still, even then, carrying one little 22 ounce bottle and an overflowing bag of shtick, things were looking up. He’brew was seeing the makings of a cult following. My buddy Jon, who owned a small wine company, was very supportive: “You’ve got a tiger by the tail. It very well might be a milliondollar idea. You’ve just got to figure out a way to make it work.” The problem was, I needed a lot more people to actually buy the beer — and drink it. Then I needed them to go back and buy another and drink that… and another… and another…
With the sun having set on the exuberant decade of his twenties, looking to get serious about his future prospects, an enthusiastic, not-so-young gentleman got off his windsurfer for a moment and called Shmaltz Brewing Company. To his everlasting credit, Robert thought pulling a beer off a shelf at the only vaguely Jewish deli in San Francisco, and contacting the beer company directly on its Catskills-M.C. voicemail, would be a perfectly appropriate way to forward his career aspirations.
He left me a message in the beginning of 1999, as I was in the process of raising money. I told him I would in fact be hiring a salesman, and would be happy to meet with him.
Rob had done a little bit of a lot of things, from waiting tables to working as a sailing instructor and a health spa attendant in London. Most importantly, he had an aggressive sense of humor and irreverence, mixed with a profound appreciation for the Jewish traditions he’d grown up with in a Conservative family on the south side of Chicago. He had received a robust formal Jewish education and knew many more Hebrew prayers than I did.
Although Rob and I were both about the same age — my twenty-nine to his thirty at the time — we made the attempt to have a structured business relationship. I tried to play the role of boss, and I created a Sales Manager position for him. No org chart followed, but after several months of patience and follow-up, he began as soon as I sealed the deals with my investors. I had him create a sales and marketing manual for himself, and for the company — how to approach on-premise bars and restaurants, off-premise grocery stores, corner markets and chains, how to work with distributors. How to prepare for the Jewish holidays and promotions, how to roll out new markets.
I was extremely excited, and nervous. Instead of me actively selling the product ten percent of the time, he’d be banging on doors one hundred percent of the time. It was a strange process for me, going from working by myself to having another human being I was supposed to be managing. I had to learn what I should and shouldn’t say, when to get upset and when not to. Today, even with seven employees and many more years of experience, I still struggle with what I think a good manager should do and be.
In the beginning, having Rob on board was an endless source of fun. It was great to have a companion, a brother in Shmaltz, a fellow crusader. Though our sales didn’t really skyrocket, as I had assumed they would, I just kept thinking that employees take a few months to pay for themselves, and we were bound to turn the corner.
I offered him a flat monthly salary. We weren’t selling enough beer for either of us to worry about commissions. With my sincere hope to share profits and possibly equity as we grew, Rob was willing to work cheap for a time, which made a world of difference.
We’re very close friends now, but to this day I can hurl shit at Rob for his first enthusiastic call about a sales success.
“Dude, we just made a sale!”
Kick ass! Where?
“Homeboy Liquors!”
Homeboy Liquors?
I thought, That’s the first account my new salesperson gets? I have a brand-new sales manager selling one 22 ounce bottle of high-end and expensive Genesis Ale to a ghetto liquor store in the middle of the sketchiest skid row in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. I told him to get the hell out to Whole Foods and Andronico’s, and to forget about Homeboy Liquors.
Rob and I did plan out what I think were all the right attempts to sell more beer week after week. He did ride-withs, in-store demos, sales meetings. He traveled to Chicago and crashed with family to keep expenses low. We expanded a little to some on-premise bars and cafes that would pull in a keg on occasion. Eventually that year our sales grew to the highest point by far: over seven thousand cases.
At that number, making five bucks per case, I had about thirty-five grand to run the whole business, pay Rob, cover rent on the new Shmaltz headquarters, and pay my own rent at home, which Tracy was subsidizing. Progress seemed certain, but with my lack of reporting prowess, I generally just kept my head down and kept pushing.
One morning we were in L.A. to do a presentation at Albertson’s, at the time the third or fourth largest grocery chain in California. As predicted by the Southern account manager, the meeting went pretty quickly: the larger markets in southern California carried very little craft beer. They still considered Becks and Michelob to be high-quality specialty items.
So it’s maybe nine-thirty in the morning, and L.A. is starting to get hot. We’d both been grinding away for several months, trying to build the business by any means we could dig up. In those days, I really didn’t cut loose very often. I think I was so stressed and anxious that I just didn’t allow myself to let up. Unfortunately, my back had not eased up much, and I had this developing neck twitch that kept my head from relaxing on the pillow when I lay down at night.
That morning, I just didn’t have it in me to crisscross the flats of the L.A. basin, humping samples. I said, Rob, I think we need to bust out a little. How about Disneyland?
As a kid, I went all the time with my dad. I had not been in years. Rob said, “Hell, yeah.”
As we rolled into the huge parking lot, I asked him whether he just happened to have any drugs in the car. He said, “Well, I have a joint, a hit of Ecstasy, and a Viagra.” I said, Great let’s split the first two, and I’ll leave the Viagra for you and Alexandra.
Even with thousands of people swarming the park, I’m sure the second we hit the entrance the security guards were on the radio: “Uh, we got a couple of thirty-year-old men approaching with dark sunglasses and no children.” Suspicious as we must have looked, we had a blast.
As fun as it was having Rob around, it wasn’t long before we both started realizing that our partnership just wasn’t working. It seemed like we were doing everything right, except the results part. I don’t think he was the wrong guy. Maybe I was the wrong manager. There were just limitations on the brand at the time. The 22 ounce bottles never quite got off the ground. They were seen much more as a novelty than an everyday product. I also hadn’t realized that though I’d only spent a certain percentage of my time selling every day, I had over those first two years reached a big percentage of the top beer accounts already — and the market really didn’t stretch a lot deeper when it came to niche beers. I had essentially filled the sales pipeline; now it would be more a question of selling off the shelves, which generally means relentless guerilla marketing, or simply throwing down the cash for big-buck advertising. “Yes” to number one for many years to come, and as I’d already hemorrhaged most of my cash, it would clearly be “no” to number two.
Rob and I would soon part, for all the right reasons. In fact, we became much better friends after I fired his ass. Pursuing his own small-business destiny, he opened a presentation skills consulting shop. Within a few years he was making amazing money — tens of thousands per session coaching businesspeople about how to make better presentations. If his class speaks English as a first language (he trains a lot of foreign engineers), he tears it up, often breaking the ice with the story of the company he used to work with — the Jewish beer with the slogan Don’t Pass Out, Passover.
Rob has the magic charisma. No matter what he chooses to do, people love him. You can’t teach that. He used to joke about the fact that he was getting paid to give talks about the process of talking companies into paying him to give a talk. When the economy went into the crapper in 2008 and his clients dried up, he and his wonderful wife Alexandra and their two kids moved to Mexico to ride it out.
Once in a while, you just gotta go to Disneyland.
Robert Graham, founder and President of GrahamComm (“Experts in Presentation skills, Sales Training and Teambuilding Programs”) adds his own shtick:
It’s a good thing Jeremy is creative and persuasive, because his memory doesn’t seem to serve him so well. Rather than discuss the fact that I quit vs. his claim to have “fired my ass” (he asked me to stay through Chanukah ‘99), we shall focus on the good stuff, as there was plenty.
The best thing to come out of my eight or so months as “the other He’brew guy” was undoubtedly our friendship. We were working on how to work together, and along the way much hilariousness ensued.
It’s true that I got the idea for the job after drinking a bottle or two of Genesis Ale while watching the ‘99 Super Bowl in San Francisco. It’s also true that my starring role as Queen Esther in my fourth-grade play had a big part in his decision to hire me.
My first sales call was a ride-with with Paul from our second of many San Francisco distributors. As we walked into Homeboy Liquors, he mentioned to me that the owner owed him a favor, as he was behind in his payments. Paul was pretty sure he could help me sell in a couple of cases, and we got a facing right between the Camo forties and the Olde English Malt Liquor. A more prime selling spot was rarely found.
Next stop was an equally suspect corner liquor store in the ‘Loin. As we drove there, Paul told me the story of his attempt to reenact a scene from Dirty Harry. A couple of months before, he had walked into the store and had a somewhat terse conversation with the owner. He then yelled out the door to an imaginary sidekick, “Call 911, ‘cause this guy’s gonna need it when I get through with him.” Suddenly, the air was knocked out of him by a sucker punch to his solar plexus, and he slumped to the floor. Pretty sure that’s the last time he tried that line.
Another highlight from our Monday morning sales meetings: Having a new and very attractive girlfriend at the time, I wasn’t always getting the requisite eight hours of sleep per night. One Monday, I staggered into his office with a forty-eight-ounce French roast coffee in hand, hoping to kick-start the thinking process. Jeremy took one look at me and asked, “You up doing the wild thing all night?”
As Jeremy points out, I still get plenty of laughs from my audiences talking about my days selling kosher beer. And the friendship that was fired in the kiln of the Shmaltz Sales Machine is still as strong as a bottle of Jewbelation Bar Mitzvah!
In the spring of ‘98, several people suggested I go to business schools to find free advice. I was invited to give a talk at Stanford Business School, and I told the M.B.A. students I could use every form of help I could possibly think of. Several classes used Shmaltz as a case study. The overriding theme was always the same: Just raise more money and spend more money, and you’ll make more money. Brilliant.
I made up an internship announcement and sent it to Stanford, Berkeley, and a couple of Jewish college organizations. Amazingly, I heard from a guy who turned out to be a godsend to a Jewish small-business entrepreneur.
Social chair and then vice president of his Jewish fraternity at Stanford. Kevin was studying some humanities and some business. I let him make up his own title at the company for the project he worked on. He did such a great job for me that years later, I still got mail addressed to “Kevin Friedman, Executive Vice President of Shmaltz Brewing.”
He said he’d work forty hours a week, and before I even raised the issue of compensation, he said, “If I can just sell a few t-shirts at beer fests now and then, I’ll be all set.” He spoiled me so much that he pretty much sealed the fate of every future intern I’d bring into the fold, including his underage cousin, Leah, who would take the torch several years later, and then come aboard fulltime as the company’s protean project manager.
That summer Kevin bought me my first computer (yes, first computer ever at age twenty-nine7), and we installed him in the walk-in closet downstairs from my five-foot-ten-inch loft. After mailing press releases and postcards to key buyers and organizing absolutely everything, we’d take our strategic business meetings outside, at the Whiz Burger on South Van Ness.
We went to beer festivals and bar promotions together. One bonus of being an even halfway presentable guy in the beer industry: you can talk to any woman at any bar. You can’t be rejected, because you always have a fallback — you’re at work. So I sicced Kevin on all the cute college town girls. The instructions were simple: smile a lot, be nice, wear your He’brew t-shirt. Find out what they’re reading, what movies and bands they’re into. Since we’re not going to have billboards, bus stops, and advertising any time soon, just reach people one at a time, and get them to buy our beer. Having Kevin was fantastic. If I could have a tribe of Jewish fraternity guys who were outgoing, smart, and motivated, I thought, I could really turn the company into something.
After leaving Shmaltz, Kevin traveled the world, then went to business school. And he changed, from being the scruffiest guy in raggedy shorts, a floppy-haired Jewish kid, to a clean-shaven M.B.A. grad in suit and tie. Most recently he’s even stepped off the corporate ladder to start his own venture. It’s been very gratifying to see where people who get involved with the company over the years end up later in life.
The business plan called for a second beer style. From the beginning, I wanted to have a darker beer. When my grandmother passed away, I thought I’d honor her. She loved figs. In Judaism, it’s one of the sacred species. (Fast forward to our twelfth year, when we finally did use figs, in our Rejewvenator beer.) My thought in 1999 was to make something I’d call Granny’s Fig Porter. But I couldn’t think of a good punchline, or how to buy the figs for any reasonable price for brewing, so the idea just sat there. It might have been a blessing. I don’t know how many other beer drinkers would think of grandmothers as appropriate boozing inspiration.
We’d started at the beginning, with Genesis. I have no recollection how it happened, but eventually I came up with the idea of going straight to the end — the Messiah. Messiah Stout: “It’s the Beer You’ve Been Waiting For.” For the second time, the process of creating a label with Tracy was both fun and excruciating. She made me stand naked in her studio, arms upstretched, holding beer bottles, while she sketched a picture of me standing on a globe. Then she added her own profile, all the while insisting that the characters looked nothing like us — we were just for sizing and placement. We chose little icons from around the world to place on the globe — the Eiffel Tower, a trumpet for New Orleans, Red Square, the Statue of Liberty. The beer would encompass the entire world in its breadth and harmony.
Drawing from Jewish tradition, the label referenced the coming of the Messiah as a return to a state of innocence and grace reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. The two figures represented Adam and Eve characters, globetrotting the world. The goal was not to have a naked picture of me and my girlfriend on the packaging. We just thought it would be funny, and we were cheap models. Besides, by design, the banner of the He’brew scroll would unfurl over our less modest bits.
However, we did a terrible job of planning the label. Given the characters’ spindly arms and legs, the He’brew logo would cover the bulk of the artwork, so the composition never quite worked.
At some point (probably the minute I spoke to my kosher rabbi about it), I also remembered that in more observant communities there’s a prohibition against seeing anybody naked, other than your own husband or wife. One element of an overarching concept called “modesty”: women wear long skirts; men cover knees and wear hats.
My original notion for the brand, the punk-rock Jewish vibe, was still there, but we were doing outreach to Jewish community centers, and now the spectrum of the Jewish community, including Conservative and Orthodox synagogues and consumers, all the time. Even with kosher certification, I quickly found out that several observant groups weren’t willing to have the new beer label at their events.
With strong relationships in place and buyers less concerned with modesty, I did manage to slide the beer into most Safeways and Whole Foods. Finally, we had two beers next to each other on the shelf. It allowed for the idea that He’brew was now a brand, not just a one-off novelty beer. It gave people an option. It made the whole thing seem real. For anyone who has ever endured the consumer-product market jargon: This was my double-size billboard effect.
Months earlier, when I told the guys at Anderson Valley about my idea for Messiah Stout, everyone agreed it was pretty funny. But they also said, “We don’t know if you really want to make a stout. Dark beers are pretty hard to sell.” I just thought it sounded cool. I ignored their advice, and asked them to brew a stout for me.
At that point I honestly did not have a lot of experience with the beer style. Anderson Valley made an oatmeal stout that I thought tasted fantastic, as did the many judges and critics who showered Barney Flats with medals and respect. But I didn’t want one just like theirs — maybe a little lighter-bodied, not quite as much coffee, a different palette of flavors. We only needed small batches, so I said, What if we mixed some of your stout with another beer to create a unique blend?
Now, I’m well aware that plenty of people in the beer industry will gag, laugh, and heartily mock the concept of combining two year-round beers to make a third, and calling it special. It certainly undermines my entire position that contract brewers can be just as ambitious, unique, and original as any other brewer. But if the beers are complex and high-quality to begin with, blending them can still create a unique and respectable beer8.
As somebody who was desperate not to go out of business, I just wanted to promote a second beer. But Anderson Valley said, “Absolutely not. We would never bastardize our own products like that. We’ll just create a new beer, and you tell us if you like it, and we can tweak it from there.”
About a month later, they’d brewed a new recipe, and they called me to Highway 128, winding up into Boonville. So we’re sitting around the conference table trying it — myself , Ken, the head brewer, and a few other brewers and office staff. They pour it out of a unlabeled bottle. Everyone is sipping, holding up their glasses to see the goods, smelling, sipping again. It’s good, a little drier than I wanted, not quite as rich. It’s focused a bit more on the coffee flavors, not the sweeter caramel tones. In the scheme of things, though, it’s a really solid beer. I mean, these guys are pros. That’s why I’m here.
I say, Good to go for now. Maybe we can tweak it slightly for the next batch, but let’s do it. Thanks so much, everyone!
Ken, whether in celebration or a typical five p.m. ritual, whips out his bowl and begins stuffing it with some Boonville kind bud. I figured, Fuck it, we have a new beer. Let’s get a little peace and love working around here.
Half an hour later, Ken’s pretty high, and I’m pretty high, beers in hand. He looks at me and says, “Well, kid, I wasn’t gonna tell you, but I feel like maybe I should. That beer you tasted — it’s a blend. We used ninety percent stout, and added some wheat beer to it. We can adjust it if you want, but we didn’t do a recipe for you.”
Now, there are moments in a business relationship that, to this day, I don’t know how to handle. I probably should have said, Are you fucking kidding me, old man? I said we should do that in the first place, and you guys made me out to be a douchebag for even suggesting it.
I imagined it like that daydream sequence in High Fidelity, when Tim Robbins walks in to tell the record shop boys that he’s the new man in John Cusack’s ex-girlfriend’s life. In a fantasy, the sidekicks hurdle over the counter and smack him in the face with the rotary phone: “Get your patchouli-stink out of here!” The entire scenario plays out only in your head, but instead you mumble, “Oh, uhhh… Yeah, umm… OK.”
Ken seemed to see our business relationship as an endlessly combative attempt to get something from each other, as opposed to a collaborative attempt to move forward together. I once asked him for his wholesaler list, to see if I could dig up some desperately needed business.
“No way,” he barked. “I’ve worked for years to create these relationships.” I only learned later that many of them beyond California had very little ongoing communication with him. AVBC made beer — great beer, for years — and the distributors picked it up. That was it. But with Ken it was always a battle. It’s too bad he thought that way.9
Though the He’brew Messiah got off to a rocky start, it has since settled in as a pillar of the He’brew brand. When I switched to Mendocino Brewing in 2003 and went into six-packs, working with Paul McErlean, the master brewer at Saratoga, we finally changed the recipe for Messiah from a stout to a nut brown ale. When I nervously drank straight from a twelve-ounce bottle of the initial batch of Messiah Bold at the brewery, that first sip had all the richness, the balance and flavor, yet the clean finish that would make it one of my favorites to this day.
Perhaps even more important at that moment was the enormous sense of relief, satisfaction, and hope that I was finally onto a new phase of the Shmaltz adventure. On so many levels, it was exactly the beer I’d been waiting for.