Now that I had deconstructed Shmaltz world headquarters to a cell phone and a laptop, I went looking for what would be the first of many, many, many sublets in New York. Peter had graciously hosted the first month of my new life, but it was time to leave the nest.
I know Yahweh can be a jealous and vengeful God, but I think even the divine will appreciate my non-idol worship of Craigslist. Four and a half years of road travels, including countless trips between the west and east coasts, without a permanent address — Craigslist was my sublet bible. After finding a few places that might be in my price range (the bottom), I narrowed it down to two spots, one in Chinatown and the other in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn.
At the apartment in Chinatown, I talked to a very nice, stylish young woman, Asian-American but not from the neighborhood. She and her roommate had a room open because her boyfriend was going on tour with his band. When I told her I made kosher beer, she said, “Oh, my boyfriend is Israeli. He’s going on tour in Europe.”
Williamsburg, that summer, was the global headquarters for the truckerhat movement, filled with guys in ironic t-shirts and cutoff cowboy shirts. I walked into a nice-enough two-bedroom apartment, greeting my host, who had a bedhead Jew-’fro and five-day stubble. He was smoking a cigarette, sitting in front of a cobbled-together electronic drum kit. He was playing bass and looping guitar licks behind a woman’s voice — soaring, spiritual vocals, in Hebrew and in English.
I said, Wow, that’s funny — I just came from another apartment in Chinatown where the woman said her boyfriend is a musician going on tour.
Between drags, the guy says, “Oh, that’s Ori’s girlfriend. We’re in a different band together.” (Balkan Beat Box. Sweet.) Freakishly, the only two apartments I end up looking at in all of New York City are connected by zero degrees of separation.
I took the place in Williamsburg, which was above a small Italian tapas wine bar with a wood-burning stove. In the skanky New York summertime, the place had no air conditioning. There were multiple days when I took at least three showers. Five was my record. Every morning, I hustled to meet reps at S.K.I. or on their routes anywhere in the city, with subway platforms radiating the summer swelter and my new He’brew t-shirt collection getting a real workout. Door to door to door block after block, day after day — I lived with the S.K.I. reps for weeks on end, walking every block in any neighborhood that had any craft beer, trying to ram my two new six-packs onto any overcrowded shelf I could reach. We made a respectable splash and sold about as much beer just in the city in three months as I had in the previous year in all my markets combined.
In August, I decided to throw a party to celebrate the new era of Shmaltz. My sublet-mate Itamar was friendly with a wild local klezmer-punk-funk band, which was going to be playing the Knitting Factory in Tribeca. We made plans to bring a few cases of beer for the band and to run a beer special on the night of their show. I ordered seventy knishes from Yonah Schimmel’s and crossed Delancey to Guss’ Pickles on the Lower East Side, where they agreed to give me a cut rate on seven buckets of their brined specialties. I invited everyone I knew, hyped up the event with a little local media blast, and planned to rock out for the night, from Genesis to the Messiah.
It was August 14, 2003. Before the party, I decided to take a mid-afternoon nap — cool-down prep before the workout. I woke up around four to a commotion outside. I leaned out the window, saw a few confused locals, looked in the kitchen, and realized the clock had stopped. I tried to use my cell phone and couldn’t. I soon learned that we were in the middle of the largest blackout in American history. The lights (and the amplifiers) would be out for a day to a week, as over 55 million people lost power.
The likelihood of my little rager going off was slim to none. I didn’t have any way to get through to the knish place or the pickle guy; no way to call the club. The subways and buses weren’t running. The city had come to a standstill.
With no electricity needed for one more cold shower, I hosed off before walking to the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, where I witnessed the spectacle of tens of thousands of people walking across. I later learned that something like 250,000 people walked across the bridge to get home that day. It was a hot, sticky summer day, and a big group of Hasids with their sleeves rolled up handed out cups of water to everyone, sweat dripping from their earlocks.
Halfway up the bridge, I noticed a very cute woman in front of me taking photos. Suave: Hey, are you taking pictures?
“Yes.”
Clearly an opening, so I invited her to walk across the bridge with me. A tourist from Berlin, she’d just arrived that morning. We walked on the upper deck above the flow of foot traffic, trekking through the old Jewish Lower East Side into the Village. I was headed to Peter’s girlfriend’s house to eat by candlelight.
I asked where my new acquaintance had been planning to eat, since everything was going to be closed. “Why?” she asked. Uh, the blackout.
“Ha! Uhh, I had no idea,” she said. “I thought it was impressive that so many people walked across the bridge every day.”
Unbeknownst to me, the band did show up at the Knitting Factory that night. They couldn’t be inside the building, so they ended up having a punk-rock-klezmer throwdown on the sidewalk. Wish I were there, but we made our own happening.
At the end of the night, carrying a few last beers and snacks, we strolled over to Washington Square Park, where a giant, mellow gathering was taking place. It certainly wasn’t the wild party I had envisioned to celebrate the culmination of re-entry to New York. But it was an only-in-New York moment, between the eerily darkened tall buildings and the rare silence of traffic and white noise.
At about one-thirty in the morning, I glance over, and there’s a couple sitting on the edge of the fountain. Just as I look, the woman bends her arm and takes a big swig of a twelve-ounce bottle. It was straight out of a movie moment — a slo-mo, absolutely perfect label shot. She was drinking He’brew Messiah Bold, the new nut brown ale.
The moment launched a reel of images in my head. I thought of all the sales calls I’d made, all the stress and sweat. I thought about getting divorced and traveling, trying to get rid of all those ghosts. The risk, the money, the uncertainty. And after all that, here’s this stranger actually consuming my product, on this mythical evening in New York City.
Part of me wanted to run over and grab her, howl at the sky and give her a huge hug. Instead, I casually asked, Hey, how’s that beer?
She looked over, paused, looked at the beer, and said, “It’s really good.”
Instead of making a public spectacle of myself that night, getting blasted and stuffed on knishes and pickles, dancing on the bar, grabbing the mic, and bellowing “Hava Nagila,” that quiet, tiny personal connection served as the climax of the first chapter of this new era for Shmaltz Brewing. For all the sound and fury every entrepreneur feels going through these epic, often private battles, it’s a profound sense of satisfaction when you see your little drop fall into the pool of the world. That one experience justifies all that effort and energy. A minor, unexpected marvel.
Within the next week, I was on a plane back to San Francisco to set up shop in my mother’s den for a few weeks. Age thirty-four, once again moving into my mother’s house. This time, however, I was doing so with a renewed sense of purpose and optimism. I was in a much better place than I’d been the year before, awkwardly chatting up two Jewish singles at a comedy show while attempting to hide my copy of American Psycho.
I reconnected with all the wholesalers who serviced northern California retail stores that were willing to bring in the six-packs. As part of the typical wholesaler consolidation in the beer industry, the local Miller and Coors distributors had merged. With some of my wholesalers going out of business or selling to the big guys, I came back to the west coast to some pretty big holes in my network.
But I did the best I could. I took that same sales focus I’d had all summer and started making the rounds through Bay Area accounts, many of whom I hadn’t seen in years, some of whom I still knew from my early self-distribution days. Rick at the Menlo Park Draeger’s was still an enthusiastic supporter, and there were specialty stores from Marin down to Santa Cruz that I could now pitch six-packs that should sell faster than 22s, with only four purchases to move a case, instead of twelve, to get a re-order. Keith at Bay Area and Ron at Morris both agreed to pick up my new packages. I got nowhere with the new Miller/Coors manager on the Peninsula, so I fell in with a very nice guy trying with very little luck to create a sustainable distributor out of his extremely niche import brands (yes, even more niche than He’brew). I picked up another small guy down in Monterey and one in Sacramento, and I just kept on pushing the goods every day.
Southern brought a couple pallets to L.A., and I went down to see some old acquaintances across southern California. Changing over my SKU and UPC codes from 22s to sixes took some time and effort, but nothing like the initial, relentless push of the first few years.
With three or four dollars per case of my five-dollar profit going straight to truckers, I barely made enough to justify spending time and money on California sales. I figured that with my jigsaw-puzzle wholesale map, I was just trying to keep my business moving forward, so that as sales grew I could once again arrange for production on the west coast. I haven’t yet brought on a west coast brewer, but it was still the right strategy.
By then I had about eighteen wholesalers across the country. With no experience at being spread so thin, I needed to figure out how I would manage and maintain them all.
With the rumblings of an idea, I looked at a map. Since I had first road-tripped with Maggie, a family friend from Palo Alto, to New Orleans many years before, I always wanted to see more and more of the U.S. I thought, What if I jump in the car and put together some kind of cross-country sales and marketing tour?
Maybe I could get sponsored by companies that would help cover the cost of the “tour” — cell phone carriers, hotels, Starbucks, Apple… I had what I thought was a compelling, legitimate opportunity, but I needed an angle.
How often do you see small business owners on billboards or TV ads? I could pimp out my beer for a few grand and some free lattes and Wi-Fi.
The number of wholesalers I had - eighteen — happened to coincide with the sign of life in Jewish mystical numerology (see also: number of chapters in Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah). And Chai (as in L’Chaim — to life! — and the giant gold chai adorning those noble hairy Jewish chests) — the numerical value of those letters add up to the number eighteen.
The high holidays and the Jewish New Year were coming up. Shortly into the new year, Sukkot, also called the Festival of the Tents, commemorates the wandering of the Jews in the desert on their way out of Egypt to the Promised Land. Revelers gather for festive meals in a sukkah, a temporary hut, often set up in the backyard (suburbs) or rooftop (Williamsburg). In a kosher sukkah, palm fronds loosely covering the roof allow a glimpse of the stars. I realized my ‘93 Pathfinder had a little moonroof that should do the trick.
I figured I’d take my two-ton sukkah on the road, leaving at Sukkot. I thought I could make the trip in five or six weeks, which meant I’d be in New York by Thanksgiving.
That year, the time span between Sukkot and Thanksgiving was almost exactly forty days. Once in a while, the stars align. I thought the ultimate marketing shtick had just been handed to me. I called it “40 Days and 40 Nights: The Wandering He’brew Beer Tour of America.”
I sent emails to the business development people at companies like Wells Fargo, Apple, and Starbucks, but got absolutely nowhere. Instead of landing any sponsorships, I ended up calling every person I could think of at stops across the country, asking for a couch to crash on while I pursued this personal and professional odyssey.
I contacted stores, bars, Jewish groups, and personal friends who might be able to help organize events to promote my cause. I let my wholesalers know I’d be coming to as many sales meetings and ride-withs as they could offer in a day or two per city. I loaded up a new press release with as much shtick as I could fit on two pages, and Matt generously donated Web time to create the template for a rudimentary blog to chronicle the trail.
Much like my first months in New York, with no strategic plan beyond selling the three thousand cases necessary to cover my credit card bill, I had no grand scheme for the 40 Days expedition. I knew I needed to spread the He’brew gospel every step of the way, attempting to inspire people along the route to join the roadshow by buying a case or two.
As it turned out, I was embarking on what would become a four-and-a-half-year tour of America and a life on the road.
DEAR DIARY: OUTTAKES FROM THE ORIGINAL 4O DAYS AND 4O NIGHTS JOURNAL. A LITTLE LOOSE RE-WRITE OF THE ORIGINAL, BUT YOU’LL GET THE IDEA:
Genesis 12:1: LECH LECHA — Leave your country, your people and your mother’s household and go to the land I will show you… and I will bless you.
OPENING NIGHT: Friday, October 11, 2003. SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA.
In the beginning, there was a Happy Hour (well, several hours… into the wee hours). Chopped liver, potato latkes, Prison Whiskey, and the opening-night appearance of Genesis Ale and Messiah Bold in twelve-ounce bottles for the first time over the bar at San Francisco’s Hotel Utah Saloon. And the Wandering He’brew Beer Tour is ON!
Big thanks to Joanna, Will, and the Utah posse, Laurence and Vic’s 110-proof dynamic duets, and of course to all the local He’brew faithful who turned up to send me out of my garden of San Francisco Eden in true Shmaltz style. Fortunately, no one ended up like Noah, drunk and naked in his tent after the flood. So now I’m off for five more weeks of communal celebrations, endless retail sales presentations, and blissful taste-bud exaltations. Come out to join the tour, taste the Chosen Beers, buy an official limited-edition Wandering Beer Tour t-shirt, and enjoy the festivities with the Shmaltz tribe.
LOS ANGELES:
Rolling into Hollywood for a Three’s Company-style flop off Sunset with Blyth and Tara, the hostesses with the mostesses, and the first of many not-quite-Zen-style sleeping spots on the floors and couches of generous friends across the country. No wall-to-wall carpets for Zen masters, and no Regal Beagle down the street for me. Just mile after mile of L.A. pavement, freeway, corner liquor stores, and lots of delicious Jewish delis.
SAN DIEGO:
Some warm San Diego hospitality once again from Melanie Rubin at the JCC, and the rest of the staff and local art collectors who sampled He’brew. Over to City Deli for a casual beer tasting, a World Series game and delicious cheese blintzes, with the smooth, dark malt of Messiah Bold. What a match. Oren Patashnik came by and may get the award for Most B’nai Mitzvot featuring the Chosen Beers. He writes, “Our three He’brew celebrations were for two bar mitzvahs — Josh, October 1997; Jeremy, December 2002 — and a bat mitzvah — Ariel, August 2000.” Too bad Shmaltz didn’t start until 1996. Could’ve had a Patashnik bris as well!
PHOENIX, MESA, and TUCSON:
Anyone who says the Wild West of Arizona has been paved over and co-opted by strip malls and fast-food joints hasn’t had a run-in with a certain Arizona badass: the low-hanging awning at Bruce and Dee’s Little Guy Distributing compound in Mesa. I wish I could say that my sliced eyebrow came from a payback brawl with the drunken, lederhosen Weinstephan reps from Munich (“This one’s for the Beer Hall Putsch!”), who were celebrating Oktoberfest at Papago Brewing the night of my arrival.
DENVER:
Hey Denver Mayor (and Wynkoop Brewery owner) John Hickenlooper: The main complaint from everyone in town, and now from me, too, is that you promised to lower the meter fees downtown from twenty-five cents for ten minutes. Just another broken promise from a politician?! Shouldn’t we expect more from our elected Beer Officials?
Two thousand miles traveled already, and now off to Vail for a day of sales with the pros at High Point Brewing. The Chosen Beer in Vail? Where’s my full-length sable fur when I need it?
MILWAUKEE:
If you’re going to do one thing as a Wandering Jew beer salesman in Milwaukee, it’s gotta be kickin’ it in a bowling alley. Shlemiel, shlemazzel. Though the carpets leading to the basement may overwhelm the novice with the unmistakable waft of soiled diapers, one of the best dive bars of the “40 Day and 40 Nights Tour” was undeniably Landmark Lanes.
Most honorable mention goes to a certain ex-swimming champion, Matt Polacheck’s dad, for bear-hugging me (I am still 6’1”) in front of a room full of JCC locals with jaws dropped, ready to flee the madman before he turned on them. A parting thanks to Brad from New World Wines, who mail-ordered a case of the very earliest version of He’brew to celebrate the birth of his twin girls six years ago. Guaranteed that he brought the first case of the Chosen Beer into Wisconsin. After crossing half the country to hear him retell the story, it left me proud and grateful. Buy He’brew at Brad’s beautiful wine and boutique beer shop.
CLEVELAND/KENT:
As the debate rages over who has the best corned beef in Cleveland, the thrilling fact for me is that both Jack’s and Corky and Lenny’s are stocking both styles of He’brew. I leave the judging to the locals, and simply request that you all order the Chosen Beers to accompany your sacred and secular deli rituals.
Survived yet more semi-apocalyptic weather — a freezing ice and windstorm that brought six-foot swells to Lake Erie, outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Boy’s entitled to an hour of vacation along the way. Tried to smuggle a He’brew in for a promo shot with Jimi, Jim, Janis, or Jerry. Damn tight security!)
PHILADELPHIA:
Only one thing to say about Pennsylvania on this segment: Road Kill. Attention Deer in rutting season: Stay away from long stretches of Pennsylvania highways. Save yourselves!
Oh, yeah, and the Italian Market in Philly is sweet. Visions of Rocky on his first morning, after the raw eggs, barely able to run up the library steps. Three weeks later, in the ring with Apollo. Classic. Moira, my queen of crucifix kitsch, provided warmth, comfort, and whiskey to the weary traveler at the neighborhood basement dive Twelve Steps Down. So good to join you in my first taste of Ommegang’s Three Philosophers, courtesy of Tom at Monk’s. I feel smarter.
Hitting the end of the far-from-homestretch. Thanksgiving, here I come.
The sophisticated strategic plan for the re-invigorated Shmaltz 2.0 for the end of 2003, into 2004: Extend the 40 Days tour indefinitely. Sell as much beer as possible. Spend as little money as possible. Solid.
Between couches and floors, thankfully, it would be well over a year before I would have to sleep the night in my car. At that point I feared that I didn’t have the money to cover a Motel 6, so it was a constant scramble. With those first two batches of Genesis and Messiah, I was just about breaking even and starting to cover setup charges. Though merely “on the cusp” of profitability, at least I wasn’t losing money. No apartment, no office, no landline — not even voicemail anymore — a free Yahoo email address. My entire overhead was a cell phone bill and some Internet charges for Wi-Fi along the way. No rent and no fixed address, other than a four-inch-square P.O. box in my old neighborhood in San Francisco, where they could forward me mail around the country every couple of weeks. Gas, car insurance, food, beer. One business card, one sell sheet, one promo postcard. The leanest Jewish contract-brewing company in the world.
Early in the new year, I returned to Brooklyn, grabbed my car from Matt (who’d been car-sitting), and I drove south to see my wholesaler in Florida. I arranged meetings and some work days with my distributors along the way, in D.C., Virginia, North Carolina, and potential new business in Georgia.
For years I’d been trying to decide: was He’brew a community project? An arts organization? Yeah, it was a beer company, but I thought I could also do all these creative projects for my peoples. But the business was never successful until I put my head down and decided I was really a salesperson.
The marketing kept happening, but it became much less of a priority. The best marketing, I realized, came from having the beer on the shelf — not in my car, or in a distributor’s warehouse, or at a synagogue fundraiser or the brewery.
After a few ride-withs and catching up with some distributors (DOPS in Maryland/D.C. and Hop and Wine in Northern Virginia), I headed south, with a brief stop in a frozen Richmond to see the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. Poe seems to be claimed as native son by several east coast cities, many of them great craft beer stops. Coincidence? I did not manage to “quaff this kind nepenthe” (an elixir that chases away sorrow, from Poe’s “The Raven,” which was itself taken from Homer’s Odyssey). But I toasted his honor and kept on moving.
A few specific events stand out along the early 2004 wandering as teachable moments. After rolling through the head office and hooking up with a couple of reps from Tryon in North Carolina, I headed over to Chapel Hill for what turned out to be an absurd double-header promo. I set up a tasting beginning at eight at a great little neighborhood joint with a decent selection of better beers, and it went well. I mixed with the locals and a few Jewish community folks, who pledged to spread the good word.
At eleven, seven or eight guys from Sparks, the energy drink-malt liquor combo, rolled in for their promo. They were beefy, macho guys, and they began egging on the customers to party down, all the way, with them. They rolled up in their bright orange-wrapped van, put up banners everywhere, plastered the place. Bought rounds, dropped tons of free samples, and took over. I respectfully took a quick sip of a sample and got the hell out of there.
That week I also had the single worst-attended promo ever in Shmaltz Brewing history, at the University of Georgia in Athens. The event was organized by the on-campus Jewish student organization. Cute, smart young Jewish woman invites you to a renowned music and party town. Hell, yeah, I’m on my way.
I walked in at Happy Hour and stayed for a couple hours. Literally not one person, other than the coordinator and me, showed up. Again: zero people.
Not every stop was so dismal. A dedicated and scrappy new craft beer wholesaler in Florida called Microman had brought my beers to the state, along with Mendocino’s brands, when I’d first introduced the six-packs. Founded and managed by two buddies with a double passion for good beer and brutally long hours, my first few days with them were pure craft-beer-dude hang-out sessions. I talked smack, tossed off endless punchlines, and even made a few sales with the two reps that covered Orlando, Tampa, and the surrounding hundreds of miles between — Mike Fouch, former bar owner, onetime president of the Tampa homebrew club, and current member of renowned bluegrass performers Hot Carl and the Shrimpers, and Johnny V, another fervent lay student of theology (much like Angelo of S.K.I.), though with a wild streak of banjo and entrepreneurship.12
On that first time down, Mike and I tried to pitch the Holy Land Experience, a “living Biblical museum,” built to replicate the Jerusalem of 2000 years past, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, a model of the Temple on Mt. Moriah, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. All this just a few miles from Orlando city limits. Perfect fit, we felt, for Genesis and Messiah. But the pimply adolescent, no doubt a true believer, wearing his safety vest and directing traffic at the entrance, shattered our dreams, albeit apologetically: “Wow, that sounds terrific, fellas. But we don’t sell any beer inside.”
Steve and Ina, family friends from my bar mitzvah congregation, generously donated a stint at their condo in another heartland of the Jewish diaspora: Boca. I walk into the clubhouse to grab the key, and a small pack of bubbes and zeydes straight out of central casting have congregated before heading to early-bird seating. As I approach (and I am not making this up), one of the mensches, with rising timbre and disbelief, shouts, “If they’re not gonna have lox at the memorial, then what are they gonna have??”
Finally, I did a presentation for a Jewish community fundraiser for Livnot (my Israel program folks) at a country club in West Palm Beach. After a couple weeks of cranking out work with my new wholesaler in Florida, I’d given myself a couple days off and moseyed down to Key West, where I stayed on Marathon Key, at the brick bunker apartment of my friend Heather’s younger brother, Val. Driving back north, I stopped at a cute roadside café and grabbed a quick tuna sandwich.
Midway through the drive, I realized that I was not feeling so good. I started to feel bloated and a little moist, a bit gassy in several body cavities.
When I pulled up to the country club, the place was gorgeous, meticulously groomed, with marble and mahogany everywhere. It was straight out of Caddyshack: “Hey, Wang, it’s a parking lot! And don’t tell ‘em you’re Jewish.”
My stomach was feeling terrible. I met the woman who organized the fundraiser, and she pulled me aside and said, “There’s something I need to tell you. This club started after they built a huge Jewish golf club across the way, because the original club wouldn’t let Jews in. You need to be a little sensitive.”
Yeah, sensitive. I’m on it. I wandered off in a queasy daze, struggling to keep down a Sprite. When my time came, I gave my spiel. I talked about why Livnot was so important to me, how profound the experience was on my Jewish consciousness. I survived, barely.
When everyone was finally walking out, I sprinted in the other direction, through this gorgeous marble entryway into these midtown-Manhattan-style bathrooms with heavy floor-to-ceiling doors. I slammed the stall door and retched up my guts. Damn tuna sandwich. In a rare pay-for-stay travel night, I spent the next twenty-four hours in a Motel 6, purging my disease.
From spring into summer 2004, my wandering continued in earnest. I took ride-withs and sales meetings and threw promotional events wherever possible. As I never fail to tell my staff today, the initial sales pitch is so important, but if there’s no follow-up, you haven’t done your job all the way. Without follow-up, the chance of staying on the shelf is geometrically reduced. Then it’s that much harder to get back on the shelf the next time.
Even with my best-laid plans, I just recently heard the complaint from an account we have in Coney Island: “Why should I bother with you guys? I gave you a shot, and I never heard back. All romance and no follow-through.” The owner was absolutely right, and I made sure he heard from us every week for the rest of the summer. The initial pitch needs to be powerful, succinct, and compelling, but in some ways the follow-up is much more important.
As with many industries, we call it “filling the pipeline.” There are empty shelves out there somewhere when you’re the new flavor of the week. You can generally guarantee that, as long as your product doesn’t suck (and even if it does suck, if you have enough incentive dollars), a lot of buyers will take a shot on that first case.
They’ve seen a slew of brands come and go. They may not trust that we’re going to be in business forever. Plenty of entrepreneurs do the song and dance, and then they never hear from them again. In the first generation of the craft-brewing community, a lot of people were great brewers, but many couldn’t, or didn’t, focus that much on sales and follow-up.
The companies that spent money on sales reps — putting a body and a voice in front of sales managers, retailers, chain buyers, bar owners, and customers — thrived. Insert cliché here: boots on the ground, feet on the street, pressing the flesh. The clichés are annoying but the idea is the truth: emmis!
Once the distribution network exists, if they’re given the correct attention, that doesn’t go away. Those buyers remember it — that Lenny Bruce joke you told, or how you talked about the woman’s group of homebrewers in college. There’s always some little nugget. My goal was to try to revisit people in the more distant markets every six to nine months.
Another cliché, also undoubtedly true: Nobody sells your product like you do. But I also think there are a lot of different ways you can sell your own product, beginning with the base-level humanity of a person sharing something they made, and talking about why they think it’s special.
When I look back at my 2004 calendar, the traveling was non-stop. (The same would be true for 2005-06-07.) I went from Boston to Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Missouri, Indianapolis, Detroit, Chicago, to Milwaukee, back to New York and San Francisco. In Kentucky, I had the chance to get into a handful of the biggest stores in the state, giant party stores, that somehow stock almost everything but also manage to sell almost everything. They had thousands of products stacked everywhere. Though He’brew was one tiny widget inside a huge operation, that was the place to be, and the buyers and staff there knew good beer and hand-sold it every day.
On one of my passes through Kentucky, I traded myself some comp time to stop into the Woodford Distillery. I had never been to a distillery, and I didn’t really know much about the process. One more thing I’d need to research: Thank you, sir, may I have another?
Embarrassing to admit, but I guess I never thought about it enough to realize whiskey was made essentially from beer (except that beer brewed for distilling generally has no hop additions). The base grains — usually corn, barley, rye, sometimes wheat — are ground into what’s called grist and then soaked in hot water to create the wort, much the same as with beer. Yeast is added to begin fermentation and this malt soup, also called the wash, will go into the complex of copper pots and tubes of the still, where it’s boiled to perfection to achieve ideal alcohol transformation. Poured into charred oak barrels to age, for flavor and coloring from the wood, the liquor will emerge from two to four to many years later, after the beer caterpillar has morphed into its liquor butterfly.
By law, Kentucky bourbon must use at least fifty-one percent corn. Woodford Reserve used seventy-one percent corn, thirteen percent barley, and sixteen percent rye. The increased percentage of rye gave the bourbon its robust and assertive spice. It’s a little bit harsh at first, a little rugged, but it smooths out nicely as your palette gets accustomed.
As a nice Jewish beer guy, I loved the fact that the original whiskey cooked up by the founding fathers was made from rye. Back in San Francisco, Anchor created a couple of delicious spirits using rye malts, including a fire-hot version of what was an 18th century whiskey recipe from revolutionary times. That trip to Kentucky inspired my thoughts for the recipe for our future double IPA (Bittersweet Lenny’s R.I.P.A.), which builds an aggressive hop profile around the intrinsic character of rye.
Also that summer, I made a seemingly harmless stop in Missouri for a couple of ride-withs with Missouri Beverage. When I’d first come through on the 40 Days and 40 Nights tour the year before, the beer manager, Bill, had personally brought me around town to his best accounts. He showed me a new sell sheet that had He’brew on the cover — “Shmaltz Brewing, Welcome to Missouri.” The entire first page of the sales book used our tagline: “Christ, that’s good beer!” Though these were somewhat understated Midwestern guys, their pronounced sense of humor permeated the entire operation.
After hitting key accounts in town, I took an afternoon off to see a good friend from the beer world before heading to Indianapolis the next day. My buddy suggested a couple beers at the taproom, aptly named the St. Louis Brewery, at local heroes Schlafly Brewing. We enjoyed a couple pints of their offerings around two in the afternoon. Then we proceeded to go on an eighteen-hour tear.
Early in our bender, we popped into the oldest standing bar closest to the original Budweiser brewery to hoist a round for history. After heading around to the corner lot and getting way too high, we jumped on a Happy Hour brewery tour. At one point, we were standing in an alleyway looking up at the pipes running from the brewhouse to the cellar. These pipes were maybe a foot in diameter. This wasn’t even one of Bud’s bigger breweries, and we joked that just the amount of beer in that pipe running across the path was probably more beer than He’brew made in an entire batch.
We were headed to the racetrack for the infamous one-dollar beer night (that beer unfortunately being the recently introduced light beer for connoisseurs, Michelob Ultra). What better way to enjoy race night, naturally, than to buy some crack cocaine in the ghetto of East St. Louis?
At the time I figured, what the hell — I’m a guest, and I’m on a road show. Rock and roll, baby.
Through the tiniest of slits in a lowered driver’s window, we scored said specialty items from a wild-eyed, strung-out Rastafarian. We got so high, we figured it’d be a good plan to buy some powder cocaine to come down.
This next dealer’s name was Cool Breeze. Waiting for him, we were parked in an abandoned parking lot, a former supermarket, apparently, in a totally blown-out part of town. Cool Breeze was taking longer than we expected — a lot longer. In between jabbering and solving the problems of the universe, I wondered if we were about to get car-jacked or taken hostage. Finally, Cool Breeze’s brother shows up in a brand-new, sparkling metallic green Caddy, casually waves us over, and hooks us up.
At the track, we’re flying. For absolutely no justifiable reason, we keep alternating between the dollar beers and the dollar hot dogs. Since my last college fraternity party, this was definitely the most Budweiser product I’d ever consumed at one sitting. (Well, sitting and standing, pissing like a furiously dehydrating racehorse.) There are, I dunno, hundreds, maybe thousands of people there, bands rocking, grandstands bumping, but we’re in a crystal fog of our own little private party. All of a sudden I spot a guy I think I know.
Perhaps it’s a mirage, but I think I sold that guy beer at a deli in town. As we walk by, he says, “Hey, man, what’s going on?”
Where do I start? We sit down and drink with him and his buddy’s friends for a while, yammering like Heckle and Jeckle.
After the track, someone in the crew has a local favorite in need of his monthly attention, so he drags us all to the Hustler Club. Still rolling, my friend suggests we go even deeper.
East St. Louis is evidently notorious for having some of the dirtiest fun you can have. Though I usually attempt to carry myself as a sensitive, progressive member of society, the nether regions of East St. Louis were undoubtedly a one-of-a-kind den of hedonism and iniquity. (And cheap. Recall that I was still “on the cusp” of breaking even.) A few more outposts on the tour with late night turning to mid-morning, drug-addled conversations with strangers turned best friends at a dance club called Pop’s, and we finally stumble into my buddy’s house long after sunrise, at 9:45 in the morning. I’m supposed to be on a ride-with in Indianapolis at 11 a.m.
I certainly won’t be driving anytime soon. I call my man in Indiana and apologize profusely for having to cancel on him (without disclosing the less professional details). Then I crawl into the guest room and pass out.
I snuck in just enough sleep to slink out of bed mid-afternoon and drag my ass to Indianapolis. The next day I set up at a festival run by a bunch of folks from the Indianapolis Craft Brewers Guild, a true class act. At one point in the fest I realized that a couple of cute ladies kept coming back to my taps. For the first time in my whole history of owning a beer company, I was suddenly struck with the fairly certain notion that a woman was about to pick me up at a beer festival. And she seemed smart, fun, and sexy. I could not have been more surprised, or happier.
After the event, we went to a blues concert in a nearby city park. Then she said the magic words: “Why don’t you crash at my place?”
She had a huge, three-bedroom tract home, startlingly under-furnished, on the outskirts of town. It all seemed far too good to be true — I was more than a little uneasy, waiting for her boyfriend, or maybe her pimp, to pull up while we were butt-naked in the hot tub.
Eventually she explained that she was just breaking up from a relationship, and it seemed I’d been in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Despite the paltry furnishings, she had an incredible stereo system piped through the entire house, and all night she cranked a local modern-rock station. Weirdly, every fourth song or so was clearly some kind of loosely-masked Christian rock. “Soaring now… I feel the power… you light up the sky… and I know you’re there,” etc. She had a cross hanging from the rear-view mirror of her cream Murano, and another cross hanging between her spectacular breasts.
Dear Penthouse: I never thought it would happen to me, but…