“Your body is not a temple, it is an amusement park.”
— Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
“I guess if circus sideshow freaks are more mainstream than Jews, Shmaltz is going mainstream.”
— My response to a question from a Brooklyn journalist in 2007
In the fall of 2006, a lawyer in New York, a nice Jewish boy from Manhattan, approached me about a client he represented. A licensing specialist who’d been at our Lenny Bruce tribute event at the 92nd Street Y, Dave said he’d been impressed by the product and by what we pulled off. He said he was charged with the task of obtaining licensees for a nonprofit arts organization called Coney Island U.S.A.
Now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, Coney Island U.S.A. stands as a landmark and a cherished institution. The maestro, Dick Zigun, who started the non-profit, serves as de facto mayor of Coney Island, strolling the neighborhood to see friends and hoods alike, quoted in every article that comes out about the death, the rebirth, and the eternal controversies of Coney.
Coney Island somehow seems to be in a constant, inconclusive period of profound transition. Every year has been either the end of an era or the dawn of a new age, or both. From the long-lost days of Elephant hotels, giant public baths, and enormous amusement parks serving millions of New Yorkers escaping the heat, Coney Island has long been known as “America’s Playground.” Through divisive attempts at large-scale urban planning mixed with an obvious air of decay and neglect, the neighborhood remains packed with families and tourists — literally millions of visitors still assuming Coney Island is their kinda town.
Years before they became our new collaborators in the Craft Lager project, CIUSA began hosting a giant arts event called the Mermaid Parade. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of revelers flock to the farthest edges of Brooklyn to star in a sweaty, anarchic pageant of tattooed, roller-skating, hulahooping, half-naked mermaids, pirates, and sea goblins, with board-member judges expecting to be bribed with treats and trinkets and a New York popcult celebrity king and queen reigning over the festivities. It’s a spectacle.
But CIUSA’s main attraction involves running the last remaining circus sideshow in a fixed location in America — what’s known in traditional lore as the Freak Show. Renowned staff performers include Heather Holliday, the world’s most petite yet provocative sword swallower; Insectavora, a face-tattooed, whip-cracking, nationally recognized fire-eating artist; and Serpentina, the house snake-dancer with her partner, a seventy-five-pound, twelve-foot albino python.
Coney Island had seen it all — beds of nails, an electric chair stunt, contortionists, and a new array of genetic oddities each summer. Natural-born freaks such as the Wolfman, Black Scorpion, and Seal Boy, Mat Fraser, with his dashing British charm, drumming talent, performance art sensibility, and Thalidomide-induced flipper arms. Nic Sin, the three-foot, 6.66-inch rockstar midget and straightjacket escape artist, would soon join us to brew the inaugural batches at Coney Island Brewing Company, the World’s Smallest Brewery.
The superstar emcee, Donny Vomit, showcases a signature piece known as the Human Blockhead, originally credited to Melvin Burkhardt, a famed (and Jewish) carny from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Story goes that Robert Ripley coined the phrase, remarking, “Wow, Melvin, you sure are a blockhead.” Eight performances a day during the summer months, Donny opens by hammering a sixty-penny nail into his skull, “All for the demented pleasure of you fine folks sitting here today.” Taking it up a notch, Mr. Vomit then jams a running power drill into his face: “Hey, look at me, I’m at work!”
Dave, the licensing lawyer, approached me and said, “What you did with the Lenny Bruce beer was fantastic. Would you consider doing a tribute beer for Coney Island?” I’d never thought about anything like that before. When people asked, “The beers are really great. Have you ever considered a more generic brand?” I’d reply that I hadn’t started this just to be Jeremy’s Beer Company. I started it to make He’brew.
We were completely slammed at that point, consistently up eighty to one hundred percent every year. I had hired Angela as my full-time assistant, Jesse was on retainer for some part-time PR help, and Matt, still at his full-time job, served only occasionally as my on-call art director for specific projects. The concept of taking on an entire new brand seemed pretty absurd.
Joining me to hit a holiday beer night, Matt and I drove down to D.C. On the trip, we started kicking the Coney Island idea around. I told him the first time I’d been to Coney Island was probably in 2003, when I went to the Mermaid Parade. It was a rainy day, and I took the Q train with Peter to check out the scene. The rain limited the crowd, though it never dampened the enthusiasm for the pageantry.
Afterward, we went to a bar called Ruby’s on the boardwalk. The place was full of dudes who looked like they’d been working out in jail. I kept thinking of that part in Dazed and Confused, when the guy named Clint says, “I came here to do two things — kick some ass and drink some beer.” Luckily, Ruby’s never runs out of beer.
I’d never really dreamed of running off to join the circus, and I didn’t have some lurid fetish for clowns. It wasn’t like my grandmother grew up in Brighton Beach. My father, though a prankster in his own way, would probably have been more a mark than a carny. My good friends the Mullin brothers were both born with six fingers and/or six toes, as was their sister, though all had them removed, and they rarely seemed to regret losing that potential career path. Generally speaking, the closest things to sideshows I’d participated in were the parking lot scenes at Grateful Dead shows. That freak show had quite a different vibe, with hacky-sack circles, miracle tickets, and veggie burritos — not foot-long Polish sausages, funnel cake, and potential gang fights.
What we did have, however, was a sensibility about artistry and uniqueness, mixed with sincerity… and shmaltz. As Matt and I talked about the idea of starting another brand, we sensed the rivulets, the tributaries of potential. My first thought was, What if we did a whole line of Coney Island freak beers?
We were selling six-packs of our originals, Genesis and Messiah, but by then we also had three other beers we felt ranked up there with some of the best craft beers in the country in terms of creativity, recipe, design, and execution. I figured, what if we used this as an opportunity to go totally bonkers?
I thought about contacting some of our favorite craft brewers, like the guys at Allagash, Elysian, Ithaca, and Terrapin, and asking them to do a beer they probably wouldn’t make for themselves — something that was too weird or experimental, something that didn’t fit their portfolio. I thought the idea would highlight just how far contract-brewing could go. I liked the concept: A craft-beer freak show.
To this day, I get excited about it. People in the business are doing some bold collaborations now, and in 2007 we would have been right in the forefront. But I knew it would have been harder than it needed to be, with multiple packaging lines, labels pallets, bottle styles, case configurations, shipping, and potential distribution conflicts.
I don’t remember how it started, but we were beginning to think of Coney Island as something potentially a little more… “mainstream.” The Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel, Houdini, the Marx Brothers — there’d been a literal parade of star power through the place’s well-documented history. In its heyday, Coney was where the escalator was invented for moving masses, through parks lit up way ahead of Times Square. And of course there was America’s annual freedom binge, Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, held in the birthplace of the world-famous invention.
There are over eight million people in greater New York, a bit more than the population of the entire Bay Area, which boasts nearly fifty breweries. New York City has four. Brooklyn Brewery has been leading the cause for over twenty years, dominating local craft beer in the city. Chelsea Brewing, on the west side of Manhattan, has purposefully stayed pretty small and doesn’t distribute much packaged beer.
The only other brewpub to not only survive but thrive in New York is Heartland Brewing, then with four locations (now seven) in the tourist-heavy commercial areas. They began brewing the beers in the restaurants as traditional brewpubs, but several years before, they opened a production plant in Brooklyn to feed all the locations from a central facility. The relative newcomers at Six Point Craft Ales were making big waves in the New York craft beer scene, a welcomed, and much-enjoyed, draft option at the local bars we frequented.
With only four breweries in the whole city, we started thinking: What if we didn’t go so far out, but made a beer that might appeal to a lot of different people, instead of our usual hyper-niche target? From somewhere in the cosmic soup, the word “lager” made an appearance in our conversation for the first time.
As much progress as we’ve made in craft brewing in the last thirty years, ninety-five percent of the beers consumed in this country are still mass-marketed lagers. More than anything, craft beer is seen as an alternative to those styles. Generally speaking, great craft breweries make wonderful ales15.
I can, of course, recognize that most of the country, still in the early stages of American beer evolution, asks for a light lager, the closest thing to Budweiser they can get16. But that doesn’t mean I necessarily want to give it to them. There are plenty of examples of very flavorful lagers — bocks, schwartz beers, dopplebocks, eisbocks, rauchbiers. Some breweries had already started making imperial pilsners and extreme Octoberfests — bigger, stronger, hoppier. We thought, what if we did a whole line of lagers? We could leave He’brew to be pretty much all ales. If we did some interesting, unusual lagers, we’d have an obvious point of differentiation. The progression could parallel what Anchor Steam and Sam Adams had done the generation before: taken recipes for European lager styles, and upped the ante. We thought, why don’t we take it one step further, bringing American craft ale sensibility to traditional lager brewing?
It was clear we had a real opportunity, something that fed off the notoriety of Coney Island. Unlike He’brew, the Chosen Beer, the brand “Coney Island” already existed in people’s minds across the country and around the world. Coney Island unquestionably suggested an image of something fun, perhaps historical — a little wild, an escape. A chance to “come out and playy-ayyy.” Matt, Paul, and I decided to focus on creating a line of craft-brewed lagers with ambitious recipes. They’d be craft-brewed lagers for connoisseurs. I took to calling our flagship Coney Island Lager a “pitcher beer for beer geeks.”
The idea was not necessarily to get the Bud drinkers to drink our beer. The microbrew industry has this notion of “gateway” beers, which help ease the transition from mass market to craft brewing. I always kind of disliked that idea. Why make something medium for the sake of being medium?
On the other hand, if you drink a double IPA or an imperial stout (or a barrel-aged, multiple-yeast-strain, funked-up wild-fermentation lacto-bretto one-of-a kind-o), sometimes it’s nice to have a few more beers, whether they be a bit lower in alcohol or just a bit more subdued in flavor, in between.17
As Matt and I were thinking this through, we had a couple of meetings with the folks who ran the Sideshow. They wanted to leave the beer styles up to us, as long as we included the shtick and the energy of the Sideshow in the marketing. For us, that’s a no-brainer. That’s what we get off on.
They thought we’d design the beer labels from their existing Sideshow banners. They had an extremely talented house artist on their board, Marie Roberts, who’d painted an ongoing series of brightly-colored carnival banners. They’d licensed the art to a company for bike messenger bags, coasters, and t-shirts, but none of those projects got very far off the ground. Remembering what a headache it was to transfer Tracy’s real-world artwork to the original labels, I pushed Matt to seek our own artist, who could work directly in the digital medium.
Matt’s wife, Laura, had a friend who worked with her at a teenybopper fashion catalog company, a guy who recently had been named one of the top ten tattoo artists in New York. We asked him to start with the unofficial logo of Coney Island, the original logo for the famed Steeplechase Park from the 1880s, known as the “Tillie” face.
The Tillie face was by then in the public domain: The hair parlor, the dry cleaner, the sausage vendors, and pretty much everyone in and around the area of the amusement park were using it. What we didn’t want to do was just recreate it. We asked Dave, the artist, to take that logo and create an edgy, modern version — something proprietary and truly unique. He abstracted a kid’s face with a huge smile and a pointy haircut, with piercings and face tattoos loosely referencing snake patterns, Donny’s handlebar mustache, Angelica’s vertical streak, and a Riddler-style question mark spiral.
In early spring of 2007, I came back from Morocco on a two-day stopover in New York before returning to San Francisco. I thought I’d use the time to button up some of the details for Coney Island, so I went to talk to my wholesalers, S.K.I. We were thinking about putting out the first Sideshow lager for the summer, but we hadn’t decided yet whether we’d do it in six-packs, 22 ounce bottles, or draft only. I think S.K.I. saw it as an opportunity to have what would become one of a small handful of genuine New York brands in the market.
Ralph saw the vision. Actually, the moment we showed an early draft of the logo and mentioned the brand name to Ralph and a few colleagues — Paul, the off-premise manager, and Claude, the on-premise manager — I knew we were on to something. Their eyes lit up. Ralph suggested, “It would be so great if you could get the beer brewed in Brooklyn or New York City somewhere. That would be the perfect hook.”
The problem was, there were only four functioning breweries locally. Brooklyn Brewery didn’t have enough capacity to brew even its own beers. As mentioned earlier, Brooklyn brews a little of its own beer, some of the draft and more of the very special releases and 750s, in New York City, while the majority comes from F.X. Matt upstate. Chelsea was out: they were too small, and I didn’t really want to deal with brewing on the side of town farthest from Coney Island. It also wasn’t the right fit for the Coney Island shtick. And Six Point was booming, and already could not keep up with demand.
So Ralph says, “What about that guy at Greenpoint? He might have capacity.” Of all the local breweries, I really knew next to nothing about Greenpoint Beer Works. They made the Heartland beers for the chain of centrally located brewpubs. Those restaurants seemed incredibly successful, in some of the most popular spots in New York.
Though neither of us had any idea, Greenpoint’s production facility turned out to be five blocks from Matt’s house in Prospect Heights. They were producing about five thousand barrels just for the restaurants, which is an amazing success, especially given New York’s otherwise unsuccessful brewpub past. By contrast, my production for the entire country, for thirty wholesalers and a couple thousand retailers and bars, only surpassed five thousand barrels in 2008. At the time, it was even less.
When we went to meet with the brewery manager at Greenpoint, it was hard for me to project how much beer we were going to need. I had never done anything intended for a wider audience, especially a lager. Would we need twenty kegs a month, or two hundred? It was a draft-only brewery, so we planned to do kegs in Brooklyn and, later, bottles up in Saratoga. They were typically scrappy, small-production brewery guys. I really liked the whole crew. Greenpoint had a thirty-barrel system with a few 30-bbl. fermenters, a couple of sixties and, later, one ninety. By contrast, Saratoga started at one hundreds and had a 300-bbl. bad boy. Given the smaller batches, Greenpoint could easily crank up, or scale back, on, production, as demand set our needs.
Kelly at GPBW had brewed in the Pacific Northwest, and he’d been in the business longer than I had. He was a west coast beer kind of guy, about my age. We nailed down the basics within forty-eight hours. Matt and I couldn’t believe how quickly it came together.
The association with a local brewery gave us instant credibility in the neighborhood. We could walk in anywhere in Brooklyn and explain that we were sharing profits with a beloved local arts organization, with a staff, designers, and brewers who all lived and worked right here in Brooklyn. That really got us off the ground, and it was one hundred percent Ralph’s idea. I hadn’t even known about or considered Greenpoint.
Eventually both the business relationship and the brewing would turn sour, but in the beginning things were great. For all the pain and suffering He’brew had gone through over the years, this seemed like it might actually be a relatively smooth project. A first!
The plan was to make a robust amber lager, light enough to have “drinkability,” but also complex enough that real craft drinkers would find it interesting. The recipe ended up being a bit of a blend between a darker amber Munich lager Paul had designed for Olde Saratoga (a Great American Beer Festival award-winner) and a hoppier, lighter-colored lager Kelly had been making, which had more of an aggressive pale ale hop profile, but was brewed with a Czech Pilsner yeast. We bulked up the malt profile a bit, bumped up the hop recipe, and dry-hopped with Cascade, the mother of all American craft hops. It turned out to hit just the right balance, as I wrote for the label: “a mashup of European brewing tradition and strongly characteristic of American craft.” A damn tasty and very balanced beer. I was excited.
In the beginning, everyone played nice. Kelly and Paul were having easy conversations. Things were done on time, and the Sideshow was supportive and helpful. Everyone was very positive and optimistic.
At first we were draft-only. Then we decided to add 22 ounce bottles as well up in Saratoga. The logo was so kick-ass, we just had to get it on a bottle. In Brooklyn, we were making thirty-barrel batches, sixty kegs at a time. It took off right from the beginning, and Kelly threw in the second and third batches right away. We were selling maybe a hundred kegs a month that first summer.
Creating the branding, the naming, and the marketing for Coney surprisingly felt a lot like He’brew, but with a completely different sense of history and context. On the original Coney Island Lager label, I barked: “Step Right Up and Witness the Delectable Alchemy! Discover the Thrill of Old-World Brewing Conjoined with Beguiling New-World Flavor!” It was a combination of old and new, funky and bizarre, yet open and approachable. A freak-show version of family-friendly. We couldn’t have done it if we hadn’t already gone through all this with He’brew. Remember the three pillars of Shmaltz? Really, the same three applied to Coney Island — quality, community, shtick.
He’brew will always be a niche product. That’s what I like about it. As I’ve said, I’d rather be the big (or only) fish in a small pond.
It’s interesting that outside of New York, in most places, He’brew still leads Coney Island in sales. Within New York, however, Coney Island was clearly going to take off in a big way for our portfolio. It quickly grew to be significantly bigger than He’brew for us in New York, which was bittersweet for me, for sure. I couldn’t believe I’d spent eleven years of my life creating equally high-quality products and promoting the hell out of them. And then this clown-faced beer waltzes in poised to outsell my dancing-rabbi babies, in just a matter of months, by a margin of ten to one in certain neighborhoods. Don’t get me wrong — I’m thankful it’s working. But part of me was like, Come on! Where have you sales people and buyers and customers been the last ten years?
For whatever reason, my juju never fails to hit its share of speed bumps. One of the first days we launched the original Coney beer was for the Mermaid Parade, in June 2007. It was a glorious, sunshine-y summer day. I didn’t know the Sideshow very well yet. They were operating their concessions out of a tiny space called the Freak Bar, with maybe three bar stools and a pass-though window. I had no idea what to expect.
With at least a hundred thousand people in Coney Island for the parade, this was by far the most high-profile thing we’d ever done. We had to fight our way to the bar just to check it out.
When we get there, the Sideshow bar staff is totally overwhelmed, completely unprepared. And the beer is warm. There’s no ice, and no beer in the fridges as backup.
I lost my shit. The problem was, I didn’t know who I was supposed to be mad at — myself for not seeing this coming? The Sideshow, for the same? Standing in front of Matt, I just needed a moment to scream. Then I pushed my way down the sidewalk to the bodega on the block, asking if they had ice.
They did, so I ran back to the Sideshow and grabbed an intern, a longhaired rocker kid with a nose ring. I gave him a hundred dollars to run out to get all the ice I’d secured from the bodega. He came back and filled buckets to try to chill the beer. And then they ran out of cups.
I’m thinking, You’ve got to be kidding me. Finally, they simply ran out of beer.
I’ve done my best to convince myself over the years that the little injustices don’t really matter. I want to be a perfectionist, as do Matt and most of the people I try to work with. But it doesn’t mean the world needs you to be, or somehow rewards you for all your anxious attention.
In the Sideshow’s defense, this was a scrappy, non-profit arts organization that was essentially running a snack counter. They were winging it, and nobody was prepared. All in all, it was a terrible success. They sold a lot of beer, and we got a ton of new customers in exactly the right setting for our new brand, as well as lot of media coverage, including Russian TV and a Japanese newspaper article. In the end, the Mermaid Parade kicked off our launch summer with a bang.18
From the very beginning, Coney Island was sort of liberating for me. I used to tell the sales reps, you can hurt my feelings with the things you say about He’brew, but you can’t hurt my feelings with the things you say about Coney Island. He’brew is my soul and my passion. Coney is our jam. It’s supposed to be a party.
One of my favorite accounts was Manitoba’s, in the East Village. Handsome Dick Manitoba was one of the true icons of the New York punk rock scene, with his notorious Jewish Afro. His band, the Dictators, were essentially a punk-rock bar mitzvah band. The bar had six draft lines, and when we first walked in, the guy running it was wearing a Coney Island belt buckle. Turned out to be a Coney Island fanatic. Kevin added our beer in place of Yuengling, “America’s Oldest Brewery.” He even went online and sourced a killer backlit Coney Lager sign (paid for it himself!), and the place has carried Coney Island ever since. We regularly do events with them, sponsoring punkrock DJ nights and the Gotham Girls roller derby team’s after-parties.
Those were the kind of guys we were appealing to with Coney Island, at East Village places like Doc Holliday’s, the Riviera, and Marshall Stack. As the local beer-drinking scene in New York grew more sophisticated in its tastes, as new accounts were opening every month, and with restaurants finally coming around to better beer, we were perfectly primed to participate.
By early ‘07, I’d completed (survived) the ten-year anniversary of Shmaltz Brewing Company. We’d put out Jewbelation 8, 9, and 10, as well as Genesis 10:10 and Bittersweet Lenny’s R.I.P.A. After all those years of making the distributor and retailer rounds, I’d lashed together what proved to be a rather solid distribution network.
After several years of working with these same wholesalers, the few that had dropped off because of slow payments, weak sales, or buyouts left me with a reliable group to whom I could feed these new products. The beer company that had started in Jewish delis and at bar mitzvahs was becoming more about creating ambitious, high-end craft beers than simply confining itself to gatherings of members of the tribe.
Even as the brand seemed to expand its reach to the better beer enthusiasts around the country, I am so pleased that I never had to compromise my vision for He’brew as a truly Jewish brand. In fact, digging deeper into the traditions and adding even wilder layers of shtick only seemed to complement our efforts to make even more ambitious beer recipes, flavors, and labels.
You don’t have to be Jewish to love He’brew (this slogan stolen straight from Levy’s Rye), but if you’re interested in or willing to engage in the reasons the shtick informs the beer, and vice versa, there’s a narrative to the interplay between the malts and the punchlines that I hope inspires a deeper investigation. Very few (if any) “Jewish” products on the shelves at the grocery store have tickled these same ribs.
As the shtick got more intense, so too did the booze. In 2006, three of our beers were ten-percent alcohol, and they would continue to rise, depending on the occasion. Among other things, that did a fair amount of damage to my body. My taste buds were constantly titillated, and our sense of our success was more apparent than ever, but my body wasn’t in the best of shape.
I’d been asked to speak at the Extreme Beer Festival, sponsored by the guys at Beer Advocate in Boston. Begun by the Alström brothers, Jason and Todd, Beer Advocate started around the same time as I did. Methodically building their reputation over the years, they now preside over an empire of craft-beer junkies from around the country and the world. They do reviews, tastings, and events to foster this community. Smartly, they do a little bit in every part of the country, helping their devoted following find each other, from beer cellars to neighborhood bars and well-loved specialty festivals. BA (now a website and a nationally distributed magazine) stands as both cause and effect of what many of us have experienced as a sea change in our boutique beer world. They’ve created a sustaining buzz in the industry, and some occasional healthy controversy. Their success (along with Rate Beer, another hugely influential, social-networking beer-enthusiast site) has reflected, as well as driven, the broader success of craft beer in the U.S.
My talk for Extreme Beer Fest that day was “How It Took Ten Years of Radical Jewish Brewing to Create a National Success.” (Hey, it worked that day. Why not keep it rolling?) For me, the invitation to speak crystallized so many elements of my business that had changed so much in such a short time. I was thrilled. I was being asked to speak as the warmup act for arguably the biggest celebrity in the craft beer world, Sam Calagione from Dogfish Head Brewing. He’d started a couple of years before I did. I read his book, Brewing Up a Business — we’re the same age, we graduated the same year, we studied mostly the same things. He got into brewing as a hobby, which grew into a passion. He distributed his own beer in the beginning. He somehow did everything I had done — starting a brand and putting out a few beers at first — but then he did everything that I’d done while also starting a brewery, personally brewing much of the beer, changing legislation in Delaware, starting a restaurant, and even making all his own tap handles. All while I’d … contract-brewed… and stressed all the way out, just from that.
To this day, I have a bit of a complex about some of the top craft guys — Sam, Vinnie, Adam (yeah, yeah, don’t tell him), Rob at Allagash. So many of us are around the same age. Greg and his partner Steve started Stone Brewing the same year I began Shmaltz. The two Floyd Brothers and their dad Floyd opened in 1996. Same with Jim and Jason Ebel at Two Brothers. The Norgroves at Bear Republic started the same year as I did, and run a multimillion-dollar pub and beloved national craft brand. A lot of people around my age were a lot more financially successful, and had created a lot more buzz. They were often the minds, if not also the hands, behind the actual brewing. I knew that they were they were the pioneers, building the excitement and the demand, for the larger craft beer movement and what Shmaltz has been able to participate in over the last few years.
The audience at Extreme Beer Fest was a hardcore group, many of whom likely knew a lot more about beer than I even did. They’re the guys at the epicenter of the scene - beer geeks, BAers and Rate Beer fanatics, homebrewers, and avid enthusiasts. Meanwhile, I represented the two dirty words in craft — contract brewer.
I made sure to create some rapport from the get-go, so we could have some fun. I wasn’t about to make any claims, telling these people what they should think about my products. If I’m at a tasting in a store, I’ll gladly tell people what they’re tasting and why they should respect and buy our beers. But this was a different situation.
Starting with my self-deprecating dirty-word intro, I told some tales from the road and some punchlines. I said, It’s important to realize I am advocating for this family of small businesses called craft beer everywhere I go, in every pitch to every grocery store buyer, every bar owner, at every community event. With enough shtick, enough sincerity, and enough flowing pitchers of ten percent R.I.P.A. and Jewbelation, the crowd seemed to appreciate that we were serious about making outstanding beers.
Then it was Sam’s turn — the main event. One of the Dogfish managers, a big tall guy, helped Sam wade through a throng of well-wishers. It looked like the heavyweight champ making his way to the ring, like the parting of the Red Sea. Matt and I looked at each other. A beer guy on one side of the room, referencing one of Dogfish’s best known IPAs yelled out sports-stadium-style, “NINE-ty MIN-ute!” Clap, clap, clap clap clap. Someone on the other side shouted out, “ON-ne TWEN-ty!” Clap, clap, clap clap clap. Back and forth, rising to a fever pitch. People were going nuts.
Though the craft beer community is typically a very friendly, supportive community, I sometimes get a bit of flak. Someone will ask, “If you’re not a brewer, where do the recipes come from?” Or, “Don’t you want to make your own beer?” And those are legitimate questions. My honest answer is that I love to taste the flavors, but I didn’t want to be the brewer. I absolutely love to eat, but I really don’t have any interest in cooking. I didn’t know how to design a website, either, so I hired someone to do it. (Actually, first Christopher and then Matt did it for free, for a long time.) I hired a trademark lawyer (eventually), and an accountant (finally — twelve years in). Label printer, publicist, t-shirt maker… I describe what I want, and if I do it right, eventually we end up with something much better than I could ever have done myself, or even imagined.
I’d come a long way from the early days of my turkey reuben analogy. Working with Paul on new beers, I got to the point where I could clarify directions to the balance of flavors, the overall malt profiles, alcohol content, and the specific hop varieties. I’ll say, I’d like to stay away from black patent malts and focus more on caramels. Let’s add some oatmeal or wheat, pilsner malt, pale rye or crystal rye. And so on. Paul and I sampled a lot of different beers together, and he’s been able to calibrate his recipes to my tastebud preferences — much the same way Matt has been able to fulfill, and far surpass, my vision for the aesthetics of our brands.
It’s really just an evolving version of exactly what I’ve been doing since I started. In 2008, Jay Brooks wrote an article for an issue of Beer Advocate that profiled six “Bad-Ass Beer Advocates.” He wrote, “Shmaltz is arguably making some of the best contract-brewed beer in America.” There are caveats in that sentence, but there are a lot of companies that contract brew part, if not all, of their beers, including Sam Adams, Brooklyn, Harpoon, Blue Point, Southampton, 21st Amendment, Six Point, Pretty Things… And I drink them all. Great company to keep.
Matt came down with me to Washington D.C. for the Strong Beer Festival at the Brickskeller, a big supporter of ours over the years. I did my song and dance for another family of beer fanatics at the Brick’s annual gathering. Super-mensch Dave Alexander generously hosted us, as always, offering what will likely be called the Michael Jackson suite for eternity (the iconic beer writer, not the pop king). He also mentioned that the room had recently served as the Tomme Arthur suite (of Lost Abbey and Port Brewing).
Anyone familiar should fight off the mental image of Michael Jackson, Tomme Arthur, and me snuggling in one of those Brickskeller faux-brass twin beds. I certainly did.
Why a dozen high-alcohol samples of the region’s finest extreme beers wasn’t enough to satisfy our evening’s pleasure, I cannot say. But when our waitress, Kristin, bought us double shots of Jack Daniels and suggested a group move to the freak-show-themed bar Palace of Wonders for Coney Islands and more whiskey, we bounced through the rabbit hole and headed for the existential hangover certainly awaiting on the other side.
Also that month, Big Daddy Dave Keene’s infamous Barleywine Festival at San Francisco’s Toronado offered seventy or more ways to leave your lover and punish your liver. I did both. Or rather, I punished my liver and my girlfriend prepared to leave me. A whirlwind romance had started with a slightly buzzed cell-phone conversation outside Falling Rock at GABF in the fall with a soon to be not-completely-blind date. She would receive the first “I love you” I’d said to anyone since my divorce. She also challenged me to think about money, family, and a future beyond the road that would continue to elude me and compromise our relationship.
I was inspired, however, to throw all the modest profits from two years of Shmaltz into a IRA for myself and begin a commitment to a life of more Priceline hotels and fewer foldouts couches. Progress?
Perhaps you can see where this is heading: south. I went on from San Francisco to L.A., to Craig and Jsun’s warm hospitality and cold He’brew at the new The Other Room on Abbot Kinney in Venice for a Jewish community event that we’d been planning a long time. The crowd was too busy with each other to care about my shpiel, so I ended up yelling over the din a quick history of the company. Then I let them go strap on the Jewish beer goggles.
We partied the night away, and when I woke up, my body rejected me. After weeks of beer festivals and tenth anniversary goblets, I don’t believe I had one molecule of hydration in me. Gingerly traveling north, somewhere outside San Luis Obispo, I managed not to throw up on the poor college girl serving me soup and dry toast, and I drove on to Monterey to see my cousin. Stumbling to his door, I said, I think I need to go lie down. Now.
For a much-needed break from the self-inflicted damage, that spring I celebrated Passover in Morocco, a several-thousand-year-old Arab empire where alcohol is generally illegal, and what beer that does exist is rather undesirable. Family friends invited me to visit one of the few remaining Jewish families in Meknes, where we commemorated, with only four small cups of libation, the liberation of the Hebrews.