The 40 Days and 40 Nights beer tour, starting in fall 2003, had stretched across four and a half years of my life. Shmaltz Brewing had sold more He’brew beer than I’d ever thought possible. We’d introduced a second brand, Coney Island, that I’d never foreseen. I’d risked more credit destruction than any lender should’ve deemed reasonable.
I may have damaged my body a bit, but the distribution and marketing foundation built over those years would make viable all the new products, the new PR plans, and the aggressive revenue growth that followed. The intuitive business plan, incubated on a couple of stickies and hatched on one Excel spreadsheet, was working.
I decided it would be a good time to go home. At least for a few months.
With a few more real-life classes of business math under my belt, I took a look at the rents in San Francisco, which had more than doubled since I’d started my enterprise. I realized I’d be better off scraping together everything I could to buy the smallest apartment I could stomach to house myself and the global headquarters of Shmaltz Brewing. Sneaking in during the final death throes of “stated income” mortgages, in the spring of 2008 I put ten percent down on a 420-square-foot studio in one of the city’s eternally “transitional” neighborhoods, South of Market. “Transitional” in San Francisco means equal parts crackheads, junkies, and the associated social services of rehab centers, homeless shelters, and low income housing, all sitting directly next to the well-intentioned gentrifiers with cool shoes and a taste for a better latte. Specifically in SOMA, the economic step far above (but not far away from) the indigent included the longstanding leather-daddy bars, high-end scooter showrooms, and a cluster of dance spots hosting Asian club kids and Burning Man theme campers. Fortunately, a gourmet grocery store with a prepared foods section and an overstuffed salad bar sat at the end of my block. Even more importantly, my studio came with a deeded parking spot.
What my friends called my live-work cube did not come with any closets (the modernist/minimalist architect who designed the building was serious when he advised, “Just get rid of everything”). They’d generously installed a dishwasher, which I immediately sold on Craigslist, figuring the chances of me needing to do more than one or two dishes at a time were pretty close to zero. I put an all-in-one washer-dryer in its place — one of the best executive decisions I’ve made. Parallel to my brewing plans, my eating regimen remained almost exclusively contract-eating. My “cooking” at home entailed preparing an occasional bowl of cereal or a bagel toasted under the broiler.
I’ve eaten out nearly every meal for close to fifteen years. In 2010, having relocated my apartment and home office to the heart of the Mission, I challenged myself to eat two to three meals a day out, never at the same place, for sixty days. Success — I made it to seventy-five before returning to my first duplicate, appeasing a friend in dire desire of the chicken liver appetizer at Serpentine on Third Street. Over one hundred fifty different spots, mostly in the neighborhood, and I never came close to running out of eateries to explore.
In 2008, at age 38, I bought my first couch and my first new bed, as well as two plates and two sets of silverware and six beer glasses to serve the maximum number of friends I calculated could fit in the forty or so square feet of my “living room.” Coincidentally, my mom would soon be retiring to Montana, meaning the long-running storage facilities of Shmaltz Brewing would be closed forever when she sold her garage, along with the rest of her condo, in Palo Alto.
Leah secured us the smallest, cheapest rent-by-the-month storage locker we could find beneath the off-ramp of the 101, and we loaded in the boxes of old — I mean “vintage” if you see them pop up on eBay — Shmaltz materials, from promo posters to limited-edition baby shirts to early hand-painted tap handles.
Global headquarters consisted of a four-foot stainless steel desk, one three-drawer filing cabinet, and of course a collection of yellow stickies to track company priorities. An upgraded Macbook, a USB wireless card, and an unlimited-use cell phone meant no need for a landline or a cable connection. I’d make it three months in my new slice of the American dream before heading to New York for the summer and subletting my own apartment to someone else for the first time in my life.
I’d heard the cliché many times in the context of business-speak: “Plowing the profits back into the company.” Even after well over a decade of ostensibly being a “businessman,” I don’t think I could have defined exactly what it meant on paper, or in practice. Likely not a coincidence, since I had so little experience with profits. I aced that real-life class in 2008.
Following the plan from Eva’s prophetic spreadsheet to my profit-and-loss statement, now generated quarterly by the recent addition of a freelance bookkeeper, Shmaltz Brewing started making money. And as fast as it started rolling in I started spending it — on the business.
I’d done three to four ride-withs each day and several evening and weekend events nearly every week for almost five years. Managing twenty-five or so monthly distributor orders, event planning, marketing materials, press release edits, and media interviews, all the accounting, the ongoing landslide of customer emails, donation requests, compliments and constructive criticisms, and making time for the new products we were cranking out — all while on the road. I was cooked.
Whether coincidence or confluence, the company started generating the profits that allowed me to hire talented and committed people to push the Shmaltz vision beyond anything my one-man show could handle.
Still purposefully without an org chart, I had gathered a posse of co-workers. Leah inherited the virtual office mantle from Angela to handle admin and the zillion projects that the company (or I) would cook up repeatedly; Matt split time on art and sales in and around New York; Darren in Atlanta covered the South, and Zak in San Francisco juggled the West. Everyone cranking throttle. On monthly retainer for Shmaltz, perched above Mission Street at the modest headquarters of his own entrepreneurial outpost, Jesse spun out press releases and media blasts, lighting up the phones and cajoling journalists, from the biggest nationals to the neighborhood Jewish newsletters. In my head, (and I suppose outside my head as well) Shmaltz Brewing suddenly became a real company.
Yet with the new employees, I was becoming what I always feared: a manager. For so many years, customers, distributors, and buyers simply referred to me in the singular as “the He’brew Guy.” Having had so much practice without staff, I continued to think of myself less as the Boss than as simply a creator, or perhaps the Producer.
Even after three years, the role of manager still feels new to me, and sometimes awkward. I wanted to create a company more like a family than an organization. I’m realizing as I write this that I’m unconsciously mimicking my primary role model: not a business leader, but a Jewish mother. With high expectations for those around me and high hopes for their own personal development, my response to shortcomings and missed opportunities commonly sounds something like, “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.”21
Whenever I meet people and mention that I run the company, the response is usually the same: “Wow, this is your job? That must be the best job ever!”
I often say that I don’t want to taint the glamorous image of the freewheeling small-beer business owner with gritty details of real struggles (other than the three hundred or so pages here), so I encourage the fantasy and suggest they buy our beer to touch the magic.
However, there are certain moments that even I can appreciate: Wow, is this really my job?
Tasting a box full of our favorite beers from around the country and around the world as part of serious R&D for designing new beers is just such a moment.
From the first round with Simon at a table outside Brewmakers to the dozen times I’ve been responsible for “research” with Paul, the process has been the same: instructive and scrumptious.
For Albino Python, I grabbed a sample of everything I could find stocked at Bierkraft in Brooklyn that seemed within the realm of white or wheat beers. We tasted probably eighteen different micros and imports, searching for the elements in each that reflected our aspirations for our own creation.
Much like any “proper” beer tasting, we go through the elements of a formal beer judging, starting with clean glasses and a quiet moment of anticipation.
From here I’ll borrow from the non-profit Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) official guidelines. Hit their website for tons of great info at bjcp.org.
Appearance: Simple enough: Look at the beer. But is it simple? Color, clarity, lacing of the foamy head. Some beers are designed to be crystal clear, others to be light but cloudy, with dense stouts to completely block out the light. Does the beer achieve its intention?
Aroma: A distinct size advantage for some members of my tribe — bury your nose in the smell of it all. For purposely hoppy beers, the floral and citrus notes of a strong IPA, especially when dry-hopped, bring first enjoyment even from afar. Moving closer, explore the malts - bready, biscuit, sweet or spicy grains. The smell of a neighborhood bakery, or the brew pub down the street.
Flavor: Finally — drink it! Sweet or bitter up front. Chocolate or grapefruit, raisins or cornmeal — the flavors, especially over the last several years, have expanded exponentially. Let the liquid explore your mouth and seek out the nooks and crannies of the subtle — or extreme — spectrum of tastes to enjoy.
Mouthfeel: Light on the pallet or thick, viscous, and chewy. Does the carbonation help or hurt experiencing the flavors? Smooth textures or rough edges — important for both the intention of the brewer as well as the enjoyment of the drinker.
Overall Impression: Did you like it?! Did it accomplish what the label/brewer stated as the goal? Do you want to keep sipping, quaffing, gulping?
Work, work, work!
For Albino Python, we whittled it down to Hitachino white, Allagash white, and Hoegaarden as points of reference. I love tasting beers right next to each other that I might otherwise think seem pretty similar. Sip to sip, the variations come through so clearly, revealing a world of difference even within comparable styles. The intensity of the wheat profile, various spices, the mouthfeel and carbonation, and the overall flavor directions of the three offered perfect points of departure for my discussion with Paul. And they tasted so good.
As with nearly all our beers, we decided to go for a hybrid version of several styles. Every year this decision proves painfully problematic at Great American Beer Festival, since none of our beers are brewed to classic “style guidelines.” Comments every year come back something like, “Great overall beer, but not close enough to style for medal consideration.” The awards we’ve won, which have been enough to justify bragging, usually come from wider categories such as “Best in Show” or alternative catch-all groupings such as “Alternative Lager” or “Experimental Belgian.” Not a huge concern — we usually just brew to impress our friends, beer cohorts, and, most importantly, ourselves.
Paul designed the Python flavors to come through as a bastardized Belgian wit with a touch of German hefe, though with a heavy dose of American craft taste and attitude. The grain bill included specialty two-row barley, about forty percent wheat malt, acidulated malt, pilsner malt, and oatmeal. Hops included warrior to bitter, and saaz and summit for flavor and aroma.
Paul suggested we include spices from well-known beer styles but not in any traditional combination: ginger, sweet orange peel, and crushed fennel seed. I said, Hell yeah, go for originality. Even at six percent alcohol, Python could be considered an “extreme” beer because of the unusual ingredients and brewing process.
All the beers I’d brought and could find were brewed with top fermenting Ale yeast. However, this mashup of styles and ingredients would be brewed with lager yeast. As far as we knew, Albino Python would be the only White Lager… in the world! (Not positive, but happy to hype it as such until proven wrong. Please send samples for confirmation to address at front of book.)
The day we poured the first cold Pythons at S.K.I., the Italian salesmen loved the spices and were ready to bring it home to drink with pizza and family recipes. Because of its multi-layered flavors, we continue to use the beer at nearly every beer dinner we do, pairing with dishes like sushi-grade smoked salmon and wasabi crème fraiche and house-made, chorizo-stuffed calamari with squid ink risotto. At Brouwer’s for Seattle Beer Week in 2010, they even prepared an actual python as a special dish for the night. Scary, but tasty.
Since Heather, the Coney Island sword swallower, tended toward sweeter tonics, I warned her ahead of time that our tribute to her might be a little rough on her palette. But her performances offered the perfect foil for an aggressive hoppy lager: sharp, strong and steely but also delicate, poised, well-composed. Paul designed a seven-percent robust IPA recipe for Sword Swallower, with barley, rye, wheat and pale Vienna malts for the lightest colored (yet still complex) beer we offered. The hops drew from European sources but served up a huge helping of Pacific Northwest flavor and aroma hops, dry-hopping with IPA favorites, crystal, cascade and amarillo. We weren’t sure how the lager yeast would affect the overall beer, but the characteristic clean finish and slightly softer texture have made Sword probably my favorite “session-ish” (for seven percent) beer in our portfolio. And we love working with Heather whenever possible, even if she prefers a Mermaid Pilsner or a vodka and pineapple juice.
And the maestro of the whole beer carnival: Mr. Donny Vomit, the MC of the Sideshow with his signature act the Human Blockhead. When the shtick can so beautifully inspire the beer, Shmaltz Brewing shines.
Powerful, intense, raucous, a standout. And — as with the Sword — alarming, precise, and graceful. Commanding.
I looked to the strong European lagers for inspiration, buying a box of boozy options from our pals at City Beer in San Francisco. Zak and I sampled the medley, and I narrowed down my scheme to something in the neighborhood of the fabled and noble high gravity legends, Eku 28 and Samiclaus Helles.
Kelly and I had banged out a loose idea for a recipe the year before, and he threw together a test batch one-off at Greenpoint that had turned out well and sold through at several bars in New York City. Over the phone, Paul and I worked to refine the flavors, preparing for the national launch as our lead Coney seasonal. We went though our five steps of “pro” beer tasting simultaneously, over the phone.
We knew we could not afford the many months of brewing and aging of the coveted originals, but the grain bill aimed to coax a luscious adaptation of what we knew we could create: our own bad-ass American version of a strong European lager. Munich and Vienna malts, pale and crystal rye, wheat and flaked oats gave the Blockhead a huge, complex malt foundation. Warrior, horizon, tettnang, palisade, crystal and hallertauer displayed a cornucopia of both continental and clearly U.S. craft hop flavors. Donny (and many others) loved the beer. I knew Paul had nailed it.
The summer of 2008 marked my sixth annual pilgrimage to New York for the summer selling season. To launch our Coney Island Craft Lagers, we organized a bash at the Gate on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, one of our favorite bars in Brooklyn. We brought in the sideshow acts, Donny (Human Blockhead), Heather (Sword Swallower), and Stephanie (Albino Python) to perform in the standing-room-only inside bar.
The crowd was pretty well boozed up, and I jumped on the bench seats and started yelling MC-style, hollering about the great craft beer scene in Brooklyn, barking about the evolution of Shmaltz. I introduced the maestro Mr. Donny Vomit, who jumped on the bar and jammed a power drill into his nose. The place went nuts.
Coney looked to be a bit of a different beast than He’brew.
Matt and I glanced at each other across the rocking bar and mouthed “H-O-L-Y S-H-I-T.”
In addition to putting the performers in front of every room we could manage, it also seemed like a good plan to start protecting our Shmaltz assets and my evolving enterprise.
My friend Jon had been pounding me year after year to get my trademarks in place. I made one brief attempt to handle it myself a few years earlier, and then I accidentally let the trademark for He’brew slip. I didn’t realize renewal is mandatory every five years. After all the headache of going through the buyout in 1999, I essentially owned nothing: no recorded copyrights, no registered trademarks, no intellectual property. I had common law rights from simply using the marks, which carried some legitimate weight, but in the scheme of rock-solid protection of goods, I had zilch.
Jon gave me the name of his trademark lawyer in New York, saying, “For this kinda stuff, I want a pit bull of a Jewish lawyer with a Manhattan address.” Fitting the spirit of Jon’s colorful commentary towards foes of her clients though absolutely lovely in person, Barbara has become one of my most gracious and truly invaluable vendors.
Perhaps it’s lucky I started investing in a lawyer as the recession slammed New York City: She has been very understanding of my own financial limitations, and she and her firm have been incredibly flexible in working within my budget. Even so, they’ve been completely professional and thorough in protecting my brands.
I knew it was going to be tricky for Coney Island — in general, geographic names cannot be easily trademarked. Several years back I’d had the idea to make a light beer and call it Israelite: “Tastes great, more fulfilling… You shall be a Light unto the Nations (Isaiah 42:6).” Perfect shtick for the lineup, but the U.S. P.T.O. sent back the trademark application, rejected based on the geographic reference. Since I wouldn’t have likely wanted to drink much of the beer, they saved me the effort.
Still, Brooklyn Brewery seemed to have gotten their trademark, as had Sam Adams for Boston Lager. Then I saw an article about somebody who was marketing, of all things, a Coney Island perfume. Ah, the invigorating scent of the sea… and sweaty amusement park operators, knife fights, sausages…
I told Barbara about it and she said, “Actually, that was my client.” In a city swarming with lawyers, Jewish or otherwise, this was unbelievable — kismet, my legal beshert.
At the time of this telling, we’ve trademarked just about everything we make — all the brand names and company marks, “Coney Island” for beer and brewing services22, even soda pop (coming soon). We registered “Freaktoberfest” and “Geektoberfest” for both the beers themselves that we produce and the festivals we’ve promoted in Brooklyn and around the country. The entourage of He’brew Beers have finally all been filed into the P.T.O. hall of trademark justice. After negotiation with a Mexican tequila company and an evangelical Christian spring water bottler, one final loose end should get tied up momentarily to finally register our flagship brand, Genesis Ale, nearly fourteen years in.
For all the right reasons, Barbara has me right where she wants me. Now we have to protect all these trademarks. Over the past year we’ve had multiple incidents demanding legal attention for our marks. Coincidence? She’s like the trademark drug dealer: she gave me the first few for free, and I just keep coming back for more. Intellectual property junkie — hit me.
My first run-in with trademark complications came very early in the business, right when I started, from a guy who ran a snack company called Meshuganuts. Much like I had, he started the venture at home, in his garage in San Francisco. A couple months after I started He’brew, I’d asked his advice about the business, and he had been really helpful (though he warned me he’d seen very few examples of Jewish products the community supported over the long haul). He gave me leads and contacts, and overall was a great resource. And I loved the name — seriously, Meshuganuts?! Wish I’d thought of it… and felt like selling nuts all day long.
Maybe four weeks later, I got a letter from either him or his lawyer, I can’t remember which: “Dear Mr. Cowan: Please cease and desist your entire project. Using Jewish humor, illustrations, and puns in branding is owned by Meshuganuts.” He was making pecan shortbread cookies. We should have been co-marketing at the grocery store, not waging a war of words. He sold his company a couple of years later to a national confectionary giant, likely relieved of his burden.
I got another absurd cease-and-desist over the graphics for Origin. Matt hand-drew an abstracted pomegranate tree, for the background and Poma Liqueur sent another three-pager on heavy linen cream paper stock, filled with bluster and accusation, demanding we remove the image. They charged that we’d stolen their logo.
1. Matt personally drew ours, and we’d not even looked at the Poma bottle or their marketing other than in passing as one of a hundred bottles on most back bars. 2. Come on, guys — dancing rabbis blowing a shofar and floating in a kiddie pool of pomegranates… I just don’t think anyone will be confused.
When it comes to trademark disputes, you will inevitably find yourself on both sides. In the spring of 2009, I was contacted by a guy who was leaving his head brewer’s job at a larger regional brewery to start his own packaging microbrewery in upstate New York.
The town name, Canandaigua, is an Iroquois word meaning “chosen spot.” He told me he wanted to call the brewery Chosen Spot Brewing and wanted to confirm with me that I wouldn’t have a problem with the name. I said I appreciated him getting in touch, and that, yes, I owned the federal trademark for the phrase “Chosen Beer.” I’d used the phrase on every bottle and every marketing piece for the brand and my company for thirteen years. I see it as a fundamental element to our identity. (I didn’t explain the nightmare of retaining the phrase through the early ATF label approval insanity.) I pointed out that there is not one other beer of the tens of thousands of beer names from over 1500 breweries in this country that uses the word “chosen” in the brand. In closing, I really needed to discourage him from using it.
He said, “I’ve got to tell you, my lawyer says it’s going to be fine.” I was pissed.
Over several months I repeatedly urged him to reconsider and even offered to find a compromise. Maybe he could just use it as a descriptive line attached to the brand specifically in town, since that was where people would recognize the slogan.
Simply the potential for customer confusion is the test for trademark infringement, and I couldn’t imagine that if we had big banners reading “The Chosen Beer” next to “Chosen Spot Brewing” in the New York section at Great American Beer Festival, no one would come up and say, “Hey, are you guys connected?”
Barbara looked it up, and she saw that he hadn’t trademarked the name yet. We figured it was going to cost me between $25,000 and $50,000 to sue him after he opened. So I decided to take another tack and put out a beer of our own called Chosen Spot.
At the tail end of my summer sublet in Brooklyn, in the shower one morning, I came up with the shtick for a fake brand. The next week, Matt and I designed the label in five hours.
We had a batch of Coney Island Mermaid Pilsner coming up, so Bob at the brewery pushed through label approval. We shipped a pallet to our local wholesaler and we had cases of Chosen Spot Pilsner in the guy’s hometown within forty days. It was definitely ruthless and sneaky, but better, I thought, than us spending $100,000 arguing in court.
I never heard back from him. I did what I thought was necessary — what I thought was the cheapest and most efficient solution to protect myself and the company. I also felt conflicted about it the whole time. After years in the business, clearly this guy was finally pursuing his own craft beer dream, and before it even opens he’s got this giant mess.
Months later I read an article that said he was spending close to a million dollars to open his brewery. It turned out he was going to change the name anyway. With plenty of experience and resources behind him, I’m sure he’ll do well.
Interestingly, for a while both Chosen Spot and Mermaid Pilsner were reviewed on Rate Beer and Beer Advocate with rather varied ratings, given the fact that they were the same beer. I still love the real t-shirts we got printed out for the fake rollout.
“WELL, I MEAN, WHO CHOSE IT?”
Right from the introduction of our new white lager from Coney Island, Albino Python got up and started running… before it crawled. I’d asked Paul to design a robust, unfiltered, unpasteurized wheat beer brewed with cold fermenting lager yeast. The brewery had produced many different white beers over the years for themselves and their contracts such as Southampton. But all the ales had been processed with top fermenting ale yeast. We thought it should work as planned; however, since there weren’t any other white lagers we’d found, we had nothing to go by.
The first batch tasted so lovely. As I mentioned, the day we poured samples for the S.K.I. reps, the Italian guys tasted basil and chided us for not bringing quattro stagione pizza or primavera to pair with it. The whole crew loved the aroma and the complexity of the herbal spices and floral hops.
They went out and just sold the beer. We shot straight to twenty-five, then fifty kegs for the month, growing every day. Only a year earlier, we’d been selling maybe ten to fifteen kegs per month of our entire portfolio. Having a hot seller jump straight to number two in sales for us was a great sign. And I simply loved to drink that beer.
About six weeks after the launch, The Python suddenly curled up and refused to move — literally. Whether it was the lager yeast dropping to the bottom of the keg and clogging the flow of beer through the stem, or whether the lager yeast still active enough at the cold temperature was going through secondary fermentation in the keg — likely both — it simply wouldn’t pour. Chunks of clotted yeast or endless foam would spew out of every keg online in the city. Within two weeks sales plummeted.
Even after over a decade in the beer business, I did not know enough technical details to respond quickly or effectively. We stumbled through apologies and begged for patience as we flipped the kegs upside down to move the yeast away from the stem. We asked the bars to gently roll the kegs to try to get the yeast back into suspension so it would pour correctly. You can imagine the response of the average New York bar owner when asked to manually massage a keg several times a day inside his already jam-packed cold box. The t-shirts on Bleecker sell here for a reason: Fuck you, you fucking fuck.
The kegs turned out to be an ominous sign. Clearly enough yeast remained active to over-pressurize even the bottles. The first report came from one of our most important accounts in the Midwest, Binny’s in Chicago. Two bottles displayed in the cold box exploded with enough force to shatter the entire cooler door.
They pulled all the bottles off all the shelves of the chain, and we scrambled to figure out what the hell was going on and how the hell we might fix it. Rather remarkably, I’d never experienced a brewing problem before — never a spoiled batch and never a packaging concern.
I called my business liability insurance company, who’d specifically targeted small brewers by marketing through the Brewers Association. They told me recalls were not covered by my insurance. I was shocked. Isn’t this exactly why we have coverage for worst-case scenarios?
They said I was covered for any damages that might occur if someone got injured after the fact — lost an eye or cut open a hand — but the decision, and the cost of trying to prevent that catastrophe, fell completely on me.
Over my years of bartending, I’d had plenty of bottles blow up from much bigger companies such Bud and Heineken. We all knew it was a part of the business. But this was my baby. Trying to explain the situation to concerned buyers and wholesalers felt almost as painful as imagining what I stood to lose if the situation got much worse.
In this case, being so small turned out to help my cause. Since we hadn’t packaged all that many cases and the beer had been a big hit from the start, not much remained from the early batches on shelves or at wholesalers.
I stopped shipping and destroyed what was left of the batches at the brewery, and we took back problem cases from wholesalers and retailers. Particularly perplexing, it seemed not all bottles were experiencing the problem, so we’d never know where the next report would come from.
As of fall 2010, we filter and pasteurize the beer, just to be safe. I know some craft beer brethren are shaking their heads in disappointment at the “killing” of our beloved “live” beer. But I’ve tasted both versions, and I still absolutely adore the current flavor. And I especially love that we won’t harm anyone, or our own future, in the process.
The ad campaign for our new addition to the Coney family of beers should have read: “Don’t order yet, Friends. Once you’ve enjoyed the explosive taste of Coney Island Albino Python, you also get, thrown in at no extra charge — a frivolous lawsuit! Cheers!”
Just as I was coming up for air on the recall, a completely unexpected kick to the nuts: The snake-dance performer depicted on the label filed a lawsuit against me for $250,000. She had emailed me that winter that she thought she wasn’t making enough money from the product. Was I just another person who was going to screw the Sideshow, like so many had in the past?
My agreement was with the Sideshow itself, the arts organization that employed the performers. The organization was supposed to work out separate agreements with the performers; Shmaltz wasn’t supposed to be involved in those negotiations. (However, as everyone involved regularly quips, “It is a freak show, after all.”)
I forwarded her email to the Sideshow management with a note to please respond and take care of her concerns. Six months after the email, I got a letter at my P.O. box in San Francisco from her lawyer. They were suing me personally (not the company, and not the Sideshow) for a quarter-million dollars. I remember I called him from my cell phone as I left my studio apartment on Howard Street in my ‘97 Pathfinder. I got straight through to him — strange for a lawyer with a midtown Manhattan address not to have a secretary. The moment I mentioned who I was and why I was calling he launched into a tirade, screaming, “LISTEN, MR. BIG SHOT! YOU BETTER COME OUTTA YOUR FANCY OFFICES AND THAT EXPENSIVE CAR AND TELL YOUR INSURANCE AGENT THAT YOU’VE BEEN SCREWING A TALENTED ARTIST. NOW YOU’RE GONNA PAY!”
I replied with rare calm, given the situation, “Sir, your letter is the first I have even heard of the lawsuit. You need to stop screaming at me.” Loved the “fancy offices” bit.
I’ve definitely been responsible for plenty of negativity in the world, and I’m culpable for many failings. This, one hundred percent, was not one of them. I’d been approached by a non-profit arts organization for a licensing project that would generate needed funds. I’d done my part. Now one person they employed was blaming me, and holding the organization unaccountable for a perceived injustice. She was suing me for far more than the total sales of the entire product line.
But the goddess of conflict resolution was smiling on Shmaltz that summer. Maggie, who was friendly with the Sideshow, miraculously saved the entire situation from utter calamity. A Manhattan corporate lawyer for years, she decided to change her career and help non-profits and small businesses whenever possible. She patiently responded to the lawyer’s absurd bluster, gave the Sideshow time to regroup, and urged the people involved to settle the dispute among themselves. I can’t thank her enough.
I was terrified that the other performers were thinking the same way and that the whole project would unravel. I was so relieved to find out they were not in any way feeling taken advantage of, and we’ve continued to work together whenever possible in New York City and around the country.
Surviving the madness offered the chance to make my working relationship with the Sideshow much healthier. We’ve been able to achieve a more productive level of communication, and, as I mentioned, they are our number one account in the country. When the world gives you exploding lawsuits of lemons, make lem-… no, wait — just make more beer.
Our tiny company was growing exponentially. At the end of 2008, Jesse could legitimately send out a press release announcing that Shmaltz Brewing sales had grown ten times what they’d been just five years before. Shmaltz had a staff around the country, distribution in nearly thirty states, and a growing appreciation of our diverse lineup. The company had come a long way from the two 5.5% ales I’d sold on a solo mission crisscrossing the U.S. We’d been able to participate with the best craft beers in the country at special events, from Extreme Beer Festival to GABF to high-end beer dinners and boutique beer pairings.
S.K.I. had a strapping young street rep with great intentions and a mouthful of urban dictionary-isms. He handled the East Village and the Lower East Side, crucial territories for our brands. Tired of selling so many brands and chasing down so many bad checks, Sean told Matt and me that he was planning to leave S.K.I., and he wondered whether we could make some room for him on our supplier side. He loved the idea of working with a smaller portfolio, and ours was the one he was most excited about. He was a non-Jewish guy who just really loved great beer.
I’d spent so long thinking of the company as my personal project that the idea of someone not already connected to me approaching us for a job still seemed astonishing. Sure, I’d get the occasional blanket email looking for a position in the “organization,” or in the “warehouse” or the “marketing department.” Hated to burst their bubbles. Why would someone venture their career and their paycheck on the dancing rabbi and the Sideshow freaks?
I asked Ralph’s permission to talk to Sean about a job with us. The last thing I wanted to do was risk my relationship with one of our most important customers. Ralph was very cool about it and knew Sean was ready to leave, so I hired Sean part-time and sent him outside of S.K.I.’s territory.
I’d gotten used to asking new employees to pay their dues in a part-time role. My strategy was to force them to force me to hire them. And every one of them did it. Sean was no exception.
After a few months working on our surrounding markets, he came back to focus on S.K.I.’s territory. He knew their system — the schedule, the ordering, the reps and the manager’s expectations. He would prove extremely valuable helping us grow to make S.K.I. our biggest distributor, particularly with the expansion of the Coney brands through specialty beer bars and, most important, neighborhood hangouts. He would stay passionate about the beers and committed to the company throughout our growth. However, unfortunately, as Ralph later remarked, sometimes a company’s needs outgrow the individuals that got it there. This would be the case with Sean, who needed to move on over the past summer.
In the fall of 2008, Leah took over from Angela as my official administrative go-to. Leah had interned for me for years, many of those while still underage, while she was going to Emory University. She’d done all the research for the numbers eight, nine, ten for Jewbelation, and for pomegranates, figs, and dates for Rejewvenator. Her cousin Kevin had been my first-ever intern. I knew I could rely on her. The family tree was growing stronger and stronger.
None of us are exactly sure whether Jesse thought he was hitting on Melissa at Beer Advocate’s American Craft Beer fest in Boston. But after a final buzzed chat (this was the month before he met Robyn, the love of his life), Melissa got in touch about entering the sisterhood of the Shmaltz Internship.
We put her to task immediately, and her talents and sensibility became an obvious fit for our small but growing tribe. She would take on full-time responsibility for Massachusetts before moving down to New York to help with S.K.I. and juggling Indiana, Michigan, western Pennsylvania, a bit of Ohio, and even some of Nebraska. She’s also become our Twitter queen on the East Coast.
From the day I wrote my first business plan, my mom has always encouraged me that one day I’d have enough help that I’d be able to focus on the stuff I’m good at (and want to do). If I didn’t have a new product, a big event, or some other distraction-slash-evolution-slash-challenge, I’m not sure how I would have stayed alive through the grind. It’s the whole reason I did this in the first place: Wouldn’t it be cool if...
Perfect example: Freaktoberfest. Our buddies Pat from the Gate (now the Smuttynose sales manager) and Ben, the grand poobah of my (and many small breweries’) long time top account, Bierkraft, had been kicking around the idea of a Park Slope beer festival.
With years of experience and beer connections and an impossible-to-miss ZZ Top beard, Pat served as the dirty rock ‘n’ roll Santa Claus of the Brooklyn craft beer scene. And Ben, one of the most enthusiastic and sophisticated beer-and-cheese geeks I’ve ever met, brought the grassroots network of customers, potential volunteers, and technical skills needed to pull it together.
Matt and I pitched them on doing a fest with us. We didn’t mean to take over the branding of the event, but the guys were totally into it.
To fill out the team, we recruited Erica, who managed a burlesque bar in Prospect Heights, the too-short-lived Barrette, and DJ Mikey Palms, co-owner of Southpaw and Public Assembly, our Jewish homeboy and hookup to the local underground music scene.
On one of many brainstorm-filled drives we took together, on our way back from D.C. earlier that summer, Matt and I had thought of an idea for a beer festival specifically focused on the Coney Island beers that would bring all our very favorite brewers from around the region and across the country to Brooklyn for a craft beer rager.
Though I loved the name, Schlocktoberfest wouldn’t reflect the quality of the great beers we wanted to present. Shocktoberfest sounded way too Clear Channel rock jock.
Freaktoberfest fit the bill perfectly. We could pimp our seasonal Halloween release as well as brand a killer party.
Since we didn’t own a brewery, Matt and I figured if we had our own beer festival, it would give us an excuse to bring people to us to present the beers in the way we wanted to showcase them. We wanted to remind our fellow beer geeks that beer is still supposed to be fun. Step inside and experience great craft beer, with go-go dancers and brass bands and rockin’ DJs.
At the same time, we wanted to expose ambitious micros to people who might not otherwise be all that interested — people who might be drinking PBR or Red Stripe, or whatever’s on special — but who would love the rocking party. People who already respect indie music and indie movies and like local restaurants and alternative culture — those people should be drinking indie beer as well.
Once you expose those people to the complex, wild, and exciting flavors of the most creative beers coming from independent small breweries — whether a barrel-aged American brown sour brewed with exotic spices and multiple yeast strains that might take six months to two years to produce, or an American take on a European low gravity fruit beer, or a mead/malt blend unlike anything they’d tasted before — they usually realize, “Damn, this is amazing stuff!”
We figured the perfect place to kick off what we’d hoped would grow into an annual gathering (coming up on our third annual as I write) would be at the Sideshow at Coney Island U.S.A.
Once we got the posse in place, we had about a month to pull it together. Even with so little time to plan, the night came together beautifully. We had a blast.
Mikey nailed down the music acts and the bands set up in front of the historic old bank building on West 12th Street across from the Sideshow. Erica booked the best burlesque and go-go dancers she knew. Ben pulled together a crew of volunteers and worked with Pat and me to nail down the brewery lineup. Matt jammed out the graphics and designed the website with online ticket sales. Jesse pounded down his phone lists and invited the media.
The breweries who came brought only their specialty beers. Downstairs, we asked for styles more on the sessionable side, four to seven percent alcohol, but no flagships of widely distributed brands. The V.I.P. room upstairs featured only rare and obscure beers from our favorite breweries, with special burlesque performances just for the private room. We had one unbelievable beer after another — Lost Abbey, the new Dogfish Head, Southampton, Hair of the Dog, Allagash, Firestone Walker.
I was blown away. I’d been hitting festivals for thirteen years, and I’d never seen the stunning selection we were able to pull together. Great beer, roller derby women, dancing girls, rocker chicks, and the men who love them all. Spectacular.
While we were pulling in the Brooklyn beer freaks and beer geeks, we also got an invitation from a local staffer, who loved our beers, to join the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.
I figured it seemed like an appropriately grown-up business decision to make, so we joined as a networking opportunity, hoping to connect with some retail accounts in the borough. Though my disposition is generally not probusiness of the kind that seems to dominate many Chambers of Commerce, everyone in Brooklyn was surprisingly nice, helpful, and supportive.
Just a few months later, we ended up winning the Distinguished Business award for community-based small businesses and organizations. The honorees at the annual gala were the president of Pratt Institute, a hip new downtown hotel, and Shmaltz Brewing.
I’d seen Marty Markowitz, the president of the Borough of Brooklyn, on TV for so many years, typically holding a Junior’s cheesecake in one hand and a Brooklyn Lager in the other. It was a treat to be introduced by this flamboyant Jewish icon at the ceremony at the Brooklyn Museum.
After all my tongue-in-cheek braggadocio spewed out over the years of Shmaltz Brewing, the freeway signs along the BQE (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) took on a slightly different feeling:
“Believe the hype!” (westbound, at Kosciuszko Bridge)23
We had our first company-wide meeting during San Francisco Beer Week that winter. Leah and I planned all-day staff meetings, and then the crew went to events that Zak had pulled together every night. Beer dinners, happy hours, pub crawls — a jam packed calendar to highlight so many things we’d accomplished as a company. We barely survived. By the last afternoon of Toronado’s famed Barleywine Festival, we were all ready for a vacation.
Still, in some specific ways, we got more accomplished in one week than I had in years. I printed out profit-and-loss statements for us all to review and sales reports by distributor, by territory. Line by line, we went over what the company spent, what it made, and where we spent it and made it. Everything was open for discussion, and everyone could see the bottom line.
My friend Jim donated his loft for our off-site. When we first sat down, I looked up, and everyone was looking at me. I’d made such a scramble to get all the data together, I realized I hadn’t given one second of thought to what I should say as a manager, or what I should do as a leader.
So I opened my mouth, as I tend to do, and started yapping. I tried to speak from the truth of the moment. I told them how bizarre and exciting, and how meaningful, it was for me to have this group of people bring their talents, their time, and their energy to a project I felt like I’d been doing alone for so long.
The week was a huge success and a turning point for me. I saw the staff throwing themselves into their jobs, and began to see that I could delegate and truly rely on them to follow through with a similar care and commitment that I’d demanded of myself.
Unfortunately, one area I couldn’t toss off my plate were the huge credit card debts that I relied on to keep us afloat. Given that I’d seriously exaggerated my income in the first place, perhaps I should not have been so self-righteous in my fury when the recession started my credit lines receding. However, I’d made payments every month and paid the necessary interest and balances and kept in great standing — with a credit rating much higher than my Stanford-qualifying SAT scores.
With literally five working days’ notice, the credit card that I used to pay for company expenses just closed. I had been using the one card for several years to pay for everything from hops to travel to FedEx to pint glasses, point-of-sale materials and so much more. Not a bankruptcy or buy-out, they sent a one-page letter in the mail that simply stated the lender would no longer extend credit and my account would be terminated. Thirty-five thousand dollars of cushion ripped out from under me.
After receiving TARP funds from the taxpayers to allow for their own survival, Chase unilaterally changed the terms of a balance transfer offer I’d accepted and had been paying down every month for eighteen months. The minimum monthly payment went up one hundred and fifty percent, and the payout changed from five years to two years. The balance was still sixty thousand dollars when the accelerated payments began, which meant just the increase added up to nearly my mortgage.
It didn’t need to happen overnight, but I knew I should start planning to cover my butt as our sales continued to grow and my financial resources continued to dry up.
Throughout the first two years of the recession, with front-page lip service paid by government and bright new billboard ads by banks targeting small business as the “engine of growth” and “driver of new jobs,” yadda yadda, I figured it must be a good time to approach banks to help finance what now had been five years of profitability and growth for Shmaltz.
For all the economic hardship of 2009 and into 2010, all the suffering and unemployment, the foreclosures, the widespread problems in the country, craft beer continues to grow. One nagging problem continues to be that small businesses haven’t been able to come up with the resources to support their growth or to get out from under the debt they’ve created.
It hasn’t been a lack of demand. In 2009, overall U.S. beer sales were down two percent and import sales were down nearly ten percent. In contrast, craft beer dollar-sales grew ten percent in 2008 and 2009 and look to be on the same pattern for 2010. Shmaltz’s numbers have auspiciously stayed well above that pace.
When we were named one of the “Top 20 Fastest Growing Companies” in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times, I received multiple inquiries from local lenders claiming just such small-business loan expertise. One well-wisher quickly dropped out when they realized we didn’t own a brewery, real estate, or equipment.
I went to the local bank that I’ve used since my first month in San Francisco, when I opened a little personal savings account in 1995. Originally on the upper floors of the Bank of America building downtown with an breathtaking panorama of San Francisco, they’d been so inviting: “Why don’t you bring your friends up for the view?”
Fifteen years later, with my business looking to break two million in sales, I was greeted by a silver-haired, sixty-something gentleman in a three-piece pinstripe blue banker suit. Sitting at a conference table, he opened by saying, “I have to tell you how impressed we are. After thirteen years of business, you’ve really paid your dues. And I can tell from talking to you, and looking at your business, the company is clearly on a roll. My local BevMo has eight of your beers at eye level, in stock at all times. I’ve looked at your profit-and-loss statement, and I’ve been reading about you in the local media.”
Frustratingly, for the last three months of the previous year, this same banker would not even return my phone calls. I finally had to threaten that if he didn’t call me back by “this afternoon,” I’d be pulling the rest of my paltry savings account out of this bank and never coming back. This meeting came a month into our renewed negotiation.
I think he was sincere in saying some of the nicest things anybody’s said to me in a professional setting that I can remember. But in the end they ran me through a relentless series of fiery hoops, until a botched accounts payable audit on their end undid the whole deal. After four months of hours and hours of answering questions, providing documentation, running and re-running reports — all wasted effort.
The same thing happened in New York with a lender who, according to their small-business loan specialist, was a “very enthusiastic and extremely well-funded, working people’s bank.” After many more painfully detailed demands, they pulled a flawed real estate appraisal off the Internet, which skewed all our numbers and undermined the agreement, dashing nearly five months of work.
But the worst insult probably came from the bank I’d been doing business with for the entire history of my company, Wells Fargo.
In a year in which I would deposit over two million dollars and carry a healthy daily balance at all times, Wells Fargo would not even extend a ten-thousand dollar business credit card to me — at any interest rate — to buy the shirts and merchandise we wanted to stock at the storefront brewery for summer in Coney Island.
My much bigger concern — the hundred and fifty thousand dollars I needed to support our inventory growth — for them was out of the question. One of their reasons for turning me down: too many requests for credit increases on my credit report. Most of the requests, however, had come from them.
Finally, a smaller San Francisco-based bank that focuses on green tech companies and some New Age beverage products threw me an eight-percent-interest bone for a hundred thousand dollar unsecured line of credit. I had to close out some credit cards, so my total available debt may have even gone down from the deal.
Thankfully, this past year has been by far the most prosperous period in the history of the company. We sell more beer in one month now than I sold in my first year and a half in business. At the end of 2009, still plowing the profits back into the company, I found myself with $125,000 in checks to deposit the last week of December.
I remember seeing the total on the bottom of the deposit slip. I thought, There’s the possibility that everything is going to be manna from heaven from here on out. Or the chance that it’ll all come crashing down, as I’d feared for so long.
The most likely scenario, however, remained: “blocking and tackling.”
The next day I turned around and paid my final invoice of the year: $97,000 for beer inventory.
I tried to pay it online, as I had so many times before, but the dollar amount was too big to process through Bill Pay. I had to write the check by hand. Spelling out the numbers (n-i-n-e-t-y s-e-v-e-n t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d) and holding up the check in my hand, I mouthed the letters to myself (for one last time in this book): H-o-l-y s-h-i-t.
For the first time in over thirteen years, Shmaltz Brewing broke even in the first six months of 2010. With profits growing and debts shrinking, this summer I printed the healthiest balance sheet I’d ever seen with our business name at the top. Sink or swim? Swim!
For Jewish New Year, which fell during New York Craft Beer Week in the fall of 2009, my mother came to visit. Alan, the owner of the Blind Tiger, hosted her and my lawyer Barbara at the bar, for the featured barrel-aged pomegranate experimental strong ale, which had gone from a nearly unpourable disaster to one of my favorite beers we’ve ever accidentally made. Josh, our on-call guru for all the barrel aging, cask conditioning, and blending that goes on after-hours at the brewery, had pulled off another minor miracle.
Post-apples-and-honey, my mom and I went to an alternative synagogue with an occasionally cross-dressing comic rabbi for Rosh Hashanah at City Winery in Tribeca. A sweet beginning to the new year.
I had heard my shofar wake up call and prepared for our Jewbelation Bar Mitzvah anniversary marathon, stretching from the Great American Beer Festival in Denver later that month to San Francisco Beer Week in spring. I was confident that our thirteen-percent-alcohol monster brown ale would rise to the self-generated holiday challenge: “Chanukah versus Christmas: The Battle Royale of Beers.”
For the Great American Beer Festival, the biggest craft beer gathering in the country, Leah sourced commemorative yarmulkes with the Shmaltz logo on gorgeous silk of various colors. Underneath our “best anniversary” wishes, just to be clear, we screen-printed: “This Is Not a Frisbee.”
Joe Carroll, owner of Spuyten Duyvil and the sister BBQ joint across the street, Fette Sau (named top barbecue in New York City), FedEx’d several pounds of meat out to GABF to join me in a presentation in the food-and-beer-pairing pavilion. Jewbelation-glazed brisket, pulled barbecue chicken with pomegranate seeds, caraway-crusted beef tongue, and Kobe beef hot dogs partnered with Jewbelation 13, Origin, R.I.P.A, and Albino Python. Zak cooked up the soundtrack, only slightly reminiscent of Hot Borscht at my bar mitzvah. We got the crowd to yell Lenny Bruce-isms and toast the World’s Largest Beer “L’Chaim.”
The national promo crawl ran straight into the second annual Freaktoberfest the next week in New York. Our V.I.P. tasting paired rare and obscure craft beer euphoria with a jazz group jamming heavy metal covers and Blue Note solos. The party downstairs raged. The Stumblebum Brass Band marched from North Sixth Street in Williamsburg into the middle of Public Assembly, with a standing-room-only crowd. One of the go-go dancers said, “What should we do?” and Erica hollered, “Just jump up on the pedestals and shake whatcha got.” The whole place was jamming. Our favorite breweries from all over the country and such special beers from around the world, with our friends in the band, Workout, rocking a Flying V in hot pink spandex and headbands. A thrilling sophomore effort.
The Freaktoberfest season rolled straight in Chicago. For several months, I’d been hearing from a gravel-voiced and endlessly energized guy at what he said was a “haunted bar” just west of downtown. His messages, which began “Hey, it’s Ronnie from Cigars and Stripes,” inevitably included some wild description of sideshow acts, fetish performers, and more and more great beer.
He’d scored an actual sideshow tent from Ringling Brothers, circa 1940. This gregarious ex-wrestling promoter said that every year he attached the tent to the backside of his bar and booked whatever crazy acts he could come up with. Big hits of the night’s twisted lineup included the Human Pincushion and a guy who invited hot girls to come onstage and kick him in the nuts. Matt and Anthony, from my wholesaler Glunz, pulled together just about every craft beer in their book to sample for the festival goers. Even the pouring rain couldn’t drown the carnival enthusiasm.
Mostly for fun, but with just enough business scheduled to justify the write-off, I dropped into New Orleans for Halloween. My date had a full-body rubber jumpsuit and a taste for Cochon. One of the biggest distributors in town had a new craft beer manager who was eager to close a deal. At Great American Beer Festival he’d said, “Yes, we’re Coors, Miller, Abita, Sam Adams, Brooklyn, Harpoon, and Stone, but we want to bring the Shmaltz to NOLA.”
It’d been about twenty years since I’d lived in New Orleans, chugging 32-ounce Turbodogs and sweating out cheap domestic drafts by funking out at Tipitina’s and the Maple Leaf. More so in the last few years than the twenty previous, New Orleans has a growing high-end beer scene at places such as Avenue Pub, Stein’s Deli, Barley Oak, and Martin’s, even at music venues such as Howlin’ Wolf, and most shockingly, on Bourbon Street24. It was a great excuse to catch up with some old friends and make a few new ones.
I’ve been promising my co-workers we’ll have company meetings there at some point, and I’m sure they’ll hold me to it.
I feel only slightly guilty saying that my favorite part of the most recent San Francisco Beer Week this year was that I did almost nothing besides showing up. I made some suggestions to Zak, Leah, and Jesse, and they pulled together some of the best parties this company has thrown, by far. At the same venues we’ve been doing business with for years, the parties were a smash. Standing room only, and we sold out of beer at every event.
And the craziest part for me was that I looked around, and out of the whole crowd I recognized only a handful of my closest friends. I knew hardly anybody. Packed with happy beer partiers and flowing pints and bottles of our goodies passed repeatedly over the bar — to strangers.
Who were all these people? I hadn’t emailed them, and I hadn’t stood in a beer aisle and hand-sold our beer to them. Were they Jewish or carnies or beer freaks — or just there for the show? Yes, to all the options.
In spring, Mayor Bloomberg announced that a highly regarded vendor had signed a ten-year lease at Coney Island to open multiple new amusement parks over the coming years. And the mayor of New York City, one of the richest, most powerful individuals in the entire world — Jewish or otherwise — held up our beer at the Coney Island press conference. He said that the city and the new park operator would spend tens of millions to upgrade and renovate America’s Playground.
I had just received final trademark confirmation on “Coney Island” for beer, brewing services, and soda. During the summer we opened Coney Island Brewing Company — the World’s Smallest, non-commercial, non-production brewery, with a rotating lineup of nano-brewers, starting with Nic Sin, rock star, impersonator, and midget. Is Shmaltz going “mainstream”?
2010 marks a lineup of He’brew beers far beyond anything I could have described even just a few years ago. It’s inconceivable that I could have imagined any of it with Simon in those early “turkey reuben” days. R.I.P.A. on RYE, our first packaged barrel-aged offering this spring, followed by Rejewvenator’s Year of the Grape for summer, onto the fall to the Vertical Jewbelation project for winter, and our anniversary.
I thought it would be fun(!) to re-brew (yes, re-contract-brew) each of the recipes for Jewbelation 8 through 13. Plus brew a new recipe for J14. And then take a portion of each batch and barrel-age them in our second use Sazerac barrels from the R.I.P.A. on RYE project to release as Vertical Jewbelation. Another in a lineup of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” projects.
The Vertical Jewbelation gift pack will have one twelve-ounce bottle of each recipe, Chanukah candles, and instructions on how to make your own beer menorah. Delicious beer, delicious shtick. Buy it, drink ‘em, celebrate. Like the miraculous sacred oil of the Maccabees, it’s meant to be used!
And there are plenty of projects that continue to tickle my entrepreneurial bone, including a brew pub in San Francisco, a west coast home for the Shmaltz offerings after all these years of wholesale wandering — rotating matzoh ball soup specials, Kobe beef bagel dogs, corned beef knishes, the best damn free-range organic funnel cake west of Coney Island…
And possibly the same in Brooklyn. We’re always on the lookout for the right fit. I still need a spot to commission the black velvet homage to Lenny Bruce, and the same could work for Donny and Heather from the Sideshow as well.
All to be continued. I’m excited to read what the next chapters have in store for myself, my family of co-workers and our craft beer mishpocha.
Earlier this year, trying to get back to the plan to take a break from Shmaltzville and see a bit more of the world, I spent a couple weeks out of the country. On my last stopover, at the airport bookstore, I spotted Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Reading the work inspired waves of questions in my head about what the significance of my labor might be. What does it all mean?
As Greil Marcus writes in Lipstick Traces, “Real mysteries cannot be solved, but they can be turned into better mysteries.” My deepest intuition, drawn from Jewish tradition and other explorations, leads me to a related thought: Interpretation is the only absolute truth.
I’ve tried to understand the sources that I have come across, and I’ve chosen to produce offerings that I hope both reflect and add to our evolving narrative — through craft beer.
In his analysis, Zinn points out the importance of the transition this country made from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution. The Revolutionary document entitles us to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In the Constitution, the Founding Fathers rewrote the phrase as “life, liberty, and property.” Was it prophetic, this change from the pursuit of happiness to the protection of property?
I look at the time and effort that has gone into creating this book, and even more so, into creating this company. As I’m finishing these last few lines, I think it finally feels good to consider this project a real business. Though there was never any guarantee that in the thirteenth year, we’d have grown into a mostly-legitimate, mostly-thriving enterprise, this has indeed proven to be our bar mitzvah year. Well past the cusp of some things, still on the cusp of others.
For the moment, I’ll grab myself a Mazel Tov cocktail and hoist one with you in a toast to the tribe. To life… L’Chaim!