From the Wisconsin State Journal...
Wisconsin a hotbed for craft brewing
BARRY ADAMS |Tuesday, March 13, 2012
WISCONSIN DELLS — Tanner Brethorst has spent the last 14 months building a brewery with the help of family and friends who have invested money and provided help with engineering and construction.
And now, the work is paying off.
Brethorst, a former home brewer, last week brewed his first commercial batch of beer at his $700,000 Port Huron Brewing Co. in this city’s industrial park.
Bottles and kegs of the Honey Blonde Ale will be ready for sale by early next month, but the title as the state’s newest brewery likely won’t last long.
And that’s just fine with Brethorst and most other craft brewers in the state. The goal for the small, independent brewers is to collectively continue to take market share from MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch InBev. Despite the booming popularity of craft beer, it accounts for only about 8 percent of all beer sold in the state.
“We’re not going after each other. It’s about chipping away at that other 92 percent,” Brethorst said while seated in his still-unfinished tasting room. “I really don’t care how many breweries start up.”
According to the Wisconsin Brewers Guild, there are more than 50 small breweries and brewpubs in the state employing more than 1,000 people, and those numbers continue to grow as start-ups come online and existing breweries expand.
In Madison, former home brewer Page Buchanan last year opened the House of Brews at 4539 Helgesen Drive. Buchanan spent months converting a 4,800-square-foot space in a Far East Side industrial park into a brewery.
On the North Side, Ale Asylum is building a $6.75 million, 46,000-square-foot brewery, tap room and restaurant at 2102 Pankratz St. near the Dane County Regional Airport. The brewery currently is in a 10,000-square-foot building at 3698 Kinsman Blvd. The new facility will have an annual capacity of 46,000 barrels. When the brewery opened in 2006, it made 2,500 barrels a year.
New Glarus expands
Growth at New Glarus Brewery also is continuing. Sales are up 20 percent this year and president Deb Carey said she needs more room for beer and tourists.
A $6 million project, scheduled to begin in April, will include a 17,000-square-foot warehouse while doubling the size of the visitor center.
She’s also hired an engineer to study how the brewery can use wind and solar energy.
She expects her brewmaster husband and his staff to make 125,000 barrels this year compared with 109,000 in 2011.
“If you’re trying to create jobs in Wisconsin, you need to be partnering with small brewers. There’s no doubt about it,” Carey said. “I don’t see it slowing down.”
Points north
The Stevens Point Brewery, founded in 1857, has spent $2.6 million since 2009 expanding capacity and improving efficiency, including a $1.1 million project under way that will increase capacity to 120,000 barrels.
In 2009, the brewery made 70,000 barrels, about 40 percent of it for other brewing companies, spokeswoman Julie Birrenkott said.
Just down the road in Plover, Marc Butterra, brewmaster and owner of O’so Brewing Co., said he spent $750,000 to move to a larger facility that would allow him to increase production from 1,900 to 5,000 barrels. But it took a year to secure financing before he was approved by Rosholt-based Community First Bank.
“We struck out with a lot of big banks,” said Butterra, who opened his brewery in 2007. He employs 14 people and distributes his beer in all but seven Wisconsin counties. “The promising thing is that when (beer drinkers) say they’ve never heard of us, that means there’s room to grow.”
The Brewers Association is scheduled to release its industry statistics next week but the numbers will be up over 2010, said Paul Gatza, director of the Colorado-based organization. More than 200 breweries opened in 2011 and craft beer sales (by dollars) were up 15 percent in the first half of the year.
“Most of the new openings are very small packaging breweries aimed, at least at first, toward (supplying) beer for a limited number of accounts in a very local area,” Gatza said.
And that’s the business plan Brethorst is using for his Port Huron Brewing Co., named after his grandfather’s 1917 steam tractor and located in Wisconsin Dells, a popular tourist destination and a place flush with restaurants and bars.
Brethorst, 34, who grew up in Lodi and has an agriculture business degree from UW-Madison, spent 12 weeks at the country’s oldest brewing school, Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago. He then spent seven years working under two of Wisconsin’s most knowledgeable and innovative brewmasters: Tom Porter of Lake Louie Brewing near Arena and Kirby Nelson of Capital Brewery in Middleton.
‘Enormous pressure’
Brethorst now has his own 7,000-square-foot brewery, financed by issuing $25,000 and $50,000 shares to family and friends. His uncle, Bruce McPhee, who has a finance background, planted the seed for Brethorst to break out on his own.
“It’s enormous pressure. Your sense of responsibility is heightened quite a bit,” Brethorst said of his investors. “It makes it real tough because you have to go to Christmas and Thanksgiving and see these people.”
Brethorst was optimistic when he began converting a former ink and lithograph supply company building into a brewery in January 2011. He thought he would be brewing by June but construction and regulatory delays kept pushing back production.
But on Wednesday, he began using a restored 17-barrel brewhouse purchased from a brewery in Illinois. The plan this year is to make four styles of beer totaling 900 barrels.
Brethorst has 96 half-barrels and 44,000 bottles waiting to be filled. The only other craft brewer in the immediate area is Moose Jaw Pizza & Dells Brewing Co., founded in 2002 in Lake Delton but which only began bottling its Rustic Red beer in December.
“There’s a lot of opportunity here,” Brethorst said. “There’s a lot of outlets to get our beer to and still stay local.”
No comments:
Post a Comment