By Dick Cantwell

One Very Important Thesis

It wasn’t literally nailed on the brewery door, but on the cosmically inconsequential scale of a medium-sized brewpub the efforts of one bartender (our own little Martin Luther!) has altered one of the things we in the brewhouse theocracy hold most dear---the brew schedule. All too busy with the production of a spring and summer range of specialty beers, as well as an increased demand for our regular lineup, we had let slide one of our own favorites, Loki Lager, a somewhat over-hopped Dortmund-style beer.

“This letter is being written on behalf of the numerous members of the Concerned Citizens for Loki Lager,” it began. “It has not escaped our attention that the Elysian Brewing Co. has not produced a batch of Loki Lager (arguably the brewery’s finest beer) in several months. Our research also indicates that no plan, as of yet, has been implemented to produce more Loki Lager in the immediate future. We see this as a tremendous loss for the population of beer consumers at large.”

It happens that I couldn’t agree more with the opinions of Lucas, our in-house firebrand, on the subject of this particular beer. It’s my favorite beer as well, as it is of the two other guys who work in our brewery, both of our other owners, and many other patrons and members of our staff. I would love to have the beer available all the time, but with the aforementioned pressures and demands, it just doesn’t work out that way. But there was the letter, along with a petition bearing over fifty signatures (to which I added my own). Not forgetting that Seattle is a city a decent proportion of whose protest-minded citizens hang gas masks alongside their camping headlamps and rollerblades in anticipation of a little action in the streets, I decided to try to make it a priority. And so we brewed it, mollifying for the moment the respectfully submitted demands of the Concerned Citizens for Loki Lager (CCLL).

It isn’t the first time, certainly, attempts have been made to influence the production schedule. People are always fondly recalling some obscure (and often commercially unsuccessful) brew from the past, urging the closest available brewer to make it one of the permanent lineup. This is always at least flattering--it’s nice that they’re paying attention. One thing that always gets me is the goat-bearded guys who wonder when you’re going to brew a nut-brown ale. My personal feeling is that they simply like to say the words “nut-brown” (kudos to Samuel Smith’s, and Charles Finkel for suggesting it), and once it’s available won’t necessarily support it at the taps. One time I ran into a couple of these guys at another local brewpub that at the time happened to have a brown ale available. I sidled up to one of them and asked if he was drinking the “nut-brown.” “No,” he told me, “I’m having an IPA..” “That’s what I thought,” I said.

Don’t assume I have anything against brown ales big, mild or nutty. Nor do I dislike at all dark lagers, Bavarian-style wheat beers, or another perennially requested of our repertoire, wild rice ale. It’s simply, as I mentioned, that I can’t always fit them into the brew schedule with all the other things we do. Anyone who has worked at any brewpub of reasonably long standing is familiar with my plight. You just can’t keep everything available at all times. This has always been the challenge with brewpubs, many of which have thrown into the mix wholesale demands and retail keg sales. But the will of the people is worthy of notice. I would far rather go out of my way to satisfy the drinkers at my bar from time to time than pay slavish attention to marketing trends and make this beer less hoppy, that one lighter, and so on. It’s enormously helpful, in a best-of-all-possible-worlds scenario, to have a small pilot or satellite system with which to turn out some of these sentimental and quirky favorites at the same time that more prosaic duties are being fulfilled, to be that responsive not just to the wishes of the customer but to the whim of the brewer. We’ve all got to stay interested, after all.

Or perhaps the best of all possible worlds is the places that couldn’t possibly accommodate wholesale demands, that have a couple of dozen diminutive fermenters in order to provide an outlandish variety of beers to the immediate consumer. My favorite of these is Tugboat Brewing in Portland, Oregon. When it first opened several years ago as the Northwestern Brewpub—a name soon shredded by the briefly energetic propellers of the Aviator/Nor’wester juggernaut—it offered something like sixteen different beers, fermented in plastic 50-gallon pickle barrels and mashed in a Rubbermaid horse trough. There were ales and lagers north, south, east and west in derivation, and many of them were quite good. With a lineup that comprehensive it’s a matter less of satisfying the nominally arcane demands of the occasionally vocal customer than demanding participation in a game of stump the brewer.
I guess the lesson here is that the bigger and more firmly established you get, the less immediately responsive, the less spontaneous, you can be. It took years of the big brewers being bitten, here and there, by the bugs that collectively became our swarm, for them to even think about what to do about us. They all took different approaches, but they move so slowly and we move so fast, that I’m not sure they have any better handle on the situation than they did ten years ago. I’m actually not sure we do, either. We’re just a lot better able to take it as it comes.