Herein lies one of the things that keeps me up at night.

Now that Mystery lays on the cusp of opening, I find myself faced with an interesting new challenge: the words “highly anticipated” that I keep on seeing pop up in articles and on social media.

On one hand – holy shit that’s awesome. It’s mind-blowingly flattering to know that people are looking forward to the opening of Mystery and to know that people are excited about the beer that we’re going to make. I can’t help but think that it’s at least in part to the fact that we’ve been out and about in the community, sharing samples whenever possible, and generally trying to build buzz.

Here’s the thing that worries me: As soon as we open our doors and roll out onto the market, we graduate from pre-opening buzz. How do you keep that wow? We’re planning on releasing some beers that we’re excited about, but, y’know.. it’s just beer. It’s good beer, but it’s not like we’re releasing gold-plated eaglets bedazzled with elf tears. Will the anticipation built in pre-opening buzz live up to a blonde ale, even if it’s a great one? What if it’s not spectacular enough?

A few months ago, when I participated in a charity event called Cask for a Cure, I found myself in a preview of the situation that I imagine I will find myself in shortly. The event was originally going to be just a cask from Mystery and a cask from Haw River Farmhouse Ales. We were contacted by the organizer of the event saying, “Hey – so, what if we try to get casks from these other people who are starting breweries?” and my first thought was: “Man, I’m not even open yet and I’m already not exciting enough; they need someone newer.” In the end, it worked out great and I met some great new guys who are getting into the industry, but it was initially very intimidating.

It’s a little bit of what I’m worried about in the marketplace, though it’s something that I’ve seen other breweries weather and handle well. It’s exciting to see the spotlight sweep your way, and I kind of wish we could revel in it. I don’t think it’s something you can chase. You run the risk of seeming gimmicky if you’re constantly hitting the market with the most alcoholic beer ever made, or the 1000 IBU beer, or a beer made with live turtles or something like that.

Right now, I think the only thing we can do is just keep on making great beer and hoping that it’s enough to keep us a little corner of the wow and to try, every once in a while, to nudge back into it with a release.

Until we lose that wow, though, I think we’re going to enjoy it. See you on the market soon.

Last year about this time I held a beer class – it began as the idea to make a Certified Cicerone^TM study group for an upcoming exam, but others wanted to take it to just learn about beer, and it sounded like a great idea. Now, by popular demand, it’s back.

This time, we’ll have the advantage of experience under our belt, and we’ll have a much more focused class. If enough people in the class are interested in the Certified Cicerone^TM exam, we will arrange to have an exam offered at the end of it, however the course covers material well above and beyond the Cicerone^TM exam. I don’t teach to the test – I want people to understand all aspects of beer.

Here’s a loose syllabus:

Week 1: Intro, Beer Ingredients, How to Taste Beer, style tastings.
Week 2: Hot-side of Brewing (from milling through mashing, boiling and lautering), Off-flavor tasting.
Week 3: Cold-side of Brewing (yeast and fermentation), style tastings.
Week 4: Post-fermentation brewery-side handling (clarification, filtration, souring, and conditioning). Off-flavor tasting.
Week 5: Beer packaging, shipment, storage, and aging. Style tastings.
Week 6: Serving beer: draught systems, casks, bottles, glassware, and the rest. Off-flavor tastings.
Week 7: Style history and tastings.
Week 8: Beer and food. Questions, and review. Style tastings.

The class will run Monday evenings starting at 7PM at Mystery Brewing Company in Hillsborough, NC starting on January 30th. There will be multiple weeks off through the course (when I’m busy). The course will end in April.

Join us! We will have a maximum enrollment of 16 people, the course costs $150. Payment is due on the first day of class.

Pre-Requisites: None, but you’ll probably be happier if you are at least somewhat familiar with beer and are a Certified Beer Server^TM.

Questions? E-mail Mystery Brewing Company.

Use this form to save your seat. Since there are limited seats, please only reserve a seat if you mean to use it.

This article is a followup to The Long Winding Path to Startup; call it part of the Mystery Brewing startup series, if you will.

So, here it comes. We’re entering the last month before we finally, finally, should be opening our doors. In the next 2 – 3 weeks, according to every vendor and government agent that I’ve spoken to, we’re going to see all of our equipment arrive AND our federal licensing. From there, I’m hoping that the rest of installation is a snap and that state and local licensing is a breeze. We’d like to have beer in tanks by Christmas, and we’d like to launch the New Year with some Mystery Brewing Company beer.

This is by no means a guarantee, but it’s what I sincerely and deeply hope will happen.

Let me share with you, like in the last article, the phrase that’s been driving me nuts, lately:

“While Mystery has yet to announce an opening date…”

It’s not a terrible phrase. It’s normally surrounded by other nice phrases and words like “highly anticipated” or “exciting.” But, deep inside it makes me feel like there’s somehow the suggestion that we’re being lazy about getting open or that we just don’t know, and it’s far from the case. If it was my choice, I would have been open months ago. Keeping a manufacturing business moving toward market without having the ability to create any sort of income is, to put it succinctly, terrifying. At the same time, as I said before, I’m sensitive to creating too much buzz before we know when things are going to shake out.

So, before I start cranking up the hype machine, let me share the continuing saga. When we left off back in July, I had just received word from the bank that, yes, indeed, they were going to be able to fund the equipment in the brewery. I was pretty excited, as was probably evident from that article, and hopeful that it meant that, given the 18 – 24 weeks that companies need to put equipment together and get it to you, that we’d be up and running in the fall. You can see now, in December, that it hasn’t happened quite like that.

Part of that is because we didn’t actually sign on that bank loan until October.

I’m not one for throwing out figures or naming names, but I will write this as a warning to other startups: I have spent tens of thousands of dollars waiting for banks and loan programs to get paperwork across their collective desks. My aggregate total waiting time for the SBA to turn me down (twice) has been 6 months. Had I known all of this, I would have asked the bank for money to cover the amount of capital that I spent just waiting. Now, it’s lost, unrecoverable, startup cost. It’s money that I can’t spend on equipment or upfit or other useful startup items. It’s money gone to lease, utilities, and enough money for me to pay my mortgage and eat while I was waiting for other people to shuffle papers across their collective desks. I’m not bitter (well, okay, a little), but it should be a warning: Calculate the amount of money you’ll need to not get anything done, because there will be a lot of not getting things done.

In the meantime, though, we tried to keep ourselves busy.

First of all, I say we because in September, when things were getting too busy for me to really handle on my own, I brought a friend on staff to help me. Chris and I met via Twitter, and he and his lovely wife Jen have been great friends ever since. It has been just an incredible boon to have him on my side and helping me out. In fact, I am sure that without him we would be much farther from opening than we are now.

So, together, Chris and I have worked toward getting Mystery going as best as we can without the ability to a) make any sort of large amount of beer (y’know – we can homebrew) and b) make any sort of income. We’ve been getting involved in events where we can, pouring casks when possible (so long as money doesn’t change hands), and trying to be as up front and visible as we can without building up too much insane hype ahead of schedule. We might have failed that last goal by pouring at the World Beer Festival in Durham this fall, where we had a line all day. It was pretty awesome to be there, but not so great to have to tell people that there was no place to find our beer. Soon, people! Soon!

Over the course of the fall I wrote a book and had the fantastic opportunity to visit almost every brewery in the state of North Carolina. Recently, as a companion business to Mystery and with the help of Derrick Smith of Hillsborough’s Wooden Nickel Pub, we opened Nash Street Homebrew, a homebrew shop that seeks to fill a niche in the Western Triangle and far Eastern Triad.

They’re both opportunities that sort of fell into my lap. The book – and I’ve mentioned this in another blog post months ago – came to me, rather than me looking for a place to publish, and while I’m glad I did it, I don’t think I could have chosen a worse time to attempt to write a book. Starting a brewery takes a lot of your time, even when there’s no brewery there. Throw a few dozen road trips and hours and hours and hours and hours of research, writing, and editing on top of that and.. well.. let’s just say that I haven’t slept much in the last few months. I had originally wanted to chronicle my entire trip via the blog, but it became apparent to me very quickly that I had enough writing to do to put the book together. Writing a second book online while I was doing the first was just foolhardy.

You can see a all of the photos that I took, many of which will be in the book (and don’t you dare re-use these without permission) over on Flickr.

The homebrew shop was very much the same way. Without getting into boring specifics, the opportunity and the idea were presented to me together and it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. It helps that I have Derrick and Chris to help in the setup and management of the shop. All I basically need to do is manage the business end of things. It’s a great thing to have good partners.

All in all, things are coming together nicely and I’m optimistic for the future. We’ve had some rough times over the past few years, and the opportunity for rough times still exists. If we don’t see TTB licensing this month, things are going to get dodgy really fast, so we’re looking at a couple of ways to make it less dodgy for us as our final pre-opening month comes to a close.

I won’t go all NPR pledge drive on you (I’ve done that here on this post at Mystery), but this week we’ll be launching our Irregulars program, named after the Baker Street Irregulars of Sherlock Holmes fame.* It will be a comprehensive Mystery membership club that includes all kinds of fun swag (a membership kit!), opportunities to get unique Mystery beers, early admission into Mystery events, chances to brew with us at the brewery, and a way to always be a long term part of the brewery. I urge you to check it out, because I think it will be fun (and maybe even a great Christmas gift!), but it’s also a way for people to help Mystery make the final push over the finish line. We can make it at a sputter or we can take air and fly. With people behind us, we can soar into the New Year and bring all of our backers with us.

We’re also planning a New Years Eve soiree at the brewery; a way to see the new brewery first hand before the first beers even get released. What better place to spend New Years Eve than at a brewery? I’ll be there no matter what, party or no. Keep an eye out for more details on that within the next few days, and if you’re in Central North Carolina keep your New Years Eve open and available.

At the end of this all, I just want to take a moment to say thanks. People across the internet, from good friends here in North Carolina (and especially in the NC Craft Beer community), to people I’ve never met before across the country and around the world have been incredibly supportive of me and Mystery over the past year and a half while the entire startup process has been dragging on. This page – the full list of Kickstarters – just makes my jaw drop every time I look at it, and those are just the (awesome, amazing) Kickstarters. It doesn’t even list the dozens and dozens of people who have given of their time, intellect, and advice. I can’t wait to justify your trust and good will with great beer, and I sincerely hope to share a pint (or maybe a half-pint) with each and every one of you.

*The Baker Street Irregulars are a band of street urchins employed by Holmes to help him investigate crimes and track criminals. They first appeared in the first Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet.

I just wrote a small piece in my book about what defines a craft brewer, and I was faced at having to put down this ridiculous statistic, here, directly from the Brewers Association.

Microbrewery: A brewery that produces less than 15,000 barrels (17,600 hectoliters) of beer per year with 75% or more of its beer sold off site.

Regional Brewery: A brewery with an annual beer production of between 15,000 and 6,000,000 barrels.

As a small brewer who will, with any luck, make 500 – 1000 bbls of beer next year, I could not fathom writing down that last number. Just to put this in perspective, I downloaded the 2010 craft beer statistics to take a quick look at them. Bear in mind, now, that 60 or so breweries didn’t report data, so I may be off from reality by a few decimal points here or there. The 2010 data lists 1415 breweries with barrelage data, which is about 300 short of our current number, since so many have opened recently.

Of these, 1334 fell under 15,000 barrels. That’s mindboggling. Up from there, only the top 18 make over 100,000 barrels/year, and only the top 4 make over 500,000 barrels per year. If you take the average from the top 10 craft producers in the country (in 2010), the number is 487,528. If you average all 1415, the number is 6,961, and if you leave out the top 18 it drops to 2,919.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, for two reasons. One, I think we need more than two categorizations for breweries, because I fail to see what anybody that’s operating at 1,000 bbls/year has in common with someone who is producing 500,000 bbls/year aside from the actual end product. I don’t think you could find two more different companies, and I wonder if the majority of the breweries (ie – the small ones) are actually having their needs met from a professional organization standpoint.

The BA Board is primarily comprised of people from the largest breweries who don’t know what it’s like to be a small brewer in today’s market, only yesterday’s where they didn’t have to compete with.. well.. themselves. Kim Jordan has no idea what it’s like to have New Belgium expand aggressively into her state, Sam Calagione has no idea what it’s like to have to compete with his innovation. They’ve never had to do so. Their success has changed the market for small breweries in ways that they’ve never dealt with. Can they accurately consider and respond to issues and concerns of breweries significantly smaller than them? Maybe they can. I don’t know.

I would like to see a more tiered breakdown of breweries, and maybe see the BA address them as separate segments from an organizational standpoint:

Artisanal brewery: 0 – 10,000 bbls (1311 breweries in 2010)
Microbrewery: 10,000 – 50,000 bbls (71 breweries in 2010)
Regional brewery: 50,000 bbls – 100,000 bbls (15 breweries in 2010)
Super-regional brewery: 100,000 bbls – 1,000,000 bbls (17 breweries in 2010)
Premium craft brewery: 1,000,000 bbls – 6,000,000 bbls (1 brewery in 2010)

I’d also just like to pose the question: Would a brewery that makes 6,000,000 bbls/year really have the same interests as the 1300+ that make fewer than 10,000 bbls year? The size difference there is just staggering. In no way is that still a small business in any way shape or form. I’m not advocating culling the BA membership or anything, but given the large numbers of very small breweries, wouldn’t it make sense to treat each of these tiers differently from an organizational level, especially since the small breweries are less likely to have the resources to advocate for anything other than making their own sales goals to stay open?

Maybe the BA could feature different sized small brewer committees to deal with issues that come up within each successive tier. They’re going to be different, from supplier needs to distribution needs – what is relevant to a small brewery will be laughable to a large one and vice versa. Each tier could have advisory members from larger tiers to offer advice on problems that arise for these small guys that they’ve already conquered, or to act as a liaison to the larger tiers if there are intra-industry issues that pop up where small brewers are having a hard time getting their voice heard.

Just food for thought.

I’m a little late off the mark on this, since the article that I’m responding to was actually written days ago, and really had a fair amount of buzz over the weekend. Still, since through some fluke of internettery or bad programming I’m unable to post my feelings in the comments of article, you get to read my thoughts here.

This is in response to the article posted on Bon Appetit‘s website named (le sigh) Why Beer Growlers are Bad for your Brew

The first thing I’d like to point out is that the URL to the article is actually “Garrett Oliver Thinks Growlers…” and I bet the next work is “Suck”, but that apparently didn’t meet the “sweeping generalization in order to get as many eyes as possible” criteria. Good job. It worked. I wish it wouldn’t have.

It’s raised a bit of ire around beer blogs and on Beer Advocate, and one of the commenters on the article itself poses the interesting question of “Why would anyone ever be so emotionally committed to growlers that it would ever induce such outrage?”

I can’t say it’s outrage, but it definitely makes me feel a bit.. well.. exasperated. Garrett Oliver really did write the book on beer. Well… he edited it, anyway, despite numerous errors, and his opinion carries weight, even when it seems like a quick one-off bullshit answer to some guy who he’s drinking with. Because after you’ve written the book on beer, your slightest opinions get repeated like this:

“Oh, well, Garrett Oliver says [poorly translated version of what Garrett Oliver actually said taken immediately as the holy fucking gospel].”

It’s especially bad when it’s repeated by a magazine like Bon Appetit, even if it is a bullshit one-off name-dropping blog post by some guy who was probably just desperate to meet an editing deadline, because people who trust Bon Appetit (who are likely people who buy good, craft beer) are likely to come away with:

“Oh, well, I read in Bon Appetit that Garrett Oliver says [something incredibly inaccurate which will be taken as an unbreakable law that only a basilisk's tooth dipped in unicorn tears could possibly destroy].”

So, let’s hear it for journalistic integrity on the internet in 2011!

(crickets)

I can tell you why people would get emotional about it – for some small breweries, growlers can be a life saver. Packaging lines (bottles, cans) are expensive, and growlers can be a great way for new and/or small breweries to get product into locations, like grocery stores, or maybe even people’s homes, in a way that kegs just can’t do on a large scale basis. It’s not emotional, it’s defensive.

At Mystery, we’re counting on growler sales to help us through our startup, and I’m hoping that they constitute a large portion of our sales. That said, we’re planning using a counter-pressure growler filler to make sure that they’re packaged correctly instead of urinating directly into each one, as Garrett Oliver would have Andrew Knowlton have you believe. And I would never, EVER fill a dirty growler. Dirty growlers should be traded out for clean ones. I have the tools to clean growlers in ways that most people do not in their homes, and ultimately, I am represented best by giving you excellent beer.

But to address a big issue in the article of “the pros hate growlers”. Ugh. Are growlers ideal ways to package beer? No. But I don’t hate them.

Here’s what I hate: I hate it when bottle shops have beer sitting warm on shelves. I hate it when they have beer sitting near fluorescent lights. I hate it when they don’t pull beer off of the shelves after 90 days. I hate it when bars don’t clean their tap lines, or when they serve beer in frosted mugs, or shove a faucet into a beer while it’s being poured, or don’t give me a new glass when I order a new beer. I hate it when bars don’t have dishwashers that get hot enough to clean lipstick off of glassware, or wash their glassware in the same dishwasher as their food dishes.

All of those things can have a detrimental effect on the flavor and presentation of a beer and all of those are way, way, WAY more common than someone filling a dirty growler or filling one so incorrectly that the consumer will notice a difference, assuming they consume it while it’s still fresh.

But I can’t control those other things. I can, as a brewer, control the quality of the growlers that leave my establishment. I can make sure they’re clean and they’re filled properly – just like any packaging brewer would do for ANY packaged beer product.

I’d like to see an actual well-researched, well-considered followup article by Bon Appetit about this, but I’m sure it just won’t happen.

This piece of pseudo-journalism will go on misinforming in droves. It might seem silly, but these little one-off things coming from a source that people trust can be very damaging to small businesses. It’s already being repeated, and all it takes is one more journalist who doesn’t know how to research (which I’m starting to believe is most of them) to make this opinion law by referencing it in some wider reaching periodical.

Come on Bon Appetit, do what’s right and fix your crappy journalism by actually doing some work on the story. I’m issuing you a challenge. Write a good story on beer packaging. Your readership deserves it.