Two Brew Books (say *that* five times fast)

Yesterday was the annual Bay to Breakers “race” in San Francisco.  While I had a fun time dressed as the letter ‘A’ in an alphabet (plus full punctuation contingent) of friends, and beer certainly featured prominently in the day’s activities, I’m afraid B2B has no place in the blog.  Quality over quantity, my friends. 

In fact, I figure this is the perfect time to roll out reviews of two beer books I read recently, to counter with literacy any impressions of idiocy I created yesterday in the midst of the “beer cheer”.

Brewing Up a Business by Sam Calagione (Dogfish Head Brewery)

The short of it: Interesting and funny, but in the end, probably not incredibly helpful to a budding entrepreneur.  Ironically, despite the fact that balance among competing strong flavors is a hallmark of Dogfish beers, balance is exactly what this book lacked.  I don’t want to sound too harsh about it though, because I did enjoy it, but I just felt unsatisfied in the end and wish I had gotten more.  But, on to the positives first…

There is no doubt that Sam is a natural-born story teller.  The anecdote about his worst day ever (the multiple car wrecks are only the beginning) is hilarious and I loved the story of him rowing across the Delaware.  What can I say, I’m a sucker for historical re-enactments of any kind. Also, I was thinking Allie would really love to have seen it. 

Plus, the business lessons are in here, if you can cut through the smarminess of hearing “we make off-centered ales for off-centered people” for the 5,000^th time.  The ones I will take away are:

• Do your research: make sure the market needs your product before starting your company.  I think this is one of the most depressing lessons in microbrewing today.  The market expanded hugely 15 or 20 years ago where there were so few brewpubs and microbreweries.  If only I had been a legal drinker, or even out of 3^rd grade, during this era…  Now?  They’re everywhere and even if you make great beer, well, there’s already a lot of great beer on the shelves.  It’s not enough to be able to brew beer and run an operation, there needs to be a market opportunity if you expect your beer to take off. 
• Fall in love with sales.  If no one’s buying your product, you don’t have a business.  And, especially in an industry like brewing, no one can/will by your product if you’re not out there selling it.  All. Day. Long.  It’s a cliché complaint of small business owners, that they got into XYZ because they love XYZ but now all they do is take phone calls from customers and prepare invoices.  Yup, that’s what being a business owner is about, and if you don’t like it, you’re probably better off working for someone else.
• There’s a lot of do-it-yourself mechanical tinkering in brewing.  Sure, obviously commercial brewing involves lots of equipment for producing the beer.  And of course the brewer needs to know how all this equipment works and how to maintain and fix it all.  But I was surprised at how much re-use of equipment there was across breweries, from dairies to breweries.

However, there was an odd mix of personal and professional focus.  Sam seemed to want to give the viewer an insight into his personal life, but never commits to it.  You’re left wondering if this is (A) a lopsided biography or (B) a business how-to guide.  More likely it is (C) a book that does each reasonably well, but could probably be better if it chose to go one way other the other. 

On the personal side, I wanted to know more about how he got interested in brewing and how he developed his home brewing skills.  We get one story about hot, newly sanitized bottles that melted into his synthetic carpet, but that’s about it.  It’s all over before the first 18 pages are up.  I also wanted to know more about his wife, because she’s mentioned in passing references so frequently, but we never get the full story on her role in the business, or how becoming a small business owner affected her.  

The structure of the book is pretty clear, each chapter has a theme (e.g., building a brand), starts with a summary of the coming chapter, then a story about how Dogfish Head dealt with this issue, then a “moral of the story” type section on what the lesson he learned was.  I think it was this last part that irritated me - it came off as a bit pedantic.  As in, “Ooh, I once was as naïve as you, but now I am so wise.”  That’s probably true, but it emphasizes the gap between himself in the reader in the way a straight-forward how-to book doesn’t.  A how-to book just delivers instructions and assumes you are capable enough to follow them, without constantly reminding you that before reading it, and probably after as well, you have no idea what you are doing. 

There were two other items that I have to admit bugged me:

• I just have never liked the “off-centered ales for off-centered people” slogan.  I know he can’t really help that, but I always think: what does off-centered even mean?  Who wants something ‘off-centered’?  It sounds like ‘unbalanced’, I’d rather have something ‘innovative’ or ‘experimental’ or ‘original.’  Doesn’t “Original ales for original people” sound so much better?
• I find his obsession with certain subjects bizarre.  He seems to fixate on certain ideas like the Northfield Mt. Hermon School, Black Mountain College, or Andy Warhol, in undue proportion to their relevance.  I guess my stint in corporate America has left me jaded, but I just can’t get that excited about a motto or a mission statement, I care much more about the product (is it tasty?) and the business realities (are we making a profit?).  I’ve seen what happens when you agonize over a mission statement or a strategic plan, and in the end it just seems like most of that effort would be better spend honing one’s operations.  

 

Beer School by Steve Hindy & Tom Potter (Brooklyn Brewery)

I thought this one was the more helpful of the two books, but lacked some of the charisma of Brewing up a Business.  I think both differences stem from the fact that although Hindy homebrewed, it’s clear from the beginning that they are business-savvy beer lovers, not brewmasters.  They’ve had Bill Moeller or Garret Oliver overseeing the brewing, and F.X. Matt doing most or all of the brewing on contract until their own brewery was built.  The upshot of all this is, they are good at business and communication, it’s what they do full time and what they did before opening the Brooklyn Brewery (commercial banking and foreign war correspondence). 

 Part of the helpfulness of the book comes from their specificity.  They don’t just tell you the incorporated, they’ll tell you which ownership structure they chose, a limited partnership, and why, and what the alternatives were.  They don’t just tell you that raising the initial capital is hard, they explain how many dollars they needed, how long it took, what increments it came in, and the external factors that almost sunk them. 

The structure also makes it a little easier to understand.  Each chapter contains some storytelling and some instructing, as with Brewing up a Business, but the instruction comes packaged in its own sub-section with a clearly marked header proclaiming the main point of the lesson. 

Sure, there was some annoying cheerleading (for themselves and for the reader) in this book as well.  At the end of each chapter, they give themselves a letter grade, assessing how well they did at each of the facets and phases of their business.  Of course, this is as silly as it sounds because it gives the reader no extra useful information they had before and the grading criteria seems a little ludicrous.  They don’t give themselves all As, but when they give themselves a D on something, they usually also give themselves an “A for effort” as well. 

It is peppered with good stories as well, most of which make me realize I had no idea how much the crime situation has improved in their part of Brooklyn since they opened the brewery.  Between being robbed of $30,000 at gunpoint, losing their forklift battery to a break-in, and fending off thuggish mafiosos, there’s plenty of entertaining material. 

At the same time though, because the beer itself isn’t their baby as much as the business, it doesn’t seem to sparkle with the same reader-engaging joy of Brewing up a Business.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re not cold-hearted cutthroat businessmen and Sam Calagione isn’t a naïve creative type without an eye on the bottom line.  All of them care about their businesses and profitability, and all of them want to offer a well respected beer.  The difference is that Sam seems to be more interested in imagining what more beer could be (what if we put finished beer through a fresh hopping filter on the way to the glass?), while Hindy and Potter seem more interested in what more Brooklyn Brewery could be (what if they sold beer direct to the consumer online?).  The world needs both, innovators in beer, and innovators in business to make sure those beer innovators reach us consumers.  The difference is that the first feels romantic and adventurous to the beer lover in me, while the second sounds practical and responsible.  It’s closer to what I’m good at, but you know at least that the first type came to business for the love of beer, the second type may have come to beer for the love of business.  And there’s nothing wrong with loving business, I do, there’s a difference between those who are really intrigued by a cool new business idea, and those who just want to make a buck.  I think Hindy & Potter fall into the love of ideas camp, but it’s never quite possible to tell with business where the enthusiasm for an idea ends and the enthusiasm for cash begins.