Cheers to a booming industry

A capacity house of 400 people packed the second annual Beer, Cider and Spirits Conference this month in Santa Rosa.|

A capacity house of 400 people packed the second annual Beer, Cider and Spirits Conference this month in Santa Rosa. The event, produced by the Sonoma County Economic Development Board, was created to showcase what has proven to be a promising new area-wide industry that complements the behemoth wine industry.

The current count is 24 breweries in the county (five of them in Petaluma, seven cider producers, and an 11 distillers, three of them in Petaluma.) While these numbers may be dwarfed by the many hundreds of wineries in the county, they do represent a considerable nucleus of a rapidly growing segment of our economy. There were only 17 in the above listed categories just three years ago.

And, the local industry is indeed growing. Since 2012, the beer sector has enjoyed a 40 percent increase in barrels produced, 56 percent growth in employees hired, and beer’s economic impact countywide is up 37 percent.

Much, but definitely not all, of that impact is due to Petaluma’s Lagunitas Brewing Company, which has rapidly grown to become one of the largest craft brewers in the United States. Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa has achieved worldwide fame with its Pliny the Younger (devotees stand in line for hours to get a glass when the beer gets a two-week introduction each spring) and its Pliny the Elder (hard to find, but still available year round). Bear Republic in Cloverdale has been hitting sudsy home runs with several of their entries as well.

So Lagunitas is dominating the scene, but they have plenty of quality company.

The conference included several helpful sessions for new and wannabe beer, cider and spirits producers if they want to succeed in the world of beverage commerce. All of it was good, sound textbook advice.

The fascinating thing, however, is that the king of county beverage Lagunitas has grown exponentially by following practices almost diametrically opposed to those offered at the conference, and they have enjoyed tremendous success.

I began to understand why when given a book written by Lagunitas founder and mastermind Tony Magee titled “Lagunitas, the Story,” subtitled “So You Want to Open a Brewery?”

At the conference, one of the speakers stressed the importance of marketing, and having a marketing budget, to get a foothold in the market. For years, and perhaps still, Lagunitas spent zilch on advertising and other forms of traditional marketing, opting instead to give free beer and ale to local non-profits for their fundraising, confident that increasing public awareness would translate into public acceptance.

Upon reading Magee’s narration, it became apparent that much of the inherent silliness and irreverence on Lagunitas labels, even on their business cards, is consistent with a clearly thought out vision of what Magee wanted Lagunitas to be. A good writer with a gift for the comic and the absurd, he writes all the copy on the labels. His independent thinking is expressed by one of the chapter titles in his book, “dogma is for the dogs.”

In his book, he includes several dead-center parodies of significant authors, such as Hemingway. In college, Magee studied music, and the brewing business was way far in the future. In between, he got into the printing business, and at some point decided he needed a new career, so he learned to brew beer. There were obviously plenty of misfires until he landed on the right yeast for his pale ales.

Throughout, he saw Lagunitas as a sort of frothy symphony, with the product, relation with the staff and with suppliers, the labels, interface with the consumers, all working together in symphonic harmony Lagunitas has now opened a second plant, in Chicago, as the brewery has entered most of the markets in the United States. One of the speakers at last week’s conference cautioned the new businesses not to choose “clever” names for their products. Don’t tell Magee, as he has come up with product names such as Brown Shugga, Censored, Hop Stoopid, Sucks Holiday Ale and a great many other wordy delights. And, Lagunitas devotees drink it all up.

Perhaps the moral of the story is that when you have an exceptional product, you can do it your way.

(Don Bennett, business writer and consultant, has been involved with city planning issues since the 1970s. His email address is dcbenn@aol.com.)

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