The Sum of the Parts: Turning Pro Part 24

I know that the person I am is a sum of the people that I have called friends (and I guess the few that I might call enemies too). Those experiences, those people, made me the person I am today. The beautiful parts of my personality along with those gross, nasty, stinky parts are what those experiences wrought. If you took away any of those people before I met them, then I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

I still believe that, in some small way, those five precious people live on through me. However, thinking about it today I started feeling that with the passing of each person, so did a little part of me. They weren’t there keeping that bit alive and active. After even a short time, those bits are not quite as bright. They are fading and I’m losing a little part of me with each soul lost. I know, big bummer, poor me, get over it you pansy, this blog entry has nothing to do with beer.

Well, the weird thing is, it got me thinking about the life of a brewery. Yes, us beer geeks know that breweries have a life and a personality. This maudlin thinking got me wondering about how the personality of a brewery develops. What is it that makes up the brewery personality? At first I thought it was the beers. Sometimes it is just one beer that “defines” a brewery, but for us geeks we like to look at the whole of the portfolio and try to read into it the gestalt of the brewery. Are they hoppy, malty, Belgian,
wild?

But that isn’t the whole of the brewery. There tends to be some person that gets to be the face of the brewery. In some cases it is an owner like Greg Koch of Stone or Jim Koch of Boston Beer. Other times it is the brewer, like John Maier of Rogue or Matt Brynildson of Firestone-Walker.Sometimes it can be someone who holds both titles, like Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River, but I think the drinkers choose the person, rather than the brewery defining who that might be.

Heck, believe it or not, I think it is the consumers that define the brewery. I think no matter how hard you might try to market your product, you can’t control the consumers that become passionate about your
beer. (I guess you could force away some people by bad marketing.) Is that it? Is who you are as a brewery controlled by the people that drink the beer? They certainly choose who it is that becomes the person identified as being the face of the brewery, but do they control the beers made?

I’d like to say they don’t. Hey, we brew the beer and we use our passion and creativity to produce new and unique products, but I think we all take into account what we think will sell when we decide on a new brand. Yes, the reality is that we think about what our consumers want when we craft a new product. In the end, like all of us, the personality of a brewery is the sum of its parts.

Written by Jamil Zainasheff