From Oskar Blues Brewery's Dale Katechis to Brewers Association CEO Bob Pease, these are the most influential brewers, beer educators, lobbyists, importers, and exporters in America.
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With his long hair and thick beard, the man dubbed by some as "Beer Jesus" spreads craft beer love across the world. Greg Koch, CEO of Escondido's Stone Brewing, has plans for a new Napa, CA, taproom, and has already opened Stone breweries in Richmond, VA, and Berlin, Germany. Though the international expansion should be cause for unanimous celebration amongst beer fans, Koch has met with resistance from a vocal minority — not from Europeans, but yanks who view the brewing of double IPAs overseas an act of "brash Americanism." Koch is confounded by the stance: "We should be proud of the fact that American craft beer styles have found their way onto the mantle of world class styles," he says.
Still, such defiance is nothing new for a trailblazing entrepreneur like Koch. "I would often get the question: 'Hey Greg, aren't you afraid that people in Germany and Europe won't like your kind of beers?' And my answer has always been, 'No, because when we opened up in San Diego 20 years ago, they didn't like our beers then, either.'"
The three brothers who first made small batch European beer widely available in the U.S. are perhaps the most indispensable importers in the country. These siblings from Massachusetts are more than mere businessmen — they're curators, a label that eldest brother Dan Shelton reluctantly accepts. As he prefers to describe it, "We took stuff in that, as Frank Zappa put it, had no commercial potential, but was just really great." Beyond importing, the brothers have hosted a podcast called "The High and Mighty Beer Show" and interviewed international brewers in videos for their own YouTube channel. For the past five years, they've also organized a large drinking festival appropriately called The Festival, held in a different city each fall.
Most every beer Matt Brynildson makes turns to gold — or at the very least silver or bronze. Over the last decade the Firestone Walker brewmaster has nabbed medals for diverse beers counting crisp Pivo Pils, Wookey Jack black rye IPA, and Velvet Merlin oatmeal stout. Brynildson drawing a blank? Understandable. “Eighty percent of the beer that we make is consumed in California,” says Brynildson, whose brewing career commenced at Goose Island, where he helped create Goose IPA and its first quality control program. (Small surprise he previously worked at a spice firm specializing in hop extracts.) The humble bearded brewmaster favors technical conferences and leading global workshops on America hops, visiting farms to find the latest flowers to incorporate in his revolving Luponic Distortion IPA series, an endless exploration of beer’s experimental fringe of fragrance and flavor. “We’re a brewery that’s living the art and process of brewing, and hopefully that’s reflected in the beer,” he says.
Sommeliers are wine drinkers’ tested guides. Beer? It lacked hoppy Sherpas till Ray Daniels battled his nemesis: “Bad beer, short and simple,” says Daniels. To rectify shortcomings in beer knowledge and care he founded the Cicerone Certification Program, which educates industry professionals on styles, history, taste, and proper care and serving. (Cicerone is a bygone term for a guide.) While your buddy might call himself a beer expert, passing the Cicerone test — the four levels start at Certified Beer Server and culminate with Master Cicerone, counting 11 worldwide — proves he knows why German kölsch is like American cream ale. (Answer: They’re ales fermented at colder, lager-like temperatures.) Since 2008, some 75,000 people in more than 30 countries have become Certified Beer Servers, and around 2,500 are Certified Cicerones, able to offer beer-pairing tips and smartly steer you to your happy hour pint.
Want a taste of how hot craft breweries are? Just check out the portfolio of this Boston private equity firm, which started buying breweries in 2012 and now owns the majority stake in the Oskar Blues Brewery Holding Company, comprised of breweries like Cigar City and Oskar Blues. All told, their acquisitions pump out more than 300,000 barrels a year, making Fireman a major player. Thanks to investors, the company also has a massive fund — said to be $100 million, although the company declines comment — to buy additional breweries. “Investors are attracted to growth,” says firm partner Marla Sabo. “And a lot of investors view craft beer as hot and sexy and something they want to be part of.”
Plenty of brewers can toil in their basements, perfecting an award–winning oatmeal stout, but only a very few have the means to turn one into a nationwide phenom. As the head of Anheuser-Busch InBev's The High End division, Felipe Szpigel's job is to identify craft gems, then bump up their batch sizes by a factor of 50 — or 500. Szpigel, from Brazil, has always been a beer man — he started pushing pints from behind a neighborhood bar at 18 — but it wasn't until InBev's $39 million purchase of craft darling Goose Island in 2011 that he realized the power of great beer. "I would say 99 percent of what I drank then was something similar to Bud," says Szpigel. At dinner with his co-workers shortly after the takeover, "it was basic food paired with beers," he says, "and I remember trying the barrel-aged Sofie and Halia — it was a religious experience." Szpigel, who was working as a marketing exec at the company, offered to lead a division devoted to acquiring small beers with huge potential. Since The High End was formalized in 2014, it's grown to include eight U.S. breweries (among them, Goose Island, Blue Point, 10 Barrel, and Elysian) and a portfolio of premium imports. Today you'll have a hard time finding a sports bar or pub that doesn't have at least one High End beer on tap. And by pushing their own beers, Szpigel's team is spreading the overall gospel of better brew. The High End works with the same American retailers that sell more than 30 billion AB InBev beers (Budweiser, Corona, Michelob, etc.) last year. So when the bars and restaurants that have never heard of a 60 Minute IPA or a Ruination begin to think beyond just the Bud, well, all beer drinkers win.
Ever sip an IPA that tasted like mango or smelled like a Christmas tree? Chances are that's thanks to Jason Perrault. As CEO and head breeder at Washington's Select Botanicals Group, he's helped cultivate many of the hops — the green flowers that bestow beer with flavor — that have transformed American brewing. Among the hits: Citra hops, which has inspired a whole category of citrusy beers, and the fruity, tropical Mosaic. Creating a new hop is not for the easily discouraged: Only about one of every 40,000 cultivars will come to market. "I always joke that breeding is a depressing job," Perrault says, "because you throw away 99.999 percent of your life's work." Perrault sends out experimental hops to brewers, soliciting feedback that's rarely uniform. Promising varieties include one offering a minty aroma and another imparting a woody, vanilla-like flavor that mimics barrel-aging. "We're just starting to scratch the surface on hop flavors," Perrault says.
In 1997, when Dale Katechis opened Oskar Blues, a tiny Rocky Mountain brewpub, in Lyons, Colorado, the only canned beer available was from the big boys — Miller, Budweiser, and local industry giant Coors. Canned beer was viewed by craft brewers as watery swill. But Katechis saw an opening. "Early on we got laughed at a lot, all the way until four or five years into the project," he says. Today, Katechis' Pale Ale is a canned-beer powerhouse, with additional breweries in North Carolina and Texas churning out 192,000 barrels of beer per year. And now Katechis is extending that innovative vision into the company's ever-expanding lifestyle division, which includes Reeb Cycles mountain bikes (Reeb is beer spelled backward), Hotbox Roasters coffee (packaged in cans, of course), and the B. Stiff and Sons soda line. Katechis has even opened a resort in North Carolina, Oskar Blues Reeb Ranch, which hosts festivals and weddings and is adjacent to the bike trails of Pisgah National Forest. Investors might call the side projects diversifying, but Katechis thinks differently. "We're just doing what we love," he says.
If you think making beer is tough, try distributing it: loading and navigating trucks or dealing with Anheuser-Busch InBev’s “incentive program,” which reimburses those who mostly carries their mass-produced product. Although the number of beer distributors has contracted from about 5,000 in 1980 to 3,000 now, that trend didn’t stop brothers Matt and Eric Schulman, along with a cousin and longtime friend, from launching Sarene Craft, the hippest craft-beer distributor on the East Coast.
According to Matt Schulman, the idea hit when he was working at a New York craft brewer: “One of our suppliers offhandedly said, ‘You guys do a good job, but I wish there was another option for wholesalers. You should open one.” (It may have helped that the Schulmans’ great-grandfather was a Wisconsin moonshiner during Prohibition days.) Sarene, named in honor of the Schulman’s late sister, launched in 2013, serving New York and Connecticut; thanks to the brothers’ face-to-face salesmanship — they even drove their own trucks for a while — they’ve managed to break not only into bars but retailers like Whole Foods.
Just as vital to its success is the company’s carefully curated selection of the best craft beer available—a mere 26 brands, including the worthy likes of Pipeworks, Central Waters and Knee Deep. “Anyone can start a distributor,” says Schulman. “But we’re super-selective about what we bring in. We’ve turned down 200 brands. We’re not peddling a pile of whatever’s new. It has to taste good and have quality according to our tastes.”
It's not often a beer geek gets pulled in front of Congress to testify. But last year Bob Pease, CEO of the Brewers Association, did just that. As head of the Brewers Association, which represents thousands of independent breweries around the country, he appeared before a Senate judiciary committee to make a case against a potential $107 billion megadeal between the industry's two behemoths, Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller. If the merger went through, Pease argued, one company would control more than 70 percent of U.S. beer sales. Sure, there are now a staggering 4,600 craft breweries in the U.S., but they represent only a 12 percent market share. "You go to a football stadium or a ballpark and you see 10 beers on tap, and it looks like a great selection," he says. "But really all those beers are owned by one company. Most beer drinkers don't know that." So to ensure the corporate powerhouses don't drown out the little guys with strong-arm business tactics — AB InBev is also the country's largest beer distributor — Pease and the Brewers Association hired its first-ever D.C. lobbyist in 2015 (thus his appearance before Congress). Pease, the David in this Goliath fight, basically fell into his role as craft champion. After earning a poli-sci degree, he started his career in the customer service wing of the Brewers Association in 1993. He slowly worked his way up, soaking in the craft gospel. Now he's tasked with serving as an industry watchdog for issues like this merger, which he says will make it harder for independent brewers to get their beer in front of consumers. "We're going to do everything we can to fight against that," he says. "Goose Island [owned by InBev] is a great beer, but you can't tell me that's what everybody in the country wants to drink."
