HONEST PINT: CRAFT BEER BAR OWNERS UNITE

Photo by Jacqueline Dole 

“When someone’s just in the business just to pull the handle and make money, they’re not craft. But if they’re interested in educating the customer and their staff, that’s craft beer. Basically, it’s handmade, hand sold.”

Late last month during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, the owners of about 50 of the country’s best beer bars met at Lord Hobo in Cambridge for an annual craft beer bar owners meeting. Daniel Lanigan, owner of Lord Hobo, spearheaded the meeting.

“There are certain things about craft beer bar ownership that are specific to just us; generic restaurants don’t have the same issues we have. It’s just an opportunity, a meeting of the minds of people who do what I do,” Lanigan told me at the end of the second day.

“It’s really about educating and promoting what we do.”

The meeting fell squarely on two sides: the detailed logistics of running a beer bar, from staff management to draft system maintenance, and the bigger questions: what defines a beer bar? Should you support local breweries? How do you keep expenses down?

When I arrived on the first day of the conference, about 40 beer bar owners are sitting around Lord Hobo’s high top tables and booths, yellow legal pads, laptops, and iPads out on the table.

They’ve come from around Massachusetts—David Ciccolo of The Publick House, Alec Lopez of Armsby Abbey and The Dive Bar in Worcester, Max Toste of Deep Ellum—and also from across the country—Tom Peters of Monk’s Cafe in Philadelphia, Troy Terorotua of REAL a Gastropub in Honolulu, Greg Koch, CEO and co-founder of Stone Brewing Co., in Escondido, Calif., which is also home to an expansive restaurant and beer garden.

Lanigan, in his black collared Lord Hobo shirt, sits on a stool at the corner of the bar, facing everyone. He shouts out questions.

“Who here serves beer they’re not proud of?”

About 10 hands go up slowly.

“Who serves Bud/MillerCoors?”

A few less hands go up.

“Who has personally been called a douche bag on Yelp?”

A few people let out a knowing chuckle and raise their hand.

Lanigan said he invited people mostly based on word of mouth—people who he knew owned great beer bars, and anyone they might know—but there are certainly more than 50 beer bars in the country, more in Boston, even. All of which raises the question: How do you define a beer bar?

“It’s a really tough question,” Lanigan said. “There are people that have really great beer bars in this room that also sell Bud/MillerCoors, which I don’t. Are they not a craft beer bar? I wouldn’t say that. They still are, they’ve just made a choice that I haven’t made. I just think that it comes down to the passion of the owner for what we’re selling,” Lanigan said.

“When someone’s just in the business just to pull the handle and make money, they’re not craft. But if they’re interested in educating the customer and their staff, that’s craft beer. Basically, it’s handmade, hand sold.”

Discussions vary from the specific–what kind of Point of Sale systems they use or how to best train and maintain staff members–to the broader questions of expansion and how to acquire funding. There are some tense moments. Two representaives from the Belchertown, Mass.-based distribution company Shelton Brothers spoke about their extensive selection of craft beer, distribution questions, and pouring issues with  keykegs. When it came time for questions, Michael Roper of Hopleaf in Chicago started to ask about the distribution of Cantillon, a small Belgian brewery specializing in lambics, whose beers have become increasingly sought after and thus harder to get a hold of.

“No, we are not talking about Cantillon,” Lanigan said. “Maybe after a few beers.”

In between presentations on social media, cask ale, opening second locations and expansion, bar owners drank cans of Heady Topper and glasses of Hill Farmstead, caught up, met, and talked beer. One of the biggest concerns was how to keep prices down when everything else is going up, Lanigan said.

“It’s really a price war—what we’re getting charged for beers  is getting out of control. All of our costs are going up, everything we do gets more expensive every year.”

While they are able to discuss some of these issues on a general level, specific concerns have to be dealt with state to state, since liquor laws  and distributors vary greatly.

Most owners seemed curious about the event and open to how it would help them. Many of them are pushing forward craft beer in their communities, whether it’s in Honolulu, Atlanta, or Louisville.

“For a while we were pushing them. Now, the community is pushing back, always looking for new things,” said Mike Gallagher who opened the Brick Store Pub in Decatur, Ga. with Tom Moore and Dave Blanchard in 1997. When they opened, Gallagher said, they decided to not carry BMC products. It may have been a bold choice back then, but now, he said: “You don’t need that. People don’t ask for it. You don’t even need Stella.”

Tyler Huntington, who owns four Tyler’s Restaurant & Taprooms in  the Triangle region of North Carolina, said he changed his mind about carrying BMC products since opening his first taproom in Carrboro, N.C. in 1998.

“There is a really divergence of opinion even in this room.  When I first opened I didn’t.  I was like ‘dammit none of that stuff is going to be in here,’ and I really was in that mindset.  A few years ago it struck me that was very condescending and egotistical of me to say to somebody ‘just because you like Miller Light you’re shit’ or ‘your palate is crap.’  That’s what they like, so I’ll put a bottle of that in for them.”

Another recurring topic of conversation was the decision of the degree to which craft beer bars should be supporting local breweries, new and old, by carrying their beers on draft and in the bottle.

“This has been an interesting topic of conversation among people the past few days: really wanting to support local, but also staying true to serving high quality beer. And sometimes the two don’t match up,”  said Huntington.  It’s like any business, it has to mature. Sometimes a brewery in its first year or so has a product it’s putting out that may not be the best in the world.”

Huntington says he typically puts a keg on and allows customers to give them feedback; if there’s a demand, they’ll continue to carry it; if it’s not up to quality or if there’s not a demand, they don’t.

“But that doesn’t mean it won’t go on again in six months or a year, when they have had a chance to refine their process,” says Tyler. “[It could be] a new brewer working with new equipment, or maybe their brewery changed six months into the gig.  A lot of it is really just staying in touch and keeping a relationship going with the local guys, and having them bring stuff by to taste.”

Yetta Vorobik, owner of The Hop & Vine in Portland, Ore., also has her fair share of local breweries to choose from.

“In Oregon, I have over 80 options of breweries. We are spoiled, but at the same it’s hard to pick and choose because you do have your C breweries and then you have your A+ breweries. You want to support people, but you also want to push for the better end of it.”

Lopez, of Armsby Abbey and The Dive Bar, voiced a similar opinion.

“I only support good beer, and local beer doesn’t mean good beer, at all. It’s been proven a hundred times over. I feel like people get into that trap. … If someone’s making really good beer and they’re local? Hell yea, I’d take that over everything.”

The main purpose of this meeting, Lanigan emphasized, is to help each other be better business owners and to create a forum to bounce ideas off each other.

They’ll be continuing to do that the next time they meet in Washington D.C. in March for the Craft Beer Bar Owners Conference before the Craft Brewers Conference, hosted by the Brewers Association. They’ll also be joining the Brewers Association as a sub-group, the Craft Publicans Association, and will have an online forum where bar owners can log on, and keep the discussion going.

I asked Huntington, of Tyler’s Taproom, what he hoped to take away from the conference.

“To actually get to sit down over a beer with them is a really cool experience,” he said.”  That’s kind of been the biggest thing for me.

The people in this room are the people who are going to keep pushing this business forward.

And just listening to them about where they are right now and were they are going to be, I think it’s where we can see how the business is going to trend.  And I think you can kind of see where it’s going to go from here, with these guys, and I like that a lot.”