A Note from Our Publisher...
Nearly 40 years ago this month, I boarded a plane bound for Germany to return to where my family, over 300 hundred years before, began our recorded journey in beer and brewing. There, in a small town just outside of Cologne, my 10th great grandfather, Vitus Fijten, started his career in beer. Like many apprentice brewers before and after him, he patiently studied under the masters, who were brewing the top fermented beers of the day, all the while taking notice of the new golden brews coming up the Rhine River from the Alps - what we have come to know today as lager beer.
I learned that Vitus eventually set out with his family and headed west to a small village in the neighboring Netherlands where he established his own brewery and inn. I imagined that he, like many German brewers of his day, may have immigrated to the Netherlands to brew a version of the new bottom-fermented beer to quench the thirst of locals and travelers to the area.
Upon returning from my trip, I took an internship at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, an institutional market for the large grain companies who call Minnesota home. While executing my daily activities for the role, one day I noticed a series of tables off to the side of the hustle and bustle of the trading pit with rows of barley samples around which stood a group of older men. They were holding up grain samples to the beaming sunlight coming in from massive windows at the end of the trading floor. After curiosity got the better of me, they shared that they were grading barley for maltsters for brewing beer.
As a college student any time the word “beer” was uttered all ears perked up. “Beer you say?” I said excitedly. “Yes beer,'' they said with a smile. “You see maltsters require a specific moisture, protein content and plumpness to make good malt for beer. If the sample does not meet their spec, then it's only good for feed barley, which is valued much less.”
For the rest of the summer, I listened intently to their stories about the malting process, their reminisces of when malting companies and breweries dotted the countryside, and their laments about the loss of so many family businesses over the passage of time. Their passion for malt and my recent trip to Germany sparked a fire in me to learn more and eventually follow in my forefather’s footsteps.
A “Made” Man
I started my actual career in beer as a college campus rep for the Pabst Brewery. Because of my study abroad in Germany and my growing fascination with malt and beer, I helped launch an International Business Club at my school. Import beers were all the rage. So, taking a page from Miller’s marketing program, which was presented at our school, I set up an “Imported Beer Night.” A number of import reps sampled their products and discussed the import beer business in the United States and job opportunities available. To say it was a success was an understatement. Hundreds of students showed up and overnight I was getting requests to do another one the next semester. The distributor noticed it, too, and immediately offered me a job as a campus rep for Pabst. I was hooked, and off to MIlwaukee for training I went.
I have often said, being a campus rep for a major brewery in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was like being a made man in the movie “Goodfellas.” Everybody wanted to be your friend, and everyone was your friend because as Adolphus Busch most famously said, “making friends is our business.” Pabst was no different.
I arrived in Milwaukee to enter brew school at Best One Place. There, we learned about the history of the company, the products, proper serving of beer and above all service to our customers. Everyone in Milwaukee knew that when the reps came in in their Pabst polos, the beer would flow. Literally, our job was to buy folks beer and tell them it was on Pabst. What a job. I came back pumped and ready to hit the streets, and how I did, for at least a while.
Like many of the great regional breweries who succumbed to pressures of markets before, Pabst, too, was experiencing its own troubles. The hostile takeover fever of the ‘80s was now hitting the national brewing industry. To insulate themselves from the uncertainties of Pabst, my distributor decided to pivot to something more local. Thus, came my introduction to Jake Leinenekugel. Our distributor, seeing the rise in the craft brewery business on the west coast with breweries like Anchor Steam and Sierra Nevada, also thought marketing Leinenkugels to local campuses would be a smart move.
The next thing I knew I was teamed up with Jake, and we hit the local campus watering holes. Jake is probably one of the greatest beer men with whom I have ever worked in the industry. He could sit and have a beer with anyone and make a friend. After meeting him at promotional events, folks, more often than not, became converts. It was at one of these beer promotional nights where I met the love of my life, Madeline, who has been at my side ever since.
An Idea in the Making
Madeline was a student at a local all girls college up the road from where I attended school, and next to it was a famous pub called, The Club Bar. It had been a student hangout since prohibition and was in need of a night manager. After working for the distributor for nearly two years, I was ready for a change and a different kind of challenge. I took the job and began to reshape the bar with a focus on only local beers, capitalizing on the trends I saw coming from my time at the distributor.
It was quite a feat given we were a 3.2% beer bar. Trying to find eight local 3.2% beers to fill the taps was difficult. But I did. When the Miller rep showed up and could not believe I pulled Miller Light and put on Leinenkugel's Light, the first bar in Minnesota to do so, he thought I was nuts. He came up with all sorts of reasons, statistics and facts about why Miller Lite was the better beer to have on tap. My reply was yes I knew all the statistics and facts, hell I had attended the Miller marketing nights on campus, but Miller Lite was not a local beer. Plus, Jake Leinenkugel himself had sampled his beers when introducing his Leinie Light to a packed house.
When I told him I was homebrewing and planned on putting a micro brewery in the basement of the pub, the rep just smiled, shook his head and said good luck kid, this micro beer thing will be a fad. Here today, gone tomorrow. The year was 1985.
Unfortunately, I was not able to make a deal with the owner to buy the bar, and he eventually sold it to a group who returned it to a corner college pub. And though my vision didn’t come to fruition that day, the idea of a craft brewery taproom was just beginning. One year later, in the fall of 1986, Summit Brewery, currently Minnesota’s largest producer of craft beer, would open in St. Paul. In the winter of 1987, the James Page Brewery, the first lager craft brewery in the state opened in Minneapolis.
Craft Brewers Convention, 1988
Like Vitus before me, that spring I became an apprentice brewer and salesman at the Page Brewery. There were three of us in those days, and you couldn't help but learn every position in the brewery. The craft beer industry was in its infancy, and it was tough work forging the trail. However, we had great help from the legacy brewers, who had themselves trained under generations of master brewers. The same was true for craft brewers and breweries of the day all over the country. A movement was spreading.
In 1988, the owner of the Page Brewery, Jim, asked if I would like to attend my first Craft Brewers Convention (CBC), being hosted in Chicago. I said yes, and was one of about 300 brewers and seven vendors that year, who came to hear the likes of Michael Jackson, who was our dinner speaker; a young upstart named Jim Koch; John and Greg Hall, who had recently opened their Goose Island Brewery; Roger Briess, America’s original craft malster; as well as the Siebel Institute’s Bill and Ron Siebel.
It was at this convention when I was introduced to and would become great friends with Bill and Ron, who years later entrusted me with their family’s Siebel Publishing collection and ownership of Brewers Digest Magazine, which finds its home here today online.
At the conference, we also listened to Fritz Maytag’s closing remarks, who discussed his journey with the Anchor Brewery and the story his mother told him as a young man about beer. Beer, he was told, “was a gift from God” that brought people together and was the social lubricant that helped people befriend one another. As I sit here remembering Fritz's words, I can’t help but agree – I met so many great people at my first CBC and would go on to meet many more over the next 40 years of my career.
If you can attend the CBC this year, in my hometown of Minneapolis and St. Paul, I encourage you to do so. You never know who you might meet – a future vendor, a future employee or boss or like me, a future business partner for life.
Prost and welcome to CBC 2022 Minneapolis!
Tod