Sometimes your brewery can start as one thing and morph into another. That can happen because adjustments need to be made because of your business plan, what consumers see you as, or even staff changes.
“The raison d’etre — the point of being here — is that you’re making the best beer you can for your customers,” Adam Robbings said.
For a family-owned business like Reuben’s Brews — which was started in August of 2012 by the trio of husband and wife Adam and Grace Robbings along with brother-in-law Mike Pfeiffer — beginning with a shoe-string budget, a small space and lots of learning along the way that the brewery’s four pillars of the business have become apparent for the Seattle-based company.
Pillar 1: Glass-Backward
It’s simple, really. Think of what the beer tastes like, smells like, and looks like, and reverse engineer from there.
Choosing beer styles that maybe were a little bit off the beaten path, but in an educational way, and not beers that would become intimidating for craft beer customers, is how Head Brewer and Director of Operations James McDermet put it.
“It’s from the perspective of, imagine it in its glass at the end of the day,” he said. “Why does it exist? What is it? What does it taste like and smell it in your imagination?
“Then how do we build to that point? That’s something that we’ll ask people to do throughout the year. We typically have a list of beers that we don’t get to the end of ever.”
Adam pointed out that even though they are now a bigger production brewery (producing around 25,000 barrels per year), the brewing team still has to use a lot of bag malt because he said they have to go from the glass, then backward.
“If we want this beer to taste in a certain way, we’re not constrained by production inefficiencies or what malt is in the silo or what yeast is in house,” he said. “We work backward.
“We could take that (recipe) down to six malts, easily. But that’s not gonna make the beer better, it just might not be noticeable. If it’s not going to make the beer better, then why would we do it, that’s not in the ethos.”
That’s the same for everything they do, Robbings added.
“We needed to put in a new canning line,” he explained. “So we needed to get more compressed air. But why do we need to get more compressed air? Could we get compressed nitrogen instead and then reduce our carbon footprint? So that’s what we did.”
When they started the first brewery, they used the same space to bottle and brew as the taproom. That meant moving benches around and being super inefficient.
“Adam and I did a guest lecture at a brewing course,” Grace said. “And we said that, yeah, our original space was 1,440 square feet. The instructors said, well, I’ve advised the students here that 3,000 square feet is the minimum they should look for.
“I said, yes, I don’t advise it. I’m not advocating for it. I’m just saying it’s the way we made it work because that was what we felt comfortable dipping that toe into. That was enough where we didn’t have to stress and make decisions for another reason other than to make great beer.”
Pillar 2: Breadth of Style
The brewery launched with a Roggenbier. Not exactly the “happening” style, but that was a homebrew beer scaled up for the launch in August of 2012 and it was the brewery’s 10th-anniversary beer as well.
It’s not breadth for the sake of it, Adam said.
“It’s the breadth for discovery, for trying something new,” he said — indicating this is both for staff and consumers. “It’s breadth for having a customer come in and try something amazing to them.
“That’s how we got into this.”
Reuben’s routinely brews more than 150 different beers per year, even nearly 200 in some years
Now, that doesn’t mean they go beyond a five-barrel pilot batch
When Grace and Adam first won a commercial festival as homebrewers with a Chocolate Rye IPA, he said he sat and thought about how to make beer different.
“We don’t want to just do a standard beer,” he said. “It worked out really well. And for us, it was underlying everything we were about.
“It was so much fun, making people excited about trying something new, and they liked it. And then we can talk about the malts in it or how we came up with the flavor concept.”
That homebrew gumption carries over to today as employees from all areas of the brewery are encouraged to brew something. But it all starts with that “Glass-Backwards” and “Breadth” mentality.
Pillar 3: Balance of Flavor with Quality
It’s the simplest of the pillars, really. However, having a balance in flavors and keeping a high-quality product both in the taproom and on shelves is paramount.
“Quality is table stakes,” Grace said. “If you don’t have quality, then you don’t have a seat at the table.”
McDermet joined the Reuben’s team in 2017 after working at fellow Seattle stalwart, Fremont Brewing.
“They’re brewing these beers that maybe you haven’t seen before,” he recalled about what enticed him to work there. “And they’re really good and well made. For myself, and I think for a lot of other folks, Reubens had this great reputation of high quality, but also they have been able to do that across the board. It could be any style. So that was certainly appealing.”
Pfeiffer said quality was important from the start and even before the brewery invested in a lab they were getting it tested by a lab in Oregon. Eventually, the cost of having a high-quality lab cost less than sending out samples and waiting for results.
“Because if you’re sending 5-10 samples a week, times that by whatever it was costing … if you present Adam with a business case of how it’ll pay itself off, that makes more sense,” he said.
Pillar 4: Trusted Guides
The brewery wants to help people on their beer journey, rather than what exists.
“We want to be that knowledgeable friend,” Adam said.
“Yeah. The quirky tour guide,” Grace added. “We want to meet you where you are. Be approachable. Not, “We know all this about beer, I can’t believe you don’t know the difference between this style and this style. That’s not the way we want to operate.
“We want to bring people in. We all do better when there are more people who understand that craft is better. Being approachable and helping people on their beer journey, no matter where they’re starting. And we want to be there in helping them find something that they’re excited about on that beer journey.”
That goes from the way employees interact with people at the bar to exploring different avenues of beer or what goes into the beer with a podcast called Sightglass.
“It’s about making the learning piece fun,” he said. “And craft as a whole should benefit. If we can help people see the true difference, we will all benefit.”
Adam Robbings came into creating Reuben’s with a business-world mindset as he was working on financials and business plans for a multi-billion dollar company. So he knew in creating the brewery in the Ballard area of Seattle, he didn’t want to overthink things and he wanted to keep it simple.
“The only plan we had when we opened was, basically, how do we not run out of money? That was it,” he said. “I never had any estimates of how many beers we want to sell in the next year or anything like that. It was a very… maybe, risk-averse?
“How do we make sure we can get open? And how do we make sure we don’t run out of money? So that was the only plan. The one thing that you know with forecasts is that they’ll always be wrong. So I didn’t see any benefit of spending a long time trying to make an estimate — at that point — that I knew would be wrong.”
Adam used the analogy of dipping your toe in the water to see if it’s hot or cold.
“I didn’t realize that we were kind of falling in the water at the time,” he said. “When we started, there was no way out or way back.”
He admitted it would have been helpful at that point to think about how they could scale past the 1,100-square-foot building they started in (they quickly moved into a larger facility in 2015 and then opened a production location in 2019 as growth kept coming) and know the paths or the decision trees that they could have taken.
“But we didn’t think like that,” he said. “I mean, I had a day job for the first 18 months. Mike moved over here, like four months after we signed the lease and Grace had another job for the first five years.”
When they first started, one thing they didn’t want was investors telling them they had to make some returns.
“We didn’t have to prove to anybody or a bank, this is what we’re going to do,” Adam said. “And that, for me was a big part of our value. It helped us launch our value set in the right way.
“We could always concentrate on the beer, we weren’t having to make decisions that weren’t focused on the customer or the beer.”
You do need to think about working capital, he said, which is a key to forecasting.
“If we’re going to sell more, you’re going to have to buy grain and have a certain amount of inventory on hand. And you’re going to have to have certain assets that might need to be bought,” he said in talking about “Days Working Capital” accounting. “I’m going to make up numbers: we have 100 days of inventory on hand. We pay our suppliers in 30 days. So If we’re going to make a sale, we’ve essentially got these 100 days of inventory, less 30 days of AP, and then 30 days before you get paid yourself. So effectively, you’ve got 100 days of sales wrapped up in the balance sheet of money that you don’t have in your bank. So for each increased sale, you’re going to have 100 days of those sales on your balance sheet.
“You need to understand for each sale that you make, how much working capital that uses. And we’ve been doing lots of things to try and bring that down.”
Robbings said he couldn’t be comfortable if the brewery was having to sell beer this week to pay the bills for next week.
“That’s part of the business plan, and that’s part of what makes us a little different because a lot of people don’t take into account working capital,” he said. “So selling more costs more. From my background, I’ve always known that, and I’ve always been very conscious that you need a big buffer to be able to take opportunities as they come.”
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