This is a part of a continuing series of Q&As with members of the brewing community from across the US. Brewer Magazine will share business and personal insights from Brewmasters, Head Brewers, Brewing Managers, Sales Directors, QCQA Managers and others each weekend to help you get to know each other better in the industry and learn more to better develop your own brand.
Bobby Harl, Owner, Back Pew Brewing — Porter, Texas
BREWER: What are some new ideas and plans, either be it with branding, brand personnel, or even physical spaces, that you are excited about going forward in 2025?
HARL: Traditionally, we’ve been a Lager brewing Company. That’s kind of my passion, and so I’ve been championing the lager since 2015 when we opened. And there is certainly movement toward people enjoying sessionable lager beers — the crisp, cleanness of them. But really, when you step back every year and look at dollars and cents, you’re looking at IPAs. People keep buying IPAs. Even the people who are mad that you’re making another IPA, keep buying IPAs. So we’re actually changing our portfolio in 2025 and we’re going to be moving away from some of those traditional German-style products that we always offer: Lucy, our Hefeweizen and the Hyper Light, which is our ultra-light-style Lager. Lucy is pretty much going to go away, except for intermittent brews. Hyper Light will be sticking to just kegs, so the cans will likely be taken away. And then Satyr’s Swill, which has been with me since the beginning, is our 7.2% German-style Bock. We’re going to exchange that for what we call Son of Satyr, which is a more Texas-style Bock, 4.5%, still brewed in the same way, but just smaller, which is what’s kind of more expected in the Texas market thanks to Shiner. So we have a pretty big switch up in our core lineup.
BREWER: When it comes to making such radical changes you’ll probably have a vocal minority not happy about it.
HARL: We will have some disappointed people that certain products are going to be more difficult to find, like Lucy. But, the easiest thing to do in the beer world is, if you really like a product and you go buy a lot of it, and we’re selling a bunch of it, we’ll keep making it. But when you step back you’ve got to keep it around long enough to say, ‘Okay, why isn’t it working?’ Are we not spending marketing dollars on it? Are we not doing demos with it? Is it something we’re doing internally? Because you can make a great beer, have great branding, but if you don’t get it in front of people and get them to know about it. Otherwise, a product that could work, didn’t. So you don’t just shit-can it after like six months, because if you’re trying to massage that with the rest of what you’ve got going on, that’s gonna be very difficult, because you still have rotators and stuff like that. I think we have to give it a long enough time. But, Lucy, it’s been with us since 2020, that’s a pretty long time to kind of really look at it. The Hefeweizen market isn’t a giant market in the state of Texas. Live Oak kind of has that cornered. Where do I spend my money, my effort? And it’s really not the Hefe market. They (your core) should be your most profitable items if you spend all the money already, but it has to have volume. So even if you spend the money, if there’s not a justifiable volume, you kind of have to make a switch. So it’s not like we’re giving up on them. You just can’t do them for the same regularity anymore.
BREWER: You also do a lot of contract brewing. What got you started down that road?
HARL: It started with some groups that were coming by to look at buying a similar brewhouse to what we’ve got. We have a 30-barrel Sprinkman four-vessel, it’s an intense brewhouse. When we got into it in 2015 that was still kind of a feasible model. Today, doing that would be very, very difficult, both with potential sales volumes and just the number of breweries around. I said to some of these people looking, ‘Look, if you guys really think we need all this volume, why don’t you let me brew it for you on a contract basis. You’re gonna have to build a new facility, buy all the stuff I bought. You’re talking at least, probably $4-7 million just to get into it. Now you’re trying to pay that note back. That’s really, really tough to do. So we started going down that road, and they realized this is actually kind of better for them, because they get a unit-price item. And that’s actually a reasonably attractive value proposition to say, ‘Hey, do I really want to invest all this money and have all these liabilities, or do I want to be able to really control my business?’
On a very small scale, you can’t get to that level where you can get efficiencies or you need too many people. It’s not that people are bad, but people are expensive. And I only say that from a business perspective. When you think about insurance, all the different things that it takes to have one employee, it gets very, very expensive on a per beer basis. Your overhead is eating up everything else you’re trying to make. And it’s a very difficult decision to make. Most people got into beer brewing because they love brewing beer. If you cut that out, turn that in the taproom space, get rid of your equipment, take it from me as a unit cost, you have a real shot at making some money. But, that’s a very emotional thing.
That’s one option for how we try to approach some contract breweries. Otherwise, we really like to find breweries who need more capacity. Either they’re out of room at their current location, and it would be very expensive to expand, but they need more capacity, those would be great, and we try to get some of those as well.
Now contract brewing is not a high-profit margin business, it’s a volume business, but if you’ve got space and can do it, do it. At least, for us, that’s how we are approaching it, and so we want to keep pursuing it. Just getting the word out and trying to find people who need that to link up with us.
READ MORE: The Three Concepts in Contract Brewing
BREWER: What are you sipping on right now from your brewery that you really enjoy?
HARL: My baby is always Blue Testament (Pilsner). That’s been with us since the beginning. I drink that beer every day. But right now, we just came out with two darker beers. We have our Nitro Porter and our Aybara, it’s an imperial oatmeal stout. I had both over the weekend, and both are drinking really nicely. And that’s strange to say, because it’s 90-some odd degrees here still. With Nitro Porter you get the creaminess from the nitro, which is very different from oats and all that protein that you get in something big, like Aybara at 8.7%. Aybara is really nice to have more towards the end of the evening, but the Nitro Porter at 5.8, you can drink multiple of them all day. You get the creaminess without it being overfilling. So it’s really pleasant. Those three are definitely what I’ve been into here lately.
Editor’s Note: Questions and replies edited for brevity and clarity
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