A Tale of Two Breweries

This past week Laura and I visited two breweries: New Belgium in Fort Collins and Twisted Pine in Boulder. New Belgium is a wildly successful former microbrewery that, in eighteen years, has expanded from a husband and wife homebrew operation to a 270-employee machine set to expand nationwide. Twisted Pine is a small microbrewery with eight employees, two full-time. Twisted Pine has a small tap room and self-distributes to about forty locations, all in Colorado’s urban corridor.

My personal feeling is that Twisted Pine’s beers are tastier than New Belgium’s. Twisted Pine has the usual staple beers – an amber, red, blonde, IPA, honey brown, and stout. These are all very solid staples, particularly the honey brown which is one of the better ones I have tasted from the genre. In addition, Twisted Pine offers a fantastic raspberry wheat (best fruit beer of the few I have ever had) and a very intriguing chile pepper beer that somehow a) tastes and smells like peppers, b) tastes and smells like beer and c) tastes and smells really good. The current recipe for “Billy’s Chilies” is a metaphor for Twisted Pine overall: peppers are hand-cut, then put in mesh bags and steeped in their wheat beer (I don’t remember how long). They have no machine to cut and de-seed the peppers, so it’s all done by hand. This leads to a great, truly “hand-crafted” beer, but also means they struggle to produce it on a massive scale. The raspberry wheat is made using the same process – adding, then removing raspberries to their wheat beer – but can be produced more easily because no manipulation of the fruit is necessary.

New Belgium runs a great tour, with a personable hippie spinning beermaking tales accentuating the brewery’s core values – making Belgian-style beers, treating each other with respect and kindness, and protecting the environment. New Belgium really plays up the “brewery next door” angle – everyone knows everyone, everything is done with a smile: they’re just hippies trying to make some beer and be nice about it. But make no mistake about it, New Belgium is an aggressive, savvy company with serious business moxie looking to spread, expand, and carve out market share. The company is now run by the wife of the original husband and wife team – the husband retired about seven years ago and they brought in a new European brewmaster.

New Belgium’s tour hardly went into the brewery at all. Most of it was a Q&A sort of thing in a bus outside the building. They really want to deemphasize the scope of their operation, which has gotten pretty industrial. Their beers are pretty adventurous, generally speaking. Highlights include the Mothership Wit, an excellent hefeweizen; Trippel, a very wild, almost absurdly flavorful ale, and their filtered Sunshine Wheat. But the best of all, and the first reason why New Belgium is so much more successful than the Twisted Pines of the world, is Fat Tire. I have had a lot of ambers, and have never tasted anything near as good as Fat Tire. The beer is rich but smooth, flavorful but not bitter. Quite simply, I think it is a perfect beer. It is also very popular and leads the New Belgium charge across America. Fat Tire really serves as a mascot for the brewery, and much of their success depends on it.

The second reason why New Belgium is more successful than Twisted Pine is ambition. Twisted Pine does not seem to have much design on growth. They appear to be happy as a microbrewery, making good beer, experimenting some with seasonals, and always providing an excellent, fresh product to consumers. I like everything that Twisted Pine does, and taking this understated route might be the way to go for our company. I’m not sure how much money the company is making, but they’ve been around for about nine years, they make good brews, and their customers are happy. I think this is just what they want.

The third reason why New Belgium is more successful than Twisted Pine is marketing. New Belgium beers have great labels, with illustrations done by an old friend of the company’s founders. You can tell you’re looking at a New Belgium beer by the illustration on the bottle, though they’re all different. Finding a creative, entertaining way that both aligns and differentiates the different beers will be a critical part of our sales process. It’s going to take some good ideas and good execution, and we really can’t afford to screw it up. New Belgium does a great job, but their style can’t be copied. New Belgium also does a lot more aggressive mass-marketing than Twisted Pine. I’m not sure of their techniques, but they certainly do a good job of getting their name out there and getting beer into the hands of merchants.

New Belgium does not have a pub or any other sort of business attached to it. They have a decent-sized, fairly popular taproom attached to the brewery. Twisted Pine has a comfortable taproom along with their brewery open afternoons and early evenings. They serve peanuts, play some tunes off an i-pod, and sell gear. Sometimes they have some small concerts. If we don’t end up going for the all-out pub approach, I think a small taproom similar to Twisted Pine’s would be an excellent compromise.