Omnivore - Wild Heaven, Red Hare, SweetWater talk beer legislation and more

• Joeff Davis/CL File

Late last week, the Georgia Tech Business Network held a Business of Brewing panel in the packed Neal Conference Room at Tech’s Scheller College of Business. Hop City’s Kraig Torres moderated the event, which featured representatives from three Georgia beer makers: Red Hare Brewing Company (Managing Partner Roger Davis), SweetWater Brewing Company (VP of Sales Dave Guender), and Wild Heaven Craft Beers (President Nick Purdy). Over the course of an hour, Torres asked the panel 15 questions, then opened the floor to a brief audience Q&A.

Some topics and fun facts from the session:

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• Brewery social media strategy: “A brand’s social media presence should be that brand’s personality after one beer.” - Wild Heaven’s Purdy
• New beers: Red Hare and Wild Heaven are working on sours. In fact, Wild Heaven just installed three 15-barrel sour tanks. Purdy said, “Three or four years from now, everyone in this room who says, ‘I don’t quite like sours yet? You will.” Red Hare is working on Fresh Hop IPA for Atlanta Beer Week, and is aging beers in tequila barrels.
• Speaking of IPAs, there’s a reason you see so many breweries making them. “IPA is by far the biggest category in craft,” SweetWater’s Guender said. “It grows every year. It was number three or four a few years ago, and has really distanced itself from the other styles.”
• “Liquid” is easily the most frequently used synonym for “beer” in the Georgia craft brewing community.
• It took SweetWater 3-4 years to break even and start making money as a company. Red Hare is “starting down our fourth year of selling beer for a living,” Davis said, “and on paper we made money last year. We’re profitable, marginally. We’re starting to see a daylight, but it could change tomorrow.” Wild Heaven hopes to “definitely be in the black in a couple years.”
• The Department of Labor has cracked down on brewery volunteers, which was formerly a common occurrence in the beer world. “There are no volunteers,” Red Hare’s Davis said. “You’re either on our staff as a part-time or full-time employee.”
• Wild Heaven drilled a well at their Avondale Estates location. “We’re making our beer from well water, we do a lot of our cleaning with it, and most of our water usage is well water,” Purdy said. “That’s reduced our water bill by about 80 percent.”
• SweetWater, the nation’s 19th largest craft brewery by volume, continues to grow. Guender said they’ll expand their distribution reach into Texas by the end of the year.

Inevitably, talk turned to Georgia craft beer’s hot-button issue of the moment: on-premise sales for off-premise consumption. As it stands currently, Georgia is one of only five states in the country (Hawaii, Mississippi, North Dakota, and West Virginia are the other four) that doesn’t allow breweries to sell their product directly to customers in any form. Visiting consumers can’t purchase a case, growler, or even a pint of beer. They can, however, drink “samples” on a tour, but even then, the regulations are fairly byzantine. All three breweries spoke to the benefits of softening of these regulations.

“I do see examples of states like Florida or North Carolina, where the regulations are a little more relaxed in terms of what a brewery can do, and I look at the growth that’s happening in those states,” SweetWater’s Guender said. “Not only in craft beer as a category, but the number of craft breweries coming in, which could be indicative of the regulations that are a little bit more conducive to opening a brewery.”

“It would be good for me for someone traveling through from Tennessee to be able to take a six pack of our beer back to Tennessee,” Red Hare’s Davis said. “That’s a part of us that gets to go there, and that builds the story. It lifts all ships.”

Wild Heaven’s Purdy agreed, but stressed that the notion that modifying the laws slightly would crush the three-tier system is a straw man. Moreover, small breweries need the three-tier. “The worry has been that brewers want to get rid of the distributors,” he said. “We don’t. We love our distributors, none of us want to buy a fleet of trucks, that’s not a business any of us have any interest in being in, it’s unbelievably complicated. I don’t want the restaurant down the street calling me and saying, ‘We need another keg of beer, can you bring it over?’ That sounds terrible to me. We have no interest in getting rid of the three-tier system.”

Calling it a “philosophical/freedom” issue, Purdy elaborated on his point with the double standard of Georgia wineries, which are considered an agricultural product, and can therefore sell bottles of wine on their property. There’s a two-pronged issue of breweries keeping up, both with the wineries on their home turf and the brewery competitors with better laws in every neighboring state.

“The rules aren’t even across the board, and they should be,” SweetWater’s Guender said. “An even playing field is what we’re all going for.”