Rogue is Different
This
Oregon brewery is perhaps the smallest brewery that you will
find in beer stores and bars across the country – widely
scattered high-end beer stores and bars, but national
nonetheless. Being national certainly hasn’t hurt them, as
they get picked in more “best of” lists than almost any
other beer: simply being there is half the fight in most of
these contests. Rogue inspires great loyalty in customers,
loyalty you won’t see with many other craft brewed
brands.
The person most
associated with Rogue is their brewer, John Maier. The Rogue
mythology has Maier walking into the brewhouse on the day of
the first brew and becoming the destined brewer. Maier’s
heavy hand with hops is well-known throughout geekdom. Rogue
– Maier – brews big beers, bitter beers, a lot of them, and
they package them in striking silk-screened ‘bomber’
bottles.
Maier would be a
great interview if you could get him to talk. But he’s a
quiet man, almost shy, so if you want to get much, you’re
better off going to Jack Joyce, the guy who runs the place –
although he’ll tell you that all he does is let John make
beer. I got hold of Jack while he was in Hawaii, spending a
little morning time by the pool.
JACK
JOYCE
Aloha!
LEW
BRYSON Aloha! I
wanted to start from the beginning. You started Rogue in
1988 with two partners, Rob Strasser and Bob Woodell. Are
they still around?
JACK
Oh, yeah.
LEW
How come we only ever see you?
JACK
Well, they’ve never been involved in the
business.
LEW
What did you do before?
JACK
I practiced law for 15 years, probably got bored after 1O. I
worked for Nike for 6.
LEW
Doing law?
JACK
Oh, no, no, no. Doing marketing, management, stuff I knew
nothing about, of course. So getting into the beer business
and not knowing anything wasn’t a handicap.
LEW
Good point. Why did you get into beer?
JACK
We were actually looking for an Oregon food product
business. We thought that there was something appealing
about Oregon. What we said back then was that Oregon
products would sell at Macy’s on Herald Square, which then
was the epitome of retail. One of my partner’s CPAs was a
homebrewer, he’s down in Ashland and looking for money. So
we started as investors.
LEW
What was the beer scene like in Oregon in 1988?
JACK
Obviously, because we all lived in Portland, Bridgeport was
going on, Portland Brewing was going on, Widmer was going
on, Full Sail was going on, Deschutes was just getting
started.
LEW
And you figured you’d fly right into these guys?
JACK
No, we’re not that bright. We just thought we’d have a
brewpub, you know, guys always want to own a bar. Taking the
Herald Square example, we figured we could sell it across
the border in California – in Redding and Red Bluff. That’s
as far as we thought. We never started out to build this
nation-wide distribution network, as we call it.
LEW
What was the pub like in the early days?
JACK
It was small. We actually started in Ashland, a town of
15,OOO. It certainly was fun, and the people who appreciated
the beer appreciated the beer, but they didn’t actually
adopt the brewery. They have a Shakespeare festival there,
and that’s about the only thing the town is capable of
adopting. And there was a lot of pot, and a lot of wine
competing back then.
LEW
There wasn’t really room for another intoxicant at the
time.
JACK
Yeah. And the quote, movement, unquote, hadn’t gotten that
far south. Or coming up that far north from Anderson Valley
or Sierra Nevada.
LEW
When did you move to Newport?
JACK
We opened Newport in May, 1989, and hired John Maier at that
point in time.
LEW
I wanted to ask you about that. There’s this almost mythic
thing about how John Maier walked into the brewery as you
were brewing your first batch and just kind of took over. Is
that true?
JACK
No. You don’t want to ruin the myth, but I met him in an
airport. We were both stranded in Denver. What do John and I
do when we’re stranded in an airport? We go to the bar! He
was working for Alaskan Brewing, and he was from Oregon.
Just in the conversation, I recall him saying that he’d like
to get back, that it’s a little cold up there. When we
decided to open in Newport, I just called him; I’d saved his
Alaskan Brewing card. I told him to “come home”, and he’s
been brewing for us ever since.
LEW
He’s become almost synonymous with the brewery. He’s in a
lot of the website, his dog’s in the website. Did his beer
became the character of Rogue’s beer?
JACK
I don’t think we ever thought it was about us. Too many
investors think it’s about them. It’s not about them. I
don’t know how to make the product. It seems to me that if
you’re going to be honest, it needs to be about the guy
that’s making the product, not about the business guys. You
need both, but it’s about him making the stuff. If he made
average beer, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
LEW
It’s not average beer. Your beer was hoppier and bigger than
most right from the beginning. What started that? Was that
John, or was it your idea?
JACK
Not me! One thing Jeff Larsen told me, from Alaskan Brewing,
when I hired John he says to me, “Watch your hop inventory!”
I didn’t even know what a hop was. I’ve just always let him
make great beers, and we’ll figure out how sell
’em.
LEW
You’ve got a lot of them, too. You’re maybe best known for
the Shakespeare Stout, but you’re really one of the biggest
craft breweries that doesn’t have a flagship. What is the
biggest seller?
JACK
Probably Dead Guy Ale, which we couldn’t sell when it was
called Maierbock, even though it was a preferred pub drink.
But as Dead Guy, it’s probably our top seller. But our
model, at least as I learned the business, was the Samuel
Smith line. If you went to the right places, they would have
five or six of them. I thought that was a good idea, because
it keeps your brewers fresh, otherwise it’s just a
production job.
LEW
You talked about wholesalers coming to you. You’re still
relatively small, but your beer’s all over the country, even
in Japan. Why so far flung?
JACK
A couple reasons. One, on a practical level, you’re
flattered when somebody on the East Coast wants your beer.
It’s hard to turn down. Newport’s got a thing called the
Hatfield Marine Science Center, which isn’t Woods Hole, but
a lot of the Woods Hole people would come out to it. And
they’d take a pony keg back East. I mean, it weighed 75
pounds, and they’d ship it. That was then, shipping a metal
container like that these days might be a little more
challenging in an airplane.
We thought,
because we were 6th in Oregon, and obviously in a remote
location, that we’d like to be the first somewhere else.
Because our beers have such a high ingredient quotient, they
travel well. It was sort of like Sissy Hankshaw in “Even
Cowgirls Get the Blues”; if you’ve got a handicap, use it.
Hers was elephantiasis of the thumbs. So what’d she do? She
hitchhiked. And if she stayed anywhere for any amount of
time, she’d be a typist, back in the days when you hit the
spacebar with your thumb. So if hoppiness was our handicap,
which is what everyone told us when we started, how do you
turn that into an asset? Well, you ship it abroad because
it’s bulletproof.
LEW
How much of the beer is sold in the home market, in
Oregon?
JACK
Probably 25%.
LEW
That isn’t much, is it?
JACK
That’s actually
high, it’s between 2O and 25%.
LEW
You seem to be moving more to 12oz. bottles. That’s probably
popular with the retailers. Why do that now?
JACK
I don’t think we’re doing it, that’s just what you’re maybe
seeing. We’ve had five six-packs for probably five years.
Our business mix is only a third six-packs. Draft and 22oz.
bottles are each a third. Our theory is that we can
distinguish ourselves in 22s, by the package and the
screen-printed labels. Our six-pack carrier is good, but
it’s not that much better, if it’s better at all, than
anybody else’s. It’s just another six-pack, no matter what
you do.
LEW
Is beer and food a big thing with Rogue? Is that something
you lean on in your education efforts?
JACK
More the matching than the cooking with beer. With the Soba
that doesn’t have to be the case, but our beers generally
are so hoppy, and in cooking, especially if you’re
sauteeing, it’s really hard to control the hops. But because
of our packaging, and our variety, we’d like to have more
business – all beer companies would – in white tablecloth
restaurants. It took American wine a long time to get there,
and it’s going to take beer a long time to get there. I
think we have the tools to wage that battle.
LEW
“We” meaning Rogue in particular, or “We” meaning craft
brewing?
JACK
I think craft brewing in general, but us in particular,
because of our packaging. Probably we’ve got a better chance
now, because the Belgians have sort of broken a barrier that
our industry, perhaps outside of Fritz Maytag, has been
singularly unsuccessful in crossing.
LEW
I don’t think they’ve put in enough effort.
JACK
Yeah, for some reason the wine people are better
organized.
LEW
I’m hoping that the merger of the Brewers Association of
American and the Association of Brewers will do something
about that, though I’m probably being overly optimistic.
JACK
That’s a combination of a lobbying group and an educational
group, with both sides venturing into marketing. Now there
are going to be more dollars behind it, there will be more
of it.
LEW
You made a small number of fruit beers over the years, but
that seems to be over now. Was that a policy decision, just
because they were fruit beers, or did they not sell?
JACK
No, we made Rogue-n-Berry, before (Washington DC mayor)
Marion (Berry) went to jail. It was made with marionberries,
a local berry in Oregon. We were one of the first ones to do
it. We started with real fruit, and then we evolved to
concentrate, then we were about to go to syrup, and we just
said, screw it, we’re not really making beer. If anyone
wanted to buy that beer, they could go buy it from Pyramid
or somebody else.
LEW
You’ve gotten involved in a number of causes. Do you think
any small business should get involved in community causes,
or do you think maybe small breweries should be even quicker
to jump into that because of relations with the
community?
JACK
Our first landlord was Mo Niemi, a local restaurant owner.
We had a tough negotiation over what was a “brewery space”.
It was a garage where her kids kept their antique cars. I
think I wanted to pay her a thousand bucks where she only
wanted a couple hundred. But she said, “If you’re lucky
enough not to go broke, feed the fishermen.” And I said,
“Hey, I’ve seen these fishermen, and they have more money
than I do.” She says, “It’s not always that way.” Whenever
fishing was down, she fed people for free at her
restaurants. So I took that to mean to integrate yourself in
the community and give back.
Plus, if you
think about it, it’s a heck of a lot simpler and more
fulfilling way to spend your advertising and promotional
dollars, than it is to do traditional print or radio. You
can never measure that, you’ve got too many choices to make
and people to meet with if you do it right. That was Nike’s
philosophy. If I had 5% as a marketing budget, we’d give 1%
to traditional media advertising, and 4% to what we called
promotions, whether that was establishing road races, or
basketball camps for kids, giving shoes or t-shirts away.
Plus, you can see it, it’s right in front of you. Same way
with the homebrewer community – we support that. We view our
communities as being broader than just where our pubs are.
It’s wherever our beer’s being sold.
LEW
In the east, maybe five or six years ago, there were a lot
of complaints about old Rogue on the shelves. It’s still
selling well, and I haven’t heard any complaints or had any
old Rogue in a few years. Did you do anything, or did things
just sort themselves out?
JACK
Obviously, because we’re so small in this industry, we don’t
have the power to force rotation of stock. So to some
extent, you’ve just got to rely on it selling through. Six
years ago, when the thing went to hell, the shelves that it
sat on were in stores that never should have carried it; not
just us, but everybody else. At the time, everybody and
their uncle was into 22s, everybody and their uncle had a
brewery, so after the shakeout occurred, the sell-through
took care of it.
LEW
What’s the most important goal this year for the brewery?
Your manifesto says you don’t want to be big; what do you
want to be?
JACK
Oh, we don’t have goals like that. We try to do four things
– keep making great product, keep trying to make our
packaging great, keep trying to integrate ourselves in our
communities, and keep creating unique thunder, which means,
the world doesn’t need another table tent, or another
coaster or another neon. We look for educational things to
do that promote the sale of the product, whether that be
Rogue Nation, or our “just add water” bottles, or our
taphandles with grain and hops in them. Then whatever comes,
comes. We never try to push things. We respond to pull. We
try to buy equipment before we need it, so that we can
respond quickly to growth that’s unexpected.
LEW
Any advice on how to sell the product?
JACK
Buy 22s, and buy 64s and buy ceramics. Not six-packs. Rogue
does better in those packages in Massachusetts. Those kinds
of products can be merchandised. They don’t belong on a
shelf. They can be merchandised just like liquor. The
different character of the Rogue on each package is great
for that. You can merchandise our Morimoto product with the
Japanese beers. You should probably merchandise what we call
our XS line, in black ceramic bottles, with the Belgians. If
you’re selling tequila for Cinco de Mayo, or the Day of the
Dead, stack Mexicali Rogue with it. If you’ve got a sushi
bar next door, put a sign by the Morimoto beers. We’re a
merchandiser’s dream.
