KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Sip And Learn Exploring Non-Alcoholic Craft Beers In MN

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Welcome to All Things Flamingo Podcast with the Flamingo Group and myself, Beth Riley. Join us as we discuss all things to do with our community, real estate, and all things Flamingo. Welcome and tune in for a flocking good time. Well, hello, hello, hello. Today we have Ian Meredith with Summit Brewing Company in St. Paul. And Ian, you've been there over 10 years as the area sales manager? That is correct, yeah. Thank you for coming on. This will be a specific webinar in the sense that we'll talk about beer and all things beer as far as Summit's concerned. But we're going to dig a little bit more into NA and sort of really what's going on in that market. But before then, if you could tell me a little bit about Summit, it has a really nice, rich history that I'd love to hear about. Yeah, so Summit was founded in 1986 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Our founder, Mark Stutt, Rood,

is still our CEO and acting president of our board now. Still works five, six days a week. He's very active in the community, lives in St. Paul. But we've been around since 86, and we're now in our second facility. So we originally started on University Avenue in 280 in an old auto part shop. And then we just recent, in 1996, we broke ground on a new facility in Montreal Circle. That was actually owned by the Port Authority down on the Bluffs. above Shepherd Road.

And that was the first facility built in the state of Minnesota from the ground up since Prohibition in 97 was when we opened. And we actually imported a German, a full four vessel, 100% copper German brew house, which still is in operation today and does 100% of our product. And we've grown incrementally over the years. So since 1986, we've seen growth up until just a few years back. And we are now the 31st largest brewery in the country.

And we do 100% of our own production, which is different than a lot of folks that are on that list as well. We have five state footprint. We service Minnesota, the Dakota's, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Those are some good brewing states. Oh, yeah, they're good drinking states for sure. But also are we going to do six months of the year. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

No. So, but yeah, we've grown our business on the back of a brand called Extra Pale Ale. It's kind of, it is the best-selling beer in the state of Minnesota, craft beer. And it is an English-style American pale ale. It's kind of a hybrid beer with some imported English ingredients and some American ingredients as well. Can you tell me a little bit between what's a craft beer and like a basic run-of-the-mill beer? Sure, like, you know, a lot of things that there's a lot of different definitions for, craft, but a lot of it has to do with your size. So production size, capacity and things like that. Most breweries, craft breweries, brew under 2 million production barrels a year. Most of your larger domestic breweries will do upwards of, you know, 5, 10 million production barrels in a calendar

year. Okay. It's also just a, you know, an adoption of a certain mantra of brewing. So it's using, sticking to four main ingredients, experimenting with new things, not using a lot of adjunct, so things that are not hops, water, malt, or yeast, things like corn. A lot of folks will put in beer and things like that. So we steer clear of a lot of those. It sticks to some of that German purity law in lots of, you know, experimentation. Yeah, because it seems like when there's corn added, it gets pretty sweet. And you don't, I don't get that sweet taste or after taste, I think, that comes with it.

Yeah, I agree. So it kind of gives you a nice, like, sweet. for corn but it also helps to get your alcohol up without having to use a lot of raw materials so okay but that craft gear is really a it's a segment of the brewing industry it's growing and it's it's it's really starting to take on its own forms we've got some heritage breweries like summit that are leading the way so yeah with good tasting beer you guys have never skimped on quality can you tell me a little bit about you just talked about all the

different you stick to the the four basics which you said was hops malt water and grain right is that in yeast yeah yeah the malt would be some sort of malted grain so people would use like a two-roll barley or wheat often sometimes they use rye things like that but yeah you're absolutely right like that's one thing that i would give mark a lot of credit for over the years there's he took no shortcuts and when he wanted to do something he really invested in it so we're talking about top-tier equipment, you know, there's not many breweries left in the country that are brewing on full copper. I think if you ask any trained, classically trained brewer, if they could brew on copper, they would prefer to. But there's just not a lot of manufacturing for that, and it's very expensive to produce those nowadays.

So to go find a copper vessel brewhouse and still have that produce 100% of our product is very unique, probably less than a dozen breweries in the country that are doing that. Wow. And then things like we're also one of more only a handful of breweries in the country that naturally carbonate 100% of our product. And in large. Naturally. That's the key word, right?

Naturally carbonate. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So throughout the brewing process, the fermentation process, you get CO2, but most breweries then will release the CO2 and then they'll actually force carbonate the product for packaging. But we actually retain the CO2 in our fermenters and then we recycle. it back in the liquid. So, you know, it's a real commitment to quality. It costs a lot of money.

Our fermenters are very expensive. They need to be, they need to be jacketed with glycol to prevent any kind of, you know, disasters from imploding or exploding of fermentation tanks. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And when I say, too, you know, Mark also really heavily invested in quality assurance, quality control from the beginning. So spending a lot of money, on a full lab. So we have a microbiologist, we have a serial scientist that work on things. We're testing our beers throughout the entire brewing process.

So from, well, it's in the kettle's brewing all the way to the fermenters, and then we're testing it once packaged too to make sure we're not getting things like dissolved oxygen in the liquid, which would make a beer go flat very fast. So. Good. Yeah, it does make a difference.

And then your storage is also, I know you guys are very particular about your storage too, after it's actually rude and bottled, it's always in cold, did you say? Yeah, so we, I mean, with all of our, so we deal 100% with wholesale party, third party wholesalers to distribute our product. And it's in all of their contracts, that product needs to be stored cold. After it's done with our production runs at the brewery, it goes directly into a cooler, and it lives there until it goes to our wholesalers.

We also work pretty tirelessly talking to retail accounts about cold storage and making sure beer is well rotated. So you get the oldest beer sold first. But all things that we're working on constantly. And really, I mean, you can taste the difference in the end when we check the market. We try a lot of product and I don't taste a lot of off beer out there for us. Yeah. And I did go through your plant. Oh, I think it was late. It was early 2000s. I think I went through the plant. I did see the copper brewing vessels and how that worked. It was, and Mark did the actual tour. So that was pretty fun. We did it for a nonprofit gig that we were doing. And the other thing that was, I think we saw it when saga came out. Okay. So that was about 10 years ago then. Yeah.

So he had to tell us the whole story, or as you would say, the whole saga of how it got its name, what happened. It was really, it was very, it was very fun. It was, I thought it was, it was, nice and unique. We got to have the original brewer in there that was telling us how this all came together for him and for the community. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's one thing that I enjoy as a person who lived in St. Paul for a long time, you know, is how involved in the community. Not only our brewery as our company is, but also Mark. So he's very, very dedicated to the community. So yeah, well, that will keep it going. I always think, I always think a summit first. So I was pretty excited when I met you. I was like, oh, I like this beer. This is my face.

favorite. And yeah, just recently I decided, you know, I drive for a living since I'm a realtor. Obviously, I'm always in my car and I decided that's, I'm not going to drink anymore. I just couldn't take the risk. And I didn't really, I'm not really a good drinker in the sense that I pretty much feel my beer immediately, but I didn't want to give out beer. So I started drinking your non-alcoholic line. Yeah.

Yeah. And I didn't feel I was missing anything. good because that's I mean it's hard to do and then you know that are non-alcoholic beers it's we call them neeless is the line of beers so it's a neilis means nothing in iraig gaelic um which our head brewer is an irishman um and so uh it's a three and a half year project um a very hefty investment from the brewery um it's the first and only beer we're doing uh pasteurizing currently so we had to actually put a pasteurizer into our facility to to make this product. But it was something that we thought we could really service a new clientele

with, you know, a new consumer base. And it's been going well. Okay. So my understanding is that it's a full beer, but then what do you do to take the alcohol out? Because I have, it tastes like a full beer. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was kind of always our goal with this project was to brew a beer first and then figure out how to make it non-alcoholic, which is probably a different way than a lot of people are approaching this project. But like I said, it took about three and a half years with Damien McCann, who's their head brewered, and Sack Quant, who's our quality assurance, quality control manager, really trying a bunch of different things.

There's a lot of technology out there nowadays, and most folks are doing what you would call, they're basically brewing a full beer and then they're stripping it of alcohol by either heating it or filtering it out in some sort of way. And we could do that, but we actually feel pretty strongly about the technique that we chose because we feel like it keeps flavor in the beer, flavor and aroma, what you're looking for. So we're actually using a European yeast strand to brew our beers. And it's a specialty yeast strand that really, we call it restricted fermentation. So it brews a beer and imparts a lot of the flavors that you'd want.

your carbonation, but it doesn't actually produce ethanol or alcohol. So we're brewing a beer just like we'd use, we'd brew any other beer only using a different yeast strain, which prevents the yeast from creating the ethanol in the beer. Wow, that's an excellent detail because everybody else is telling me exactly what you just had said was that they brew a full beer and then they were pulling the alcohol out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where you're still brewing a full beer, but you're not pulling anything out of it. Yep.

And so it doesn't, in other words, we don't have to beat the beer up. We don't have to, you know, heat it to hell. We don't have to strip it of any flavor and aroma. It just allows us to be able to maintain the quality of the beer that we're looking for. And it really is fairly unique to our brewery. So I think you'll start seeing a lot more folks who are venturing into this category. Burbers starting to use a similar technique as time marches on. But for now, we're one of the few that, few that are using this site.

restrictive fermentation. We do a lot on social media and it was interesting as I started, we did mock tales and things like that around Christmas just to get people to think of other things they could make instead of having to drink because so many people have to drive, right? So that's a big deal. And I got tons of hits on that. And we also even now we just started promoting you and this and we started to get some hits because people want to know more about this, not only the process of what you're doing for the beer,

But it is getting to be very socially appropriate that you put out a non-alcoholic drink as well, not soda all the time, but you put out a non-alcoholic drink along with everything else at parties. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think in general, too, even at like bars and restaurants, we're seeing a lot more extensive menus for non-alcoholics, whether it's beer. I've even seen some non-alcoholic wines on menus now. Like you said, mottails have become a huge.

huge menu item for people. They really put an emphasis on that. And all the industry, at least brewing industry publications that I read regularly, all the statistics are also pointing towards this being a growing segment, you know. I always think that it'll be a niche portion of the market for beer, but I think it's definitely a growing portion. And, you know, statistics are also telling us that this younger generation of drinkers, they don't drink like as much as previous generations. Mine. We're meeting people where they're at, you know, and we're, you know, we're really servicing a different kind of clientele. So when you're saying it's important to us. Right. So when you're saying it's trending, you guys just recently went to Europe too.

Could you tell me a little bit of what's going on in that market? Is there more non-alcoholic options in Europe than there are here? What do you, what's sort of trending there? I mean, I think, I think yes in certain countries for sure. So I was, I think you're referring to my wife and I went to Europe. Yeah, a couple weeks ago, I think. Yeah, we were in the south of France for a little bit and then we were in Monaco. But, you know, non-alcoholic beer has been pretty prevalent, especially in Germany, which has a heavy brewing culture for a long time. Most of the big production breweries in Germany have always had some offerings.

And you see that too in America with a lot of the big domestic breweries. have had offerings for quite a while. I think we're just kind of finally starting to get into a place where some craft brewers are getting into the game a little bit and trying to make, I don't want to say a higher quality, non-alcoholic product, but maybe a more flavorful. Which is higher quality. But yeah, I'm not here to have a bunch of light beers that tastes, you know, like, you know, just tastes like urine is all I can say. It just tastes terrible. It tastes absolutely terrible. So that the craft side of it is what I really dig. I mean, that's what I've been looking at. Absolutely. No,

it's been, it's been a fun little project and we're looking to expand on the series as time marches on, add more styles, do different things. But really, I mean, you know, it gets us into some areas where we don't get to be otherwise. You know, pat, this beer is like I said, pasteurized so that, you know, adds to some shelf stability for us so we can get into grocery stores and things like that. So you'll see our products and targets and cub foods, cub groceries, Luns and barley, koalskis, things like that. So, I mean, it gets us into some new areas where current Minnesota laws don't allow us to be with full, with full strength, alcoholic products. Yep, not going to happen. Also, you had right before we started, I heard the can pop and you

are drinking which one now? Yeah, so I'm drinking the Nieless Irish Dark, which is, One of two products we have in the Nielis lineup. There it is. There it is. And we released both at the same time about a year and a half ago. And so we have this Irish dark, which is our version of what you call an Irish style. We just can't legally call it that. So this is a darker style beer.

It's got really big flavors of espresso and chocolate and caramel, spicy hot malt character. And then we actually use all imported ingredients. So imported malts from Europe and then European hops as well. Wow. I haven't tried that one. I drink your IPA. Okay.

The Nealus IPA? Yeah. Yeah. I'll say this. I'm surprised at how equally both are selling, especially as we released it throughout the summer and things like that. The dark beer is keeping up with the IPA. But the IPA is definitely edging out just a little bit. So it's a little bit. Well, if you like an IPA, you like an IPA. I think there's drinkers that like it and there's people that will never get it's too bitter. But it's definitely it's much more my choice. Now we have all of your beers up here, which is pretty terrific. What can I, your leading drink, of course, is the extra pale ale. That's, that's your leader. Extra pale ale is the first beer we brewed 37 years ago. And it's still our best selling beer.

It's still the best selling craft beer in the state of Minnesota. And that's actually, you know, Mark started our founder, that was his recipe formulation. So he came up with that quite a while ago. It looks like the next two on the list, you've got our two most recent seasonal offerings. So we've got a seasonal lineup where currently it's our winter ale, which is an English winter warmer, would be the style. It's kind of like a brown ale, but the hops and malt in there give it a nice spicy characteristic that a brown ale wouldn't have. Okay. And then the one next to that would be our October Fest, which is our best-selling seasonal.

It's a German-style Marzen. So it's an amber lager, stronger beer. And that's something we release usually in the fall, like August, September, run it through October. And then we kind of get into some of our different IPAs. So we've got, you know, Saga, which is our flagship IPA, which I know you mentioned. Yeah. We started doing about 10 years ago. And that still is our best-selling.

IPA, but as you mentioned also, Saga herself, the goddess series is, we're adding in beers every single day on that series pretty much. So we have Saga, Saga Hasey. We've got an imperial version of Saga now, and we're going to have a tropical version of Saga. And then we've got all four of those in a variety pack that we just released a few weeks ago. So. Well, the tropical, what's the main, usually that has a fruit base to it. What's the main fruit base on the tropical? Yeah. So what makes it? tropical in flavor and aroma is primarily it's going to be, we're using a lot of southern hemisphere hops, so hops that are growing south of the equator. And what that does is where, depending on

where you plant hops a lot, like wine grapes, the flavor profile changes. So when you plant to hop down in the southern hemisphere, it tends to give you nice tropical aroma and flavors. But we also do add a little bit of passion fruit puree. So there is a little bit of that in there, but the primary driving force of the tropical flavor and aroma would be the choice of hops that we use. And then with your nitros, can you tell me a little bit about nitro? I know you, yeah, just so everybody can kind of be educated on what is that? Yeah, so we brew one beer that we do on nitro, on nitro glass, sorry, excuse me. And we don't do it anything in package as of right now, but we do an oatmeal stout.

So it's a Scottish style stout and it's got oats in there as part of its malted barley or it's malt. It's malt build, sorry. But the big difference between a nitro beer and regular carbonated beer is we still use CO2 throughout the brewing process. But then when it comes time to serve the product, we're actually using nitrogenated gas to push the product. And then we're agitating as it goes. And what it'll do is it'll cascade similar to like a Guinness. and give you a nice creamy mouth feel that you don't get from like a regular CO2 push beer. So we only do one style for now.

We've messed around with some in the past. Limited runs for our own premise, the Ratskeller, as we call it. But it really, I think oatmeal style where you find it, I always drink it. I think it's great. Yeah, it's a creamy mouth feel. Yeah. Yeah, I love it. Maybe we could talk a little bit about the Ratskeller since you just mentioned it.

Yeah, for sure. So like I said, we opened up a new facility in 1997, and we're right off of 7th Street and St. Paul and 35E. We're just on the bluffs above Shepherd Road. It's a really beautiful facility that we actually bought the property from the St. Paul Port Authority. We own two buildings in about 10 acres down there. And we have a really nice consumer-facing area to come enjoy some beers. we call it the summit rat skeller which in german rat skeller is like a gathering place okay so just remodeled a handful of years ago uh beautiful high ceilings nice woodwork uh

we have some shows every now and again um we have pretty limited hours though Thursday through sat or Thursday through Sunday i think you got on there three to eight yeah and we have Saturday so it's Thursday through Sunday three day okay and then you do have a nice outdoor patio and the weather changes kind of overlooks the bluffs a little bit. We have some board games, things like that. There's St. Paul Kubing Society, uses it for their leagues. We generally, the hours, the days that we aren't open,

you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We need that space open for nonprofits. So we use a lot of folks come in. I know you said that you'd come through. That's what we did, yeah. Yeah. So, but we also allow some folks to use the property more. often than not for free of charge to host their nonprofit organizations.

So very fun. Do you have any food or is it mainly? We don't have a kitchen. We don't have a kitchen on site but we always have when we're open for public hours we have food trucks available. So you can go to our website summitbrewing.com and they have listed out all of the food trucks and we also have any other specialty events going on at the brewery, you know whether it's trivia here and there or some live music or uh i think we had a we had a fly fishing tie group in there they were teaching we bought a Thai fly fishing lures so that's a good group oh yeah they're a fun group so i bet now are you guys going to get into the hoppy water at all that seems to be the next

arena of non-alcoholic beverages you know i can say with confidence that um there's no plans as a as of for 2024 but we're starting the marketing team and some of some of the guys who make the decisions on products for the year are starting to look at 2025 and i'm not going to say it's out of the realm of possibility it's just definitely it's not something that's been discussed in any kind of great detail at this point so i know the hop waters have been going well so yeah they're kind of i haven't tasted the flavored ones i've kind of just tried some of the other the when they first came out I started tasting them it was just kind of bitter water so I wasn't wasn't really intrigued by it but I guess as they get into flavors and different things um that's

where you'll probably come up with some tasty stuff but right now I'm not super intrigued yet it's kind of expensive yeah I mean yeah some of that stuff you know it can be price prohibitive I mean again you know there is a consumer for it I know there are some that are doing incredibly well throughout the, you know, throughout the country. And I've heard good things about the flavor profiles. I personally haven't tried any of them. That's fair. Like I said, I've tried them.

I'm not madly in love with it yet. But, you know, as soon as I get the right flavor, I usually right away start buying it and keeping it in the house. Sure. So the other thing I think I sent to you in a text message was just N.A. Day, which was in Chicago as they started to have a whole festival on non-alcoholic drinks. It was mocktails, but also they had a series of different beers. They were all craft beers.

And this was in Chicago. I think we had brought this up. Sure. I really appreciate your time on this. Thank you so much. I feel blessed that I got to have the opportunity to have you on. And then we've also done real estate. So that was another area that we got to talk a little bit about that.

And I'm glad that you're a proud Bloomington resident. Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. We love the new house. So thanks for helping us out there. That was good. Great. Thank you. Well, I think we're done with everything here. Is there anything that I've missed? Not that I can think of, no. Just, yeah, thanks for trying the beers and they're out in market. So check them out. Five state footprint. Please do drink all the beers. And if you like NAs, they are, I think they're the best on the market. So, and I've tried a lot of them because it was like,

yeah, I can't drink anymore because I can't handle it, but I can always drink N.A. So these have been my favorites. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good day. Thank you. You too.