Yankee Brew News Archive

Brave New Brew Pubs

Originally Published: 05/94

By: Mike Moore

The resurgence of well-made beer in this country isn't good only for beer drinkers; it's also good for entrepreneurs, because it's widely perceived to be a trend, a Good Market, where the customers are still thirsty enough to turn you a profit. If the resurgence is going to keep being good for beer drinkers then it has to go on being good for entrepreneurs; but by now Americans are used to profiteering businessmen corrupting their demands. Suppose -- just suppose -- the microbrewing industry spawned sprawling chains of fast-food-type brewpubs that served extract beer to people who were sick of Budweiser but couldn't tell porter from stout? Would the chains seize the market, or simply fold when the veneer of fashion dies?

"I think it will be like the discotheques," said Ray McNeill, who owns McNeill's Brewery in Brattleboro, Vermont. "I don't know anything about discotheques. Probably the really good ones survived the seventies and are still out there ... The pubs that will survive will be the ones that have the really great atmosphere, really great beer, really great food or all of the above. One or more of those three things and the rest of them are going down the toilet. They'll reach a saturation point."

Well, maybe. But the toilet doesn't recognize virtue. McDonald's has managed to stay out of the toilet without supplying atmosphere or great food.

"Beer is a profitable business," said Peter Leavitt, brewer at Sunday River Brewing Company in Bethel, Maine. "Everybody's doing well at it except for the very few ... and there's usually pretty stark reasons as to why they go out of business. So it only makes sense that chains would be able to take a profitable business and through standardization, and the strict inventory that most of those chains keep, really turn it into a super-profitable business."

Hop's Grill and Bar is a chain of brewpubs in Florida that's grown, since November 1989, to seven pubs all over the state. An eighth will open soon in Tampa, and Tom Netolicky, who oversees all the brewing, says the chain also wants to open a separate brewery to market its bottled beer. (Florida laws won't let brewpubs bottle their own.) They are, by all accounts, flourishing.

"We do everything -- consistency's everything," Netolicky said. "You can go into any one of our restaurants, try the beers, and it's gonna taste like any of the other restaurants you go into. In fact, in a few minutes here I've got our weekly brewer's meeting where the brewers will bring samples of their beer from the restaurants; we sit down here in the corporate office and we compare them side-by-side for quality control."

Hop's brews three beers -- "Hammerhead Red," "Hop's Golden," and "Clearwater Light." The recipes were developed by Karl Strauss in California, refined by Netolicky; and they're brewed using mainly J.V. Northwest equipment in split levels -- a brewhouse upstairs, where it's visible to the public, and a fermentation room in the basement.

"I've done all the training for the brewers, I've done all the writing of the brewery manuals that set down procedures," said Netolicky. "How much variation do we allow from the procedure? Zero. Zero tolerance for experimentation. We've got a proven track record with the three beers that we make, so, you know, don't fix it if it isn't broken."

What about the atmosphere inside the pub. Is that consistent too?

"Oh, yes, very consistent. We all are the same. The food's gotta be the same, the beer's gotta be the same, the decor's gotta be the same. All our uniforms are purchased from the same company."

Netolicky said the consistency made new sites easy to build. They're adaptable, too --- some were fit into preexisting buildings and others were built from scratch. "Five of the seven are free-standing," he said. "Two were built into strip malls."

Hop's has applied the Budweiser method to brewpub-building -- modern equipment, consistency, and a field-tested product that sells. Most of the current major breweries got big with that formula after World War II, and they've outlasted discotheques, which were always kind of weird. The beer at Hop's isn't Budweiser, and the food isn't McDonald's, but is it distinctive enough to be written off as a trend, a phenomenon of the nineties? "It is a place where you can bring the whole family," said Netolicky. "The beers, they're very drinkable. I mean, you can come in, and they're very refreshing, and they balance off very well with our food. And the atmosphere ... it's not loud and noisy and brightly-lit like some restaurants that you can go to."

How, exactly, can you lose money on this?

"The handcrafted-on-the-premises kind of thing will lose its cachet as it becomes more and more prevalent," said Ray McNeill. Peter Egelston, who co-owns the Portsmouth Brewery and the Northampton Brewing Company, gave a sarcastic outline of the way that might happen. "I think if you start seeing 'brewpubs' popping up in Marriott hotel lounges and, you know, the local little pizza joint buying some cheap tanks from the back of a magazine and getting a malt-syrup brewery going, putting out their crappy little beer, with their pizzas, that's gonna be real tough on brewpubs in general," he observed. ." You're gonna see when one person proposes to another, 'Why don't we go to the Portsmouth Brewery, that's the brewpub in town,' and the other person says, 'Oh, I've been to one of those brewpubs, they make shitty beer.' "

But right now most people don't think that way. The public likes the beer at Hop's, or else it wouldn't be flourishing. "Actually, we have plans for, um -- the eighth store's going up in Tampa, the ninth store is gonna be up in Jacksonville, we're putting up a second one there, the tenth store will be in Port Richey, and the eleventh store will be in Ocala, the twelfth store will be in Orlando," said Netolicky. "We've got financing for ten more of these."

Pull quote #1

How much variation do we allow from the procedure? Zero. Zero tolerance for experimentation. We've got a proven track record with the three beers that we make, so, you know, don't fix it if it isn't broken.

- Tom Netolicky, Hop's Grill and Bar

Pull quote #2

The handcrafted-on-the-premises kind of thing will lose its cachet as it becomes more and more prevalent.

Ray McNeill, McNeill's Brewery