Lagunitas closing one of its Breweries, Shmaltz Brewing resurrected, and other beer news

Just Tapped

I've always thought it was a stupid question. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If no one is there to hear it, who cares if it makes a sound? This week, I tell the story of a tree falling in the woods. You decide if it made a sound. Read on. 

Lagunitas Brewing is Closing its Seattle Brewery and Taproom

Maybe you didn’t even know that Lagunitas had a brewery and taproom in Seattle, which says something. Last week we learned that it was closing, so if you missed it, sorry. 

Quick history. The nearly 30-year-old company is headquartered in Petaluma, California but in 2014 Lagunitas Brewing opened a $26 million brewery in Chicago that vastly increased the company’s brewing capacity. In 2015, Heineken International acquired a 50 percent stake in Lagunitas, aiming to help distribute all that beer globally. The news shook the craft beer world: another beloved, O.G. craft brewery consumed by a corporate behemoth. In 2017, when Lagunitas opened a new brewery and taproom in Seattle, a minuscule affair compared to Chicago, it was hardly a blip on the radar. (Below: opening night at Lagunitas in Seattle.)

Lagunitas no longer fits the definition of a craft brewery because of the Heineken acquisition. In a city with no shortage of locally owned craft breweries, many of Seattle’s beer aficionados never entirely warmed up to Lagunitas. Still, some folks will miss the Seattle brewery and taproom. The tone of the statement from Lagunitas suggests that the decision was not related to the location's popularity, though it's hard to imagine the corporate muckety-mucks abandoning a profit center. (Below: Part of the expansive taproom at Lagunitas in Seattle.)

To be fair, "craft" or not, the brewery in Seattle operates with a great deal of autonomy. The taproom’s draft menu features a lot of locally conceived, house-brewed beers and not many of the familiar Lagunitas standbys. And of course, the "Lagunitas Seattle TapRoom and Beer Sanctuary" employs a lot of local people. 

“With great sadness, we’re closing the doors at our Lagunitas Seattle TapRoom & Beer Sanctuary on January 9,” the company said in a statement to Craft Business Daily. “This is not a decision we took lightly. Strategically we decided to run taprooms in our home markets of Petaluma & Chicago... We are working on providing employees with resources to assist them post-closure.”

For transparency’s sake, I live in Seattle and am the one who broke this story last week. 

Shmaltz Brewing Finds a New Owner and New Purpose

Shmaltz Brewing is best recognized for its He’Brew: The Chosen Beer brand of beers. At the helm, founder Jeremy Cowan was not shy about his Jewish heritage and used it to build the brand, often in an admittedly shticky, tongue-in-cheek kind of way.

After a 25-year run, Shmaltz Brewing shut down last year when Cowan said he wanted to focus on his other businesses. Down but not out, Shmaltz Brewing was just purchased by a new owner, Jesse Epstein, a 26-year-old Reform rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College. Epstein hopes to bring some younger energy and a different focus to the brewery.

According to a report in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), Epstein began home brewing during the COVID-19 pandemic and began looking for ways to work his love for beer into his rabbinical pursuits. “I started forming in the back of my mind this idea for a Jewish brewery: how to combine these two big passions,” Epstein told the JTA. When he heard that Cowan was winding down Shmaltz, Epstein says he jumped at the chance to acquire “the closest thing the beer world had to a storied Jewish brand.”

Epstein says his goal with Shmaltz is to use beer as a vehicle for rethinking the idea of a synagogue, and of Jewish communal gathering spaces. “What about our Jewish values can be used to inform our food practices? How, through beer, can we embrace the values of welcoming in the stranger, freeing the captive, opening the eyes of the blind?”

I encourage you to read the full story from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Firkin Finance

Consumer Price Index shows prices coming down, but not so much for beer. On Tuesday, Bart Watson (Chief Economist for the Brewers Association) sent out the following information in the form of a tweet: "Beer CPI comes in at 7.7% YoY - highest level since 1991 (Federal excise tax doubled). Decent jump in November, though 3-month number similar to most of 2022. So to sum: signs overall price inflation coming down in headline CPI, but less so in beer."

Around the Web 

• Brewers Association releases its 2022 Year in Review report and a brief look forward. It's a mixed bag of bad news and less-bad news.  

• In North Carolina, Hillman Beer is buying and moving into the former home of Catawaba Brewing.

• Indeed Brewing of Minneapolis is making THC edibles. Says breweries are well-positioned to benefit from recent changes to Minnesota's marijuana laws.

• Bigelow Tea teams up with Stony Brook Brewery to create tea-infused beers.

Geek Speak 

Dip Hopping - The intention is to boost pleasant hop aromas while suppressing or removing unpleasant off-flavors. Think of dip hopping as a different type of steeping, or as an infusion of hops and wort prior to fermentation -- prior to pitching the yeast. In overly simple terms, hops are added to the fermenter before fermentation begins. A slurry is created with water or wort at approximately whirlpool temperature (150°-170°F) and then left to mingle/steep for an hour, or longer, prior to adding the cooled wort and pitching the yeast. Dip hopping was introduced a decade ago by Kirin, the big Japanese beer company, but in recent years the concept attracted the attention of America's craft brewers, more of whom are now experimenting with the technique. It's a big topic, with lots of geeky details. (Thanks to Leslie Shore, the head brewer at Pike Brewing, for turning me on to dip hopping.) Read more about dip hopping.    

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This week's Taster Tray was composed by Kendall Jones.