Review of Beer School: Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery

By Beerwench

I wasn't sure what to expect when I sat down to read this book. I like beer but I didn’t think I wanted to read about how a brewery business got started. However, I was pleasantly surprised at the easy pace of the book and the simple approach to the complicated arena of business- kind of like a well-balanced beer. The book follows the journey of the Brooklyn Brewery from its inception in 1886 to its success as one of the top 40 brewers in the nation today.

Potter and Hindy started the Brooklyn Brewery label around the same time as micro brewing was beginning to flourish in the United States. When there aren’t a lot of business models for one to look to, you kind of have to figure it out on your own. It made for an interesting read- even through the economic portions. The narrative maintained a frank and straightforward approach. The authors are candid and grade themselves looking back, on how they handled their various situations.

Mostly, the book is interesting because of the time frame of their journey. The Brooklyn Brewery is representative of many successful brewers that were started in the late 80’s on a wing and a prayer. I can recall being in a bar for the first time, and hearing a friend order Hefeweizen, and thinking, “ What the hell is that?!” Choices were pretty poor for beer when I was a teenager. There was the garden variety Bud, Miller, Coors, and the occasional crappy import- Becks, Heineken or St.Pauli Girl. Then came the microbrews and saved the United States from drinking crappy beer forever. I was fortunate enough to be on the upswing of microbreweries coming into popularity as I hit my legal drinking age. I had much better beer choices, and I grew into my drinking pants with Pyramid, Nor’Wester, and Widmer. I just never considered what the microbreweries were up against when a new market was being pried open. They had to appeal to a new market of beer drinkers- the beer may taste better, but it was also more expensive. They found that people inclined to drink micro brew beer had more disposable income and higher education levels. They had to target the right audience, and with less than a shoestring budget for advertising. They certainly could not compete with advertising goliaths like Bud and Coors. They had a series of concerts, promotions and festivals, which proved to be very effective at marketing the product.

They had to convince distributors to sell their beer, and Brooklyn Brewery had such trouble with this, they became distributors themselves. They spent a good many years having a more successful distribution business than the brewery they had initially set out to build. They helped with other small breweries and specialty beers in their distribution business, moving Sierra Nevada quite well, which was founded in 1981 and had the advantage of 5 years getting established. They followed the dot.com boom to open a website, TotalBeer.com that would offer all kinds of beers, in hopes of removing the troublesome distribution problem. Like many dot.coms in the beginning, it also folded in on itself. (I think maybe the site could have been moderately successful, but they also had the unfortunate timing of a launch right before September 11, 2001.)

The book ends with realizing their final dream- opening a brewery in Brooklyn, where it still stands today- a brewery that produces quality beer and also enjoys the success of being one of the top 40 breweries in the nation.