Welcome to Brewbound’s A Round With, a weekly feature that grabs a round with beer industry leaders to discuss business challenges, wins and more.
In the latest installment, Ben Edmunds, brewmaster at Breakside Brewery in Portland, Oregon, shares his thoughts on innovation and inspiration in the pursuit of deliciousness. He also explores Breakside’s latest wins and biggest challenges.
Have you had any recent wins that have surprised you?
Ben: After a long delay, we opened a new taproom in Beaverton – the first suburb to the west of Portland – late last summer. It’s quickly become our highest volume retail location, which has been a welcome boost and a bit of a surprise. We sell the vast, vast majority of our beer through wholesale channels, but having a small-yet-consistent portion of our volumes go through our own retail locations is great for us both in terms of brand perception and revenue per barrel. It’s a nice arrow to have in our quiver.
What is the biggest challenge your business is facing right now?
Ben: Uncertainty. From a sales and revenue side, we’ve faced more curveballs in the last four years than we did in the first 10+ that the company existed. We’ve seen wild fluctuations in off-prem sales, consumer preference, and brand loyalty. Plus, there are severe weather events that halt sales for weeks on end, inchoate cultural trends – like Dry January, longer-term fallout from the pandemic, political turmoil, and seemingly intractable blight issues in Portland.
These have left us handicapped in forecasting how we are going to perform as a brewery and business. I don’t know what numbers I should be referencing. Give us a little more predictability, and I know that we can deliver high quality and value for our customers and our team. Without it, we are brewing under duress.
During your 2023 speech at CBC accepting the Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation in Brewing, you encouraged brewers to pursue deliciousness and disavowed the notion that anyone has a lock on creativity. What are the best ideas you’ve had in that pursuit lately?
Ben: Part of my saying that is a reminder to myself that our success isn’t built on Breakside being the first to have every great new idea. And more, our novel ideas get better when we use our industry friends as soundboards. I find myself trying to be more open-minded than ever towards the innovations that I see others coming up with. Innovation exists in refining your own and others’ ideas in these incremental and interstitial ways.
That all said, I think our team is doing amazing work carving out new flavor territory within some of the styles that we are well known for. We are working very low-gravity lager fermentations to see if 3-4% ABV beers have any appeal. We continue to modernize and hone our IPAs through experimentation with new varietals, hop products and dosing techniques.
Also in your speech, you said your husband Vincent believes we talk too much about beer. What’s the most interesting conversation around beer you’ve had recently? And do people still talk too much about beer?
Ben: Ha! I used that as a line to buy time so I didn’t just start crying outright. I knew I might get a laugh from the audience while having a sec to choke back some emotion. It was supposed to buy me time! Our marriage works, amongst many reasons, because Vince and I are both nerds in our own way. He understands my passion for the craft of brewing; he just doesn’t want to have to sit through the conversations I have with my brewer friends.
To the degree that there may be a lesson for the industry there? I don’t know. I think that passion is still a pretty big selling point for craft brewers. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from sharing their love of the craft.
What’s a recent stroke of inspiration you’ve had from an unlikely place?
Ben: This may be an odd answer. Anyone at Breakside will tell you that for the last three years or so, I have been really inspired by BTS. Yes, the K-Pop band. I don’t know exactly what triggered it. What I do know is that the hustle and ambition they show, the 24/7 commitment, the teamwork amongst seven members, and the desire to deliver something extraordinary to their fans is evident in every bit of their work and story. And they seem to have fun doing it. That’s a narrative worth imitating.
If you could wave a magic wand and fix one troublesome part of your business, what would it be and what would you do?
Ben: A little more predictability in terms of the market would be welcome. But other than that, I think that I would make a wish to replace a lot of our manual labor with more efficient and automated technology. And I say that both for the sake of our business and, more importantly, our team and their longevity. We’re too dependent on the physical labor of a very passionate group of folks, and that is something that is more taxing and not as sustainable as I’d like.
If we could magically upgrade our systems and technology to increase output by +40% while keeping the amazing team that we have in place and at the same size, I think we’d be in a great spot. We could all ride into the sunset together. The technology is there to do that. But we built ourselves on the back of a growth model where we just added more staff to meet production demand rather than investing in long-term efficiencies. Those investments are something that European breweries tend to do a lot better than small U.S. breweries. It’s something many medium and regional U.S. breweries could learn from.
An alternative, much simpler answer to this question would be: return on-premise volumes to pre-pandemic levels.
If you were a life coach and craft beer was your client, what advice would you give?
Ben: I don’t know if this counts as professional life coach-type advice, but as far as a pep talk goes… six or seven years ago, everyone in craft beer thought that they had struck gold and that their success was a testament to their shrewd business acumen. The success was intoxicating. In hindsight, it’s pretty clear we were all riding a wave. A bubble, maybe.
Today, the market is tougher, and the wins and successes come on the back of actual smarts. That means they are a lot harder fought, but that should make them even more thrilling and valuable. If you want to thrive today, personally, professionally, you have to find a way to enjoy the slow grind and the hard wins.