Short’s Brewing is celebrating two decades in Bellaire, Michigan this year. The craft brewery makes a range of beers, from its flagship Local’s Light, to Bloody Beer, a Bloody Mary-inspired beer, and produced nearly 44,000 barrels of beer in 2023, according to the Brewers Association.
In the latest edition of Brewbound’s A Round With, a weekly Insider-exclusive feature, Brewbound caught up with Short’s founder Joe Short and CEO Scott Newman-Bale. Read the Q&A below:
You’re celebrating your 20th anniversary – can you point to one of your proudest moments in those two decades?
Joe & Scott: 1. Opening the pub. Just making it to the starting line was a challenge. 2. The first anniversary party where we closed a Michigan highway and filled it with thousands of people. It went well, but [there] was a lot of preparation. 3. Shipping the first truck of packaged product. Again, there were so many challenges that were overcome including having to label all bottles by hand.
What is the biggest challenge your business is facing right now?
Joe & Scott: Opportunity for growth is extremely limited. While we are fortunate to have had growth in recent years, it is infinitely harder to achieve and the market is changing so quickly that making the right product is also hard.
If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the industry, what would it be?
Joe & Scott: It would be to level the playing field between suppliers and wholesalers. To add clarity, we completely support and believe in the three-tier system but would like breweries to truly partner with wholesalers in mutually agreed upon standards and goals.
For the first 12 years of the brewery’s life, Short’s was only distributed within Michigan. What was behind your decision to expand beyond the state and how long did it take to reach your eight-state footprint?
Joe & Scott: This is certainly a topic for its [own] whole story. Not to throw anyone under the bus, but we had someone internally generating bad information that led us to a path that immediate sales outside of Michigan were critical to survival. It was a dark period in the company’s history.
That said, when given lemons we make lemonade, so it did help us long-term expand to support regional chain partners and provide opportunities for growth. It also allowed us to understand the severity of running a business in a controlled fashion, which probably has contributed to growth in the last several years.
Your flagship Local’s Light is a leader in the craft light lager space, even after two decades in the market and still limited distribution. How have you been able to sustain its popularity, particularly in a time when everyone is trying their hand at the style?
Joe & Scott: Local’s is one of our original beers and took 20 years to build. We believed in that project long before a wider audience looked seriously at that segment. We are proud to have a top 10 product nationally with distribution to only a few states.
We’re sure competition will intensify, but as an early leader we are still seeing growth in that product and hope it continues despite market forces.
You’ve seemed to up your social media game, including starring in some of the company’s TikTok videos. What makes a strong social media presence important?
Joe & Scott: Social media is a great tool to share the Short’s experience with a larger audience (approx 190K people), especially when it comes to product releases, events, community impact and generating awareness for our individual locations. We’re a highly creative company with a fun team (great ideas come from everywhere!), so we put a lot of energy into creating content and engaging with our audiences online.
It is a powerful form of customer service because it’s made it incredibly easy for folks to reach out directly to interact and share concerns or compliments when they would never go to a website to fill out a form.
Short’s took on investment from Heineken by way of Lagunitas in 2017. What’s that relationship like and how does it affect day-to-day operations?
Joe & Scott: It has no impact on operations, let alone day-to-day ones. No systems are integrated and outside of tax, compliance, and financial statements, there is not a lot to report.
Nothing has changed since the original deal. We typically try and get together every year or two and talk via Zoom every now and then to check in on company developments. We manage distribution, debt and everything else independently.
We checked in with you about the Bellaire Inn, an inn the brewery acquired to provide temporary housing to seasonal employees. How’s that going?
Joe & Scott: It is honestly a big challenge. On the positive side, it has allowed us to function and remain open, which is obviously critical.
Unfortunately, it comes with a lot of drama by mixing 26 rooms of staff in close quarters. There have been a few late night trips to sort out issues. We had no choice in doing it, but it is not an easy thing to manage.
How do you maintain a successful employee culture over 20 years of change and growth?
Joe & Scott: This is a hard one, as cultural shifts through growth and contraction makes this an ongoing challenge. Trying to set principles of the business and defining success goes a long way, but it gets harder and harder as you grow.
Owners being present in day-to-day operations shows that everyone is expected to work hard, but hopefully over the next five years, we can work on ways to seem internally like a smaller integrated company.