Shmaltz Brewing Founder Jeremy Cowan Discusses Sunsetting the Brand after 25 Years and His Next Steps

After a quarter-century as the nation’s first and only Jewish craft beer brand, Shmaltz Brewing will sunset its operations following a farewell tour this fall.

“We’ve accomplished so much more than I ever imagined with He’brew and Shmaltz Brewing that why not be really proud and excited to put a bow on it on Year 25?” founder Jeremy Cowan told Brewbound.

Cowan started Shmaltz in San Francisco in 1996, delivering the first 100 cases of its He’Brew brand family — beers with names and ingredients inspired by Jewish culture — to Bay Area accounts in his grandmother’s Volvo.

“Who would have ever guessed, certainly not me, that in 1996, having a dancing green rabbi looming over the stones of Jerusalem and the Golden Gate Bridge, with a punchline like ‘Don’t pass out, Passover,’ who would have guessed that was turned into a real company, a real project?” Cowan said.

In 2020, Shmaltz’s production volume was flat year-over-year at an estimated 2,500 barrels, according to data from the Brewers Association’s May/June issue of the New Brewer. Volume was down from the estimated 5,500 barrels in 2018.

Shmaltz Brewing is far from Cowan’s only endeavor in the beer industry. He founded Coney Island Brewing in 2007 and sold it to the Boston Beer Company in 2013. Shmaltz opened a brewery in Clifton Park, New York, and built a 30,000-barrel contract brewing business before selling the facility to Queens-based SingleCut Beersmiths in 2018. Cowan opened the 518 Craft tasting room in Troy, New York, in 2018.

With the discontinuation of Shmaltz, Cowan plans to devote his time to his consulting practice, the 518 Craft tasting room, and the Alphabet City Brewing Company brand, which Cowan acquired in 2016 from Manhattan-based friends who built it from their homebrewing hobby.

For its final act, Shmaltz has brewed Exodus 2021 Barleywine Ale, an 8.8% ABV beer brewed with fig, pomegranate and grape. The beer will be available at a series of farewell events that began during the Class of ‘96 Celebration during Craft Brewers Conference in Denver earlier this month.

As for Shmaltz’s future, Cowan said he’s “open to a lot of creative directions,” should a potential buyer emerge for the brand’s rights.

Cowan discussed highlights of Shmaltz’s 25 years and offered thoughts on the craft beer industry’s evolution with Brewbound. The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

On Shmaltz’s genesis: I thought I was starting a Jewish nonprofit. I thought I was starting an organization that would do arts and crafts and culture and food and literature and music, all through the lens of beer. … I had a zillion events with Jewish newspapers, Jewish magazines and Jewish community organizations and on-campus organizations and holidays and festivals. But that actually didn’t end up being what the business was.”

On Shmaltz’s first chapter: “Twenty-five years — sometimes you just look at it as one big chunk, but for Shmaltz it really hasn’t been one big chunk. … It was really only four years in San Francisco in the very beginning that I was self-distributing. I had jumped into a few new wholesalers, but even at the time I got so much wonderful PR and media coverage, and people were just so tickled.”

On the Bay Area mid-1990s craft scene: “Around me were already the whole generation of obviously Sierra Nevada, but Anderson Valley, North Coast, Lost Coast and Bear Republic started the same year I did. I was down the street from Anchor Brewing, where I had my very first official beer tasting education class with Dr. Joe Owades, one of the iconic Jews in beer, who for better or for worse, invented light beer, but also worked with Jim Koch at Boston Beer on their original lager recipes. That was the pool I was swimming in, and I was so lucky to have that around me at the time.”

On adapting a nomadic lifestyle in 2003 for Shmaltz’s second chapter: “I literally just drove around the country. I didn’t even have an apartment, I would crash with friends or sublet once in a while, or stay at my mom’s friends’ timeshares in Boca Raton. Those five years were incredible. That was seeing the country in such a unique way. That’s when I really made a bunch of great beer friends from everywhere, and we’d have events and parties. During those years I was lucky enough to sit in on panel discussions or beer tastings or beer dinners with people like Rob Tod at Allagash or Sam [Calagione] from Dogfish [Head] or Tomme [Arthur] from the Lost Abbey and Port. It’s so cool to be able to have participated — I was in my mid 30s so I was still pretty young, and those guys are my heroes.

“I moved back to San Francisco for a few months in 2008. We had just started Coney Island in New York with one beer, a lager. And that was when all of a sudden I realized, I’ve got to move back to New York. So, I had gotten off the road for the first time and then I basically was back and forth between San Francisco and New York for five more years. That was when I was really able to expand the Shmaltz Brewing beer lineup. We came out with all of those extreme beers and went to all the Beer Advocate fests. I got to speak at Craft Brewers Conference, and tasted for GABF [Great American Beer Festival], had an amazing Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah during GABF. That was just so much fun. That year we also published a small business memoir, Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah. That was incredibly meaningful.”

On running a 30,000-barrel brewery in Shmaltz’s third chapter … and selling it: “At the time I had been on the road doing sales and marketing for basically 17 years, and then all of a sudden I moved up to Troy, New York, and I was driving to the brewery every day running a factory. I did that for six years and was able to get it to a place where I realized I liked focusing on sales and marketing. I’m not the expert, and it’s not my passion to run a factory.”

On being the only Jewish craft beer brand: “I kept waiting for the shelf that wouldn’t say ‘Michigan’ and it wouln’t say ‘IPA,’ it would say, ‘Jewish beers.’ It never happened. It’s so funny. I don’t know what the moral of the story is. Either nobody needs Jewish beer, or we did a good enough job that nobody could possibly try to David and Goliath us in the Jewish beer category.”

On craft beer today vs. craft beer in 1996: “In the mid ’90s, it was when I started, there were only 700 breweries total. … I wasn’t even experienced or sophisticated enough to realize that in 1996, there was a massive crash going on. It was Pete’s Wicked Ale and Sam Adams and Sierra and you saw them everywhere. But then realizing like brands that had been around and you never saw it again, like Catamount. …There were a lot of the same beers being made and a lot of companies that just weren’t ready to go to the next step.

“Today, there’s tons more demand. Craft beer has completely become part of the fabric of American food, popular culture and the economy. So, completely different situation, the foundation is literally 10-plus times bigger than it was, even if it’s still really hard to grow.”

The missing piece: “It’s really hard to innovate in a market that has unlimited innovation. What’s more the problem is we really slowed down our ability to do the education, with sales reps and marketing. They got us each of those incremental steps in the first place. That’s how we got from 4% to 6% to 8% to 10%. There was a Dogfish rep or a Lagunitas rep or a Brooklyn Brewery rep that was literally teaching everybody on the staff, customers, kitchen people. Unfortunately, just the economy of the business model for the market has made it harder and harder to do that.

“I do see a lot of writing and reflection on the fact that there’s so many double dry hopped double IPAs, so many kettle sours and so many pastry stouts, but we just have to remember that almost nobody outside of our little bubble has any idea what those are. We had to tell everybody what an IPA was many years ago. We’ve got to get back to telling people what a hazy IPA is, we’ve got to get back to telling people who love wine why they’re gonna love sour beers, or people who love chocolate and coffee and dessert why they’re gonna love rich complex stouts.”

What’s next for Alphabet City: “Coming up, we’ll have a chance to start reintroducing some special release beers, some seasonals. We’re not going to go crazy. We really focus on our two core brands, Seventh Street Blonde and Village IPA. They’re like wheelhouse beers that craft beer lovers and just about anybody will really love. The exciting part about that brand is in some ways like Shmaltz and like He’brew, it has a unique angle. It has a community. It has a history. The neighborhood has food traditions, immigration traditions, rock ‘n’ roll traditions, poetry traditions. That’s where I really get excited about working on that brand, and now I think I’ll have a little more time to be able to do it.”