Nearly six months into Paul Verdu’s tenure at the helm of Wisconsin Brewing Company (WBC), the Verona, Wisconsin-based brewery is making significant changes to its strategy, focusing its energy on the Lake Louie Brewing brand and WBC’s contract brewing business.
Some of WBC’s beers will be absorbed into the Lake Louie portfolio, which will become the company’s only consumer-facing brand, Verdu told Brewbound.
“This whole exercise is about focus,” he said. “Now let’s focus on one brand, focus on core beers with innovation and support, and then focus on our now consolidated distributor network, so it’s a lot simpler of an approach.”
WBC, which was founded in 2013, acquired the much older Lake Louie (founded in 1999) in 2019. Since then, the company has produced and sold both brands, which until recently were carried by separate wholesaler networks. Last year, both brands produced fewer than 10,000 barrels combined.
As of last month, WBC and Lake Louie have consolidated with Frank Beverage Group’s Frank Beer Distributors to serve its home market of Dane County. Other distributors include Frank’s sister wholesalers La Crosse Beverage and Beer Capitol, as well as C.J.W., Inc.; Lee Beverage; and Dean Distributing. The WBC portfolio had been with Wisconsin Distributing in the brewery’s home market, but that relationship ended last month.
The decision to prioritize Lake Louie over WBC’s branded portfolio followed Verdu’s “coming in as a completely objective observer and just taking a look at the brands away from the beers underneath each brand, just the brands.”
Former engineer Tom Porter founded Lake Louie during “a mid-life crisis” more than two decades ago on land he purchased from his uncle, which included a small pond dubbed “Lake Louie” for the eponymous uncle. The brand’s age and genesis made it more appealing, Verdu said.
“The mystique, the story, the background, Tom Porter himself – a lot of it was just a more interesting story to tell and to back,” he added.
Going forward, Lake Louie’s core portfolio will include year-round staples Warped Speed Scotch ale (6.9% ABV), Kiss the Lips IPA (6% ABV) and Rational Haze IPA (6.5% ABV). Joining that line up will be WBC’s Badger Club amber lager (5.5% ABV) and Little Louie Lager (4.2% ABV), which WBC had launched as Walk Off Lager in collaboration with the Lake County DockHounds minor league baseball team.
“What I love about our portfolio is the breadth,” Verdu said. “In a few beers, we have great breadth and we already addressed the fact that not everything has to be an IPA. So, Scotch ale – not a lot of them. We get really good on-premise incremental placements and that’s doing well in off-premise as well.”
The company’s lead package format is 12 oz. can 6-packs, and its two biggest styles (Warped Speed and Badger Club) are available in 15-packs. Next year, there will be a “big push” into 19.2 oz. single-serve cans for the convenience channel for its lead styles and the team is working on a double IPA for the format.
As the company prepares to focus solely on Little Louie, the brand received a rebranding and packaging refresh that will roll out in time for spring resets. Lake Louie’s new visual identity pays homage to its Wisconsin lake country roots with an update to its fishing-inspired logo that ditches the former fishing lure and introduces a beer.
“It’s still a lure, but it’s now a beer lure and way more ownable, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Verdu said. “When the team saw it, we were like, ‘Damn, that’s killer.’ It makes it quite Wisconsin and lake life and all those things that we love up here, but also relevant in the region and everything else if we ever were to expand.”
Expansion beyond the Badger State isn’t in the immediate future for Lake Louie, but it’s not off the table either. Any new markets would be opened in “three to five years, if we decided to do it,” Verdu said, placing heavy emphasis on “if.”
“One of our heroes is New Glarus, only in Wisconsin and 300,000 barrels,” he said, adding that his previous experience shepherding Molson Coors’ Tenth & Blake craft brands through various expansion projects gives him a unique perspective. “One of the beauties of my old job is I’ve seen, lived, breathed the difficulty of expanding. Even the strongest craft brands have a difficult time.
“Now more than ever, it’s harder every year,” he continued. “And so I know that simply thinking you can add new markets to drive growth – boy, that’s a tough game to play.”
Business at WBC’s own “really robust” taproom “has fully recovered,” Verdu said, but its distributed on-premise business has changed.
“The on-premise universe is a bit different than it was in 2019,” he said. “There’s fewer accounts. A lot of innovation and changes happened in terms of what people are looking for, so I’d say almost back, but different.”
Brewing at the Ballpark
WBC signed on as an official sponsor of the Lake County DockHounds for their inaugural 2022 season at the Wisconsin Brewing Company Park. The partnership includes an onsite brewery, the five-barrel Lake Louie Brewing DockHaus, which is slated to open later this month.
“The new brewery at the ballpark is an absolute gem, that while not large, it is mighty,” WBC co-founder and brewmaster Kirby Nelson said in a press release. “The brewhouse has capabilities to utilize brewing techniques not commonly found in small breweries. You name it, we’ll be able to brew it, from traditional to contemporary styles, it’s a brewer’s dream.”
The DockHaus brewery will operate year round as a pilot system for future Lake Louie innovation products. In addition, WBC will be able to entertain wholesaler and retailer partners, as well as consumers, at the ballpark.
Flourishing Contract Business
Contract brewing remains the largest part of WBC’s business, which was in part what helped make the decision to prioritize Lake Louie’s beers over WBC’s.
“We have fantastic technology and equipment that allows us to do almost all pack formats – slims, standards, 19.2s, 16s, and then 6-packs, 4-packs, 12-packs, 15- to 18-packs. So because we are a contract brewer, we have to be flexible in that regard and that allows us as a branded business to delve into those things.”
WBC doesn’t have on-site variety pack capabilities, but is working on it. A Lake Louie-branded variety pack is not part of the portfolio yet, but could be in the future if the brewery developed enough beers along the same style theme.
“I’ve always believed they have to have a reason for being or they can’t just be necessarily one of everything you do,” Verdu said. “If we can come up with a couple more IPAs, maybe there’s an IPA variety pack, which I think is better than trying to tell someone ‘You should like Scotch ales, amber lagers and hazy IPAs all at once.’”
Verdu was mum on WBC’s contract clients, but one noteworthy brand is Troy Aikman’s Eight Lager, which will move production to WBC in the wake of New Orleans-based Faubourg Brewing winding down its contract business, Craft Business Daily reported earlier this month.
“In 2023, we have a couple really big customers coming inbound and a dozen medium-size customers and that’s a really nice balance,” Verdu said. “The beauty and what I love about this model is that we can take some of the success that we’re having on the contract side and use some of that to reinvest into our own brand.”