Brewbound Podcast: John Lane on Draft Day at the Winking Lizard Tavern

[00:00:00] Jessica Infante: John Lane from the Winking Lizard stops by to talk about what will be on draft in 2023, next on the Brewbound podcast. Happy Halloween, everybody. Welcome to The Brewbound podcast, or maybe we're a couple days late there on the Happy Halloween. But my name is Justin Kendall, and I'm the editor The Brewbound, and I am joined by Jessica Infante, the managing editor The Brewbound. How are you doing, Jess? Hi, happy Halloween. I'm good. How are you? I'm good. You're surviving Salem? Almost. We're almost to the end. It's been crazy. I'm going to sit outside and hand out candy to some kids in a little bit. Do the birds chirp and all the locals like come out of their houses on November 1st, like in the crowds have left? Is that how it works? Kind of like we finally get to go out to dinner. It's nice. Speaking of one of those tourists joining us also is Zoe Licata. How's it going, Zoe?

[00:01:06] Zoe Licata: Hello. Good. Yeah, I'm sorry I contributed to the chaos in your city this weekend.

[00:01:13] Jessica Infante: So you are always welcome here in lovely and spooky Salem, Massachusetts, the lady who sprinkled her husband's ashes in the backyard of the Hocus Pocus house. Without permission, she is not. Wow. Yeah, it's been a wild Halloween tourism season up here. And I was away for most of it. And now I'm leaving again tomorrow. Well, congratulations on your escape from Salem. Thank you. And you'll be providing us next week with a road report from where are you heading? Going to Palm Desert, California for the California Family Beer Distributors Inaugural Conference. Should be a good time. Yeah. Just one more step closer to status. Yeah, I don't know if I'm going to make it, but we'll see. Well, you got at least one more trip to California to go to as, uh, we'll be doing The Brewbound live business conference, November 29th and 30th in Santa Monica. You all are more than welcome to join us. Tickets are available now. The full agenda is up The Brewbound.com. So go over and check that out. We have a great slate of speakers from top craft breweries from Bells to Sierra to Firestone to fourth category producers like Juneshine and Schilling Cider. We've got retailers. Whole Foods will be here. Buffalo Wild Wings will be there. We've got wholesalers. Rez Beer Division will be represented. Scout Distribution. We're going to have a bunch of data presentations. Brewers Association Chief Economist Bart Watson will be joining us. And what am I leaving out? I'm leaving out a lot because this agenda is packed over two days. So I would just encourage you all to go check it out. And we'll also have our Pitch Slam competition there. And we will crown one up and coming brewery or Bev Alk producer, the champion of that. It's gonna be a good time. I'm excited. Nothing but a good time. Exactly. What are you looking forward to, Zoe?

[00:03:17] Zoe Licata: Other than seeing lots of lovely familiar faces, our content is going to be really fun. I get to host some more panels this year. This is my second official Brewbound Live, so that's going to be a lot of fun. You'll see me do some Q&A with Colin Schilling from Schilling Cider, which is going to be awesome, and do a cider panel, very cider-focused. bit for me this year, which personally I enjoy quite a bit. So that's going to be good. Get to reunite with the Funky Town guys. It seems like a nice group of just good people and good chats, which I think is not always the case everywhere. You know, we found some gems.

[00:04:01] Jessica Infante: Yeah, I think there are some gems here. And, you know, when I tried to boil down what this year's conference is about, and I think one theme is like fortifying your business. So we're going to talk a lot of ways of like, how do you succeed in 2023? So very future focused, but with an eye on what can you do now to improve your business? So. That's what I took away from it. At least I hope it comes across to everybody else. Yeah. I mean, we're in an interesting spot, right? Because, you know, we had like the real core pandemic time and that was a rollercoaster where it was like, sales are up, sales are down, things are bad. What are we doing? And now I think everyone that's gotten through that now is really the make or break time. So I think this theme of business fortification is perfectly timed.

[00:04:55] John Lane: Yeah.

[00:04:56] Jessica Infante: Well, speaking of next year, we have John Lane from the Winking Lizard joining us. He's going to share what's going to be selling in his restaurants in Ohio in 2023. And the Winking Lizard Tavern is really sort of a I don't know, like this is one of the places for craft beer in the state of Ohio and much like politics, Ohio is a bellwether for the rest of the country a lot of times. So John's going to share what he's going to be having there. And they have like this big event every year where they make the announcement and people come out for it. Suppliers do. So a lot of people leaving happy, a lot of people leaving sad, maybe some people in between. I would love to go next year. I bet this is a time. Yeah, I think this is on our 2023 travel agenda. The year of getting Jess status. Maybe. With that, let's get to the news and a story that hit this week first in San Diego Brewing News. The Lost Abbey is scaling back. They're not closing. They are looking to sublease half of their space, their 40,000 square foot space in San Marcos. They're looking to sublease half of that production space, sell off their 30 barrel system and scale down really, because as Tommy Arthur told me, I don't need a 30 barrel system to make 8,000 barrels of beer a year. It's a lot of work, a lot of maintenance. And this is kind of a point of reflection for them. And we talk about fortifying your business. And this is sort of the story that I took away from Tommy is like, We know what we are right now. And the days of talking about expansion and territory expansion, that's not it in 2023 for them. So they're really looking to focus inward. That makes a lot of sense. That stuff's expensive to have and keep and maintain. And if you don't need it, you don't need it. Yeah, that's a story that you'll find The Brewbound.com this week. And also up there, our last call column from last week was packed with stuff. And we just got in on the tail end of the news that The IRS and TTB had raided the Bay Area offices of Southern Glazer. And you guys wrote this up in last call. So there's not a whole lot of details yet on what's going on there, but what do we know so far? Honestly, nothing. I've reached out and heard nothing back. I understand Southern Glazer wanting to be a little quiet on this issue because it's not really something you'd want to shout from the mountaintops. But yeah, I mean, we just don't know. And based on the government agencies that were present, we can assume it's got something to do with taxes and something to do with alcohol. I would hesitate to say anything other than that, because it would be pure speculation. But you know, they're the country's biggest wine and spirits wholesaler. They're an enormous deal. They are in 45 states and Canada. They are everywhere. Be really interesting to see what more information comes out, because the TTB is usually pretty good about sharing, you know, enforcement issues eventually when they can. So I'm sure we'll learn more, but we just don't know more right now. Yeah, and they had been pretty active as far as trade practice enforcement recently, and that had really slowed down to a point that we hadn't heard much in the past few months. And so this is, again, a story that's TBD, more info to come. Another story in last call that developed personally for me yesterday was that Drizzly's got some, I mean, Zoe, you wrote this one up, but basically the FTC has proposed an order against Drizzly and their CEO personally for data security carelessness. But Zoe, why don't you give the people the rundown on what that was about, and then I will have personal story time, because I have been victimized here.

[00:09:12] Zoe Licata: Yeah, so this steps from a data breach that happened in the summer of 2020, which some people might remember the headlines about it spread everywhere. 2.5 million records of user data were leaked from Drizzly. And allegedly, according to the FTC, Drizzly didn't know this happened until it was reported by media outlets. They have investigated and have proposed that Drizzly had failed to install enough security and safety practices to protect users and protect data and that they allegedly knew of this back in 2018 and didn't do anything to fix those problems. And so that is how this hacking and data leak happened. And what was particularly interesting about this I found is that, like you mentioned, this is both against Drizly itself and the CEO personally. So anything that comes out of this, which is supposed to be requiring more security programming from them and limiting how much information they can take from users, it'll follow the CEO wherever he goes. So if he leaves Drizzly and goes to another company, he will still have to follow those same practices and not take as much information.

[00:10:29] Jessica Infante: That is not what you want.

[00:10:31] Zoe Licata: No, no. Don't want your data leaked for sure. And don't want major companies who have lots of information, just freewheeling and putting out their own security information and passwords and stuff on to the web unsecurely. Just what happened here. And Samuel Levine, apologize if I mispronounce his last name, who's the director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, got a little sassy in the FTC's announcement about this. And he said, our proposed order against Dursley not only restricts what the company can retain and collect going forward, but also ensures the CEO faces consequences for the company's carelessness. CEOs who take shortcuts on security should take note.

[00:11:17] Jessica Infante: on notice.

[00:11:19] Zoe Licata: Yeah put everyone out there saying heads up this might not be the only time we do this.

[00:11:25] Jessica Infante: So the major financial institutions certainly took notice of all of this because I used Drizzly to send a friend a bottle of champagne for her birthday this weekend because I could not be there in person maybe I should have known better because we published this story. And then I was like, do do do send Megan champagne. And two days later, my bank calls and it's like, hey, your stuff's in a breach. And I was like, No, that drizzly purchase that that was me like I made that and they're like, too bad. We just we need to cancel your card. And we're gonna send you a new one. But things are just so bad that we just have to do that. That's wild. Right. And it's just like losing like your debit card changing sucks. It's so annoying. So did your friend get the champagne? She did. She was very excited. Yeah. But they had to cancel your card after. Yeah. It cost me my debit card, but Megan got her champagne. Man.

[00:12:20] Zoe Licata: I mean, they worked fast then, I guess. That's like they are on top of things and taking the FTC seriously.

[00:12:27] Jessica Infante: It's just crazy to me that I was like, no, I am the person that made that purchase. And they were like, nope. What else came out last week? You know, CGA predicting a big on-premise business for Halloween, which is not surprising, I think, to any of us. Beer purchasers index being pessimistic as Q4 starts. Yeah, the at-risk inventory index was really high this month, higher than I think we've seen it in a while at, I want to say 56. In September, it was 50. In August, it was 54. Yikes. Yeah. A few closures, you know, seven stills brewing, distilling in San Francisco, shutdown operations. That's a story you can read The Brewbound.com. This is the last week for Dogfish Head Miami too. Yep. Dogfish Head Miami's last day will be November 5th. Yeah, some cheery stuff over there. Yeah. We will have better news this week. We'll be talking untapped numbers as far as taproom business. And that actually is some good news that's going to hit the site. So keep an eye out for that. And we've also got conversations coming up with Great Notion and Georgetown and a few others. So look out for those stories. And what else we got going on, Zoe?

[00:13:53] Zoe Licata: We got a bunch of people moving around in the industry, some new hires, so that's some positive stuff. We just talked about last week's pilot project, they just hired a new national sales director as well, someone over from Sierra Nevada, so they just keep doing stuff. They're just gonna keep supplying us with news.

[00:14:15] Jessica Infante: Yeah, when you got a giant Milwaukee brewery to run, you're gonna have some news, I guess.

[00:14:22] Zoe Licata: I'm also going to do a shameless plug for the Beer Culture Summit, which is next week, but I will be moderating one of the panels. Then it's on November. My panel is on November 11th. We're talking about sustainability in beer and how it's kind of not really an optional thing anymore. It might be a requirement for breweries to really survive. I'm excited to have that conversation. That is with the Bruiseum in Chicago. So that is a virtual event that the Bruiseum is hosting. I will be looking forward to reporting back on how that discussion goes.

[00:15:00] Jessica Infante: Very excited to hear more about that. We had Liz on the podcast a few months ago at this point, and you should all go back and check that conversation out. But for now, we'll get to this week's conversation with John Lane of The Winking Lizard. Ohio's Winking Lizard Tavern is among the nation's pace-setting craft-focused restaurant chains, with 16 stores throughout the Buckeye State. We are joined now by John Lane. John's here to discuss the process of getting on tap at the Winking Lizard, and you just had a big event that you've been doing for 20 years now.

[00:15:38] Winking Lizard: Yeah, it's kind of humbling. When I started it, if you think about 20 years ago, how many craft breweries did we really have? Obviously, we didn't have as many restaurants as we have now. I'm trying to think how many we had back then. I think seven or eight, but still was seven or eight when you wanted to plan anything. and you needed supply, you just can't jump on it and say, hey, I want to do this next month. Can you give me 20 or 30 kegs? It didn't work like that back then. And being an old army guy, you know, write the plan, do the plan. And so my first meeting was at one of our restaurants, Independence, in Independence's first location. And we might've had about 20, 25 people there. They were mostly, a representative from the wholesalers we were doing business with, as well as a few of our brewery partners at the time. And it's just kind of evolved to where we probably had about 150 people there. We had Marcus Englert from Weinstein was here from Germany. And then we had people from all over the country, breweries from all over the country. And then we had all of our distributor representative from all of the wholesalers that we do business with. So it's kind of just a way to lay out my plan. I wasn't able to do that plan for the couple of years during pandemic and I was ready to lose my marbles because I was doing month by month and I hadn't done that for a long, long time. So I like writing the plan out for the year and then everyone knows what we have to do. And that way we can get execution, not only from our brewery partners and our wholesale partners, but also for my staff. So they know what's coming up so we can train them and, you know, they can get excited about it. It's easier on our marketing team to get everything out to our guests. So yeah, it's a lot of fun.

[00:17:33] Jessica Infante: It sounds fun. What gets announced on this day? How deep into your plans do you get? Are you going like month by month with like limited time offers and features or is it not quite that detailed?

[00:17:44] Winking Lizard: Yeah, every single draft line is programmed out with every single month what is going to be on that draft line by store. Wow. Because some of my stores only have 28 handles and some have 36. So every single handle is planned out as well as every single bottle beer and then a rotation plan with a lot of our breweries. So the whole year is absolutely planned out so that there's no excuses. Everyone knows in the room what we have to do to get it done because as everyone knows. It's great to put it in the plan, but if I don't have it on the shelf, it does none of us any good. I can't make the sale, the burrito doesn't make money, the wholesaler doesn't make money. So it's just been a way for us to get it out there so everyone knows and everyone's on the same page. But it's also, it's just a lot of fun, right? You got all the competitors in one room. We're all beer people. And I do have I should caveat that I do solely gallo wine. So my gallo rep is there as well as quite a few of my liquor reps. So yeah.

[00:18:55] Jessica Infante: What's the mood like? Because to me it sounds fun. It almost sounds like, I don't know, like NFL draft day or in my lived experience sorority bid day.

[00:19:05] Winking Lizard: Yeah, it's funny, you know, people come in and we feed them lunch, because I always joke, I go, it's legal, I can buy everyone lunch. So I'll buy you all lunch. So we have lunch together about noon. And then I start the meeting at one. And yeah, the mood is great. Yeah, I had two other people present, I always have Rob Garrity, from Armadillo insights. So he kind of gives the insight of what's happening in Northeast Ohio and Ohio. And then I had Jim Randall there present from Beer Board, and he kind of does the Ohio thing on what's going on on premise besides me. And then I kind of show my numbers of what happened last year, and then issues I have, what I see. But it's funny, the only thing we give them is a deck with the plan for next year. I don't share like all the numbers, slides, and all that. If they want it, I'll give it to them. but some of it's proprietary. I mean, I'm not doing dollars, I'm doing percentages, so I don't want it spread out there everywhere, but the mood's always great and, you know, when I get done with it, like anything else, I make a lot of people happy and, you know, some people aren't as happy because they didn't get what they want, but with 150 call points, I make as many people happy as I can. I can't just make everyone happy though, unfortunately.

[00:20:29] Zoe Licata: So when you are having so many call points and you have, was it 16 locations now for Winking Lizard? How do you manage that as well at this one event? How do those lists and decisions vary store by store?

[00:20:44] Winking Lizard: Okay. So all year round, I'm taking meetings like The year is done for me. Now I take my plan, I give it to my right arm. We're putting together everything. We'll get feedback from everyone. If I miss someone, which I typically do, I am going to be 63 in January. I miss things now. I'm a baby boomer, not a Gen Zer. But anyway, I put the plan together and then I roll it out to my management teams who then roll it out to our hourly teams. They have meetings in December. And then in January, I started all over again. So I started having meetings with everyone. There might be some new stuff that comes out. We might do some one-off things. They might meet with me, and I say, let's just do a one-case drop of that in all of our restaurants. We'll do that. So I'm pretty much taking meetings all the way through August. And by that time, most of the breweries are rolling out for spring sets. So they've got their following year plan. And I'll either, I have a lot of meetings usually in July and August because they are coming out with those plans. The importers, not so much, you know, they're not changing as much, but the craft guys, yes. And then I put it all together. So that's how I kind of do it. So the month of September, I'm frantically putting things together. I'm also making contact because crossing the T's, dotting the I's, especially with a lot of my partner breweries.

[00:22:15] Jessica Infante: What can you tell us about this year's lineup?

[00:22:18] Winking Lizard: We're doing a few things. We have this program called the Tour of Beers. And we've had it since 1986. We're celebrating our 40th year next year. And it's a program where basically they drink 100 beers and they get a jacket. That's been very cool. We've done that a lot. But you can imagine, I've been around the Lizards for 35 years. I have like 30 jackets in my closet, right? So we're making the program, we're changing it to be even more of a loyalty program. And you guys are hearing this first because we didn't even release this even to our guests or even our, our teams yet we will I will this next week. But now if they drink 100 beers they can either get a jacket and a $25 gift card or they can just get $100 gift card. We're also doing something where after every 25 beers, if they wanted to drink the same 25 beers again they could do that, and just keep rolling it, but also to get maybe more young people involved because it is hard, keep capturing Gen Z and Gen X is attention. So doing something where if they do 25 beers and say, hey, I don't want to do it past that, we still give him a $10 gift card. So some kind of incentivizes them to do it. So it's a big Merck change from where we've done that. But we are doing some other cool things. We are rolling out war pigs in the state of Ohio, which they came to us and said, really, we really want you guys to do it. And if you don't want to do it next year, we'll wait a whole year. which is so telling, which is so opposite of a lot of what's going on out there right now. Everyone wants to circumvent the on-premise, go right to the off-premise, stack and rack, not do the hard work, not do the sampling. And so, you know, I think that's like a real tell-all. It's kind of really cool that we're going to be able to do that.

[00:24:17] Jessica Infante: Take the jacket. I would want the jacket, especially if it's got the logo. It's got that Winking Lizard on it.

[00:24:23] John Lane: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, a lot of fun.

[00:24:26] Jessica Infante: John, it's funny you mentioned the club and how it's tough to get Gen Zers. So I'm an old millennial, but I got into beer through doing a beer club at the bar in my mom's town. And it's 99 beers. Most of them were imports sitting in dusty bottles in the basement. Now that I know way more about beer, I understand that all of these were out of code and disgusting. But like, you know, I started it with, with four friends and you know, we drank like all the American beers first cause we didn't know what we were doing. And when we got to Pete's Wicked Strawberry Blonde Ale, the two guys liked it so much that they didn't want to drink anything else. And they quit. And my friend Megan and I continued and finished. But I think I got a sweatshirt, a gift card, like swag along the way. It was a good time. But yeah, I mean, I feel like it's, it's a big undertaking.

[00:25:21] Winking Lizard: And that's why it used to be called the World Tour of Beers. Because if you, some of you can't think back, but 35 years ago, I mean, there was what I called import craft. That was it. There was some Sam Smith, but a lot of everything was lagers, right? So when I think back, I mean, they all had about the same flavor profile. There wasn't a lot of differences. So now we call it the Tour of Beers. And what I try to do now is get as many styles as I can on there. because I always like telling someone that someone will come up to me and say, I'm not a beer drinker. And I'm like, OK, let's talk about it. What are you? You know, oh, you're a white wine drinker. Let's try this sour over here. Maybe you might even like this hazy over here. So, you know, we really try to concentrate on styles more now than, you know, just where they're from.

[00:26:14] Zoe Licata: I think I need to find a beer club now. We can make that happen for you. Thank you.

[00:26:19] Winking Lizard: And then I guess one of the other, you know, I always have a hot button topic and I talked about this topic five years ago and I actually. mentioned it at the MBWA conference, and I don't know if you caught it, Justin, at the very end, I talked about draft pricing, and right away I was told, oh, we can't talk about pricing here. I get it, it's a trade thing, I guess. I don't know, I said at the meeting, I talked to a few people, I go, I guess I gotta talk to a lawyer on what I'm allowed to talk about, what I'm not allowed to talk about. But draft pricing is scary right now. I mean, I showed a slide where the craft and the yellow fizzy stuff are literally only a penny cheaper than in a package. And draft is our lifeblood. And so, you know, until the pandemic hit, the on-premise was taking quite a few price hikes every single year on draft. And the on-premise, everyone wanted to keep it at 9.99 in the grocery store, right? So they're not hiking it there. So it's a real issue because we're going to get to the point if it's not a value because it costs us, you know, 20 to $40,000 to put the draft system and then we got to clean the lines every two weeks, we're putting it in a beer clean glass where we have to dispense it, you have more waste. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It could be a real issue where if it gets out of whack, why would I have 30 draft lines? Maybe I'll only have 10 draft lines and we'll push bottle and we'll push package, which isn't really a very green thing either. And I know we like to talk about green a lot now and efficiency and all that good stuff. So it's a real concern of mine. I brought it up about five years ago, but this year it's compelling because as you know, some of the breweries have taken two price hikes this year. It's a little bit scary.

[00:28:20] Jessica Infante: It sounds scary. I wouldn't even know how you would sort of navigate that at this point because it seems like the ball is continually getting moved.

[00:28:30] Winking Lizard: Yeah. I'm a three-tier guy, and I've been very vocal. I'm a three-tier guy. I believe in the three-tier. I believe it protects. I mean, you hear horror stories in third-world countries where, you know, you don't have a protection that that product is what that product is, especially, you know, spirits, but for sure beer, too, and especially keg beer. And I'm a three tier guy, but something's got to give on that and just how things are priced and how they're done. And I don't know what the answer is. It's much bigger than I am. That's for sure. But it's probably should be some discussion had somewhere with some big wigs somewhere. on how we figure that out because it's a little bit, when you're an on-premise guy and this is your lifeblood and you were at MBWA, beers to that. You see when a customer goes in, they're looking at draft handles first, they want draft. Well, if you price this out of the market, where are we going to go with that? Will the consumer pay a lot more per ounce than a bottle? Maybe, maybe that's the case. Maybe we'll get to where we don't look at draft as being that value proposition like it's always been.

[00:29:44] Jessica Infante: I guess how much elasticity do you see at this point with the consumer that it's coming into the Winking Lizard?

[00:29:54] Winking Lizard: We've always been a value player. So a lot of my draft pints are still $5.75, $6. I'm going to cities now where they're $8, $9, $10. So I always feel like I'm in the driver's seat that I've got some room to go there. But, you know, with a 40 year history and being a valued player, we've got people that come in with their families and they still can come in more than once a week and afford to come into the Winking Lizard. And we're on like third generation of, I know people, third generation that are, they're coming into our restaurants. So absolutely, we've had to take some price hikes on food and a little more than we've had to on beverage. We want to continue to be in that value area. And so if you want to be in that value area, then you're a lot more sensitive to, you know, when you get a price hike twice a year. I mean, we went to a paper menu, placemat menu for food because it's so all over the place that if we have to move, we can move in one month. and not get gouged, chicken wings. A year ago, chicken wings were the highest they've ever been. And guess what? Now they're the lowest. They haven't been this price since 2014. But we brought our prices back down. We promised our customers if the price came down, we'd bring it down. We didn't bring it all the way down because everything else is higher, but we did bring them down. But supply and demand, we still see that those prices are kind of low because most restauranteurs need that margin there because they've got to make up for everything else. Paper products, I mean, everything's crazy. We're just lucky that the restaurant scene has gained food share dollar from grocery store, even through all this, because even our price hikes, I think it's been, you know, would someone say it's 14.8% higher in grocery store and only 10% higher in restaurants. So there's still some value there.

[00:31:59] Jessica Infante: John, I've heard you speak at a bunch of different conferences and you always kind of talk about the value of your partnerships with brewery. So what makes a good relationship with a brewery partner? And what do you look for in that partnership before you even agree to take a brand on?

[00:32:14] Winking Lizard: First of all, they have to call on me. helps. That's a big start. You know what? Some of my best partners that we start with, they listen and they know something about us before they walk in the door and just say, hey, you got it. You know, this is what you need to do. This is what you need to carry. So it starts with a good relationship there. A lot of times I schedule these meetings at like 3.30, 4 o'clock so we can have a beer, you know, afterwards and just talk. And so there's a, you know, there's a good relationship there. That's where it starts, I think. And then them knowing enough about the Winking Lizard, a lot of these guys know what's going to fit. And they'll come to me and say, hey, you know, I think this is a good fit. This is what we got. But I've got a lot of long term partnerships because, again, I've been I'm a grandpa at home and I'm a grandpa in the industry. You know, I grew up with Jim Cook, Sam, Greg Cook. Ken Grossman, you know, all the forefathers in the industry. And so we've always concentrated on core. And God bless that we did through the pandemic, because the bottom seems to have fallen out of all that cheeky, cool stuff that used to come out, all the barrel age stuff that come out once a month, you know, religiously. So, you know, my best partners, I guess, to get back to your question, are those that have an insight into our business and care about as much about my business as I do their business. And I've got a lot of reps that are like that.

[00:33:52] Zoe Licata: How important are local beer brands to you? Is there, like, are your Winking Lizard customers coming in expecting a lot of local brands?

[00:34:02] Winking Lizard: I like to say I grow the good ones. You know, once you get into packaging, we're separating the men from the boys. Sorry, I'm not trying to be offensive, but we are. We're separating the men from the boys. I mean, do you have a lab? Are you testing for DO levels? Are you doing sensory, any kind of sensory tasting? How long will your beer last on the shelf? You know, these are the kind of questions I'll ask. So, yes, I do start small with a lot of these guys. Like, I'll give you a good example. So, Collision Bend is a very small brewery. down in the flats of Cleve is the brew master. He's guy. He's been brewing b a couple of years. They o So you know, we'll start help them grow. Probably a little bit, and then maybe, you know, a tap handle here and there around where people know about the brand, and then we'll just start spreading it out for them. So, you know, we've done that with Fat Heads. There's another local brewery, Masthead, that's in town. You know, we're growing them. We're doing, you know, stuff with them. Hoppin' Frog down in Akron is real small. It's got to be quality first, so I try everything. I vet beers. I don't believe in throwing it up against the wall. You should have seen my office three months ago. I had so much beer in here, it was just crazy. So I do vet and I do try and I do ask quality questions. Ken Grossman, like he came to town like four or five years ago and there was a big anniversary and they were celebrating pale ale and we've had pale ale forever since they've been in Ohio. He asked me what question I asked, and I told him, I'm asking about deal levels. He goes, you're asking about deal levels. And I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, they're, they're packaging. So they have to have that right for him. And then I, I, I would rather deal with someone that is again, going through an wholesaler just because it's easier on my, my restaurants rather than one more guy coming in through the back door.

[00:36:18] Zoe Licata: We've also talked in the past about the changing beer consumer and how important locality is to them now versus in the past. Have you seen that change at all and how important it is for when drinkers are making their buying decisions?

[00:36:35] Winking Lizard: Yes, because I'll tell you where it's come in full circle. the core brand of our granddaddy, Great Lakes. I mean, I think we're still their biggest on-premise account. Maybe the stadiums are a little bit bigger, but Dortmunder was on a decline and Dortmunder is huge in Northeast Ohio. Now, if you go to Southern Ohio, it's their other brand, Edmund Fitz. You go to Michigan, it's Edmund Fitz. But Dortmunder, Holy smokes, it's on a tear. It just tore right back up and it's doing huge, huge volume. And so, yeah, I think a lot of people do look at that. I think we're all being naive if they know about all the small breweries that are out there. You know, we started introducing mast at last year and they're doing very well, but the craft scene knows them, but the general public person coming in doesn't know who mass that has. We have to that's our job to introduce it. Hey, they're local. They're here in Cleveland. So, I, I think the audience. sometimes it's overblown that there's a lot of people that, yeah, the ones that are really into it, going all to these small breweries. But by and large, our customer that's coming in, yeah, they know Great Lakes because we've carried it for 20 some years, 28, 29 years.

[00:38:01] Jessica Infante: Well, John, we've got one more question before we let you go. We know you're busy. So you talk about your commitment to core and I guess that brings up, you know, we talk about everybody that's excited for, you know, their placements throughout the year and this and that. Is there a placement or placements in the Winking Lizard that are untouchable pretty much?

[00:38:24] Winking Lizard: Wow. The brewery is going to love me that I mentioned him in here. Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you one. I mean, one beer we have Labatt. And here's the funny thing. Labatt's got a 40 year history with us. It's not going anywhere. Now, Labatt is a nothing probably outside of Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland. Even you can drive two hours south of Columbus and you don't see a lot of Labatt. But Labatt is a big staple. you know, Great Lakes will always have two handles with us. As far as I can tell now, Fat Heads has two, will always have two handles with us. You know, we've only carried New Belgium Fat Tire since it's come in. We've never gone with the Ranger series of beer. We just sell a mountain of Fat Tire. Founders All Day IPA, I mean, that's a standard for us. Of course, you know, Bud Light, Mellow Light, we're a sports bar. You know, you've got to have some of the yellow fizzy stuff on. I always have a dogfish handle on. Now that rotates a little bit more than the other ones because I think it lends itself to that brewery. Sierra Hazy. Yeah. So there's quite a few, I would say probably about half of my handles are pretty much untouchable that, you know, what else would I put on there? That's going to do the volume that does. We've just built that brand. We built that core that, you know, that person that comes in that wants new Belgium fat tire, that's what they want. So why not give it to them? We have other things that they can try. But, you know, why not give it to him? Yeah.

[00:40:06] Jessica Infante: Well, final final for you then. Who left the day happiest?

[00:40:12] Winking Lizard: My guess is three Floyds because we introduced War Pigs for him. You know, three Floyds and War Pigs are tied together. My guess is those guys are that were probably the happiest in the room. Nice.

[00:40:24] Jessica Infante: Well, we really appreciate you taking the time out to chat with us, John, and we hope you have a great weekend. And that's our show for this week. Thanks to our one man audio team, Joe. Thanks to Jess and Zoe for hanging out. And thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week.