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REUTEMAN: Colorado rides on Fat Tire to beer heights

By Rob Reuteman, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published November 24, 2007 at 12:05 a.m.

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Correction

This column should have listed the address of a Web site mentioned as www.followyourfolly.com.

My sister was clear about one thing she wanted to do in Colorado over a long Thanksgiving weekend: tour the New Belgium Brewery.

It was a bit of a head-scratcher for me. We have several great craft breweries in Denver, I told her, and we certainly could tour Coors in Golden. But she was adamant, so we drove north Wednesday to the home of Fat Tire.

She said that her co-workers at Northwestern Medical Center in Chicago wanted her to bring them souvenirs once they heard she was going. That jibed with an anecdote related by our tour guide, Ken Petroski. When New Belgium expanded its sales to Minnesota a few years ago, the premier liquor store in Minneapolis - Surdyk's - took out a full-page ad in the city's alternative weekly touting Fat Tire for sale. The store had to open an hour early the next day to accommodate the lines, and sold 400 cases in the first hour.

That's some serious buzz, and it's mostly the reason the quirky brewery on the north side of Fort Collins is now the nine largest brewery of any kind in the United States, up from 12th last year. Although New Belgium brews seven other brands, Fat Tire easily comprises two-thirds of the company's sales, several employees told me. The smooth amber ale seems to be on tap in most Colorado bars, and New Belgium now sells in 16 other states.

A new bottling plant opened in June on the company's 55 acres, allowing 700 bottles per minute, up from 300 in the old plant. The 437,000 barrels of beer they brewed last year is still a drop in the keg compared with the Anheuser-Busch plant in nearby Wellington, which pumped out 8 million barrels. But New Belgium's position atop the state's 92 other craft brewers is one of the reasons Colorado is the nation's top beer-producing state. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Beer Institute, Colorado produced 23.4 million barrels of beer last year, pushing longtime leader California to No. 2. According to the BI study, Colorado's beer industry - including importers, suppliers, distributors and retailers - contributes $12.4 billion to Colorado's economy each year.

But New Belgium's success is important not just for the popular beer it makes. Its just as much an affirmation of the workplace culture fostered by founder Jeff Lebesch and the environmental stewardship exhibited in nearly every aspect of the brewery.

In the late 1980s, Lebesch jettisoned a career as an electrical engineer to pursue a dream of making beer. It was a dream fostered by a bike trip through Belgium and his encounters with some of the folks who make the 600 brands of beer that originate in the tiny European nation. And his successful pursuit of that dream has yielded a "follow-your-fancy" philosophy Lebesch instills in his employees. Check out followyourfolly.com and you'll see what I mean. A strong, whimsical strain permeates the culture at New Belgium, and there's a prevailing sense that "we make beer here, not heart valves," as tour guide Petroski put it.

But underneath any deliberate silliness is a dead-serious commitment to sustainability. Alternative energy provides nearly 100 percent of the brewery's energy needs. Since a unanimous employee vote in 1999, New Belgium has purchased more than 6.6 million kilowatt hours of wind energy from a wind farm in Wyoming, providing 85 percent of the energy needed. Most of the other 15 percent comes from burning methane recaptured from the wastewater treatment facility built in 2002. The brewery also is working with a local energy startup to make biodiesel fuel from algae that grows partly from the carbon dioxide byproduct of fermentation.

It'll be interesting to see how Lebesch and his wife and co-founder Kim Jordan continue to balance the growing demand for New Belgium's beer with their environmental ideals and the freedom they allow their 300 employees. So far, they appear to be model employers and model corporate citizens. My guess is that they'll stay small enough to keep those goals within reach. I can only hope my sister's next visit exposes me to another company with as good a story.

Comments

  • November 24, 2007

    5:04 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    Cheers writes:

    Rob,

    I had a similar experience boarding a plane in New York coming home from Thanksgiving. Wearing a New Belgium hat, I had three strangers walk up and tell me how much they love New Belgium beers, particularly Fat Tire. One even asked me if I knew someone there because their brother was at Yale law school and said the only thing he didn't like about Yale was the lack of Fat Tire. New Belgium seems to be a Colorado ambassador, and a darn good one.

    BTW, the URL you provided was wrong. It's www.follyyourfolly.com aand well worth the visit.

  • November 26, 2007

    11 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    bsimpson writes:

    Hey Rob,

    Thanks for the visit and the write up... glad you got some quality time with Ken P. One clarification is that while New Belgium does meet 100% of its electrical needs through renewable energy (a combinaton of wind, RECS and the methane harvest you allude to) we do use some natural gas for heating. We've found it beneficial to be very specific in this regard.

    Thanks again for taking the time to come visit.

    Cheers,

    Bryan Simpson
    Media Relations Director
    New Belgium Brewing

  • November 26, 2007

    11:31 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    RockyMountainBillyGoat writes:

    Also worth mentioning is that they eschew the typical T & A marketing typical of most beers. As one component of their marketing, host an esoteric bike ride and festival, the tour de fat. Not only does this reward their customers with a good time (instead of just marketing spin), but it also benefits local non-profits. My organazation, BikeDenver (www.bikedenver.org) was the partial-beneficiary of last year's inaugural Denver TDF, and their contribution for our volunteer hours aided us in our mission of creating a more bike friendly Denver through advocacy. New Belgium is the rare corporation that gives back very generously to the community.

  • November 27, 2007

    10:34 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    sutherix writes:

    How could a newspaper editor, let alone a business editor, provide erroneous information about New Belgium's energy use? Could it be that the company continues to mislead the public when they think the coast is clear? This seems to be the case. Mr. Reuteman is not the only recent vistor to the brewery to come away with a false impression.

    Climate change and resource depletion are difficult, serious problems to deal with. Insincerity is not going to be effective.

    Here are a few facts we wish Mr. Reuteman had considered in his hyperbolic editorializing.
    - New Belgium uses more that just a "small amount" of natural gas as an energy source for the brewery. As much as 50%, although media disinformation experts like Mr. Simpson will not produce an accurate estimate.
    - Only 15% of the electricity that the company purchases comes from renewable sources. Renewable Energy Credit (REC)purchases "offset" the remainder. Nothing speaks to the insincerity of the greenwashing like the contrived functional equivalencies that REC purchasers claim.
    - The overwelming majority of the embodied energy in a six pack is in the packaging.
    - New Beligium's largest competitor, Sierra Nevada Brewing of Chico, California, will actually be 100% self powered electrically as soon as they complete the last installment of their photovoltaic installation. Sierra Nevada does the real thing, and they don't greenwash.

    http://www.denverpost.com/allewis/ci_...

    http://blogs.denverpost.com/lewis/200...

  • December 5, 2007

    8:24 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    mizoodood writes:

    Ok, so when I take the tour of the New Belgium brewery, the blue flames that keep the brew kettles happily percolating away aren't actually natural gas, but some sort of financial derivative they've purchased (RECs) that they claim gives them the right to mutilate our common language to say it's wind power or some other form of renewable energy flickering away to make their good beer. They have not changed their core beliefs or energy choices at all. It's a sham.

    While I love the idea that New Belgium is doing anything at all to reduce non-renewable energy use, it is clear they likely use as much non-renewable natural gas per unit sales as Budweiser or anyone else, despite their use of methane recovery and other measures. Budweiser may for all we know have an edge due to process efficiencies of scale. The glass bottle packaging used by New Belgium requires a similar amount of energy as the beer itself to produce, and it's all done with natural gas.

    New Belgium is trying to make a marketing statement for being a leader in renewable energy use in the brewing industry like Fox News is trying to make a statement about "fair and balanced ©" news in the journalism industry. This appears to be easier for them than matching misleading marketing rhetoric with real energy choices to go to renewable energy options as other brewers of fine beer have done. This would mean getting rid of their blue flickering natural gas processes and move to electric processes that actually use the wind power they say they buy. Right now they violate common sense to suggest equivalence on Btu's alone between gas and renewables.

    New Belgium should quit their delusional blabbering about how great they are with renewable energy and focus on actually doing it. Just let people enjoy their beer in peace.

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