How to Build a Brewery with Jeremy Cowan of Shmaltz Brewing Co.

Jeremy Cowan is an idea guy. Conversing with him means keeping up with a mind that whirs at 110 mph. Concepts and connections seem to spin effortlessly from his head, most often expressed with a touch of humor. Cowan’s clever wit is immediately apparent. Puns and jokes – mostly subtle, sometimes not – pour out of his mouth in a steady stream. “Shtick” is what he calls it. Combined with an ebullient, extroverted demeanor, these two attributes make Cowan the perfect front man for the Jewish circus sideshow that is Shmaltz Brewing Company.

DON’T PASS OUT, PASSOVER

I first met Jeremy Cowan in October, 2008 at City Beer Store in San Francisco. Over a couple of hours, and more than a couple of beers, we talked about Shmaltz, beer, politics, the hop crisis, and the price of Palo Alto real estate. Shmaltz was still in its bi-coastal phase then. Cowan’s address was in San Francisco and the beer was made in New York. I say Cowan’s address was in San Francisco because he didn’t spend much time there. He was in the midst of a years-long promotional tour that had him couch surfing from city to city. The Shmaltz home office was little more than a P.O. Box and Cowan’s phone. He maintained a storefront for his Coney Island brand on Surf Avenue in Brooklyn, billed as “The World’s Smallest Brewery.” 

At the time we met, the hop shortage of 2008 was at full intensity. With each overdone IPA we drank, Cowan beefed about the conspicuous excesses of other brewers at a time when he couldn’t get the basic hops needed to produce his beers. The shtick kept coming, too. He mused about a possible collaboration with Oskar Blues called Oskar Jews and Jewish Blues, with beers commemorating Jewish bluesmen and famous Jews named Oskar. It was a memorable and amusing conversation. 

Cowan stepped into the beer industry from a different direction than most. Brewers typically start with a set of beers that they want to make and build a brand around it. But Cowan wasn’t a brewer when he founded Shmaltz in 1996. By his own admission he knew relatively little about beer. True to his nature, Cowan built his company on an idea – a Coors Light-fueled joke among high school friends that the Jews should have their own beer. The beer would be called He’brew and the tagline would be “Don’t pass out, Passover.” The shtick came first. The beers and the company were built around it. 

In hindsight, Cowan says that he had really started a sales and marketing company more than a beer company. For the first seventeen years of its existence, Shmaltz didn’t even have a brewery. Cowan followed the example of craft beer pioneers Pete Slosberg and Jim Koch by having his beer contract brewed. This allowed him an affordable entry. The first batch of Genesis Ale cost just $2,000. But it also allowed Cowan, a one-man show for most of those years, to focus on what he does best: generate shtick and put it into the world. 

It is only recently that Cowan has crossed over and built his own brewery in Clifton Park, New York – a radical change and a steep learning curve. “I never thought we’d have a brewery,” he said. “I didn’t think we’d have 30 people. I thought we’d have four or five people. Even going from two or three to four or five or six was a big jump. I’m still learning while doing, which is very tiring.” 

Right: One of Cowan’s many methods of getting the attention of craft beer enthusiasts.

Despite the bricks and mortar, kettles and fermenters, Cowan will continue to draw heavily on the rich tradition of Jewish comedy to help spread the word about his beer. Provocative and playful, Jewish shtick is a large piece of the He’brew identity. It’s one of the “three pillars” on which Cowan built his brand – quality, community and shtick. The use of the pillars metaphor is itself a play on the foundational pillars of Judaism; Torah, worship and acts of loving-kindness. 

Jewish humor pervades the marketing. He’brew is “The chosen beer.” The flagship Messiah Nut Brown is “The beer you’ve been waiting for.” Signage made to look like an ancient tapestry quotes God proclaiming, “Christ, that’s good beer.” A video clip shows two Hasidic rabbis entering a saloon, a turn on the classic “two Jews walk into a bar” theme. Beer names reference Old Testament figures. Slingshot American Craft Lager, for instance, invokes the underdog David taking on the Goliath of big beer. Irreverent events like the annual Hanukkah vs. Christmas Holiday Beer Throwdowns are staged across the country.

Cowan himself develops much of the shtick. The riffs on the Jewish refrain certainly have helped him sell what is arguably one of the world’s most niche brands. But for Cowan it’s more than just a gimmick. Though playful, he takes the link to his Jewish culture seriously. In his autobiography Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah he writes, “I’m trying to be provocative, outrageous, and colorful, but also sincere and thoughtful, precise and composed.” A glimpse below the surface reveals how everything from the label on the bottle down to the ingredients and flavors works together to form a holistic package with multiple layers of interpretation and understanding. 

All He’brew beers are certified kosher. Many have complex connections to Judaic traditions. Take the fall seasonal Rejewvenator, a fruit-infused mashup of a doppelbock and a Belgian dubbel. It is brewed to commemorate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah is a holiday about introspection and rejuvenation, a reflection on the mistakes of the past and changes to be made in the coming year. The surface-level shtick is obvious. By naming it Rejewvenator, Cowan could use “Jew” in the name, play on the traditional “tor” ending of doppelbock names, and convey the spirit of the holiday. But there are deeper parallels. Bock is a beer traditionally associated with Lent, together with Easter another holiday associated with renewal and rejuvenation. The traditional symbol of bock is the ram. An important part of the Rosh Hashanah holiday is the blowing of the shofar, a ram’s horn. The first version of Rejewvenator contained fig juice. Figs are one of the sacred fruits mentioned in the Torah. Subsequent releases used others, such as dates and grapes.

For his Miraculous Jewbelation anniversary beers Cowan takes his shtick inspiration from the numerology of Jewish mysticism, creating labels that read like a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap. Each year’s creation uses ingredients in amounts that correspond to the anniversary year. Jewbelation 8 for instance, used eight malts and eight hops, and clocks in at 8 percent ABV. Cowan’s label shtick for that beer explores the miraculous role of the number eight in Jewish life from the sacred – Hanukkah, Passover and Sukkot each spans eight days – to the profane – Mel Brooks stole a cap gun from Woolworth’s at age eight and Seinfeld ran for eight seasons. 

DEATH OF A CONTRACT BREWER

Though the mid-1990s brought craft beer’s first big boom, its mass appeal was still limited and its staying power was questionable. Cowan’s challenge of selling an ultra-niche brand in this market was exacerbated by his almost complete ignorance of how the industry worked. He had to learn by doing. His long learning curve saw costly trademark disputes, pallets of beer locked up by distributors, and sometimes rocky relationships with a succession of contract brewers including Anderson Valley Brewing Company, Mendocino Brewing Company and Olde Saratoga.

The tribulations of contract brewing are discussed in full detail in Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah. Some of the problem was Cowan’s naivety when it came to beers. For brewers looking for a flavor profile he suggested, “Give me the best pastrami on rye that you can manage.” Some brewers made beers for Shmaltz by blending two in-house brands, an approach that Cowan himself endorsed early on. The business conflicts included the unauthorized sale of Shmaltz by a contract partner and at least one brewpub in San Francisco that he organized on behalf of a brewing partner, who then backed out of the arrangement.  

Cowan’s lack of knowledge sometimes worked in his favor. His naivety allowed him to ask for and sometimes receive things that a more experienced person would not have reasonably expected. “It gave me the confidence and the freedom to just simply behave as though I deserved a conversation with a chain buyer or I deserved a spot on a shelf. I didn’t have the built-in layers of compromise and inhibition. It allowed me to just behave as myself. Sometimes I’d be vulnerable and other times I’d be confident. I think that the buyers responded to that.”

The first decade was a struggle, though. The company was funded largely on credit cards and profits were slim at best. Cowan says that it was a commitment to extreme beers and a realization about the true nature of his enterprise that turned things around for Shmaltz. “It wasn’t until I admitted that it was a beer company that we saw people get more and more interested on the consumption side. The previous excitement had been more about PR. I got lots of articles written about how quirky and clever and silly and fun the beer was, but that didn’t necessarily translate into thousands of people buying a six-pack every month or two and then re-buying another six-pack and another six-pack. It was really 10 years into the company until it started really being a little bit more consistent.”

Jeremy Cowan started as a marketer and worked until he had his own brewery.

After 17 years of contract brewing, Shmaltz broke ground on a brewery of its own in 2013. This move was motivated by desperation and the recognition of the changing nature of the market. Craft beer’s second big explosion has stretched brewery capacities thin. The number of options for contract brewing partners has become limited. The pipeline shrunk just as Shmaltz’s product line grew more complex. By 2012 Shmaltz had 10 core brands, 10 to 15 seasonals, and a barrel-aging program. Cowan’s portfolio was bigger than those of the breweries that were making his beer. Continued contract brewing had become unsustainable. 

But Cowan also saw a shift in consumer demands. “Local is on fire.” he said. “People want a visceral, tactile connection to how and where the beer is made.” The brewery in Clifton Park, New York gives his beers local credibility at least in that state, one of Shmaltz’s biggest markets. It’s not by accident the brewery is near Albany, where there is a local brewing tradition that peaked in the 19th Century when hop and grain fields flourished nearby and the Hudson River made delivering the famed Albany Ale to New York City and beyond relatively easy. 

The brewery also adds a facet to Cowan’s quest for multi-layered interaction with his beers. “People love the ideas, but they really also love the hands-on nature of brewing. Now we have an extra layer of connection.”

The move is not without its own complications. In a very short time Shmaltz went from being a one man operation with no home office to having 30 employees, real estate, and expensive equipment. Cowan says that juggling the demands of growing a national brand and running a beer factory isn’t easy. “I was working 100 percent of the time before on just sales and marketing.” he told me. “And now I’m working 100 percent of the time on sales and marketing and 100 percent of the time on production.” 

LOOKING AHEAD

Throughout its history Shmaltz has been an innovator. The marketing was brash and irreverent at a time when most beer branding revolved around, in Cowan’s words, “Fishing or dogs or regional geography.” The beers were big and bold before extreme was a thing. Then there is that Jewish niche. But times have changed. In-your-face marketing is commonplace. Excessive alcohol and odd ingredients are the norm. With growing competition it’s almost essential that breweries find a niche. How does a once cutting-edge brewery stay innovative?

“That is a very interesting and important question,” said Cowan. “Especially in a beer world where right now everybody is a voyeur. There is no real brand loyalty. We’re talking about it all the time. Even look at brands like Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, New Belgium. The brands that they focused almost 100 percent of their efforts on five years ago, some of them are brands they don’t even really push any more. Those big companies now have 60-plus beers that they make in a year. Which is crazy.”

Right: Jeremy Cowan holding a bottle of Genesis 10:10 from Shmaltz Brewing.

For Cowan the answer is to go even more boutique. “The way I’m looking at it now is smaller innovations that might involve more muscle from our national organization, but will give consumers that sense of ‘What’s new? What’s new?’” His idea is to leverage rare beers with small runs to build interest in their core brands. This means an expansion of the barrel-aging program and more beers like the She’Brew Triple IPA (11% ABV, 110 IBU) that was made for International Women’s Collaboration Brew Day, of which only 600 cases were brewed.  

Of course the shtick isn’t going away. For one thing, Cowan is a much sought after speaker at events around the country, enabling him to deliver it in person. The Immaculate Collaboration series will continue to help spread the word and turn out brews with cheeky names like St. Lenny’s, brewed with the Cathedral Square Brewery in St. Louis – the Catholics and the Jews breaking liquid bread together. It’s a Belgian-style take on Shmaltz’s Bittersweet Lenny’s Imperial Rye IPA.

Hanukkah is a busy time for Shmaltzy shtick. Seasons past have brought quirky products like a beer menorah. This year Shmaltz will once again lend some much needed light to the impending winter darkness with Hanukkah, Chanukah: Pass The Beer. Made with eight malts, eight hops, and weighing in at 8 percent ABV, it’s a reprise of that miraculous number 8 from the first Jewbelation anniversary beer. Seinfeld did run for eight seasons, after all. L’chaim!