Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Shirah.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Five years ago, my family and I were operating some beer bars in Arizona. I was a macro beer drinker when I started that, but slowly I turned toward craft. Instead of the beer bars, I thought it made more sense for us to try to do something ourselves at home in Atlanta. We found the right guy to brew for us in Travis Herman, who we first met at the Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Fest. Travis was a microbiologist, a vaccine developer by trade in Silicon Valley, one of those places I’ll never go. My background is in finance and corporate recoveries.
Travis is really a Teddy bear who looks like an outlaw. He ended up not wanting to work in Silicon Valley and went to the University of California at Davis brewing school, which is a very well-respected program. He was working at Russian River Brewing when I met him. It’s difficult to get good brewers to move away from California due to surfing and other gypsy-related stuff. Eventually, after he and his wife started having children, I was able to convince him to move to Atlanta.
I got him out here and we spent a couple years in my mother-in-law’s basement near my house figuring out what we were going to do. We built a lab and full-scale brewing operation down there about ten doors away from the elementary school. My mother-in-law thought it was a meth lab or something down there. She would close all the windows up whenever guys came over to work on her pool out back. She thought we were crazy but she was supportive.
We started making the beers and we developed Basement IPA down there and another one called Sucker Punch. Everything we did was homebrew, so it was legit. But we did make a barrel of this stout, about 30 gallons. In the middle, Travis walked off, maybe went to smoke one. I just kept boiling down this stout. Well, the more you boil it down, the higher the ABV gets. I finally called him after an hour. I told him, ‘This beer is gone. It looks like caramel.’ Travis said, ‘Hey man, just turn the fire off.
This beer was 19 percent by the time we got done with it. So, I take it to my neighbor’s crawfish boil. When it was time to go, I was putting down one foot and dragging the other. Our host Mike was passed out in the ivy. There were people laying in the beds of pick-up trucks and in lawn chairs. I think I incapacitated the entire neighborhood. Since it resulted from Travis being absent, we named it Absentia, first, then ran into trademark issues. It’s now called Absentium. It’s a barrel-aged stout that comes in right at 13.9% and sometimes you see it online for a pretty substantial price per bottle.
Scofflaw has been a fun story and I’ve become fairly adapted to the business. At the end of the day, Travis, the head of sales, J.P. Watts, and I all grew up in trailer parks. We all had the same struggles. I worked at Chili’s for five years as an undergrad paying my way through college at Appalachian State. I had a kid and I said, “Fuck it. I’m through with this corporate stuff.’ It doesn’t make me unhappy that people are having fun with our beers. We had a lot of fun down country roads doing the same stuff. At the same time, I see families at the brewery spending time together over the product. And then the beer becomes unimportant. It becomes something that facilitates time between friends.
Has it been a smooth road?
Almost all of our struggles involve limitations on capacity, which we’re working on expanding. But that takes time. I know the market in Georgia can take as much beer as we can make, but I can’t go into new accounts without more capacity.
Midway in 2017, we temporarily stopped canning. People couldn’t understand why we stopped canning as soon as we hit 6,000 barrels. When you have taps on in restaurants, that’s really coveted real estate. I was not willing to give that up and so I stopped canning. We stopped bringing in new accounts for draft. We then went up in capacity twice in terms of new fermentation tanks, started canning again and we’re at 16,000 barrels roughly.
We try to squeeze R&D beers in there where we can, but capacity constraints due to demand for what we are already brewing, slows us down. That will change when we get the new 50-barrel brewhouse, which is scheduled to be installed next March. For now, Travis has been going to brewer conferences on the use of honey and he’s done an imperial pilsner called Haole made with Hawaiian honey. We’ve also recently brought out Drop Kick, made with a new New Zealand hop called Wai-Iti. This beer has a really big nose with citrus flavors of apricot and peaches. Goat’s Milk is a new milkshake IPA made with milk sugar and fresh strawberries and mango. It’s also doing really well for us.
It’s also hard for any microbrewer that is growing rapidly to get all the resources needed. We put in a 50,000-pound capacity silo for our grain. So that has helped us get consistency with our malt. The challenge usually comes down to hops. If you aren’t big enough to have a contract with a hop grower or a hop broker, you get the hops leftover after others make their choices.
But Travis Herman is a very smart brewer – he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He says there’s no problem in brewing without a solution. We’re able to handle this kind of challenge without sacrificing the aromas and flavors people expect from Scofflaw. By expanding, we’ve increased the size of our orders and have hop contracts for 2018.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Scofflaw Brewing Company – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
It starts with the beer, but there’s more. Our tap room and how that presentation works, we set a very high standard for ourselves. When people come to the tap room, it’s a chance for people to see a working brewery. Everything better be clean and up to our standards. The tap room is really our marketing program, because the experience people have is something they tell their friends. When we first opened, it was the people in the surrounding Bolton neighborhood who came to the tap room and really supported us and helped get the word out. And it’s built from there.
We knew what the market wanted as far as IPAs and barrel-aged stouts. Travis has the skill set to do it and here we are after one year and Scofflaw has been well received, thank goodness. We have a good team of people and we back them up with the right resources.
Our beers are approachable, big IPAs. We hear people say all the time in our tasting room, ‘I normally don’t like IPAs, but we like the ones you’re making,’ particularly women. Our beers are higher in ABV, but you’ve got to have a lot of grain to get that flavor. We’re not interested in trying to make a range of beers, because we love drinking IPAs and big, barrel-aged stouts or strong ales. We’ve just started on a sour program with some base beers going into some of our wine barrels. But the sours are a year away.
We brew both Northeastern and West Coast IPAs. All our beers are unfiltered. That gives them yeasty haze which adds to the flavor. Basement is a Northeast style that features Citra hops and is our most popular IPA. The Westside and Upper Westside have that bittering charge, which I like. But they’re not over the top with bitterness. Hooligan is a Northeastern-style IPA. It’s a different experience. We spent a lot of money getting that aroma in there. It’s just like wine, the experience of the aroma is key. We get several pounds of Galaxy hops from Australia into each barrel of Hooligan. It’s loaded with mango, orange, lemongrass and berry flavors. It’s pretty damn good.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
We’re at a tipping point in craft beer, just because there are so many breweries entering the market.
The challenges are all over the country, not just Georgia. If you’re talking tap handles, there’s pay to play everywhere. Better products are not allowed to get on a tap because someone else has paid cash to get that tap.
With the acquisition of craft brewers by macro brewers in the last couple of years, it’s more difficult for smaller brewers to get shelf space. That’s always going to be the fall back for those craft brewers who have been bought by Anheuser-Busch or the other macro brewers. The craft guys who have sold to macros say, ‘It allows me to get more beer to more people.’
If you look at some of the more recent data I’ve seen, it does make it harder for smaller brewers to get the resources that are absorbed by the larger brewers. I’m not going to go in the direction of saying A-B is the devil. But as a result of the acquisition of SAB by them, no South African hops are available to anyone else in the entire world except for their company.
Another example. Once these craft brewers get acquired, they have access to premium product and premium ingredients.
But bigger brewers will always have an edge. Some friends of mine have a big brewery, hundreds of thousands of barrels. It took me six months to get my hands on a new fermentation tank. They make a phone call and that tank is there in a few days. There’s a lot of money involved. How many turns of beer can I do in six months if a 90-barrel tank is there?
If you look at studies of acquired craft brewers and non-acquired craft brewers, it’s interesting to see the acquired brands are increasing their sales. They’re not necessarily taking away from craft sales. Let’s say it’s an A-B acquired craft brewery. They’re probably taking away from A-B’s core brands like Bud Light. There’s not necessarily a growth in the overall beer market. It’s pretty flat. But there’s a strong tailwind for those who have been acquired that will enable them to grow more.
Contact Info:
- Address: Scofflaw Brewing Company
1738 MacArthur Blvd.
Atlanta, GA 30318 - Website: www.scofflawbeer.com
- Email: info@scofflawbeer.com
Image Credit:
Heidi Geldhauser
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