{"id":7465,"date":"2013-03-08T15:44:58","date_gmt":"2013-03-08T23:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archives.csusm.edu\/westcoastersd\/?p=7465"},"modified":"2013-03-08T15:46:30","modified_gmt":"2013-03-08T23:46:30","slug":"the-friday-five-5q-w-jim-crute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archives.csusm.edu\/westcoastersd\/2013\/03\/08\/the-friday-five-5q-w-jim-crute\/","title":{"rendered":"The Friday Five: 5Q w\/ Jim Crute"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jim Crute is the President and Head Brewer of\u00a0Lightning Brewery<\/a> in Poway, as well as one of the founders of the upcoming SoCal Business of Beer Symposium<\/a> being held next Tuesday, March 12 at White Labs.<\/p>\n

\"Jim<\/a>
Jim Crute via lightningbrewery.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What’s on the horizon for Lightning?<\/strong>
\nWe have a number of initiatives we’ve taken on at Lightning.\u00a0 Included in that is bringing to market 6-packs for our two best selling beers,\u00a0Thunderweizen\u00a0Ale and Elemental Pilsner, barrel-aging our high gravity beers with more of a schedule and then bringing on-line a process for regularly releasing one-off beers crafted at ultra-low volumes.<\/span><\/p>\n

For bringing 6-packs to the market we purchased a new “linear” filler that fills 6 bottles at a time that then caps those bottles as the next set of 6 are filled.\u00a0 I know that new is a difficult term for Lightning since the vast majority of our equipment is well used and in many cases re-built at least once.\u00a0 But we thought that the benefits out weighed the costs in this case since we want to have very high quality fills for folks that choose to enjoy our beers.\u00a0 It might be impossible to have the beer that reaches the consumer be just as good as beer at the brewery, but I am really committed to making sure we are a close as it it humanly possible.\u00a0 Those bottles will then be labeled and be transferred to 6-packs.\u00a0 Look for them in stores before the weather warms up.<\/p>\n

We have also decided to consistently age our Black Lightning Porter and Old Tempestuous Ale in used bourbon barrels based on our somewhat experimental and unscheduled barreling over the past 4 years. Each and every beer we have barrel-aged has been a real hit and does help to round out the experience folks have when they stop by our brewery. We have also decided to age our Electrostatic Ale in used chardonnay barrels to further bring out the spicy, estery and wine qualities of this beer. The first tasting on that was real positive and we would expect to have that available at the brewery for growler fills within the next couple of weeks.<\/p>\n

Finally, I have decided to re-connect with my love of home brewing, as much as I can now that brewing at Lightning uses the magic 101 to 108 multiplier to increase amounts of what I would use as a home brewer to craft some extreme beer.\u00a0 That will be at scales of a barrel or two with batches being more at the home brewing level.\u00a0 The first beer up will be a high gravity maple and honey ale fermented and then aged in an an oak barrel.\u00a0 Who know what we will call it, but it will be an experiment.\u00a0 Of course with just a barrel or two being crafted at a time will will reserve those beers for sale out of the brewery.<\/p>\n

You recently revamped your website with beer pairing and home brew tips, an “ask a beer question, get a beer science answer” form, info on your beers, and a link to your new beer finder app, just to name a few things. How big of a project was this?
\n<\/strong>\"DSC_0273\"<\/a>We did recently go live with our Lightning 3.0 website!\u00a0 That was a lot of work that took a lot longer than expected.\u00a0 However, it would still be just a pipe-dream, or maybe a suds-dream, if it was not for Adam Hay designing the site architecture and Suzanne at Informed Web Content for re-writing my thoughts on beer, our beer styles, beer and food, and what ever else is covered.\u00a0 I can’t say that I know it would be as much before I started, but I do appreciate that we will need to make the site into a 3.1 version pretty soon with my posting blog spots and some new videos pretty soon.<\/p>\n

I did add a few things in to better connect with our actual enjoyers of Lightning beer.\u00a0 If you think about it, now that we are selling more and more beer outside of San Diego County, we are going to be having more limited interactions.\u00a0 Now we invite folks to electronically sign up for our newsletter, and I even answer questions on Lightning or other beers just through having questions submitted, then I go to my email account and just send an answer back the next day or so.\u00a0 It is actually kind of fun doing that.<\/p>\n

I have also had to learn a lot about how to make more modern add-ons work and discover what works and what doesn’t.\u00a0 For instance, our beer finer app does work pretty well, but we have had issues with keeping the application current and accurate.\u00a0 It currently shows where our beers are sold, but to be honest, it is really hard to know if the retailer has run out, has changes the groups of beers sold, or when they will be re-supplied.\u00a0 It would actually be nice if all retailers just updated some sort of “TapHunter” type of database weekly or daily and then the end consumer could search that database for beers they want to purchase. But that may be too much of an expectation and make information widely available that would make the retailers feel uncomfortable. Ultimately business is personal and although we may be able to convey to some extent where our beers are sold by supplying an app, it really does work to either phone the retailer to check, or email the brewery to confirm availability.\u00a0 So I would call that a learning experience, but knowing what I’ve learned I think we can re-imagine our Lightning Brewery app and make it better.<\/p>\n

How did you get involved with SoCal BOB?
\n<\/strong>\"BOB<\/a>As many folks would imagine, I get to meet a lot of different folks by working in the beer trade. I have also become involved with local business through the Poway Chamber of Commerce and have taken a larger amount of local responsibility in San Diego by serving on the board of the San Diego Brewers Guild.\u00a0 That simply reflects that I have invested significantly in my business and I have everything to gain by ensuring the local beer and business communities are healthy and active.<\/p>\n

So two long time friends of mine, Dan Drown and Bill Reavey separately approached me and asked me what the hardest part I have seen on taking up the Lightning rod, so to speak.\u00a0 It really has been running the business.\u00a0 Most, but not all, of my friends don’t think that I am unintelligent or lacking in specific skills, but I do have to share that it is not easy to take on the gaunlet of running a business.\u00a0 So what I see as a threat to our business sector is more along the lines of not being able to take care of the brewery as a business versus not being able to craft new, different, and interesting beers.\u00a0 I can say that the hard part is not managing staff, directing operations, sourcing materials, it really is making sure all of the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed.\u00a0 It’s the business of beer.<\/p>\n

Fast forward a bit and late last year Bill suggested I help him flesh out a symposium, or a condensed day of learning on how to form and run a brewery.\u00a0 I was all for it and thought that Dan would want to get involved based on our previous interactions.\u00a0 Good beer people being good beer people we went forward by meeting over a beer.\u00a0 We first decided we would not be paying ourselves.\u00a0 That way it is not Bill, Dan and Jim making a few busks off the wider beer community.\u00a0 We each have our own businesses and that is how we make a living.\u00a0 Specifically, teaching our colleagues and future colleagues some hard-won wisdom on running a business is not something that makes money, it is a public service that should help everyone involved.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

At BOB you’ll be speaking on “better beer through science” – also the tagline for your brewery. What does that phrase mean to you?
\n<\/strong>\"brewingOps\"<\/a>With organizing the BoB Symposium, I get to talk about a pretty young brewery, Lightning, that is just getting some reasonable traction by becoming more of a respected business. We took and do take things in a different direction in the beer trade in San Diego County.\u00a0 We decided to specialize by brewing with just a few ingredients, focus on natural carbonation, brew with what is called decoction mashing for some of our beers, and we even have as our second-best selling beer a lager, Elemental Pilsner.<\/p>\n

Better Beer Through Science means not adding more chemicals or other odd ingredients into our beer, but instead it is an over-riding philosophy that says careful thinking and investing re-formulates classic brewing processes to the smaller scale brewery.\u00a0 Folks have largely forgotten that science is not big business, even if many more recent high profile undertakings have been big business and big science.\u00a0 It is a careful and considered reasoning designed to do the next experiment based on an understanding of what you are working with to further prove a scientific hypothesis.\u00a0 With Lightning each of our beers are very different.\u00a0 They are very different for specific reasons, where we either make wort with different mixtures of malted grains, hops, brewing methods, yeast, and temperature of fermentation.\u00a0 Or all of those components.\u00a0 And it is not really following a recipe that you can get off the internet.\u00a0 We just started with some simple beer and based on how they were brewed, fermented and tasted, we expanded the variety of what we we do. For more details, your readers will need to either send in a “beer science” question or ask me in person.<\/p>\n

We have 65 breweries in the county (18 opened in 2012 and three in 2013), and there are 33 in-planning. Do you see the craft beer bubble bursting anytime soon? Or at all?<\/strong>
\nOh the bubble question…and I get this question a lot. How big can big get, particularly in San Diego County.\u00a0 With about 60 breweries in town have we reached the point where if I sell a pint of fine Lightning Beer will I be cannibalizing a pint of beer sold by another local craft or micro brewery?\u00a0 First of all, it’s important to remember that breweries are classified as manufacturing businesses that sell the bulk of our beer at the wholesale level. It’s also important to remember that for our class of businesses we do not really see savings in scaling-up volumes until we pass production levels of 5-10,000 bbls\/year.\u00a0 That doesn’t mean that breweries that are smaller can’t be profitable, but it does mean that they will need a significant retail side of their businesses to back-fill that gap in their economy of scale.\u00a0 I know may not be the answer that starting brewers may want to hear, but you can sort of see that it is already recognized in the relative size of tasting room in nascent breweries compared to the brewery footprint:\u00a0 They are larger and can accommodate more retail sales.\u00a0 They are also open, on average, longer than tasting rooms were open say 5 or 10 years ago.<\/p>\n

Back to the bubble:\u00a0 For San Diego County sales we may see some plateauing over the next few years, but for all of California, all of the Southwest US and all of the wider US we are not even nearly close to that point.\u00a0 Since even with a brewery on the smaller side like Lightning we are seeing the majority of our increase in sales moving outside of San Diego County as we help quench the wider thirst for San Diego beer.\u00a0 So I think there is still room for significant growth in our business.\u00a0 That would mean that craft beer can move from being maybe 15% of the American market to 50% of the market. However, for new or planning breweries that are not looking to expand the spectrum and quality of the beers they craft and are planning on selling a more generic “BEER” in black letters on a white label, I would say there is less opportunity.\u00a0 That is, after all, the basis of San Diego beer; we craft beers largely unequaled across the country, novel in style, something that others have a harder time envisioning, and an even harder time producing.<\/p>\n

Disclosure: Both Lightning and SoCal BOB advertised in our March 2013 issue, but this was not a paid post.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jim Crute is the President and Head Brewer of\u00a0Lightning Brewery in Poway, as well as one of the founders of the upcoming SoCal Business of Beer Symposium being held next Tuesday, March 12 at White Labs. What’s on the horizon for Lightning? We have a number of initiatives we’ve taken on at Lightning.\u00a0 Included in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[298,1011,1020],"class_list":{"0":"post-7465","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-san-diego-beer-beverage-news","7":"tag-lightning-brewery","8":"tag-san-diego-beer","9":"tag-socal-business-of-beer","10":"entry","11":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","wps_subtitle":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdtr4y-1Wp","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archives.csusm.edu\/westcoastersd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archives.csusm.edu\/westcoastersd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archives.csusm.edu\/westcoastersd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archives.csusm.edu\/westcoastersd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archives.csusm.edu\/westcoastersd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archives.csusm.edu\/westcoastersd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archives.csusm.edu\/westcoastersd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archives.csusm.edu\/westcoastersd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archives.csusm.edu\/westcoastersd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}