Delaware Beer by Tony Russo

Author:Tony Russo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2016-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

The oak fermentation tanks at the new Dogfish Head facility in Milton are massive and have the entire room to themselves. A tricky part of expansion for Dogfish Head has been finding a way to innovate without compromising the underlying attitude of making solid beers.

“PLEASE BREW BEER”

The fact that so few people know who Jim Lutz is in comparison to guys like Sam Calagione, Jim Koch and Ken Grossman is a testament to how excellent he is at his job. Like Al Stewart, he wasn’t a homebrewer but made the kind of inroads into craft beer and, really, beverages in general that only makes sense in the big picture. Moreover, he has been a driving force behind the craft culture since the 1980s, when he came to Delmarva to run a relatively new beer company on Maryland’s Eastern Shore called Wild Goose.

A Milwaukee native, he started his career at Pabst after graduating from the University of Wisconsin. He left Pabst to sell Crystal Geyser bottled water back when the notion of people paying for something like that was laughable. From there he got into the distributing business, first as an employee and then with his own company, with which he had secured the rights to bottle Stewart’s Root Beer (an East Coast brand unrelated to Stewart’s Brewing Company). As part of his Colorado-based company’s work, he began distributing Pete’s Wicked Ale, so he already saw craft beer’s potential.

The thing that he got about craft beer, right from the first, was that it was a team sport. When Alan Pugsley left Wild Goose to start what would become Shipyard Brewing and Wild Goose was scrambling for someone to run it, the company’s board of directors turned to Jim. Not being a homebrewer is different from not knowing how to brew beer, and Jim knew how to make good, consistent beer in the tradition of the best big beer manufacturers. Living in Colorado at the time, however, and seeing the rise of Pete’s Wicked Ale, among others, he also knew about the potential for craft beer.

Jim’s true skill, though, was understanding what might be called quality trends and their limits. That is, he knew that being good or even great was no use if your greatness was a secret. So when he ran Wild Goose, he didn’t tout exclusivity so much as he touted quality. The kind of person who knew to drink better beer also knew to order better food. Additionally, he did all he could to encourage other brewers in the region to do the same. When Sam Calagione came in to see the operations, Jim welcomed the notion of another brewer in the region. Although neither Sam nor Jim recall it clearly, Doug Griffith was on that same tour and remembered heading to Cambridge to get some yeast and look over the facility.

The fact that Jim doesn’t remember the encounter didn’t surprise him, so hectic were the times and frequent the visits. “It was like, ‘Anyone, please brew beer!’” he said of the period.

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