Episode 43
608 Brewing on Holmen expansion, proposed Wisconsin Brewing Laws
About BizCast Greater La Crosse
We bring you news from the business community. From startups to experienced problem solvers, you’ll get in-depth insight on the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Greater La Crosse. Our show is a collaboration between WIZMNews.com and BizNews Greater La Crosse ( GreaterLaCrosse.media ).
Full Transcript [ generated by AI]
BizCast 45: 608 Brewing Expand to Holmen
[00:00:00]
it’s amazing how people come into a craft brewery and want to know all the process and how it goes. And I think that’s the part that excites me
Vicki Markussen: Welcome to BizCast Greater La Crosse, a weekly podcast from BizNews. We bring you news from the business community. I am your host and founder, Vicki Markussen, and joining me today is Phil Humphrey. He is the owner of 608 Brewing Company, and you have been around since August of 2018.
Vicki Markussen: What does your start look like?
Phil Humphrey: Yeah, that’s correct. We’ve It’s been great. City of La Crosse has been awesome so far just supporting us and showing out. We’ve grown from, I don’t know, I think we started with four or five part time bartenders now, to we have a staff of 17. Wow. And five full time, not counting myself.
Phil Humphrey: And yeah, just keep pushing a little harder and, growing the business. Yeah,
Vicki Markussen: so let’s go back in time. So first of all, we should tell people where you’re located. I will let you do that. I know where it is but you will describe it better than
Phil Humphrey: I do. Sure. 83 Copeland Ave and La Crosse here, .
Vicki Markussen: Just north of the quick trip.
Phil Humphrey: Just past Sloopy’s. Yep. Over on the right. Across from Gina’s Psychic Readings.
Vicki Markussen: You got it. A landmark. So let’s go back to the spring of 2018, and you have some partners that are saying, Hey, let’s open up a brewery.
Vicki Markussen: What did that look like? Where did the idea
Phil Humphrey: come from? Well, I was home brewing for a long time before that, and working in IT, and I was like getting a little burnt out of… Working all the time and doing kind of a thankless job. So I had reached out to a few different people to see if they were willing to invest or wanted to invest in a brewery because I, need a decent amount of startup capital just to get it going.
Phil Humphrey: And I think I had originally talked to [00:02:00] them for maybe like being a smaller investor and they wanted to take on that whole like minority share. And… We went with it and rolled and just started going there. It happened fast. We by the time we got a building and then got the money from the bank, we were open and about six months, which the licensing through the federal government and the state’s usually not a problem.
Phil Humphrey: The federal government’s usually not that fast. And we actually had a one month issue too with electrician. We probably could have been open in five months which is an insane timeline considering what we were doing. Nowadays, a lot of breweries are taking over a year to open. So
Vicki Markussen: what do you think made that so quick?
Vicki Markussen: It was the federal government piece. Is that what the leg that’s happening for others
Phil Humphrey: now? We pretty much did everything we could to help on this build out that didn’t require a certified or licensed person. So every weekend we’d be there for 30 hours, if it was demoing or pulling stuff out or getting things set up for the Monday, trying to keep the [00:03:00] contractors basically on a tight timeline because we started with no capital, we had no money coming in from any kind of business.
Phil Humphrey: So the longer it took to get open, the more it stressed us personally, financially. So getting it going As fast as possible was definitely in our best interest.
Vicki Markussen: Yeah, that’s the piece that people forget about is so you’re paying rent You’re paying the contractors and granted you do have the loan from the bank But the sooner you can start money coming in the better so talk about I mean it’s thought out you didn’t just decide to brew beer you have taproom.
Vicki Markussen: Is that what you call it? A lot next
Phil Humphrey: to it. Yep. Yeah, we have a taproom and a brewery. I guess I would go back to one thing too. Yeah, go ahead. Which we did use. We used the we reached out to the Small Business Development Center at UW La Crosse. Yeah. And they were great. They took the existing business plan I had built, made it a little prettier.
Phil Humphrey: And they had access to databases for information that most people wouldn’t have. And that was huge. So it made going to the bank [00:04:00] A lot easier when we walked in and we had all the information they were looking for, up to five year projections on the business, even though we had never operated, those numbers weren’t quite right.
Phil Humphrey: We actually did way better than that, which is great. But yeah, that, that was, they, we went in there, had to plan. They took what I had already done because I’d already sung, I already had a 200 page business plan. With all kinds of stuff done and consolidated that down to about 80 or 90 pages most of it financial projections because that’s what Banks like banks care about did that and then yeah the goal the whole goal from the start was where we were going to be a High quality brewery using high quality ingredients and the focus would be tap room.
Phil Humphrey: Not trying to go too big, uh, just, trying to give someone, give people lacrosse another craft option.
Vicki Markussen: We were talking before I hit record here about really the uniqueness of your product and that it’s, it uses real ingredients. Can you explain
Phil Humphrey: that? [00:05:00] Yeah, really. Normal beer is going to use all real ingredients to like, the malt the yeast, the hops and water.
Phil Humphrey: But if we do, if we’re doing, cause we do some crazy things that a lot of breweries, frown upon or don’t do. But if we’re going to use coconut, we’ll use real coconut. If we’re going to use, if we’re making a sour, that’s like strawberries, raspberries. And vanilla, like we’re using real vanilla, we’re using real strawberries, we’re using real raspberries.
Phil Humphrey: So the, it does drive the cost of the product up a little, a lot actually compared to using extracts, but I just feel like, with real products, you’re going to get a good product at the end. Like you can’t, it’s hard to overdo when you use the real thing. Extracts you can definitely overdo and once you overdo an extract, there’s no going back on that bad flavor.
Vicki Markussen: Yes. Are you the main creator of
Phil Humphrey: what’s produced? I was the, I was doing all the brewing for probably Three and a half years, three years. I did, I brought on an assistant brewer. And then now we actually have two full time [00:06:00] brewers. I still am creating the recipes and, all that stuff. But they’re the ones executing it.
Phil Humphrey: And It’s been going well, like I, you always get a little nervous because like, when you’re making something, you know what you’re doing and obviously as the owner, you’re going to care about it a lot more but I’d say both my, both the brewers we have they care about the product a lot and I haven’t seen really any drop off in the flavor or like processes or anything.
Phil Humphrey: So it made me feel really good to know that we could bring some people in, they’re still able to execute at a high level and it’s, hitting the standard that we want to hit. Every
Vicki Markussen: time that I’ve gone in there, there’s obviously new products. How much trial and error goes in even before you produce it to producing it and seeing how people respond?
Phil Humphrey: Yeah, we’re like a. Go live type trial. We don’t really do a lot of testing ahead of time. It’s just a, this is probably the one thing that probably irritates my brewers. Cause sometimes we’ll just like, I’ll just like pull an audible on something and be like, Hey, we’re going to do this.
Phil Humphrey: And there’s no real game plan. It’s just going in. It does help that we’ve done enough [00:07:00] of like certain styles of beer that I kind of know, like a certain amount of of a product won’t. Mess it up, but there’s definitely a lot of fly by the seat of our pants with some of this stuff we’ve gotten a little better about not maybe being so wild with the Changing the game plan just due to we are starting to get into some of the grocery stores around here And you’re it’s a different customer.
Phil Humphrey: You’re attacking when you go into the grocery store It’s more of the person that’s like hey, I like to drink this so I just buy this So if it’s constantly different, they’re not going to want to keep buying it. Where our tap room is like people a lot coming in there, they want it. They want all the new stuff.
Phil Humphrey: They want to try everything else. Cause that’s what they’re there for. They’re not there to drink the same beer over and over again.
Vicki Markussen: So you launch in 2018, what’s the, what is the public response over time?
Phil Humphrey: The opening day was ridiculous. Like I. I don’t know, I’ve been to some other businesses in the area that open and I didn’t think like it was ever like overly crazy, especially for like a product.[00:08:00]
Phil Humphrey: I guess I would assume that you get that response with a restaurant. We had no food we have food trucks, but we had no food and I, if I remember right it was, I don’t think we opened until that Friday night and it was a line down the street. It was like 40 minute wait just to get a beer.
Phil Humphrey: The place was wall to wall people. It I thought I was going to have a nice relaxing, get to walk around and talk to people and meet people and I think I just did dishes for three hours straight. It was overwhelming. It was great. The support’s always been great. And I appreciate that a lot.
Vicki Markussen: So you opened in August of 2018. So you had some feet underneath you as the pandemic hit. What happened during the
Phil Humphrey: pandemic? The whole, it’s funny you say that, right? Because we never had, I don’t feel like we had a normal, I still don’t even know if we had a normal, know what a normal year is maybe this year is the normal year because we’ve gotten out of that, but like you open, you’re busy because you’re new and you kind of like, you like rides through the waves because the beer or drinking business is an up and down thing that goes in waves and it was like solidly busy.
Phil Humphrey: And then we got our first [00:09:00] full summer. That was good. And then we rolled into the pandemic and like actually right before the pandemic, we were like, everything was going like all time best. It could have been. And then you have to shut down. I think it was like six weeks or something, which wasn’t that long compared to some places.
Phil Humphrey: And then we had to go, we basically went to a, to go only. That was good though for us from a financial side of things, the revenue side of things we didn’t lay anybody off. Yeah. Which was nice. Luckily, we didn’t have as big of a staff as we do now, but we were able to keep everyone employed.
Phil Humphrey: And we were moving probably just as much product, if not more, on a weekly basis. Because, you’re allowed to do the pre orders online. So people could just show up and grab whatever. I also got lucky. I bought a canning line before COVID. I was getting sick of doing crawlers. I don’t know if you crawlers like 32 ounce cans.
Phil Humphrey: So those ones you have to fill off the drafts. I was getting sick of doing like spending an hour and a half, two hours every day doing those. And I’m like, you know what I went at the time, went to my partners and like, I [00:10:00] think we just need to buy a canning line. It’s just going to make more sense.
Phil Humphrey: We were only canning beers. We thought we’re going to be popular versus everything. COVID hit. All of a sudden, everybody gets pushed into this new realm of trying to operate a business and you have to have a way to, if you can’t have people sitting in your tap room, having a beverage, you have, how do you move volume?
Phil Humphrey: How do you move your product then? Luckily we had that, that allowed us to basically shift everything into cans, which to this day, we still, every single beer that comes out, we can at least a little bit of it. So it is nice. It was just a, yeah. Culture shock a little bit there from a business side of things.
Phil Humphrey: Like how do you operate this? How do you do this? And like, how do you proceed and not overextend yourself financially? Because that was the unknown is who knows how. The economy is going to do and bounce back,
Vicki Markussen: And you saw, I’m sure you’re well aware of some of the large microbreweries that folded, particularly several in Madison.
Vicki Markussen: And so are you watching these [00:11:00] going? How are we surviving? And they’re not, I
Phil Humphrey: think there’s, this is purely my opinion, but I think there’s like a size of brewery. That’s not good to be me. In the current market and I and that’s that regional microbrewery because you’ve gotten to a size where you’re Not necessarily like you’re still local, but like you’re definitely have a very big reach geographically and like when you get too big There’s certain customers that will just I don’t want to go there anymore because now it’s not the cool thing It’s not it’s that they’re not really committed to the local economy as much there, and that’s like the 15 to 25, 000 barrel breweries that you can, I can go to any grocery store in the state or in Minnesota or in Iowa or Illinois, I’m going to find their beer on the shelf.
Phil Humphrey: I think that’s not a size I want to be, even if we, as we continue to grow for us, like we, we’re like living around like 700 barrels a year. So not even close to what [00:12:00] those guys are doing. So it’s there’s still a little bit of a novelty to our product. At least, if you like, we’ll do the occasional.
Phil Humphrey: Drop in like Madison or Milwaukee, but it’s very small and if you’re not One of like 20 people to come to that store that day. You probably don’t get it So like we’re still trying to keep the focus on the tap room Like we’re not sending out our super limited stuff to the market. We’re trying to keep it in house because like Unfortunately, our you know cost to operate every month is extremely high You know compared to what our actual revenue stream is.
Phil Humphrey: We don’t have that we’re like with the infrastructure is set But we need to like the only way we can you know take advantage as having a bigger setup which right now we’re not in that situation currently I don’t know if I would do it any different way though I just like being the size we are and you know maybe we get a little bit bigger, but I don’t want to ever lose that Yeah,
Vicki Markussen: and you were talking to, again, before we hit record on loyalty and people’s loyalty to particularly small brands.
Vicki Markussen: Can you talk about that? [00:13:00]
Phil Humphrey: Yeah, I think people like choosing a team. Nobody ever says they love everything. There’s always, they always have a favorite or something they’re in, for. I’d like to think that locally, like the craft beer scene is pretty open to everything, but there’s definitely, people that like, I’m not going to drink their beer.
Phil Humphrey: I don’t like those people, even though they’ve never met us or barely, or they tried it once. That’s the hardest part right there is you try it once. Like we’ve had people that, left a bad review on us, like three months after we opened and probably never came back, we were just getting started.
Phil Humphrey: I, yeah. I still go back to places, even if I had a bad experience, you get three or four in a row. Maybe that’s a bad choice, but it’s and you really can’t please everyone. You really can’t please anyone. Everyone’s got something to complain about. But I feel like the local at the end of the day, they’re loyal to what they like, but they’re also going to still be loyal to this area.
Phil Humphrey: Like it’s like there’s like levels of loyalty, I don’t know if that and so it all in all like I feel like We’ve all had great support and, [00:14:00] and, we get along all the breweries, like on the back end of sides, they all, we all get along. Like we’re, there’s, I don’t see any of them as competition.
Phil Humphrey: They don’t see, I don’t think they see me as competition. We’re just like, we’re all friends here trying to do the same thing and trying to get, more people excited about craft beer, in general. Yeah. The
Vicki Markussen: other thing that you had touched on as well is just the growing. Competition from areas that I wouldn’t have expected.
Vicki Markussen: Can you talk about that?
Phil Humphrey: Yeah, so it’s basically the the choices you have now, if you want to have a drink, you’re not, it’s not just like people are branching out into, the THC beverages, the wine or the canned cocktails, the canned wines is more portable things. I feel like but there’s so many new avenues of Alcoholic beverages out there these days.
Phil Humphrey: So you’re, and it’s hard to compete with price points too sometimes because I think sunny delight came out with the hard seltzer or whatever. I was like a vodka drink or something. They’re [00:15:00] co branded with somebody, but people know sunny delight because it’s like the orange juice you’d have when you were a kid or something.
Phil Humphrey: And then like they see it on the shelf and. tHe price points, they’re produced in such a mass volume it’s hard to sell a, 8 4 pack. thAt’s a 8 4 pack of like 10 percent alcohol, versus we can’t even get something, we can’t produce anything that low. Just a constantly evolving market, and you have to like, you have to almost either be, you’re either happy with what you currently have, or if you’re starting to see Downward trends like you have to evolve and I think that’s something that we do a lot at six or eight like We started going into the hemp derived THC beverages and that’s filled a little bit of void.
Phil Humphrey: I’ve actually seen some customers I haven’t seen in years because they had to quit drinking. So that was awesome. Another loyalty thing. They came back When there was a product they could have from us. And then the thing we’re like exploring right now that we’re going to probably release our first one in the next couple of weeks was, is going to be like a hop water just trying [00:16:00] to come up with some alternative beverages because I, as much as I don’t like dry January, there’s a lot of people that like to do that, which hurts our business a lot.
Phil Humphrey: So if I can have other alternatives that they can do that’s non alcoholic that’s going to be great for us, I think.
Vicki Markussen: Yeah. So let’s talk as well about what’s new. So when did you buy out the investors and what was your motivation for doing that?
Phil Humphrey: Yeah, it’s actually been almost a little like about exactly a year now since we bought out our partners.
Phil Humphrey: There was just a lot of creative and financial. Differences of opinions on that, like probably what everyone was telling me beforehand. If you don’t have to have partners, don’t have partners and then, I’m sure there’s some situations that work out great, but I am guessing more often than not they weren’t.
Phil Humphrey: So like I actually had some friends that wanted to be investors initially and I said, no, because I don’t want to ruin a friendship. Smart. And they still like to this day Oh, I should have been invested. I don’t think we’d be friends. Like you’d think [00:17:00] we would because yeah, it was just I have no ill will towards my old partners.
Phil Humphrey: Like they’re very nice people. And, obviously I wouldn’t have tried to go into business with them if I didn’t like them. But we were successful early on because I was doing four different jobs and. Working all the time and it was taking a strain on my wife and my kids and myself.
Phil Humphrey: And then as we, once we actually started bringing on people and like salary is always going to be your biggest expense, it’s when you started doing that, like cuts into that revenue, profits and, as profits weren’t as, maybe as good as they could have been some people get, they change a little, they react differently that you never saw before.
Phil Humphrey: They’re also I wanted to grow and you know get a little bit bigger and obviously do a second taproom type deal and they were not into that and you know Unfortunately, I just tried to, I just had to rip the Band Aid off, and had to figure out how to make it, how to get it done, and now we did, and now we have, now 100 percent [00:18:00] ownership, so if I sink the business, it’s on me now.
Phil Humphrey: Yeah. But if it succeeds, it’s the gamble I was willing to take. Yeah, and
Vicki Markussen: so you’re just about to open a location in Holman, talk
Phil Humphrey: about that. Yeah, that’s hopefully here, I’m hoping before the end of the year and just dealing with construction setbacks and equipment issues it seems like when you really want something to happen, everything can go wrong.
Phil Humphrey: It seems like it’s going wrong, even though it’s probably been going pretty smooth. It’s just, the timelines of. Getting certain things in there and all that stuff. But yeah, it’s gonna be a really nice spot. We have two floors. We actually We have a the downstairs is gonna have a little kitchen in it too.
Phil Humphrey: So we’ll have some food It’s gonna be more Like shareable plate type stuff. It’s not we’re not trying to like be a restaurant We’re still like the focus is still on our beer But you know just have some like flatbreads and like charcuterie boards and the pretzel, like the easy things The, key people there, a little hungry.
Phil Humphrey: But we also have two patios. So there’s going to be an up a rooftop [00:19:00] patio. Not a huge one, but 20 ish people probably can be on there. And then we have a side patio. aNd then what most people will probably like if they’ve been to our current spot is there’s actually going to be like a 40 car parking lot behind it.
Phil Humphrey: Nice!
Vicki Markussen: Nice! So somewhere to park. Yeah. Um, and explain where the location is.
Phil Humphrey: Oh, yeah, sorry. It’s at 103 Main Street in Holman. So it’s right off the corner of It’s County D meets Main Street, essentially. Next is where the old public library used to be before they built their new one. And right next to like T.
Phil Humphrey: Joe’s and Moxie’s salon. And then oh, the other thing is we will have an upstairs too. So actually have a private event space too, which will be nice because that we’ve lost so much revenue on not being able to have. I want to close your tap room on a Saturday. I’m like that’s not going to happen.
Phil Humphrey: Cause we don’t have private event space and it’s our busiest day. Yeah. And if you throw the number out there that would take to close it, people don’t like that number.
Vicki Markussen: No, but you got to keep your revenue coming in. So yeah, I get it. So what’s interesting is, [00:20:00] so you have, a lot of us learned growing up about the three tier system and you have.
Vicki Markussen: Basically, you are you’re distributing, you’re producing and you’re selling, correct? You’re doing all three of the tiers. How is that possible?
Phil Humphrey: So because we’re under 300, 000 barrels a year in Wisconsin, like we are able to self distribute and then with our brewers license, we can sell direct to consumer through our tap rooms.
Phil Humphrey: We can’t really go anywhere else and just sell direct to you. Like I couldn’t just pop up in the parking lot and start selling to you, like that would definitely be illegal. Before we had the second taproom, that license could be utilized as a temporary off premise site. Which we’ve used a couple times where we did some pop up shops in Madison.
Phil Humphrey: You have to go through the process of essentially submitting the paperwork like you’re opening another location. They will come through and approve it. It’s actually a very short form. Oh, good.
Vicki Markussen: I gave you a look like that sounds terrible. Yeah, it’s
Phil Humphrey: like a one page form. Yeah. But yeah, you would submit that.
Phil Humphrey: And then you have to give them [00:21:00] like a map. And as long as there was, as long as it was not on a parcel of land that had a liquor license tied to it or another bonded like brewery, distillery, winery on it, you could, if they approved it, you could literally be in that spot and then have it, which you could do up for up to two weeks.
Phil Humphrey: Really cool thing. But now by us opening the second tap room, it we lose that ability.
Vicki Markussen: Oh, interesting. Yeah. That was a decision,
Phil Humphrey: wasn’t it? It wasn’t too bad. We didn’t utilize the other pieces much as I wanted to. I originally had a plan of building a trailer with the tappers on it and then trying to do events at random parks throughout the state.
Phil Humphrey: It was a lot, it was going to be a lot more work than it was worth, and to hire somebody just to basically do that. It was gonna be I mean it probably would have been nice to hey pop up six way brewery it in Eau Claire I mean there was a but yeah, we this is gonna be the easier choice.
Phil Humphrey: I just felt like for me Holman like Tons of people are like it’s a booming area right now. There’s still like a very few [00:22:00] options for food and drink in that town so if I can get in ahead of A lot of other people that’s going to be good for us. And I live there. So
Vicki Markussen: it’s convenient. Yes. And there’s a lot of land available.
Vicki Markussen: So there’s lots of growth coming as well. So we’re doing this interview literally. Is it just the day after the law got proposed? Cause it’s going before the governor for that essentially addresses. Wedding barns and alcohol. So can you from your last understanding of the bill? Can you talk about where you see it impacting?
Phil Humphrey: Yeah, so I think the this is a weird one because like it actually normally if the Tavern League supports something, it’s probably pretty anti. Breweries, anti manufacturers almost which is such a weird thing to me considering all their products got to be made somewhere, right? but They their vendetta I think was against the wedding barns.
Phil Humphrey: Just making sure they were licensed [00:23:00] properly And I want to say now We if that what the change is essentially they get They can do X amount of events per year before they have to pay this like license fee to do our permit for each one So the complaint from their side I want to say is that if it’s a barn that’s doing weddings Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday every week, and they have to pay a 500 permit per time, it’s 2, 000 for that weekend to run those four events.
Phil Humphrey: I don’t know, I’m assuming most of that will just be passed to the consumer. So I don’t know that it’s, I think it’s probably not as bad as it’s been made out to be. But I also, there might be some other things. I’m just not fully under, I don’t, know on that side because I didn’t really focus on reading that part of the bill for breweries and wineries and distilleries.
Phil Humphrey: Now it like loosens some of the three tier stuff. I think it allows Some people that might own and if you own in one tier like technically you’re not supposed to be able to own in another so If you’re a retailer, you’re not supposed to have a wholesaler. If you’re a wholesaler, you’re not supposed to have a brewery I think it gives you the ability to have up to a certain [00:24:00] percentage of ownership in a different tier That’s still a very minority stake I think the last I had read was like 10 percent but don’t call me on that I don’t you know what’s going on with that.
Phil Humphrey: So that’s a Big deal in a way because I know a couple people that owned bars and then open breweries And then, it’s like you didn’t do the research because it all ties back to Tidehouses, like all the big boys used to do back in the, 80, 90 years ago, buy all the bars up and serve only their product.
Phil Humphrey: So that’ll change. It does adds the ability for breweries to have more tap rooms with the same production space. I think it’s up to you can get up to four tap rooms if you’re one brewery. That’s nice to not have to build a production space for each place.
Phil Humphrey: There was something else I collaboration,
Vicki Markussen: I wrote down collaboration.
Phil Humphrey: So like it does open up some other things that. I don’t think it’ll be controversial, but, I’m also for this change, but it’s basically allowing, it’ll allow breweries to have a full liquor license capabilities. So right now [00:25:00] I can’t serve out of state breweries products.
Phil Humphrey: I can’t serve wine. I can’t serve like a bourbon or vodka gen type stuff and cocktails. Unless you’re a brew pub. Those guys could do it, but they actually had to get approved liquor license from the city they’re in this basically allows All breweries to be able to do it in the state, essentially, and the, I’m not even looking at that from the perspective of Hey, I want to be a, a full bar.
Phil Humphrey: Cause I, I don’t really want to deal with that headache. It’s really just like having options for people that come in with a family or a group of people that don’t necessarily drink beer, but Hey, maybe we have a, a wine they can drink or like a cocktail or something like that. And then the bigger thing for us is six way.
Phil Humphrey: We do a lot of collaborations with out of state breweries and other places. Type establishments and, we could never do an event like, Hey, if they came in from Nashville to come brew with us, we couldn’t even put their beer on to show them off a little bit. So this will give us the ability to basically do that collaboration brew.
Phil Humphrey: And if you’ve never [00:26:00] heard of that brewery or never had their products, we can do like a tap takeover, like events while they’re there. So you can come in, you can meet some of the brewers, you can try their product and see why we were excited to collab with them type deal versus like just taking our word for it.
Phil Humphrey: That’s probably the thing that I’m most looking forward to just cause it like gives us, it’s a, it’s an, it makes an event for us and it gets people that are really into craft beer to come in for that too. Yeah.
Vicki Markussen: Where do you see? 608 Brewing Company in five or 10 years? Where do you hope
Phil Humphrey: it is?
Phil Humphrey: I’m hoping with the opening of the second tap room that we can get financially to a spot where we can do an expansion. Our brew space right now is very tight. We don’t have space to expand beyond where we’re at. So like in the next year, we’re pretty much maxing out our capacity there. We’re still running on some equipment too that, it’s you can tell it’s showing its age already, which when you start a business, At least for us, like we didn’t have a lot of money.
Phil Humphrey: So we weren’t getting Cadillacs. So we were getting, clunkers and making it work. And we’re still rolling with a lot [00:27:00] of that equipment and, just basically if we can grow, build a bigger production facility my dream is to do the bigger production facility with a restaurant, it’s a private event space and like a concert venue type thing.
Phil Humphrey: And if I have enough land, maybe even a little dog park, make it like a destination. So People are willing to drive a little bit and think I can go hang out there all day, like We’re always been family friendly. So You know just bring the family hang out for a few hours get a bite to eat try some new products, maybe see a band, like it’s like a whole day event type deal and You know from there Expand into some other markets in the state so we can share beer as soon as a lot of people that travel here And I’m trying they like it and I can’t get in Not unless you come here, cuz we’re not we don’t really have a huge footprint but really just the other thing too, I guess with the expansion like that would be getting better equipments from process side of things like [00:28:00] there’s so many things that I know like I feel like we make very good product as it is, but there’s so many things.
Phil Humphrey: There’s other like things out there that can make
Our product’s even better. And it’s, it just comes with money. It’s, it’s darn it. Yeah. It’s like going from that homebrew system to a professional system. Like you might not, you might make really good homebrew, but if you can take that skillset and apply it to the new system, like your product’s going to be better by default.
It’s like the equipment does matter. But yeah, like we’re hoping to, we’re right now, like I said, we live around 700 barrels a year. Like the next five years, like I want to be in that 2500 barrels to like 4, 000 barrel range. I feel like it’s big enough that we can. Get some beer out in the state.
We could still do a lot of fun things that we can keep at the tap rooms and be able to do more events and stuff. We unfortunately, we turn people down all the time that want us to do something because we just don’t have the beer for it, and you don’t have enough beer for it.
Correct. Interesting. Cause like you’re always like trying to. But even the distribution game, like [00:29:00] this, like relatively new to us this year, certain bars are, do really well with our product and move a lot of it. And then other bars, don’t. And it’s the sad part is if we have to draw, if we have to pull back the bar that’s been moving a lot of your product, if you pull out of there, they’re probably not going to give you another chance.
They’re going to be mad at you. Whereas the bar that’s barely moving it, they’re probably going to, whatever, let’s move on. Yeah. So just like things like that, like just making sure we have enough product allocated for certain people that have we’re friends with they’ve done well for us.
They’ve helped us a lot, I have the feeling you’re going to have some interesting self conversation, if it will, with, okay, for us to be consistently on more taps and in grocery stores, we’re going to have to start to create more consistent products. And then you’re going to be balancing, okay, do we do consistency?
But really what you love is the variety. And so how do you see yourself balancing that? I think [00:30:00] like in the plan is like, all right, figure out what our taproom needs. What is our usage? Cause surprisingly enough, that number like you figure out what it is. It just lives there.
Because you can only do so much volume through a tap room in a day on a consistent base. Like it that does kind of average out. And that, the nice thing with that is you got all the reporting and so you can just look back and see what’s selling. So it’s like, all right, we know we need to keep these brands on, or if there’s a certain style that’s doing well, you’d work it in, but we’ve already, yeah, we’ve already started to battle with that a little bit.
Cause you know, like citronados, our flagship IPA, it’s really, we only really have three or four beers we do regularly. And. We brew that beer like every other week right now. This is where like a bigger system would be nice, because maybe you could get away with brewing it once every three weeks, or every four weeks.
And then, but, yeah, right now, when you take a, 10 percent of your tank’s going to one, one beer now. And then there’s probably another two tanks that are going to the other one. So like you’re already taking 30 percent of your brew house space and it’s going to these, your core brands. [00:31:00] I’m assuming what, as you grow, like it’s probably going to become like 50%, but I will, I don’t think I’ll ever stop.
I would rather just not have that beer available to do some fun stuff too. Cause we’re not. We’re not a, we’re not a, we’re not a budget brand. Like we’re not that cheap tap it at most bars. So they’re not going to be mad if Oh, you’re out of Miller light. You know what I mean? Like Miller light will never run out because it doesn’t cost anything to produce and they just make tons of it.
But I don’t know. I, in my heart, I say we’re still gonna, we’re still gonna have fun with it. Yep. What makes you passionate about what you do? I just love first off, I love craft beer. I love making beer. I love the whole the back end sciency side of it. It’s like the more fun stuff for me.
I like talking about it. I just want… I like it when a person comes in, doesn’t know anything, and then you get in a conversation with them and you can see their gears moving a little bit they’re actually they’re actually listening to what you say. It’s I don’t know, craft beer is weird [00:32:00] like that.
I don’t feel like I ever go into a. Like a random store of some type and just want to know the breakdown of how something works. But it’s amazing how people come into a craft brewery and want to know all the process and how it goes. And I think that’s the part that excites me is just like making a product and then actually seeing people like enjoy the product, which is it didn’t even click with me for a long time because I felt like I was just working so hard, like all the time doing things.
And I was like, We’ve built a very good following. Like it’s humbling to see like people that come in and they’re like, Oh man, I love this beer. And I drove, I drove an hour on my way here because I was going to someplace for a meeting, but I drove an hour on my way and they buy two cases of beer and walk out.
It’s to derail your day, an hour or two hours out of your way. That that definitely makes me feel like we’re doing something good.
We have good people there and. That’s the stuff that excites me. Yeah, you created an experience they want to take back home with them. So yeah, Phil Humphrey, [00:33:00] owner of 608 Brewing Company.
You have been listening to BizCast Greater La Crosse. We’ll catch you next week.
