The brewery that started 24 years ago as a bucket operation in a kitchen just off Sir Francis Drake Boulevard has gone global.
Lagunitas Brewing Co., known for its uniquely irreverent bottle label language and, of course, its IPA, has been bought in full by Heineken International, one of the larger beer companies in the world. The merge follows a similar move in 2015 through which Heineken attained 50-percent ownership of Lagunitas.
But Lagunitas founder Tony Magee — the man behind the quirky language and beer names that have created the brand’s unique identity — says almost nothing has really changed at Lagunitas, neither in the staff offices nor the fermenting tanks of the brewery’s Petaluma and Chicago facilities. Nobody quit or lost their job because of the new partnership, Magee says, and the company’s longtime head brewer Jeremy Marshall is still in charge of making the beer.
The one key difference between before and now may be that more people than ever before will be drinking Lagunitas beer.
“Two years ago, we were exporting three shipping containers per month,” Magee says.
Now, between 45 and 60 containers, each containing about 1,800 cases of Lagunitas beer, will be leaving the country each month.
When I first met him 11 years ago in his Petaluma office, Magee was reclining in his desk chair, jamming on his acoustic guitar while breaking from editing a new beer label on his computer screen, and, probably, surfing the Web. “Want a beer?” he offered, and handed me a bottle of the company’s flagship IPA, fresh off the bottling line. He opened one for himself, too, and at 11 a.m. on a weekday, it was clearly good to be a craft beer king.
Lagunitas was 13 years old at the time, making just 30,000 barrels per year but wheels moving, momentum building — and it appeared like an easy ride toward the high country for Magee.
Now, he’s in the high country, but he’s working his butt off. His company is making 30 times as much beer as a decade ago, and for Magee, things are busier than ever. He’s often on the road, and to promote his — and Heineken’s — beer, Magee will be traveling the world as Heineken’s “global craft manager.” In weeks to come Magee will be visiting Portugal, Italy, Brazil and Vietnam to do one of the things he says he likes best — meet with other people who like beer.
Magee says his job is to help his new bosses better understand the craft beer marketplace and its millions of sometimes picky consumers.
But he explains that his relationship with Heineken differs from that which other craft brands have forged with some big beer companies. He notes that Anheuser-Busch — which has purchased numerous smaller brands in the past several years — “is using small breweries to tunnel into craft.”
“They’re using [the breweries they buy] as a bat to hit a ball with,” he says. “What we’re doing is infecting Heineken with our ideas, and Heineken wants that.”
For many craft beer purists, the important thing is whether or not Lagunitas is still a craft brewery, and technically Lagunitas is not. That’s because the Brewers Association’s definition of “craft” states that a craft brewery cannot be more than 25-percent owned by a non-craft company.
But Magee says the craft question doesn’t really matter.
“I haven’t the liked the term ‘craft’ for years,” he says. The word, Magee explains, lost much of its relevance in 2010 when the Brewers Association increased the maximum annual production limit for a craft brewery from 2 million barrels to 6 million.
The change appeared at the time to be a personal favor for the rapidly expanding Boston Beer Co., which was on the verge of growing out of the craft category, mainly through sales of its Samuel Adams label.
“The word has outlived its usefulness,” Magee says of “craft.” “I don’t like a label that basically says that this is cool and this is not. I’d rather put my IPA on the shelf right next to Corona, Budweiser, Coors and Guinness, and let people decide what they like.”
Though Magee says Lagunitas is still a “small” brewery when poised beside those giant brands, compared with most of America’s 5,000-odd breweries — and compared with the quaint little brewery it was a decade ago — Lagunitas is pretty darn big.
And though Magee says it doesn’t matter, Lagunitas is still cool.
Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com.