E-Malt.com News article: USA, MN, WI, SD & ND: Indeed Brewing plans to expand production to South Dakota and Wisconsin

Indeed Brewing Company opened in August 2012 in Minneapolis, and has since claimed a host of local awards along with a 2014 silver medal from the Great American Beer Festival. Keeping up with customers’ demand for beer and their own demand to stay creative. Head brewer Josh Bischoff and founder Nathan Berndt discuss how the process plays out as they move out of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-Saint Paul) and into wider distribution, Paste Magazine reported on August 10.

Indeed Brewing produces three year round beers (Day Tripper American Pale Ale, Midnight Ryder Black IPA, and Dandy Lager). They also produce many popular seasonals and limited offerings including the new wild/sour Wooden Soul series of barrel-aged beers.

Indeed Brewing doesn’t want to take over the world, but they’d like their beer to be sought after. “How often did we all have friends that, when we went to Colorado, said, ‘Bring me back some New Belgium’s beer?’” Nathan Berndt said. “Hopefully when it’s Minnesota their friends will say, ‘Bring me back some Indeed Brewing’s beer.’”

Paste Magazine correspondent: You just added even more fermentation tanks. Where is all this growth taking you?

Berndt: It seems that expansions are always happening; they’re not really pegged to a certain date anymore. Stuff comes in, we fill it, and we sell it. Our philosophy has always been to stay ahead of demand with capacity so we could do some fun things but not have to worry about it affecting other beers that we need to make and to sell.

Paste Magazine correspondent: What are you up to, capacity-wise?

Berndt: I think it’s around 25,000bbl capacity. We’re not at that [capacity] sales-wise. This year we’re projecting around 14,000-16,000bbl in sales. The numbers have come back a little bit because the timeline for some distribution has come back. A year ago I thought we would maybe be in Fargo but those things take time. I think best case right now for western Minnesota and Fargo might be end of September. That would get a lot of Minnesota, parts or maybe all of North Dakota. Then I see South Dakota and Wisconsin following the same path. Parts of Wisconsin in the first part of January-February might also be part of the expansion.

Paste Magazine correspondent: Is the expansion opening things up for more quantity or more variety?

Bischoff: A bit of both because it’s freeing up some of the other tanks for one-offs. The biggest tank we have right now is a 210bbl so the 30 tanks are where we get to play and see if people really like something.

Berndt: We definitely don’t have the scalability of the Wooden Soul beers to make them widely available even within our own Twin Cities market. That would be one aspect that we would try to scale up so we could make it more readily available to the rest of this market and then possibly package them in bottles or some other way and start spreading them out to different distribution points.

Paste Magazine correspondent: What is the plan with Wooden Soul?

Bischoff: Adam Theis, one of our brewers, does Wooden Soul. We talk about it beforehand and implement it with the bigger tanks. That leaves more time to spend with the smaller ones. We’ve been working with kettle sours lately. We have good funk in Wooden Soul but we don’t always have the acidity we want. For Wooden Soul, a lot of the things take more time to develop, six months or even years. So with the kettle sours we’re looking to get it puckering in the acidity more quickly.

Paste Magazine correspondent: Is there any kind of schedule?

Berndt: It’s always changing as we discover something new that gives us more ideas. #1 will probably be regular. I think it’s due for a real name and it will be in regular rotation. They’ll depend on the beer if it’s a one-off. #1 is an example of us finding a beer where we can consistently produce the same feel and taste.

Paste Magazine correspondent: Is there an effort to turn seasonals and one-offs into rotation beers that are easier to replicate? Where do you focus your identity between specialty and flagships?

Berndt: We’ve started discussing what the value of a flagship is. Is it just one, like Bell’s Two-Hearted? I think what we’re known for here is the breadth of the beers that we have. It’s a pretty wide range now. There are maybe 20 beers in our portfolio, and 13 of them were seasonal. There are the three-year round, and four specialties, and not counting the one-offs and Wooden Soul.

Paste Magazine correspondent: As you move further away from Minneapolis, does it change your focus?

Berndt: We’ve done some redesigning of our packaging. We wanted to make sure that Indeed Brewing was up front and that the beers could be tied to us. That’s another thing we’re working to improve. We’re fine tuning as we get further away where people might not have heard of Indeed Brewing before and it’s their first [exposure].

Paste Magazine correspondent: How much familiarity do you find when you visit a new market?

Berndt: It’s all over the place. People who are transplants are the one’s wishing Indeed Brewing was there, people who have moved to Milwaukee or Madison or Denver. Meanwhile there’s people in Rochester who have no idea that Indeed Brewing is in Minneapolis.

Paste Magazine correspondent: With craft beer growing everywhere, how hard is it to enter a new market where you compete with their local breweries too?

Berndt: With the local movement people want local beer. Indeed Brewing going into, say, California: it’s not local anymore. It doesn’t mean anything to them. We could do it in specialties. Rum King, one of our most sought after beers, could probably get into those markets and sell but I don’t know that we could come in and sell Day Tripper because there are thousands of pale ales to choose from.

Paste Magazine correspondent: How do you describe Indeed Brewing?

Bischoff: Overall, we haven’t reinvented any craft brewing philosophies. We generally make what we want to taste and hope we’re not the only ones out there who feel that way. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case. People are with us most of the time.

Paste Magazine correspondent: Do you go for a uniform or connecting piece between your beers, or is it more just focused on individual beers?

Bischoff: It’s what we’re going for in a specific beer. I’d like every beer to be its own creation.

Berndt: I think we have a baseline that we put our own unique spin on it. We’re pretty aromatic and use unique ingredients.

Bischoff: In general I’m not a very true to style brewer. There are enough breweries out there if you want a true to style place. Someone else is probably going to do it better than me, so they can have that. I like to make some adjustments.


12 August, 2015