Jewish Shtick Leavens Suds
by Dick Kreck
Denver Post Columnist
Monday, November 03, 2003
Take my beer, please. Henny Youngman's got nothing on young entrepreneur Jeremy Cowan, who spouts more one-liners than a comic in the Catskills. "Exile never tasted so good" and "King of the Brews" just for starters.
Cowan is founder, owner, brewer and spokesman for Shmaltz Brewing Co., whose sole product is HE'BREW ("The Chosen Beer"), introduced into the Colorado market last month.
In these PC times, Cowan could be treading on thin matzos with his send-up on Jewish culture but he doesn't see it that way. "I'm not making fun," he says. "I'm having fun celebrating my own culture." When he launched HE'BREW, he told the Detroit Jewish News, "I wanted to make this very overt. It's like, 'Hey, it's Jewish. No way around it.' Jewish shtick is ubiquitous in American humor. It's everywhere you turn."
A lot of other people are celebrating with Cowan, which explains HE'BREW's official slogan, "Don't Pass Out ... Pass Over."
Cowan is on an 18-city, 5,000-mile cross-country tour to promote HE'BREW. Naturally, he's calling it "40 Days, 40 Nights/The Wandering HE'BREW Beer Tour of America." He pitched camp in Denver on Thursday night to pour and chat at Roo Bar in Cherry Creek.
"It started as an inside joke with high school friends in Menlo Park (California)," he recalled while we shared one of his beers at the bar. "There weren't many Jewish kids around there at that time. We had a volleyball team and we thought, 'This team needs a beer. Mexicans have Corona, Jamaicans have Red Stripe, yuppies have Samuel Adams."' It took off from there.
Cowan, whose beers are made by Anderson Valley Brewing in northern California, started Shmaltz Brewing at Hanukkah seven years ago on a mere $2,000 and produced 200 cases. He didn't know much about beer though he "knew a fair amount about drinking it." In the beginning, he didn't even own a car to deliver the beer. "I had to borrow my grandmother's Volvo." This year, he's hoping to top 20,000 cases, which would be sales of Biblical proportions for the tiny company. We should all be so lucky.
His beer is certified kosher, opening up the bar mitzvah and Jewish wedding market, but it has gained an interdenominational following. Why? First, of course, are the many jokes and Cowan's beer-selling shtick. Second, it's good beer, well-balanced and hoppy, otherwise it would have been a flash in the beer barrel. HE'BREW comes in two styles, a light brown ale called Genesis (their first beer, of course) and a nut brown ale, Messiah Bold ("The Beer You've Been Waiting For"). There are no plans to do a Christmas seasonal.
Other than having fun and telling a thirsty public about his beers, Cowan, who majored in English at Stanford, doesn't have a marketing scheme, although he's gotten coverage in, among other places, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times and Playboy. "Everything's been on intuition and symmetry. I don't have a grand plan." This leads to another of his one-liners: "Chutzpah never tasted so good! L'chaim!"