"The Chosen Beer"
S.F. brewer launches HE'BREW for Hanukkah
by Edvins Beitiks of the San Francisco Examiner Staff
Once Jeremy Cowan got started, there was no stopping him. "It was such a beautiful shtick, too funny to pass up," he said. "The puns just came flowing out. King of the Brews? The Chosen Beer? The first creation . . . Genesis Ale. Don't Pass Out, Pass Over. And, of course, Shmaltz Brewing. How could you not go for it?"
Cowan, 28, is the guilding light behind HE'BREW, a brown ale aimed at a Jewish audience and the celebration of Hanukkah - a beer that broke into the big time with a short piece in the latest edition of Newsweek. "Just when you thought you'd seen the most shtick-filled of microbrew-marketing gimmicks, along comes a beer label with all the subtlety of a stand-up act in the Catskills," the article stated, with Cowan suggesting that HE'BREW become "sort of a hip Manischewitz." In the middle of a warehouse on Potrero Hill on a warm San Francisco morning, Cowan nodded and laughed, pointing to the HE'BREW label with its bearded, blue-coated believer rising above the rooftops, his face aglow, holding two bottles of beer. "That's just what I wanted," said Cowan. "This big Jewish guy looming over Jerusalem and the Golden Gate, saying, "Look at me! I'm having some fun!' " Fun is the fundamental word for HE'BREW, said Cowan, a San Francisco native who first joked about Hanukkah beer with classmates at Menlo School a dozen years ago. "What I want this to turn into is a serious, hilarious project," he said, "to keep both of those aspects strong the rest of the way."
Certified kosher
Brewed through the Anderson Valley Brewing Company in Boonville, HE'BREW is certified by Los Angeles-based Kosher Supervision of America, one of the country's many kosher certification programs. The beer label cites the Bible's praise of barley in Deuteronomy 8:8 and proclaims, "After 5,000 years of civilization, finally a microbrew with the chutzpah to call itself The Chosen Beer."
It's a pinch of Skeezix's helium for Cowan, a 1991 English graduate of Stanford who was treading water in graphic design before trying his hand at microbrews a year ago. He committed thousands of dollars in savings to brewing a Hanukkah beer, and the immediate result was disaster. "I went right into the trenches of capitalism," said Cowan, who farmed out his first seven batches of beer to a brewer who barely salvaged three. In the beginning Cowan was his own distributor, delivering to Whole Foods outlets and small places scattered around the Bay. "I'd wake up at 4 in the morning to drive over to the East Bay and deliver to my one retailer," he said. "Or here I'd be, fresh from Stanford, cornering some liquor store owner in the Tenderloin . . . "Hey, man, want to try this out?' " Cowan laughed, saying, "I thought I knew what I was doing. Everything was on the cheap- "Let's do it this way because it's on the cheap' - and all of a sudden I've spent $1,000 on labels and $400 on film, for nothing. Gone."
From the start, said Cowan, the first thing most people asked about HE'BREW was, "Is this thing for real? This cannot be for real.' But I'd assure them it is." The HE'BREW theme upsets some people who think it's disrespectful, said Cowan. "But there's been no criticism from anybody religious. They love it. They understand this is not a political statement, not a social movement. It's just a celebration."
Audience of 5 million Jews
The way Cowan sees it, his target audience is 5 million Jews in the United States, including a million and a half from New York City and close to 200,000 from the Bay Area - as well as non-Jews who turn up at street festivals to buy a bottle at a time and T-shirts on the side. Cowan knows "the initial reaction from people will be, "Jews . . . and beer?' There's no tradition, like there is with the ritual use of wine. But that's the reason why - because there is no tradition. We want to start one." Cowan started things off on the first of Hanukkah, 1996, with an ad in the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California. After the newspaper featured his beer as a Hanukkah gift, orders for the 12-bottle case started coming in at the rate of 100 cases a month. From the start it's been purely a family-and-friends operation - Cowan's mother made deliveries in Palo Alto, his friend Tracy Ginsberg designed the label, "and my 16-year-old cousin would go through the shelves in a store to make sure the beer was facing correctly. I had this concept and was trying to get this concept into the real world . . . it was very grass roots, a very organic process."
HE'BREW turned up at Jewish weddings, pony kegs were dropped off at community meetings, and there was a memorable night when HE'BREW was the drink of choice for the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars at the Great American Music Hall. But sales were low-key until this year, when Cowan turned to Anderson Valley Brewing. Since then, Cowan has seen a steep rise in HE'BREW demand, his accounts growing from a handful to almost 100, including more than a dozen in San Francisco, 2 dozen on the Peninsula, 3 dozen in the East Bay. The price, at $3 per 22-ounce bottle, seems to be right.
Anderson Valley brewer Ken Allen, overseeing the first 100 HE'BREW barrels of the season, said, "It's a good beer. And it's moving faster than expected." Sean Turner, an owner at The Consumers, the San Francisco distributors for the beer, agreed. "Orders have already doubled from two weeks ago," he said. "This fills a real niche. It's a distributor's dream. "My view on this is, "Let Jeremy run with it,' " Turner said, glancing over at the HE'BREW cases stacked in his warehouse. "To us, he's like a rock star and we're just the band managers."
The phones keep ringing, from Consumers (415) 621-1827 to the Wine Club (1-800-966-7835) to the in-house line at (415) 648-HEBREW. And Cowan credits Anderson Valley's brewing techniques for the beer's growing success. "Funny," he said. "There's probably not a Jew within 30 miles of Boonville. It's not a real hot spot for the Jewish community of California." But, he said, the brewers at Anderson Valley really warmed to the idea. "They were real willing to help." Cowan talked about watching Gerschon Horowitz, an observant Jew given the task of inspecting Anderson Valley for kosher certification. "Here he is, walking through a brewery in Boonville . . . like something out of "The Frisco Kid.' " "It was a treat," said Horowitz, adding that beer, with its four basic ingredients, is kosher on the face of it. Horowitz, of San Rafael, was looking for unclean conditions or borderline elements such as glycerin, and did not find them. "They showed me around but didn't offer me any beer, which I would have enjoyed." sighed Horowitz, who sees no reason to take offense at the marketing of HE'BREW. "Some Jews might think it's a shtick - the connotation of Jews being "The Chosen People.' But I don't think anyone should take offense. If they do take offense it's because they take offense at a lot of things, just to be taking offense." "All in all," Horowitz said, "I think it's terrific." The thing is, said Cowan, the idea of HE'BREW "makes people feel good, makes them laugh. I keep getting messages on my e-mail: "This is hilarious!' "I can't believe it!î
And there are jokes within jokes. Cowan was first in line at Woolworth's when he got the word Newsweek was doing a story on HE'BREW. Turning to page eight, he found a picture of the bottle - printed backwards. "Maybe it's a Jewish sense-of-humor thing, but they reversed the graphic," he said. "It was a bit of appropriate, mystical irony." This time around the joke was on him, said Cowan. And he couldn't stop smiling.