Something's brewing
Sales are hopping as He'Brew beer debuts new dark ale
by Dan Pine, staff writer
San Francisco Jewish News Weekly
Friday October 24, 2003
In the beginning, there was water, barley, malt and hops.
And Jeremy Cowan saw that they were good, and he created He'Brew beer.
Now, seven years after serving up his first cold one, the Bay Area-based entrepreneur has seen 500 percent sales growth this year alone for He'Brew, America's first and only Jewish-owned kosher-certified microbrew.
Cowan sleeps, eats (and definitely drinks) He'Brew beer. The reason he doesn't have a beer belly is that he's always on the run. On any given day, Cowan's personally shlepping 30 cases of beer to a store here, or meeting with a distributor there.
He likes to call his product line "Jewish celebration beer," mostly because he himself spends so much time celebrating. He shows up with a few cases at all kinds of local simchas (weddings, bar mitzvahs, JCC events), and he recently wrapped an 18-city tour, dubbed "40 Days and 40 Nights," hosting beer busts across America.
And he promises his product passes the most important halachic test of all: getting even the most pious Jew 100 percent blotto on Purim.
What makes He'Brew beer Jewish? Start with the packaging. Cowan is as skilled with marketing and promotion as he is blending two-row malt with Willamette hops.
He'Brew's Chagall-esque logo depicts a happy Chassid clutching twin beer bottles while straddling the globe between Jerusalem and San Francisco.
Then there's that He'Brew beer TV spot starring Chabad of S.F. Rabbi Yosef Langer. The title: "Two Jews Walk into a Bar."
But beyond the Hebraic lettering and cutesy ad copy ("He'Brew: The Chosen Beer"), Cowan also takes his kosher certification seriously.
Besides an absence of any pork products in his beer recipe, Cowan has a mashgiach (kashrut supervisor) sign off on all ingredients and procedures at every step of the brewing process.
"For Jews who want to be confident," he says, "it's important they know I'm sincere, and tied in to Jewish tradition."
Those ties go way back. A native of Menlo Park, the thirtysomething Cowan attended Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, where he became a bar mitzvah.
During his days majoring in English at Stanford, he temporarily lost touch with Judaism, but he came roaring back after spending five months in Israel.
"It was a great time to be there," Cowan recalls. "The trip gave me the tools for connecting to Jewish texts and culture in a meaningful way."
After returning to the States, he tried his hand running a literary magazine in New Orleans. Somewhere along the line, the then-26-year-old remembered how as a kid he and his friends used to joke about launching a Jewish beer.
Suddenly, it didn't seem so funny anymore.
"I grew up on good beer," says Cowan, "and though this wasn't my life's work at the time, I thought it would be fun to make a Jewish celebration beer."
After consulting with brewmasters (including the guy who launched local favorite Pyramid), Cowan came up with a recipe and contracted a small local brewery to create 10 cases. He launched the Schmaltz Brewing Co. and named his product He'Brew.
It took time to perfect the recipe ("We had to bump up the malts," he says - whatever that means), but eventually the one-man shop became a one-man dynamo.
Cowan is the first to admit that the beer business is tough to crack, with competition brutal and profit margins wafer-thin. But he believed in his product as much as he did in the targeted market.
"Beer is part of American culture," he says. "I took the concept of the regional microbrewery but targeted an ethnic community that's all over the country."
That posed a problem. Given that beer is highly perishable and Cowan couldn't personally drive delivery trucks cross-country, he had to limit distribution. In fact in the early days, Cowan practically lived in his grandmother's old Volvo, hand-delivering orders all over the Bay Area.
That was then. Now, He'Brew Beer is available in six-packs in more than 15 states. Cowan just debuted a new dark ale, Messiah Bold, which he hopes will prove as popular as his original Genesis Ale.
Though probably not everywhere. Ironically, it turns out that Israel has one of the lowest per-capita beer consumptions in the industrialized world.
Even with that 500 percent growth rate, Cowan admits it's still hard to get rich in the beer business. For him, however, the rewards are not merely remunerative.
So has brewing beer finally become his life's work? Sure looks that way. "Beer is personal to people," he says, "and it's very personal to me. The shtick I do [to market He'Brew] is so much my personality. And something fun happens every day."