Cheers!
By Adam Aigner-Treworgy
Posted Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Beer isn’t necessarily a religion in St. Louis, but it certainly is a cultural obsession. As the headquarters of the biggest brewery in the United States, St. Louis is mentioned at the end of every Anheuser-Busch commercial, but in the shadow of the A-B giant there is a small microbrewery with a passionate following.

On Dec. 26, Schlafly Brewery, its employees and its fans will celebrate the beer’s 15th anniversary. To commemorate the brewery’s unlikely success in a city so passionate about its beer, brewery owner Tom Schlafly has written A New Religion in Mecca to go along with the brewery’s 15th anniversary commemorative brew. The book is published by Virginia Publishing, parent company of the Word.

“Obviously beer isn’t a religion, but I guess [the title] was a joking way of commenting on how seriously people in St. Louis took their loyalty to Anheuser-Busch — that it was considered almost heresy or apostasy to open another brewery,” Schlafly said.

“If you want to look at how loyal St. Louis is, they never referred to any other business simply by what the business is. They never called Monsanto the seed company. They never said May Company was the department store company, but Anheuser-Busch is ‘the brewery.’ The idea that someone would challenge this civic icon made [Schlafly Brewery] look almost like a heresy.”

Schlafly attributes much of his brewery’s success to the St. Louis community’s fervor for beer. Opening a microbrewery in the shadow of “the brewery” meant that Schlafly beer was scrutinized from the very beginning, Schlafly said, but it was this attention that helped them succeed.

“St. Louis was on the one hand perceived as a tough market for a microbrewery to open in because of the tremendous loyalty to Anheuser-Busch, but at the same time because of Anheuser-Busch there is a huge awareness of beer so there is very much a beer culture in St. Louis that you don’t find elsewhere,” he said. “We would not have gotten the same amount of attention in any other market. St. Louis was very important to shaping us into who we are.”

Schlafly beer is now sold in more than 1,200 locations throughout the region and in his book, Schlafly tells stories about the journey from upstart brewery to St. Louis community stalwart. But reading the book is much more like having a beer with the author than a detailed account of a microbrewery’s history.

“I decided I didn’t want to do a chronological narrative because it wouldn’t be as interesting to people,” Schlafly said. “We need to keep in mind that people are [drinking beer] for fun and relaxation and that is actually part of what I kept in mind when I was writing the book, that if all I write about is the different hurdles we had to jump over to get bank financing … well people have that in the rest of their lives.

“In over 15 years a lot of interesting things have happened, and so I used it as an opportunity to tell some stories that were a part of our history and sometimes just amusing aspects of being in the business.”

Instead of stories about bank financing and building rehabilitation, Schlafly uses literary and historical allusions to tell anecdotes about his decade and a half in the beer industry. Schlafly’s literary skill comes from his undergraduate degree in English from Georgetown University, which was followed by law school and a position at the St. Louis-based law firm Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin. His liberal arts education plays a big part in the book as he outlines how most of his employees who have found their way into the beer industry come from unconventional backgrounds.

“We’re a bunch of liberal arts majors but it’s not as if we really didn’t know what we were doing,” Schlafly said. “Dan Kopman [executive vice president and chief operating officer of Schlafly] had some pretty valuable experience in the beer business. When he was working for Young’s [a British regional brewery] he visited a lot of markets and he had seen what a lot of breweries were doing right and what they were doing wrong. It was this experience working with these wholesalers that opened his eyes to microbreweries and convinced him that a microbrewery could work in St. Louis.”

Schlafly is conscious of his brewery’s community responsibilities throughout the book. When the Schlafly Tap Room opened in 1991 in the John S. Swift Building at 2100 Locust St., the building had been abandoned for 22 years. It had suffered severe damage in a firestorm that engulfed the whole neighborhood in 1976 and Schlafly was unsure whether he could even afford to rebuild it.

But after finding a contractor willing to do the work on the cheap, he and Kopman purchased the building and began Schlafly’s contribution to the revitalization of the western edge of downtown.

“Nearby lofts with 900 square feet are now selling for more than we paid for a 40,000-square-foot building with adjoining parking lot in 1991,” Schlafly writes in the book. “Most observers would agree that the presence of the Tap Room has been a major factor in the revival.”

A similar scenario played itself out in Maplewood 12 years later. In 2003, Schlafly Bottleworks moved into a building near the corner of Southwest Avenue and Manchester Road that had been vacant for roughly a decade. “Our presence encouraged other businesses to locate near us and helped to revive the eastern end of Manchester Road,” Schlafly writes.

Now Schlafly beer can be found throughout Missouri, in Memphis, western Kentucky, central and southern Indiana and southern Illinois.

Schlafly is even making inroads across the state in Kansas City, hometown of Boulevard Brewery, where Schlafly has just added a new salesman and has more than doubled its sales from last year, said Schlafly sales representative Nick Vickery.

The company employs almost 200 people in the St. Louis area and Schlafly attributes most of his success to a combination of passionate employees and passionate customers.

“I’m the public face of the business, but I sign 180 paychecks and I can’t do any of those jobs,” he said. “The opening line of the book is a quotation from Yogi Berra, which says, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going you have to be very careful because you might not get there.’

“Fifteen years ago I didn’t know where I was going. I think we did it one step at a time and as a small company we’re lucky we’ve been flexible. I’ve used the parallel that we’re much more like jazz than a symphony.

“As I said in the book, I didn’t set out to be Mother Teresa but it’s nice to know that in a small way we’ve put our fingerprints on some things that are kind of positive in the community.”

Tom Schlafly will read from and sign A New Religion in Mecca at 11:30 a.m. Dec. 7 at the Central Express branch library in the Old Post Office, 815 Olive St.