The Next Draft

THE NEXT DRAFT Sage wisdom from the ‘OGs’ of craft beer

MATTHEW TOTA

Dan Kenary, Jim Koch and Ned LaFortune have long regaled young brewers with stories about how, many decades ago, they lugged their own kegs to bars around Boston and Worcester.

You see them now — mostly Koch, on your TV — and would never think they ever had to work that hard to sell beer.

Kenary sits at the top of Harpoon, the biggest brewery in Boston, LaFortune helped start Wachusett Brewing Company, the biggest brewery in Central Massachusetts, and Koch runs Boston Beer Company, a veritable craft beer empire that sends millions of barrels of beer across the country.

It’s certainly a lot easier imagining them working behind burnished desks in large offices, rather than sweating over kegs, navigating the precarious steps to the basement of some dive.

But when you listen to them speak about their extraordinary journeys as three founding fathers of Massachusetts craft beer, you understand just how much they had to grind and claw and scratch at the bottom in an industry that has ebbed and flowed for their entire careers.

Kenary, Koch and LaFortune were among the headliners of last week’s Massachusetts Brewers Guild Con, an annual technical brewing and business conference that went virtual this year. Introduced as the “OGs” of craft beer, they spoke candidly for more than an hour about their own paths as brewers and their concerns

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a symphony/Then I think of you/ And the ghost rejoins the living for a day.” The Doppler pulse of the music rings joyously, but even here, there’s a sense of impermanence. That sense is magnified by the subsequent song, “Memory Disappears,” where “You don’t survive by placing ghosts around your mind.” Even love can only make a ghost so real. Even in the song “Our Solar System,” the persona describes herself as “this cold girl,” while the object of her affection is a bright, brilliant star. “Alive, alive/ This Star might die/Survive because I stole your fire/Revolve, revolve around your heart/Evolve before you blow apart.” about how their industry will survive the pandemic.

I expected to hear them use words like devastating and unprecedented when describing the toll COVID-19 has taken on breweries.

I did not expect them to have so much hope for their industry.

“I think we’re going to come out of this thing — and some won’t; but those that do would have learned a lesson that will stay with them for their remaining days in business,” Kenary said. “It will serve them well to be thinking, ‘Holy shit, things can really go wrong, what did I learn about how we react, how I react as a leader?’ I remain amazingly bullish on this wonderful industry.”

Most surprising, they agreed that this year — despite the paralyzing uncertainty of the day — is perhaps the best time to open a brewery.

“I’d much rather have started now, than having started a brewery five years ago when no one’s shit stank, and everyone could walk on water,” Kenary said.

Resiliency will help brewers get through the rest of the year, including what is expected to be another difficult stretch for taprooms, with the weather growing colder and people no longer wanting to drink outside.

“It’s never been easy,” Koch said, adding, “All of us have become quite battle-tested and resilient.”

Throughout the conversation, moderated by Night Shift Brewing co-founder Rob Burns, the three brewing pioneers offered advice for their peers watching at home.

LaFortune was blunt about the

Love ends. The solar system ends. Everything, eventually is gone. “The shadow disappears but the fun never ends,” sings Enthusiasm, in “Step Into the Sunshine.” “The body disappears but the fun never ends.” “Sunshine” is an interesting song, one which balances its sense of wistfulness with a measure of joy. Indeed, it seems those small moments in the sunshine might be the only things in life that matter. Is that too much to place on an electro-pop song? Perhaps, but it holds up well under the weight.

The themes of love bringing someone back to life and its fleetingness are revisited in “Anchor to the World Below,” and indeed are extended even further: “I can see the clock for myself, should I go Into the sky?/Look at how I float above the world Did you

Ned LaFortune, CEO of Wachusett Brewery.

FILE PHOTO/CHRISTINE PETERSON

expectations new brewers should have when they get into the industry: “Don’t expect to build something quick and get some big money for it. It’s not going to happen.”

Part of surviving and finding success is learning the business from the bottom up, he said. That means getting to know your beer and customers first through self-distribution.

“I do believe that if we did not start this business by self-distributing, we would have been out of the business,” he said. Forget the pandemic, he said, the hardest time unquestionably for Wachusett was the late ‘90s, when the industry briefly tanked and dozens of breweries closed.

“I actually did a count at the end of 1999 to see how many breweries went out of business in Massachusetts, and my number from those that were part of the Mass. Brewers

know I could fly?/Please let me stay just until day/Bring me back to earth don’t let me fade away.” Being able to fly is usually a symbol for freedom, but if that’s the case here, it doesn’t seem desired. The persona wishes to remain Earthbound.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the romantic interest in the album is always described in terms that are distant and beautiful. Earlier, they were a star. In the next song, they’re described as a “Rare Bird.” As to the persona herself, the album increasingly presents her in less than flattering terms. Earlier in the album, she describes herself as dead and cold. In “The Monster Song,” Enthusiasm sings, “There is a monster in here, there is a monster I know/She needs your heart to survive, she was

Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Company.

FILE PHOTO/PIERRE DUCHARME

Association, which was the predecessor of the MBG, was 50 percent of the active breweries went out of business,” he said. “The brewpubs did OK. But the packaging breweries at the time, we got wiped out. We were still self-distributing, and we continued to buckle down and take Sam Adams’ lines in Worcester.”

Koch also began Boston Beer Company by delivering and selling his own beer. Now he operates a billion-dollar beer business, but he started out driving his own truck and using invoice pads that he stored in a shoebox.

Toil long enough distributing their own beer, he said, and brewers can increase the value of their distribution rights if they decide to sign on with a wholesaler.

“Back in 1994, distribution rights were not particularly valuable; we sold for $2.50 a case then,” Koch said. “Today distribution rights can go for

a person just months ago.” Still, in the bridge, the song’s point of view shifts, and with it, what she really wants is revealed: “Bring out the human you see/Bring out the daylight in me.”

Almost none of this album is driven by external action, but rather, it’s a study in internal inaction. Wracked by depression, pain and fear, the persona repeatedly fails to take any action toward her own happiness. Even when the music seems happiest, the paralysis underscores everything, giving the album a tragic tinge.

All of this begins to come into relief in the album’s penultimate song, “Heart-Rate,” with its plaintive refrain of, “You never really heard me before” echoing against a thick electronic soundscape. The listener has, until this song, not really gotten a sense of

Dan Kenary, CEO of Harpoon Brewery.

FILE PHOTO/STEVE LANAVA

$30 a case or $35 a case. So there is a payoff if you can actually build up a reasonable amount of distribution volume, then sell it to the wholesaler.”

The U.S. is home to 10,000 breweries, and there has been much debate over whether the market is saturated. Count Kenary, Koch and LaFortune among those who believe the country has plenty of room for more breweries.

“Particularly in a taproom environment, there’s room for 20,000 if they are run by people who are really passionate about beer, who aren’t in it to flip it and make a bunch of money, and who are reasonably good business people,” Koch said. “The craft beer taproom in some ways has become the 21st-century version of the neighborhood bar: The place where everybody knows your name, the social center, the ultimate third place in this world of work and home.”

the romantic object. They’ve always just seemed like an unobtainable desire. But with “Heart-Rate,” it begins to feel like that potential paramour is wrestling with their own demons, and with that revelation, the album’s perspective shifts yet again.

“Let me sing to you,” sings Enthusiasm in the album closer, “Clockwise.” “Let me sing to you/Here in your bedroom/Let me sing to you/ But will it be, will it be enough?/Will it be, will it be enough?It can be, it can be enough.”

Love can bring the dead back to life, if only for a moment. And sometimes, those moments are everything.