According to Trip Advisor, the New Glarus Brewing Company lands squarely at #1 among 17 things to do in the town of New Glarus, Wisconsin (population 2,266), which was founded in 1845 by people seeking escape from dire economic conditions in the canton of Glarus in Switzerland.
Although a ranking like this may seem trivial, it remains that the big “Welcome to New Glarus” sign next to the highway bears the inscription “Home of Spotted Cow,” not to be confused with squeaky cheese curds culled from a random Brown Swiss bovine.
My wife and I spent Labor Day weekend in Madison, Wisconsin. New Glarus lies thirty minutes south of the state capital amid gorgeous rolling countryside, which udderly seduced those arrivals from the Old Country almost two centuries ago.
It’s a family habit that began 16 years ago when the New Albanian Brewing Co., my business concern at the time, began a string of annual appearances at the Great Taste of the Midwest, Madison’s nonpareil beer festival.
This occurrence coincided with the advent of New Glarus Brewing Company’s Hilltop Brewery, an expansion of its original Riverside Brewery from 1993. The “new” New Glarus brewery is best described by borrowing the words of Ronnie Ray-Gun, via John Winthrop: “A shining city on a hill,” one that still causes me to rub my eyes with disbelief when I see it.
I shan’t attempt a narrative history of New Glarus, but rather offer a “Top Ten” list of personal observations and ephemera testifying to a major exception to my personal code of skeptical detachment, in that as far as New Glarus Brewing is concerned, I’m an unabashed fan incapable of rational analysis.
And so I say: “Show me a craft beer lover who dismisses the achievements of New Glarus Brewing Company, and I’ll show you a toffee-nosed poseur.”
10 New Glarus Brewing’s decision in 2003 to restrict sales to inside Wisconsin’s state boundaries represents Hall of Fame marketing savvy, and might just be the best business plan in the history of American craft beer. “Only in Wisconsin” allows New Glarus Brewing to maintain a level of control over its products, to cultivate meaningful relationships with a manageable network of regional wholesalers, and to create a sense of scarcity among consumers.
9 Accordingly a fleet of green steel caddy wagons awaits at the Hilltop Brewery’s mouthwatering beer depot, each capable of holding 6-8 cases of cans and bottles, because if you’re not filling the trunk with beer for the drive back to (insert name of any state not called “Wisconsin”) then you’re doing it all wrong.
Not a beer drinker yourself? Then fill your trunk anyway, return home, and learn important lessons about the power of barter economies.
8 You can tell a brewery gift shop is first-rate when your credit card statement reveals only a few dollars difference in expenditures between it and the beer depot.
7 Overall the Hilltop Brewery’s campus is visually stunning and a testament to New Glarus Brewing’s old-school commitment to erecting structures with genuine architectural merit, as opposed to glorified pole barns. But the beer garden is particularly noteworthy, designed to resemble the ruins of an abbey that never existed.
6 Named for New Glarus Brewing’s co-founder Deb Carey and her legendary malting business counterpart Sabine Weyermann in Bamberg, Germany, Two Women is my favorite everyday New Glarus beer and one of the finest American-brewed lagers I’ve ever tasted, primarily because it reminds me of a beer I’d expect to be poured from a countertop Anstich barrel somewhere in the Franconian countryside, which is a feat that the bland boys at Miller/Coors/Bud cannot ever hope to replicate.
5 Speaking of Deb Carey, she was the first woman to found and operate a brewery in the United States. There oughta be a statue.
4 Deb and husband Dan (founding brewer at New Glarus) remain actively involved in all aspects of the business, but have moved their company toward status as a collective by establishing an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP):
In an ESOP plan, brewery owners distribute shares of the company across employees, based on their time served. Shares based on the company’s value are managed in a trust. Employees retiring or leaving the company can collect their gains by selling their shares back to other employee owners. Employees are also given a monetary incentive to promote the profitability of the business, along with a say on major decisions that would affect the standing of their shares.
3 New Glarus Brewing’s Spotted Cow is a picture-perfect blonde flagship beer, one capable of creative personal interpretation (I call it cream ale; the Careys say it’s pre-Prohibition farmhouse ale). Spotted Cow is tasty and easy to drink but also full-flavored, and available at the majority of beer dispensaries (and probably a great many barber shops) in Wisconsin ONLY.
2 Those fruited beers everyone kills to acquire, like Wisconsin Belgian Red (with cherries)? Yeah, they’re superlative, too, but I try not to get in the way of the geek stampede. You’ll find me over in the corner, cradling a Staghorn Octoberfest, and reflecting upon the extent of my respect and admiration for New Glarus Brewing Company’s myriad achievements.
1 This 2018 quote by Deb Carey:
“I think that brewers making their own beer—I mean those who are putting heart and soul into a brewery—are a special type of human being. They are artists, passionate people, and kindred spirits. Sometimes brewers who I met once or who are a start-up call and say, ‘I have this going on’ or ‘Can you help with this?’ and I’ll take the call every time because there are a lot of us who have been in this a long time, and that’s the way it’s always been.
Roger Baylor is an entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with 41 years of beer business experience in metropolitan Louisville as a bartender, package store clerk, brewery owner, restaurateur, writer, traveler, polemicist, homebrewing club founder, tour operator and all-purpose contrarian.
