Rogue Warrior: An Interview with Jack Joyce
'If you don't listen to anybody else, you know, things are a lot simpler'
August, 1999© 1999 by Alan Moen
Rogue Ales of Newport, OR is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. From its humble beginnings as a brewpub in Ashland in 1989, Rogue has grown to the 20,000 barrel brewery in Newport today. Known throughout the country for the inovative beers of brewer John Maier, from Oregon Cream Ale to Old Crustacean Barley Wine, Rogue is as colorful as its cagey founder and president, Jack Joyce. Following are excerpts from a recent Beer Notes interview.
BN: How did you get into brewing?
JJ: I think there's probably two factors. One of my partners - he and I had been friends since college, since '62 - we always thought it would be fun to be in a small business together. So that's one part of it. Also, we were sort of looking to support economically the Oregon food products business. Because we thought that somehow the Northwest and Oregon would sell at Macy's on Herald Square in New York, which then was the epitome of retail - it's no more the epitome.
BN: But you worked for Nike, so you were involved in marketing Oregon products anyway, right?
JJ: Yeah, I suppose in a way, in retrospect. From that experience I knew that people thought the Northwest was pure and pristine and all about cowboys and Indians.
NB: So they were totally wrong, but at least it was an illusion you could do something with?
JJ: That's right. You can't change perceptions. I guess we knew that - it was just an investment at the time. And one guy said he could brew, Greg - he still works for us. And the other guy said he could run a pub, and he couldn't.
NB: That was in Ashland?
JJ: In Ashland. And it was a pretty good deal, because every year they made a penny, we gave them ten percent. Because promoters always say they can do everything, but you've got to prove it. You've got to do what you say. And every year they didn't make a penny, we could fire 'em. So in essence, we took over the brewery. It was supposed to open in June, and it opened the last day of the Shakespeare Festival in late October. It was supposed to cost 150, and of course it cost 250. You know, just normal stuff if you're not a business person. And as soon as we got into it, we realized it was too small, you couldn't expand it, and we were sort of looking for another location. We stumbled into this one down here.
NB: But why Newport? There must be a story about that.
JJ: My partner was the director of the Port of Portland. His counterpart in the Port of Newport had a prominent citizen, Mo Niemi - Mo's Clam Chowder-, and she wanted a bar downstairs. and her kids were smarter than that. They didn't want to run it. So I came down to tell Mo we were brewers, not publicans. In the Back where the pool room is now was a garage where they stored her kid's antique cars. So I said, hell, we can make a brewery out of this. Plus it snowed down here - it was in February, it never snows here, and I was trying to look for chains for a Peugeot, in Newport, Oregon? They're still laughing. So I was stuck for four days. And she was a very persuasive woman.
BN: Mo really talked you into it, then?
JJ: Well, yeah, and she made it fair. I think one of the problems you have with a brewpub is that you're paying retail rates on the front end and the back end - and you know, we paid a buck out front, and 25 cents in the back. All we had to do was hang that godawful picture of her in her French bathtub - naked.
NB: That was part of the deal?
JJ: That was the deal. Ever take that down, and the rent goes up!
BN: When did you first make the decision to go beyond the brewpub and distribute your beer?
JJ: To distribute in Oregon in kegs - we did that from day one. To bottle and to go to the East coast, especially as early as we did, was an accident. A lot of people come to Newport from the East Coast, and they own bars, and go on holiday, sort of like a busman's holiday. And so they wanted to carry our beer on the East Coast. And since we had trucks - they get California wine out there, don't they? This transportation deal can't be that complex. Just being off I-5 is expensive, even a lot more than Spokane... our trucks linked up well with their wine transportation system. We have only 8200 people here in Newport. So, I'm not sure it was a business decision, or we would have gone to a bigger market. If it was a business decision, it was sort of like a brewpub like Elysian (Seattle) selling a little bit on the outside or Wild Duck in Eugene.
BN: In the evolution of the brewery, then, when did you decide to move across the bay?
JJ: Well we didn't have room for a bottling plant. We were bottling at Portland Brewing. So we found this building - the back half, where the brewery per se is. And this is a good community. They didn't want to lose us as an employer - another reason this is in Newport - so they helped. Plus this is a white elephant- there aren't a lot of uses for a building like this. It was originally dry storage for boats, sort of like a time share. Then they built a moorage out front, and wondered where their customers went.
BN: About the beer - I talked to John (Maier) yesterday. and he told me you give him a real free reign with the beer. As a matter of fact, he showed me one beer he was brewing that he didn't think you knew about.
JJ: Well, he's made several. I remember coming back from the Oregon Brewers Fest, and I'd been in Europe, and everybody was raving at some party I was at about our new beer - I didn't know anything about it. No, he just tells me what it costs. He's got no constraints whatsoever... it's not that John can't make lagers, because he can. But. I mean, there is a standard. And the standard is, pick somebody you're targeting, and try to do it as well or better and try to bring something new to it. because they've been doing it for two or three hundred years.
BN: Does it become a problem for you in the marketplace with so many different brands or styles to push?
JJ: Well, if you think about it, you've got three interest groups that you're dealing with. You're dealing with the distributor, you're dealing with the retailer, and you're dealing with the consumer. You'd go nuts if you try to please all three. So we try and please the consumer. The comsumer wants more variety. Most retailers don't want variety. Other retailers, creative retailers, do. A lot of distributors want their SKUs (stock keeping units). So yeah, they are the bottleneck. So that's why you hope this internet thing (beer sales online) opens up - the distributors are politically stupid opposing it. Again, it's back to the consumer and the retailer: it doesn't matter to them one iota.
BN: I've heard from some retailers that consumers have made up their minds about a lot of brands now, and they're not willing to experiement with new beers as they once did. How do you feel about that?
JJ: To me that's a judgment issue. It seems to me if you look at consumers, we really compete with gasoline, with picture houses. And where in a consumer's life are they demanding less choice? It just doesn't exist.... I don't think people are totally naive about their channels of distribution. That's why there's not just one store in the world.
BN: But price is becoming more important to the craft beer consumer, isn't it?
JJ: Again, marketing people like to have a convenient consumer. That's all bullshit. It's always been bullshit. And people categorize people by demographics, and by race, just so they can write a report - it isn't disbursed that way. Sure, price matters to some people. It doesn't matter to all people. But for us, we can't compete on price, we're not going to - because we'd go broke. In our view, we'd better compete on quality. If our product doesn't translate to an extra fifty cents to a buck a six-pack, or a pint, whatever that may be, shame on us! Then we shouldn't be in business. The consumer gets to vote on that stuff. I don't think our consumer is the person that buys our product - the consumer or the retailer - because we undercut the competition... Plus, it's suicide. It's bad business. And, like, we haven't grown. I mean, It's not our goal to grow, If growth happens, that's fine, we can accommodate it. But we want to make a quality product. To make a quality product, you've got to get a quality price.
BN: Speaking of quality, you're producing so many beers now - doesn't that put an unnecessary burden on the brewery for quality control?
JJ: Well. first of all, our stuff's bulletproof- that helps. Secondly, by having one brand, you haven't changed the equation. And the equation is, you don't have the power to have the distributor rotate. You don't have the power to have him take the economic beating, which is what happens with big breweries. All we can do is tell the distributor, we'll take the beer back.
BN: So you've done that.
DG: Oh, sure, we do it a lot. We don't want old beer out there. But it would be naive to say that it's not out there.
BN: So now that it's nearly the end of the century, what do you think about the future for craft brewers?
JJ: I think it's just a waste of time to guess the future anyway. You know, we make our own future - these things like industry and category, they're not particularly helpful. If a category goes down, or an industry goes down, there're always winners and losers. Would it be a lot easier if the thing got hot again? Sure, but we don't control that. There isn't anything we can do about it, so you just sort of play the cards you're dealt...trust me, we're not getting rich, but we've got to break even... if people want to support that, fine, if not - well, that's why consumers get to vote. We don't mind being voted out, but we don't want to commit suicide... I did this thing with CNN a month or so ago and you can tell how simple I view the world - it's just about quality and innovation, and the guy said, well, those are just sort of buzz words, and I said, "Yeah, but that's what we do, They're not buzz words to us!" You've got to innovate, and you've got to know that the friendlier aspects, or the more successful aspects of whatever you do are going to be copied by somebody bigger and better at price and all those things. So you've got to keep adding new things - that's where variety comes in.
We have a network of retailers across the country on draught that will bail us out - they insist on that. Do we wish we had a "horse" - like Deschutes Porter, or hefeweizen? Yeah, but consumers built those things, not some "genius" doing market studies. All those things were accidents. Variety is the spice of life.
BN: Whose idea was it to give Rogue the persona that it has - the wild and crazy style?
JJ: We never did it on purpose, We thought what we were doing was normal.
BN: But Shakespeare with sunglasses? Psychedelic, glow-in-the dark bottles?
JJ: It's our concept of normal. What we did for the (Portland) Rose Festival - we made the rose (on the beer label) black. well, aren't roses supposed to be red? Says who? Aren't we bored with red roses? What's on purpose is it that we try to make our bottles initially an entertainment package. Since you can't afford billboards or TV, your bottle had better be that billboard... if you don't like our sense of humor, hell, you don't buyour beer! If you don't get the jokes, hey, don't buy it!
If you don't listen to anybody else, you know, things are a lot simpler. John tells me what it is, and somehow drinking it inspires you to come up with a name or a concept. Or if you don't - like Brutal Bitter was a sort of the in-house name. We just kept the name. We couldn't come up with anything better... we've got a quotation by Hunter S. Thompson on the wall here - "when the going gets weird, the weird get going."
BN: Well, that should be a big
advantage to you, then?
JJ: I'd say that, but I think I'm
normal!
