Saint Louis Brewery leads microbrew market

Craft brewers are fueling a robust industry that's tapped into what St. Louis locals and visitors like.

By Phil Marty, Reporting from St. Louis
04:36 PM PDT, June 23, 2009

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It's officially called the Saint Louis Brewery, but no, it's not that St. Louis brewery, the one with the Clydesdales and the stadium that bears its name and the beer that everyone knows comes from here.

While that brewery has defined St. Louis for more than 150 years, this Saint Louis Brewery -- a comparative whippersnapper -- made history 17 years ago when it became the first brewery opened in St. Louis since Prohibition ended in 1933.

Its 30,000 barrels a year will never threaten Anheuser-Busch -- the maker of brands such as Budweiser, Busch and Michelob that cranks out nearly 16 million barrels a year just in the St. Louis plant. But the whippersnapper planted a seed that has sprouted into a booming microbrew industry here.

The Saint Louis Brewery still operates its original brew pub -- Schlafly Tap Room -- which provided a big boost to the rebirth of the city's downtown. In 2004, it opened Schlafly Bottleworks, a restaurant/brewery in the Maplewood neighborhood that handles the bear's share of the brewing these days and has allowed the company to distribute its beers within a 300-mile radius of St. Louis (but not Chicago because it's such a competitive market).

"There's no beer market in the country like this one," says Dan Kopman, a native of the city and co-owner of Schlafly's, which takes its name from the other co-owner, Tom Schlafly, who practices law with Kopman's dad. "There's no beer market where one beer supplier has such a large percentage of the market."

Thanks to Schlafly's lead, locals and visitors these days have nearly a 12-pack of choices when they want to belly up to a bar that's serving its own brews. Morgan Street, Trailhead and Mattingly are just a few of the brews available in their like-named pub/restaurants. And two brew pubs -- Square One, in business 3 1/2 years, and the year-old Stable -- are branching out into distilling their own spirits.

"The brewing industry [in St. Louis] is not just business; it's part of the culture," Kopman says. It's sort of woven through the fabric of society in more ways than you can imagine." Some of that is changing as a result of Anheuser-Busch's takeover last year by Belgian brewing giant InBev, which makes Stella Artois (now one of the choices when samples are handed out at the end of the Anheuser-Busch brewery tour) and Beck's, among others.

Pointing out the importance of beer brewing in St. Louis and the increasing role of craft brewers are the more than a dozen beer festivals held here each year. Schlafly hosts the majority, including its Repeal of Prohibition Beer Festival in April that, each year, invites a group of craft brewers from other states. This year Tennessee brewers were featured.

But the biggest "brewhaha" is St. Louis Craft Beer Week, which this year started at the end of May. Tastings and beer schools are among the activities, and the week wraps up with the St. Louis Brewers Heritage Festival. It's in Forest Park, home to many of the city's main attractions, and this year's fest attracted about 20,000 beer lovers and featured 60 brews from all of the city's brewers, including that one with the Clydesdales.

"There was a moment there where we were keeping our fingers crossed that the other brewer in town would want to keep participating," Kopman says. "We were able to convince the new powers in control that it was a good thing to do."

Though Schlafly plays David to Busch's Goliath, it steps into the role of Goliath when compared with all of those brew-pub operations here that don't bottle their beers, selling them solely on premises, much like many of the city bars of the late 1800s that made their own brew.

Steve Neukomm opened Square One in the Lafayette Square neighborhood near downtown as an addition to a mini-brewing empire that started with the 10-year-old Augusta Brewing Co. in the like-named town about 45 minutes west of St. Louis.

Square One last year brewed about 400 barrels of beer. Still, at any given time there are 12 brews on tap at the restaurant. Of the 12, six are what Neukomm calls perennials, available all the time. They include ales, a stout and a weizen. The other six are seasonals.

Since August, Square One has also been licensed to distill spirits and is producing vodka, gin, three types of rum, a tequila-like spirit and Mello Cello, which is like limoncello but is made with blood oranges.

Neukomm, who studied brewing at UC Davis, handles the distilling and estimates he'll turn out less than 200 cases of spirits in a year's time. He says distilling "has a fascination to it. It's coming around like breweries did in the '80s."

The Stable, which is easing into distilling and brewing, occupies the area of the old Lemp Brewery complex where the horses that pulled the wagons that delivered Lemp's brews were housed. Lemp was No. 2 only to Busch before Prohibition but didn't return after the dry spell.

The huge complex in the Benton Park neighborhood in the south part of the city was vacant for decades until the Stable opened in a small part of it in June 2008.

It took nearly a year for licenses to be issued to allow brewing and distilling, and in the interim the Stable drew a following with a beer list -- heavily influenced by craft breweries -- that includes 24 beers on tap and 35 more in the bottle, says Jared Gardner, beverage manager.

Early beer production has been limited to just one brew, a helles (a pale lager) "Demand is outstripping capacity," Gardner says. "We can't make it fast enough."

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