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Rob:
Welcome to our podcast. All about the car brought to you by Schierl Tire and Service. I'm your host, Rob Hoffman, an auto service specialist with over 44 years of industry experience. On the ride with us today and running the sound board is a regular guest Bryan Call, a 40 year veteran of the automotive industry. Hello Brian.
Bryan:
Hey Rob. Great to be along.
Hey havin you help us out today!
And Bill Schierl, a guy that's logged a lot of miles behind the wheel and always has a lot of great questions. Welcome back, Bill.
Bill:
Thanks Rob. Nice to see you again
Today, we have two special guests on the drive and this is gonna be one of my favorite podcasts. We've got Brian Elza of the Stevens Point Brewery and John Harry of the Portage County Historical Society. Welcome guys.
John:
Glad to be here. Thanks.
Brian:
Yeah thanks for having us.
Good to see you. Good to have you. You guys are the expert on our subject today, for sure. Well, we're gonna fill a few more seats on the bus today, so let's hop in, buckle up and hit the road. You guys may not know this, but you're two pretty important people to me because we're talking about Point beer and it's a top of my list for sure. Also the Point Brewery is a big part of the deep and rich history of Stevens Point Wisconsin. So to the best of my research, the point brewery is celebrating 165 years this year. Is that true guys?
Speaker 3:
Yeah,
Speaker 1:
100%.
That's a long, long time you got Team Schierl Companies beat by a hundred years.
That's correct. We’re celebrating 65.
Wow. Yeah, we're celebrating 65 this year, but that stands nowhere near what you guys are doing. So that's just unbelievable. As a matter of fact, how old is Steven's point?
Isn't it like 164?
The brewery predates the incorporation of the city by a year. So they are 1858 and the brewery is 1857.
My gosh. You know, how does that work?
Well, I mean, there, wasn't just all of a sudden people here, right? So the brewery was here, there was a logging community right on the river and where Pfiffner Pioneer Park is today was all logging camps and turned into lumber mills and things later on. But as the city became more and more populated, there was calls out to cities down south in like Milwaukee and Chicago. And they'd take out newspaper ads that would say you know, we're in search of school teachers or clergy or doctors and brewers. So this is an essential service.
Yeah. Yeah
That was an essential service provided to the people of Stevens Point way back when. And so George Ruder was a German immigrant and he was working at a brewery in Milwaukee and I'm guessing saw one of these and said, I'm gonna try it out and found this brewery in the exact location where it is today on it today it's Water Street used to be known as the Plank Road. And it was the main thoroughfare if you weren't gonna come into town on water. And so he, there was a hotel there called the Plank Road Hotel, and somebody had started construction of a brewery in 1856. And so he bought it and on 1857, they started it. That's when we know that the first batch of beer was made.
So those people were invited here, but nothing was given to them. It's like, come here and buy this brewery.
It's like modern day land, it's a modern day land speculation right? Being like, come up here, make it rich in the, you know, he was not low level brewer at a big brewery in Milwaukee and here he could be his own guy. And so then he was shortly thereafter joined by another German immigrant named Franz Wahle or Frank Wahle. And so they were the, the modern or the founders, if you wanna call them that of, of the brewery. And then George Ruder actually went up to Wausau and started another brewery in 1860. So his story here is actually pretty brief.
Any connection to Ruder where attorney firm,
I mean, you see a lot of different names of people and things throughout the area, but his brewery, Dave, that brewery actually survived until the late sixties. So they had a beer called North Star Beer up in Wausau. So, but obviously Point beat them out.
Yes.
That's absolutely amazing that it started on the same piece of property that it is still today.
Yeah. Well, and the hotel that actually lasted until the fifties and that was the, for a long time, that was the brew master lived on site. And that was where the brew master's family house was. And then by the fifties, it was over a hundred years old. And so they decided to put a new house up and then now the breweries expanded so much, but the, the second house has actually just, they moved it down the block. So that one still exists too. And then the, where the beer is made. So the foundation we're thinking is the same foundation of the original brewery at some point where the brewhouse is today. They've been brewing beer in that room since 1872. So...
That's a while.
Yeah, that is
Yeah right... A couple things have been upgraded since then.
So I would imagine that expansion of some sort has become a big part of the history. I mean, you couldn't have producing all the beer and items and soda and everything that you produced today, back in that original building. So when did all that start to come about,
I could cover the more historical stuff and Brian can talk about some of the more recent additions. So in 1872, the owner was a man named Andrew Lutz and it changed hands a couple times. And then Andrew Lutz was the owner and he was the owner from 1867 to 1897. So a huge period of, of stability within, in the brewery in 1872, he decided that they needed to expand their capacity. And so they needed to build a new, so they built this big when, at the time, this big brew house that like I said is still within that facility today. And then not a lot happened as far as brewery development until 1907 in 1907 point had their biggest competitor at a local level come up. So there were smaller breweries in town, in various places, but nothing more than like you think of like a small craft brewery that just produces in house. That was kind of where their competitors were at in 1907, the Polish Brewing Company was founded. So a bunch of these Tavern keepers didn't like that they had to give their money to these Germans and they decided they were gonna have this Polish beer. And so that was over on the corner of wood, Wisconsin street. It later became the Bakerite Bread factory. So that building was used much longer as a, as a bakery, but to compete the brewery upgraded at that point. And it, that building is still encapsulated within the rest of it, but they hired a fame brewery architect to come and make that facility even better. And then as the way, people were consuming, beer started to change into the 1910s. They started bottling more. And so they started their bottling house, which is still the same bottling house and where the gift shop is today was offices. So if you look in the right place, you can see a safe inside the gift shop. And that building is still pretty much would've functioned the same way if the merchandise wasn't in there, but then the brewery didn't really change much until the nineties. Right.
I believe so.
Yeah. So, and that kind of leads us into like the more modern additions,
Right. There was a kind of a sea change when two Milwaukee businessmen, Joe Martino and Jim Wickman bought the brewery and Wisconsin owned again. And they invested heavily in adding to the footprint of the brewing capacity there, they did it initially with the idea that the added vessels would be filled up with contract production. So they took what was once a parking lot, a train track for delivering and taking out goods and for dropping off empty kegs and bottles, if you're a college student we hear from them today, still, now that they're in their fifties, sixties, seventies, but they encapsulated that into what's called our quote unquote courtyard. At the time, there are only a few stainless steel tanks in there. Right now, there's barely any place to walk, cuz it's just a tank after tank has been lowered into the roof to add capacity as we try and keep up with demand for our branded business, we don't do much contract brewing anymore. So they've been in charge of like a pretty rapid expansion of our not only our capacity, but our capabilities and the things we can brew the last two years, they've invested 3 million each year, not in like beautification projects or tap rooms or anything like really public facing. It's all just been in modernizing equipment and added capacity, more stainless steel, whether it's lines, tanks, more centerfuges, so basically everything we can do faster and cleaner than we ever have before. So it's kind of staggering and next year will be more of the same as we eye building a new brew house.
Hey, if it's all about more production, that's the important stuff, right?
Yeah, but you also did the garden, the beer garden.
We did the beer garden too.
That was public facing.
No, it's fantastic. It's just when you think of the grand scheme of how much they've invested to make the brewery a better place and make better product, that was one of the easy parts almost. It's something we've wanted for a long time. And I think a real full fledged tap room is on the horizon. I'm sure we'll broach that.
Was the garden complete? Is that ready to go? Has it been used already or is that coming up?
I was there.
It's good. It's good enough.
It's been christened Well, so we used to do a tour in the building and we had a tasting area in the building and during COVID we decided to repurpose that space for brewing vessels and once public safety deemed it was okay to come back and visit the brewery and enjoy beer there. We needed a place to do it. So the beer garden was the answer in the interim, much like everything else. It took all of the pieces for that beer garden twice, as long as we expected for them to arrive. So we had a soft launch this summer, but this spring we're really looking to kick into high gear,
Definitely up to get there myself. For sure.
And one of the pieces in the garden is a delivery truck. Isn't that correct?
Kind of the impetus of how and why we're here about all, about the car, but.
Byan:
It's Been all about the beer so far, right?
Speaker 2:
About the concept to bring the listener back into vehicles and connection, but it was this beautiful old delivery vehicle.
Yes. Someone had acquired it. I don't know if you'd say they were a collector, but they knew it had a Point Brewery logo and reached out to us on Facebook with a very reasonable price that they were looking for. We didn't really acquire it just to put it on display in the new Point patio. That was kind of a nice synergy there. We kind of have a habit of, if anyone reaches out to us with a collection, we like to just repurchase anything that we don't already have. A lot of it goes to the university. Some of it goes to the Point burger bars for display. And ultimately we want to have it back in a tap room or a public museum portion of the brewer. So that was really something we just jumped on because we wanted to get it back in our holdings. There were times during the breweries history where the actual history was not the most important part of the brewing business, but now that's one of the things that sets us apart. Really it's only Yingling and perhaps depending on your metrics, Minhas, that's older than we are. So we kind of fight with our history when we do modernizations in the building, because the lagering cellers arguably date back to 1857, but that story runs parallel with the products we make. So acquiring those things like that delivery truck are really important
And wasn't there, the whole history around the delivery. Only the distribution, I should say, only was connected to how far a truck could drive in a day and back.
Yeah.
So that the drivers got home for dinner.
Yeah. And well, then they had a huge photo. I mean, there's one, that's blown up on the office walls of the brewery next to the store, but they had a whole fleet of different sized vehicles to take more or less different kinds of products and things. So that the truck that they have in the beer garden now is like just a little fleet vehicle would be just it's his pickup truck. You may have thrown some samples in it. You may have thrown a few cases and stuff like that.
A salesman's truck or something like that.
Right, exactly. Yeah. It's not like one of the big, huge trucks. So I wrote the book on the, the history of the brewery and a picture of one of these trucks is on the cover of the book or it's in the book, one of the two, but it, these things were used a lot. These things were workhorse.
But there were actually horses at one point.
Yeah. There were actual horses.
We're going back now.
Cause well, I was trying to figure out knowing that coming on this podcast to talk somewhat about transportation, distribution things. And I was trying to figure out like if there was like a newspaper article, it's like Point Brewery bought a truck and I couldn't find anything like that. But I imagine it had to have been sometime. I mean, I sometime in the twenties before that, that wouldn't have been the, the method, cuz there are pictures of horse drawn carriages with loads of beer cases on it. So I would imagine later in prohibition, prohibition was really hard on the brewery financial.
I was wondering about that. Yeah.
Yeah. And so, I mean, at one point they had outsourced their so Point Special started during prohibition as a near beer and how they would do it in those days. And there's better techniques now as far as like removing alcohol, but you'd make a full beer than you'd boil out the alcohol, which just,
That's a shame
Kills the,
I guess It's the flavor,
Oh it's just everything dies.
Don't boil your vegetables either.
Well, that's still how, like if you look at like a macro non-alcoholic beer, that's still like the method that they do it at. And so that's why it tastes the way it does, but they had the Point Special and they were making more money off of soda at that point. And so they actually, and I haven't been able to figure out where but they, for a couple years actually made beer at a different facility too, just so that they didn't have to keep the, when you move from soda to beers, Brian can probably attest to, the cleanings is a nightmare, because soda is so sugary and syrupy.
Yeah. Almost a day.
To clean and C I P everything.
Yeah. Just so they, at one point, but by 1931 in our minds, we're like, we're only two years away from the end of prohibition. They had no idea. They only had four staff members left. So they had a brewmaster, the owner an accountant and like a helper, that's it. And so like the accountant, wasn't just doing accountant P things right?
Right.
Everybody was doing everything. And so after prohibition is when they started to strengthen their distribution back up and I'm guessing the fleet that the big pictures are from, or from, from the late thirties, forties time. But I don't know. What was the year on the truck? Do we have a, a year on
No I wish I knew that.
It looks like a 49.
Yeah. 50 maybe.
Yeah. It seems like a forties to me.
Yeah. Well, and I know that they just getting through world war II is another challenge too, because again, you're only less than 10 years out from the end of prohibition and world war 1was used as an excuse to go into prohibition in the first place. And so they had to ration products and all that stuff again. And so you had to choose like, do I want to spend money on tires, which were super expensive? You can only get some of, or do I want to make sure our equipment's up to date? And so there was a lot of self-distribution, you know, people coming to get their beer, bring it, you know, so it wasn't probably until after world war II that they had like a full fleet of trucks that they could get.
Now with Bill's previous comment on distribution, it only went out as far as the drivers could go and get back at night. How far out was that? I mean, where did the point beer reach to?
For a variety of reasons, they didn't really maybe Wausau to the north, maybe Marshfield to the west. These towns had their own breweries already too. So you were encroaching on, you know, Marshfield had a brewing company into the sixties. Wausau as I said they had a brewery into the sixties too. And so that was part of it. The brewery didn't have a ton of capacity either and people at Stevens Point drink a lot of Point beer. And so there wasn't like a huge need to go outside of the 30 to 50 mile radius to get the beer out for a long time. So yeah.
Now looking at the point beer website and looking at the locator, obviously it's game on these days.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, our point beer footprint expanded pretty far in the nineties and is since contracted with the boom of all craft breweries in the country that I think there's upwards of 9,000 now. So when, you know, when we were expanding point beer in the nineties, there were less, but craft breweries grew exponentially. So our hard cider brand is actually going out farther and wider than Point Beer right now. Point Beer is definitely focused as a Midwestern brew. There are some outliers like Point Amber and Point special are big in Florida right now. That's fantastic. I would like to go down there and do a tasting for folks, but our whole hog beers are also doing great on the east coast. That's kind of our quote unquote brew master super crafty line, higher ABVs, bolder flavors, way more ingredients, longer to make. But yeah, Point Beer is definitely more of a Midwest and especially Wisconsin focused brew, which kind of is going back to its roots a little bit. And that's great for us because we know that audience, we are that audience and with cider boys, we are hanging on by our coattails just to keep up with demand for that outside of Wisconsin.
Nice. So obviously it's a lot more than just the 49 Chevy truck,
Speaker 10:
A little bit more involved now.
There are people that have worked at the brewery that are still there for 44 years. And when you say, would you like to come do a podcast? They like shrivel up and they're like, no, I want to go fix the pasteurizer. I'm not gonna be on a podcast. And so even my direct boss, she's been at the brewery for over 20 years. And so she was imparting to me like some of her favorite stories about like, she started out just in the gift shop as a regular employee when she was younger. And she just remembers drivers coming back at the end of the day with just wads of cash, which is probably another reason why the route had to come back that day.
Yeah, probably.
And also I think the distribution footprint could have been bigger. Because, the story goes that drivers used to take pretty liberal breaks at each stop. Like, oh, well I guess I need to have a pint here while you unload the truck. So...
They enjoyed the product too.
Yeah. Yeah. It was a different time. It would probably a great time to work in beer distribution. And there it's still a great industry right now too.
Now there's a name for that. As part of being in the brewery, you got all the samples all day long.
That's called employee retention.
No, there's actually a name for it. I, I can't think of what it is, but a perk?
They had to, they had like a tap. So where the bar used to be in the courtyard, there's a hallway that runs behind there. And there was like a tap in the wall where you could come fill up your beer here. And, and then Art Shuda, who was the operations manager for years. And he would be like, well, you get there and you know, you'd have to have a beer with breakfast and then it's like 11 o'clock. So you have your first break beer and then lunch beer, then the truck drivers would come back. And so you'd have to, and like, I'm like, how did, how did this like, never like Actually put anything out?
Oh, they were all big believers.
Yeah. Right. Well you gotta quality testers. That's important.
Yeah. Right. You knew every day that yeah. We put out a good product,
Go home the end of the day and take a nap.
Yeah. That's just funny.
It's part of the history of the brewery. I wish I knew more of because like beer distribution right now, it's a three tier system where you've got retailers, distributors, and then the manufacturers and our beer distributors who do the truck driving now for us, they are still very integral to what we do. I mean, our cider boys brand part of that is like us having drivers and beer reps at different distributors who are essentially our sales guys. They believe in the product that much, that they're helping grow the brand. So even though we don't have our own fleet in house, the distributors we work with are just a huge part of our business. And like,
They're almost like they're like your ambassadors really.
Yes, exactly. They're the ones that people at bars or at good liquor stores, good beer stores see on a day to day basis. See, 'em rolling in something new and talk about it cuz it's not our sales guys are there at every place. You know, we've all a team of fives that covers 50 states.
Now, if you're driving a beer delivery truck, you're a good guy
Right. In my book. Absolutely.
Everybody likes a beer delivery driver.
Yeah. I don't think I have anything else about the trucks. I don't know when it switched over to being like, so after prohibition, the three tier system came into place because the big breweries like owned too much power in the marketplace and they had what were called tide houses. And so if you wanted a Miller mirror, you would go to a Miller tide house. But that operated differently in places like Steven's Point. But the national laws were that you had to have a middle man or a distributor that like diluted your influence in the marketplace.
So that really started After prohibition?
Oh yeah. It was like part of the repeal laws was the three tier system. But it might have been once you reached a certain barrel amount that it like kicked in cuz Point. And I know a lot of the other breweries, they would just have their own drivers in house until it became, you know, now it makes more economic sense to outsource that to somebody else because they can make sure your product gets to the places better than you can. So
Yeah. I mean, we need to worry about our tunnel pasteurizer hitting 185 pasteurization units. Not like breaks. Right, Right.
You don't need a machine shop for cars.
Well, where was the fleet housed back when we had a place?
Yeah. So if you look at the brewery today, so you've got on the left, you have like the office building and bottle house. And then, well now there's a courtyard, but once you get through the courtyard, there's like the building that was dates all the way back to the beginning at some point and has been expanded upon over the years. But most of that building is from 1907. But then if you go to the right, there's like a 1935 garage building and that's what I'm guessing. They started to acquire all their vehicles is because they have this huge garage there and the fleet would either would park on the side. So I'm guessing they would use that for repairs or you know, storage.
And now it's the malt barn. So
The malt barn?
Chocolate malt, your pillsen and malt
I gotta get into the tour here. Yeah.
I'm thinking we're going after this.
You're right.
Well, if you stick the samples I brought outside since it's negative 17, it shouldn't take long before they're palatable.
Don't forget about 'em.
Yeah. You don't wanna forget about em.
I won't I promise.
It's the worst feeling when you're like, I left a beer in the freezer, but I also wanted a slushy so...
My next point here, international beer competition. So there's a big word international. So that's not just Kansas anymore.
No, no, it's not. And I think there's a good starting point for how Point breweries got its foot in the door in terms of being a national and international player with its quality and beer.
Yeah. Well, so 1973, there was a newspaper columnist named Mike Royko that wrote an article and he, he wrote an article that basically was just taking American beer to the cleaners American beer by this point was really like, just bland. Like when you thought about it in like a holistic way, it was basically like every macro beer you could find on the shelves today. That's all, there was the smaller regional breweries, like Point were going outta business left and right. Point was, I mean, they were probably on the verge of not being in business anymore. If it weren't for what I'm about to tell you is gonna happen. The number of breweries. So at the end of prohibition, there were 750 breweries still in existence in the United States, which sounds like a lot. There's over 8,000 now. But 750 still, not nothing but 40 years later. So by 1973, there were only 65 breweries left in the whole country. And so Point Brewery was go down this path at some point, because like I said, like Wausau lost their brewery. Marshfield lost their brewery. Oshkosh had breweries. Those were all gone. And these were breweries that had followings and had customers Mike Royko, because beer had become such a, just a bland homogenized kind of product. He wrote an article. And I don't know if anybody has heard of Mike Royko. So he was a syndicated newspaper columnist. His home paper was the Chicago Daily News.
Was he a contemporary of like Roger Ebert?
Yeah. I mean, I guess so. Yeah. Cuz they were in the same city writing for similar publications, but he was syndicated around the country. So like he was talking with my dad, who's in his late sixties and he's like, I remember Mike Roko's publication. So he was looked to as, that was like one of the only ways to get opinion kind of news. And he wrote an article that said American beer tastes as if it was passed through a horse first.
Oh that's not so....
So not, not like mincing words.
And people were like really ticked off. They're like, how dare you?
That is a form of filtration.
Yeah. Right.
Yeah. Naturally.
But people were really ticked off and like, how dare you attack my beer? I drink this stuff. And I think it's good. Who cares? What you think? And he said, you know what? Let's put it to the test and modern beer taste test. This might be one of the first ones. Cuz if you look way, way back at like world's fairs, you like, you have different breweries getting gold medals and things in the 19th century. But this is 1973 and nobody was being what tastes best Miller or Schlitz. It's just like, well they both exist. Cuz there wasn't like a lot of choice in the marketplace. And so end result of the taste test that then got published. So he took basically every beer he could find. And so you had the big American brands. He got some like there were some imports coming in from Germany and England. And so he got a taste panel together of just random people and they rated things and put tasting notes down. And the number one beer in the world was Wertzberger from Germany, which I don't know if that still even exists, but the second place beer and the number one American beer was Point Special and most of the people reading his column was like, where is Stevens Point? You know, nobody ever heard of it? So one of the notes on it from one of the people is like, I could drink this all night. And so it really boosted the awareness in the stock that there's this brewery like doing something that's not just this like big bland lager and sales took off, it helped the brewery survive. There were all sorts of requests for distribution outside of Wisconsin. They were only distributing in like a 60 mile range. Still at that point there was a distributor in Montana that wanted like to 200 cases a week TWA, the airlines wanted to carry point beer on all their flights and Ken Shibilski and Phil Shibilski, his dad, they were the people in charge of the brewery at that point. And they knew that they were not ready for that kind of expansion. If they were going to give beer to TWA, then the Elbow Room might not get their Point Special. And they wanted to make sure that places like that in Stevens Point had the opportunity to drink their beer before anybody else. So it became kind of, you hear about certain breweries that might be only available in the state of Wisconsin and people travel for it. That was kind of what Point was at that point. And so it wasn't until 1990 that they actually left the state to distribute. I think that was just only to Minnesota at that point, that article really say saved a lot of livelihoods and saved a historic brewery from going under.
Didn't know that detail.
And that really it, that era is when the brewery its bread and butter was making lagers and the DNA of point breweries and making fantastic, arguably some of the best lagers in the world. And then during the craft beer boom, a lot of the breweries that came to prominence, weren't built on making lagers, they were making IPAs and they were making red ales. So point brewery kind of transitioned into craft beer with, is, would you say it's maple wheat or Point Amber?
Yeah. Well, so point Amber was in 1994 and that was actually, they were making the beer for a sausage company and they down in Sheboygan you could probably guess they were only making it for that. But then they started being like, well, we'll put it on for tours. And people are like, this is a really good beer. And so that's how point amber came into being. And that was entry level craft beer. And I think that's probably follows my own like drinking journey as far as like how I got into like different styles of beer after college or during college, then maple wheat, which is something that I would love to see if the brewmaster Mike Schraufnagel would wanna do like a one off on It.
A couple things in the works.
That's fun.
Oh, you heard it here first
And then I think the one beer is they cascade pale ale. So that was late nineties early and probably early two thousands. And that was the first pale ale produced in this area.
Yeah. That was my first point. That was in Chicago.
Okay. Yeah. So that was the reach at that point. And so I think that, that they started to diversify so much, which is great.
So has the ingredients or the recipe for Pont Special beer changed over the years?
Yes and no. So in order to become a craft brewery, according to the brewers association, less than 50% of your products can contain adjuncts. So point special was made with an adjunct, which again,
Was corn
I was gonna say, I have to like define this term
Adjunct is anything added into a beer? So, so technically if you have a fruit beer, like if you had like point makes a (inaudible)
And a Radler
Radler, like those are adjuncts, same thing with, is there actual brownie in the brownie? Hazelnut?
No.
Okay.
Chocolate Coco,
But not like minced brownies
crosstalk:
Brown chocolate cocoa. Yeah. Yeah. It Tastes, it tastes like it, it tastes so Good.
Chocolate would be an adjunct into a beer though. It's anything outside of the like four main ingredients of a beer.
So, But if we think of the macro breweries, especially back in the day using corn, it's easier to work with cheaper and it balances the flavor with that sweetness in an easier way. So when we joined the brewers association to be categorized as a craft brewery, especially cuz that's where our brews were heading and our diversified portfolio, we switched using all malt instead of corn. But the ratio of all the ingredients is exactly the same. The types of malt we use the proprietary yeast that we have, cuz that's a custom strain for us. All that's the same. It's basically just taking instead of corn use malt, I would dare anyone to be able to tell the difference. If we made the same beer today, just swapped out one ingredient for the other. I doubt anyone can tell the difference. The main thing that's changed between now and 1960, 70, 80 90 is just the amount of advanced equipment we have. And we can make the beer cleaner more consistent than ever before. And really a lot of it comes down to just like cleaning, better equipment, and time. Our brewmaster's a big stickler on like, oh there's we need a truck that's leaving for Illinois tomorrow, too bad. The beer's not done. So that's just how things go. It's X amount of days until Point Special's ready. So yeah. Again, there's one ingredient difference and that's largely so we could be classified as a craft brewery. And I would think if anyone could tell the difference, they're probably the brew master.
I think what it does actually too is, is so I'm really big when I drink beer on mouth feel, I love to like the, the feeling that you get inside your mouth when you're swallowing, I think is so important to how you really appreciate a beer. And I think that all malt characteristic gives you kind of that grainy, bready feel as you're drinking it, it's not a very heavy beer, but you still get that which spotty. Right. And you didn't get that before. Yeah. So I think it's better. That's my vote.
I agree.
Now the Stevens Point Brewery's also involved in a lot of community involvement and fundraising. Is that the case?
Yeah, absolutely. I think, John, like there's a lot of fun anecdotes in your book about the way that the brewery is so ingrained in the community. If you'd want to share a couple of those. Cause I think it gives context to why we still do that today.
Yeah. So during the dark days of, well post-prohibition was still in the great depression and there weren't as many breweries around and things like that. And so there's stories that I heard from Ken Schibilsky before he passed where he was like, cuz his dad had worked there since 1930 and where these businessmen from Chicago would come up with wads of cash and be like, just give us the beer. And they'd be like, no, like we, because these taverns in town need this beer. And so like right there is the commitment to the beer. I mean, if you, you can going back even further than that though. Cuz I just thought about 1897, the owner, the new owner after Andrew Lutz was named Gustav Kuenzel and the nice, shiny dome on St. Peter's church on the north side, he helped finance that. So it goes back all the way. The philanthropic aspect of point beer goes back quite a ways. And then there still is. Although it's not, used for it anymore. There's a baseball field across the street from the brewery that was Calvin Korfmann field. Calvin Korfmann was an owner in the sixties and he commissioned this baseball field and it hasn't been used for baseball and quite some time. Brian:
But it was a little league field. So there are pictures of little league games happening across the street from the brewery, which I'm imagining the parents really liked.
I would imagine dad was quite excited.
I would say that I went to baseball games at that field.
Okay. And I don't know, I don't know what the last time that was used to the field.
It wasn't that long ago.
So speaking of that baseball field, let's talk about the Point Bock Run.
Yeah. Now it's a part...
Yeah. Well and Bock Run again is something we do. That's, it's A, a super fun event. It's a great way to get some exercise, but it is also a fundraiser for a ton of community sports, especially for youth. So all of that money that the Bock Run committee gathers from registrations all gets filtered back to youth sports. So the Bock Run, Pointober Fest similar event in spirit, it's come to the brewery, big tent party, enjoyed beer sample things, but also that's a fundraiser for Pints for Prostates. So there's a lot of things that we do from as small, as like giving beer to church picnics for their fundraisers to sponsoring financially one of our local arts groups, youth soccer, we donate cases and cases of soda for that. Humane Society we did an adoption program where you adopt a pet, you get a case of Point Special. So we try to keep things fun. And then even when it's COVID times just donating pallets of soda to the hospitals early on, not that like ER, nurses and janitors need soda to get through the day, but it doesn't hurt. So it's just a gesture. So yeah, there's things big and small that we do to try and stay connected to everyone that's been supporting us for so long.
So you've found reasons to use that park across the street, obviously. Yeah. That Point Bock run is just absolutely amazing. Cause I think that thing sells out within the first 30 minutes
Some years, I think the quickest was 45 minutes this year because of the pandemic and not knowing exactly what the world's gonna look like in March. I think we still have 50 spots left out 2000. So if anyone's.
My wife And I are doing it.
Good!
Which is just ridiculous for me,
You can walk.
Yeah. I'm gonna tell you I'm not gonna run the whole way.
Well, there's the carrot at the end of the stick and that's free pints of beer.
That's the party for sure.
It's worth it. Let me tell you,
You gotta get your carbs back.
Absolutely.
Train like a German.
Yeah, right. Yeah.
Well as with every all about the car podcast, we always break away halfway through and we hit the road for a Wisconsin road trip. And today we're hopping in the bus and heading to the national brewery museum. Bryan, where is that ?
That would be in Potosi, Wisconsin.
Say that again Potosi?
Potosi, Wisconsin down to my old stomping grounds. I'm originally from Lancaster, which is about 12 miles away from Potosi. That brewery ran from 1852 to 1972. And I got a special tie to that. My wife's grandpa worked at that brewery for years and years. And as a little girl, she used to play around in the brewery and then after it closed all the broken glass and all the bottles and everything that's in there, she used to play around that. So,
Well that sounds safe.
Yeah. Not at all. That thing was really run into the ground after they closed and back in the eighties, the brewing association got together and tried to get a national brewery museum going. And I think it was in the nineties that it really took off. There was three different communities in the running for that. It was Milwaukee, obviously St. Louis and Potosi Wisconsin, which is a town of six, 600 people.
And we're talking 'em national here.
It's a national brewery. Yep. It is quite the complex. They have festivals down there. They have areas for wedding receptions, parties. There's also a restaurant there that serves awesome food and the actual Potosi brewery is up and going again and all the proceeds from that go back into the brewery museum. So it's a fabulous place to go. Have you guys been there?
I have twice. So I collect, so the Breweriana people are the ones that put it on. So that's all like the collectibles that you see at bars or antique stores and things like that. And so it's like a massive collection of beer memorabilia that is just sight to see.
Yeah it’s fantastic.
Cool stuff in there for sure. I mean, it is the only reason that you would probably ever head there. So it's great that it exists to like bring this little river community kind of back to life.
Yep. It's amazing how well it's done. You go there on the weekends and it's packed people going out for rides and coming from Iowa, Illinois, come up and spend a couple hours there. So if you get a chance, I would highly recommend it.
So it's almost like a day trip.
You could do that in a day from Stevens Point to Potosi's about three hours, spend a couple hours there. You can easily make that in a day's trip
Or make a weekend and do Dubuque, which is also gorgeous.
There we go.
Gosh, darn. There's like seven brewers down in the, in the Dubuque area nowadays. It's amazing how the, the brewing industry has just exploded over the past 20 years.
Brian knows.
Yes absolutely. I'm glad we have such a strong scene here too with Plover and Amherst. I mean, we, everyone kind of has their own specialty in Portage County Stevens Point area. So similarly like beer tourism, you can hit five to eight establishments depending on what you're looking for over the weekend. And yeah,
We don't have to go too far. Do we?
No,
My hat's off to you. One of my favorite beers is point Amber.
Oh, Awesome.
You get it out of the tap, and it's like, oh my God.
Yeah. That's a tasty one.
Yeah. pitcher of that bowling that's hard to beat.
Now that museum in Potosi is also opened year own, I believe. And...
It is.
Is there a fee, you know, if there's a fee to walking through there
There is it's minimal.
I think it is. There's a small price, you know, maybe five, 10 bucks at the most.
So definitely worth the trip, worth the trip for any of us beer connoisseurs would be a good little trip to it down in Potosi.
Yeah. Kids got me a neon sign from Potosi Brewery this summer.
Oh, that's awesome.
It goes along with my Point neon sign in the garage.
There you go.
Are they originals?
The Point one is the Potosi one is a repop.
Wow. That's great.
What does the point one look like?
It's got the mountains on it or trees. The trees.
That's a good one.
That's wonderful.
Yep.
That was a fun period of branding for the brewery is the true blue Wisconsin.
Yeah, that's it. Yep.
Well back in the van and back to Stevens Point, we go, All right, now that we've gotten back from our road trip, we're get down to business here. We've learned a lot about the Point Brewery. Now let's get down to what's important and that's the beer. So how many beers are available at one given time?
We're just talking about the point brand. There are five year round brews that we make, but we also have a number of seasonal brews, your Bock, Octoberfest, for example, our summer beer Lakeside. We have six of those. Our whole hog brand is largely the same five year rounds and a number of seasonals. And we've got some new stuff cooking for that brand. This year as well, cider boys has just two year rounds and then it filters out to a number of seasonals and we put out a new one to two flavors each year with cider boys.
Now when you say the point brand and nonpoint brand is that's cider boys is the non
Or Whole Hog.
It's a sister company. And a lot of it is just, you know, when you think of Point Special or Point Beer, it might be, oh, that's what my grandfather drank or that's what my aunt drank. So Whole Hog was a chance to do things that people that were used to point beer weren't expecting like our Whole Hog Pumpkin Ale. It's won five great American beer Fest awards, which is kind of like winning five Oscars. So it's like a Meryll Streep of beer. It's like very good. But I don't know if that beer would've done as well with just the Point name on it, because it might be like, well, I already drink Point Amber. I don't know if I wanna do that. So yeah, the pumpkin ale it's a big beer. It tastes like a pumpkin pie that gets you drunk. It's fantastic. So that's why Whole Hog is around.
So I gotta ask an obvious question considering the whole time in history here with Stevens Point Brewery, what's the most popular beer. What's the number one
Now in sales or in profit? I would, you know, like I have to think about.
Either way it's gotta be Point Special right?
Yeah. I think just the, the duration of Point Special, it's still our flagship beer. I mean, there are beers that have better margin than point special Point Special's a beer that we keep reasonably priced and we make it as efficiently as we can because it's a beer people have grown up with and love so much. Whereas some of our other beers, we throw tons of ingredients and a lot of time at them, and the raw materials themselves are super expensive. So we run the range from like Point Special being a fantastically priced craft lager to something that's very difficult to make craft beer that you can only find in Brooklyn.
Got it.
Excellent. So in the history, are there any flops? And when I say flops one that just didn't quite go off as planned or last very long.
It might have been a little bit ahead of its time, but not something that anyone in the area was asking for a Point Light.
Yeah. It was...
Point Light.
Point Light has been attempted at least twice that I know of. So it was attempted in the eighties because light beer was as a national beverage was really taking off. But then you're competing against like behemoths in the...
Miller light.
Yeah. Miller light. But like, like to me, it's similar to what's happening with seltzer now where it's like, there are the brands like you see smaller brands trying to do it. And it's just like why. And so I think point was trying to find their corner of the light beer market from what I understand. So they tried it in the eighties, into the early nineties, dropped it and then they brought it back in the 2000 for a few years. I remember drinking it in college. It wasn't great. I'm just gonna say that it was not like to the standard of the other products that I've ever had from Point. And so it didn't really last too long. So you can find, still find coasters and glasses and things like, oh, at antique stores and stuff. But I don't understand though, cuz like point's special to me, it's not a dark beer. I would say it's lighter than middle of the road even, but it's still, you know, it's a full bodied lagger and I guess, I don't know who would just want that.
Right, and super flavorful.
Right. Yep.
So the other item that you had mentioned earlier in our podcast here was soda. You now that played a significant part in the brewery's history, is that correct?
Yeah. So even going back all the way to the ownership of Andrew Lutz, which was 1867 and 97, his son owned a soda company, a soda bottler. And so that was more or less, how it was made in those days was the concentrated syrup was shipped up. He would dilute it with water and bottle. It that's kind of how it worked. So that was before prohibition. And then during prohibition, obviously they had to really get into the sodas. And so they made some of their own flavors, but then also bottled for orange crush and purple crush. And which I think was owned by Coke at that point. So they made sodas and then they made sodas a couple other times. I think they made it in the fifties for a while too. And then the modern lineup of sodas came in the early two thousands.
So that was always my understanding is that the soda business really allowed the Point Brewery to stay in operation throughout this longevity.
So you really give the soda business a lot of the credit for coming through prohibition?
Oh absolutely. Well, I mean a lot of breweries that was kinda like, well we have all this bott;ing equipment, what do we do with it? But again, I think it's a Testament to the local community and supporting cuz they could have bought soda from other breweries.
Is there a connection to the current soda line, to the soda that was being made at that point?
I don't believe so.
No. What were some of the and flavors that you found labels for in our archive?
Yeah it's just like just a cherry soda, grape soda, you know, like there's not like it's not as like creative as it is now with kitty cocktail flavor, soda or anything like that. But yeah, I think that soda in brewing history is important, especially for getting through prohibition for Point and they couldn't have done it. They didn't really have any other options to like different breweries. Did other things. There was a brewery Milwaukee that made snow plows. There was one in Oshkosh that became like cold storage. Cause they had all this refrigeration equipment and I don't think Point had the facilities to do something like that. And so they had to rely on soda.
Was Point the root beer, the first soda.
They came out. I will say it's delicious too.
Especially with ice cream.
Yeah. And all of 'em use real sugar. The root beer uses Wisconsin honey in it too. So it's a craft soda and we're really excited. We've got new flavors coming out with the soda line too. And yeah. Point like as a brewery, it's funny, we'll release a beer that has like fruit in it for example. And you'll have some folks on our Facebook page, like just go back to making maple wheat. It was great. But we try and make a different beer for everyone. And the soda is kind of the same way. It's like, how does my like eight year old get involved with like my passion for your brewery? It's like, oh we've got a kitty cocktail or we've got a Concord grape. So Cider Boys was another one of those. Like we're missing folks that enjoy beverages, whether they're celebrating or commiserating. So it's like we can make a hard cider and we can arguably make it better than any cidery in the country too. So yeah, we just try and make something for everyone
Now with the deep and rich history of the brewery itself, the building that still has the original walls, possibly foundation and everything. Yeah. Can we tour that?
You can tours are back open funny before COVID if you looked down like TripAdvisor or Yelp, the nuber one thing to do in Stevens Point besides maybe the sculpture park
Sculpture park is number three
Now.
Yeah. Point Brewery is one.
The green circle is two.
Well they're all awesome. So you can interchange em, it's a great deal too. It's $5. You get to visit the second oldest brewery in the country. You get three samples, you get a pint glass at the end. So it's more, it's almost just like a courtesy $5. Like make sure you come. Cause we can only take around X amount of people at a time. So now we've got even smaller numbers that we're taking around just due to COVID and it's also, the plant is incredibly loud right now, too. So there are different parts that we used to go through. So now we've got a different tour rout. So if you've done the tour before now is a great time to come check it out again. I mean then we're pouring beers right in the gift shop for folks that come on the tour.
Nice.
Any age limitations on the tour?
So all family.
Yeah. We've got soda that will serve. You can bring a kid in a Bjorn if you want. You just need closed toed shoes. Cause it is an operating brewery.
So Where do I go to see about getting on the tour?
You can go to Point Beer dot com or you can call our gift shop. And that number is right on the bottom of the web website or if you Google us. So Stevens Point Brewery.
So I've gotta ask a big question. I've had when I was doing my research is when and where and how did the pointy head dude come into play?
Well,
Our historian.
So there's a photograph of when Andrew Lutz owned the brewery and sitting in the front row. So it's all the employees and they have beers and there's a beer barrel in front of him. And in the front row on the end is this guy with just kind of this elongated shape in his head. And he's kind of just kind got a pointy chin. And I mean, there was nothing that was ever done with that forever until the late eighties is when the first iteration. And so the, the advertisements would have, so they made his real head was not pointy. He had a hat on.
Well I figured,
And nobody really knows who this guy is. So what...
So this guy's really famous, but he doesn't know it. Or his family maybe...
Well... We, we don't know what his thought is that there was another brewer in town named George Illenberger who was like a brew master, kind of like he would travel around. He owned a brewery at one point too, but he, he spent some time at the Lutz brewery and it kind of is like, well, he's dressed pretty nice. He's got a pocket watch. And so he would be not just an average worker. So perhaps he's a, that perhaps he's a relative of Andrew Lutz. We don't really know. But in the late eighties they had the, the advertisements where they had the pointy head. And it said like choosing the name was easy, making great products is hard or something like that. Yeah. And then, so I think it kinda limped along. And then in the early two thousands, when Jim and Joe bought the place, then they gave him the name of Nicholas Seapoint after Joe's kid and
Growing up I also as a connection to the cone heads on Saturday Night Live.
But yeah, that was just free advertising. Thanks Lauren Michaels.
Well, Brian, if you had to coin the future of the brewery in one sentence, what would you say?
Innovation quality and having fun.
That sounds good. Sounds like you'd be around for a long time.
Sure hope so. I, I don't think I'm gonna be there for another 165 years, but I'd like to be there for a large chunk of it. It's a great place to work.
Maybe somebody will find a picture of you one day and they'll turn you into the mascot.
Oh, Those poor eyeballs.
Well, today's podcast will go down as one of my favorite episodes because we got to talk about beer and what could be better than to talk to the resident experts, Brian and John, about the history, the present, and the bright future of the Stevens Point Brewery.
Thank you so much for having us this a lot of fun.
Tons of fun.
Thanks for being here.
Cheers, everyone.
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