The beer that made New Glarus famous

When people say “Only in Wisconsin,” it usually means things like grilling bratwurst for breakfast on a Packers Sunday, or the ubiquity of the Friday night fish fry.

For the New Glarus Brewing Company, “Only in Wisconsin” — its slogan — refers literally to the brewery’s distribution range. The decision to sell only in Wisconsin has proven a brilliant move: New Glarus is the largest craft brewery in the state; the 16th largest craft brewery and the 26th largest brewery, period, in the country.

The brewery’s best-selling beer is named after the Holstein cows that are the iconic heart of the state’s dairy industry. Its label art, drawn by brewery founder and president Deb Carey, has an unstudied charm. There is a sincerity, an almost Lake Wobegon-like earnestness to the New Glarus story. At heart, Deb and her husband, Dan, co-owner and brewmaster, are great believers in the American Dream. They are no-nonsense but funny, casual but driven, united yet individualistic, idealistic but pragmatic. Only in Wisconsin.

Let’s start with the cow

“Welcome to New Glarus, the home of Spotted Cow,” reads the sign outside the village of New Glarus, a quick 25-minute drive from the west side of Madison just over the Dane County line in Green County. The Swiss enclave, once better known for its annual Wilhelm Tell re-enactment and a thriving polka and yodeling scene, has for 25 years been the home of the New Glarus Brewing Company. The Careys famously picked New Glarus by drawing a circle in a 30-mile radius around Madison; Dan found the original brewhouse, an unused factory-warehouse, on a scouting trip. That building, now called the Riverside Brewery and home to New Glarus’ sour cave, is dwarfed by the state-of-the-art Hilltop building, which opened in 2009, where most of the production takes place. In 2018, New Glarus produced 232,000 barrels of beer. The quantity is even more remarkable since the brewery sells within the boundaries of only one state. “We are very successful,” Deb says. “To sell the amount of beer we do in a single state is unheard of.”

“We don’t think of ourselves as a typical craft brewery,” says Dan. “We view ourselves more as in the European model, particularly in Germany, where breweries have traditionally sold around the smokestack. That’s why we’ve limited our distribution. We try to brew beer that will be appreciated by all of our customers. Some breweries sell in 50 states and six or eight countries and sell as much beer as we do. That’s a different mindset.”

“Spotted Cow is legendary — iconic, even, to people from out of state,” says Green County tourism director Noreen Rueckert. Rueckert calls the brewery “a magnet for tourism. People want to see the home of Spotted Cow.” And the Careys are “rock stars in the brewing industry.”

Spotted Cow wasn’t even one of the first beers New Glarus brewed. They started with Edel Pils, a pilsner, and several other traditional styles. Wisconsin Belgian Red was an early success and an award-winning fruit beer, but it was the kind of bottle that’s great at the family Thanksgiving table, not one to claim a tap handle at the town tavern.

The brewery didn’t really start to take off until 1997, when Dan Carey started experimenting with a “farmhouse ale” made as it would have been in pre-Prohibition times — cask-conditioned, unfiltered, with Wisconsin hops. It’s not a strong beer at 4.8 percent ABV. It’s slightly sweet and neither overly malty, nor overly hoppy. It is, like all of Carey’s beers, balanced. For a beer that’s not at all in-your-face, it’s full of character.

It has become easy, in the onslaught of local craft beers these days, to take Spotted Cow for granted. Yet it is a hard beer to not like. In downtown New Glarus, at Puempel’s Olde Tavern (in business since 1893), it seems almost criminal not to order a fresh Spotted Cow with a swiss on rye (Green County swiss; New Glarus Bakery rye) — though you might also choose from a couple of New Glarus seasonals, or — but who would do this? — a Hamm’s. Order after order comes through during a recent weekday lunch rush: I’ll have a Spotted Cow.

Spotted Cow has over 90 percent market penetration across the state. Does Deb Carey know where the blank spots are — right down to, say, that one bar in Ashland that doesn’t carry New Glarus beers?

“I do, and that is part of our success,” says Deb, dressed casually in jeans decorated with bright embroidery and seated in a small conference room in the brewery during our wide-ranging interview in late fall. “We do literally look at every single account and what they purchased and what they didn’t purchase, and what can we do to earn their business?”

“We understand that beer is expensive,” says Dan, seated across the table and looking the part of the master brewer in a Tyrolean jacket. When a bar invests in a keg of beer and that beer doesn’t sell, “shame on us,” he says. “But if it sells, they’re going to buy another keg. If the tap is being pulled, that means the customers are buying the beer and they do that because they like the taste. Not because of our ad in the Super Bowl.”

Deb laughs at this. “I did just turn down buying an ad during the Super Bowl. I said, ‘What are you thinking? You know, we only sell in one state.’ And you apparently don’t know how cheap I am.”

Dan turns serious. “You could blow an entire year’s health insurance premiums on a 30-second Super Bowl spot. Or you could tell a company not to buy the ad, and cover health insurance.”

Before the cow

Success, they agree, was not easy and far from a foregone conclusion. It came from sacrifice, hard work and perseverance.

“There is no shortcut,” Deb says. “There is also no space for excuses,” adds Dan. “This fault, that fault. B.S. Adapt and overcome.”

They met in Montana, where Deb had moved with her family when she was a senior in high school (the family was originally from Milwaukee). A single mother, she was studying for her undergraduate degree in marketing and graphics while running her own small graphics business. When a new brewery started up in town, “I went down there to get some work, designing labels or to help with something.”

Dan arrived with a degree in food science from University of California-Davis to help start the brewing program. “We’re still doing pretty much the same things, and that was 1983,” says Deb.

Stints in places as far-flung as Germany, Portland, Oregon, and Colorado — where Dan worked for Anheuser-Busch — were hard on the family, now with two daughters. Deb, looking for stability and wanting to create a place where Dan could brew the kinds of beers he believed in, started exploring the feasibility of going out on their own. They went looking for a suitable site in Wisconsin because of Deb’s family roots and the state’s beer culture.

“When we started the brewery, there were not a lot of successful craft breweries,” Deb says. Finding equipment was difficult. Wholesalers weren’t interested.

“Budweiser was king,” says Dan. And the big breweries were more than willing to throw their weight around to squelch the newcomer. “We were dropped by wholesalers because of pressure from Anheuser-Busch.”

The question the Careys got when they started was if their beer was “going to taste like Huber? Or like Budweiser?” Deb remembers.

“Now people understand flavor and are not afraid to drink something that isn’t pale,” she says. “They seek out unfiltered beers, fruit beers — people are way more adventurous in their drinking. Now, the whole culture of local is an everyday conversation. That was not around when we started.”

Almost every raw material was difficult to obtain. “I couldn’t get label paper,” Deb says. “We couldn’t get people to sell us bottles. There were not hop varieties available. When we started, it was such an odd idea — you could buy what Budweiser is making their beer with, but, you want something different? That was a fight, a really amusing kind of fistfight.”

Dan is adamant on this point: “Deb runs the business. She is very much the entrepreneur; I am not. I’m a technician, an engineer. She used to get [business] calls from men, who’d say, ‘I wanna talk to your husband.’”

Deb was the driving force in getting New Glarus beers on accounts. “We used to call it running the gauntlet,” she says. “Some days were just like you’re getting punched all day, but you keep getting up.” She is still hands-on in every aspect of the business.

After finding paper for the labels, they had them printed in nearby Belleville; today they’re printed in La Crosse. “We’re really proud that all of the materials that we can buy in Wisconsin, we do. Our bottles, cans, six-packs, mother cartons, labels, 12-packs,” Deb says. When possible, malt, hops and fruit for the fruit beers come from Wisconsin.

“Most of the other malt comes from Minnesota,” Dan says. “Don’t hold it against us.”

Deb is the first woman to found and operate a brewery in the U.S., and the Careys are proactive in making sure women are in positions of authority throughout the brewery.

The rise in competition from other craft breweries in the last quarter-century seems less of a concern. “It’s good for everybody when people start to think about flavor and taste instead of a marketing image. There’s no downside,” says Deb.

The Careys prefer to focus on doing their own best work. “I have a saying that’s on everybody’s nameplate on their desk,” says Deb. “That to truly become #1 you must constantly strive to surpass yourself, not the competition. That’s how we look at it.”

In the Hilltop brewhouse, where visitors take self-guided tours, a large wall placard says, “A positive attitude leads to a positive outcome.” That’s not all.

“There’s a saying on the wall at our old brewery from Louis Pasteur,” says Dan. “‘Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.’”

Another favorite of Deb’s, via Thomas Edison: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

They value hard work. And, they stress, they value their employees.

“When Dan and I met, we were really poor,” says Deb. “We lived in a trailer. We understand when you have to choose between medicine and food.”

“For us, providing health insurance is not a cost, it’s an investment,” Dan says. They cover 100 percent of employee health premiums. “Just like we invest in our machinery, we invest in our people.”

Dan and Deb both refer to it as a moral imperative. “Workers trust us,” says Dan. “We take care of them, they will take care of us.” The brewery employs about 125 people. “We have a turnover that is less than 1 percent.”

Lower-alcohol beers

The spacious Hilltop Brewery is a tourist destination, with ample bus parking, a big tap room and gift shop selling New Glarus-themed glassware, Christmas ornaments, coasters, posters, bottle openers, clothes and toys, along with various trinkets having to do with the totem animals of their beers, spotted cows and fat squirrels.

New Glarus makes only five year-round beers: Spotted Cow; Two Women, a lager; Moon Man, a pale ale; Wisconsin Belgian Red, a cherry ale; and Raspberry Tart, another fruit ale. None has an ABV of over 5 percent. Even with the rise in popularity of higher ABV IPAs, New Glarus’ seasonals run more to traditional German styles, bocks and Oktoberfests; their series of small-batch Thumbprint beers leans toward sours, Dan’s lauded fruit beers and some Belgian styles. Over the years, the brewery has introduced 200-some beers.

“We don’t push strong alcohol beers,” Dan says. That’s not an accident. Deb has described her father as an alcoholic (although she clarifies that “he is mentally ill in some serious ways that made it worse than just being an alcoholic”). A career running a brewery was not the first thing on her mind.

“I did struggle with the decision,” she says. “Every once in a while somebody chews me out about it.” But, Deb says, “One of my personal goals was to change the way people think about drinking, so that it became less about image and volume drinking.”

Beer, as the Careys see it, is a food. “We try to be very simple in how we brew our beer,” says Dan, “so it is pure and natural.”

“Beer is made from agricultural ingredients,” says Deb. “It’s a beverage of moderation, and I feel good about that.” Even so, “God help anybody who is around me and starts to brag about how much they drank or if I see them drunk,” says Deb. “I will chew them out.”

“She will go into the bier garden and cut people off and give them food,” says Dan.

Deb: “‘You’re done, thanks for coming.’ To me, having a beer or two is great. Being drunk is absolutely unacceptable.”

American dream

Famously, Deb made several visits to Washington, D.C., during the Obama administration. Her involvement in the Champions of Change program and the small business council resulted in her being the guest of Michelle Obama at the 2013 State of the Union address. You can see Deb, beaming, in the photos from that night, seated behind the First Lady and between Apple CEO Tim Cook and then Oregon governor John Kitzhaber.

Dan was there, too.

Deb: “I was pinching myself —”

Dan: “It was surreal —”

“You’re in the caravan of cars —”

“All those places you’ve seen in photos —”

“And to be in those rooms —”

“— with paintings of Teddy Roosevelt and John Kennedy —”

“The [Obama administration] reached out to people like me and got in touch when I would win business awards,” says Deb. The email said, “‘We would love to get your thoughts on the economy, problems you are having, or things that you see could use some work, please join us, you know, r.s.v.p.’ I thought, what a crazy thing. You’re kind of expecting the janitor to show up. But it really was somebody, really taking notes.”

That method ensured that not all the business people consulted were Democrats, says Deb, which she terms “really smart.”

Coming forward when asked “has to do with good old-fashioned patriotism, whether it’s George Bush or Donald Trump,” says Dan.

“If Donald Trump called, I would go,” says Deb. “I would hold my nose, but I would go. If someone is reaching out for advice, it is your job to go and give them your thoughts. If they ignore you, shame on them. If the leadership of the country needs help, I would go, just like I would go fill sandbags if there’s a flood.”

At the meetings, Deb pushed the importance of increasing education in the skilled trades: “Not just computer things, but how to run robots, how to weld.” Both Dan and Deb are passionate about the topic, in letting kids know that these are jobs that are open, necessary and well-paid. Dan notes that in Germany, where he travels frequently for business, the average worker comes out of “shockingly well-funded trade schools. I would love to take a group of American politicians and show them the trade schools there.”

Next stage

The Careys are now both 58 and have achieved more than they had ever imagined with the brewery. It might seem like a good time to rest on their laurels, relax and have some fun.

What do they do in their spare time?

“I mean really, we work,” says Deb. “We mostly work,” Dan agrees.

Deb: “We go for walks in the woods.”

Dan: “We have a cabin up north —”

“In Door County — ”

“— as much as we can, we go up there, go for walks, go out to dinner —

“Although we don’t do that, very often. I cook.”

There is a long, almost uncomfortable pause.

Deb: “We read.”

Dan notes that “Deb’s an artist so she tries desperately to find the mental space to paint.” Deb chimes in that Dan likes to run and read technical brewing information.

For 2019, Dan is looking to have more fun with their wild fruit cave — “It’s not a big monetary part of our business, but we’re getting better and better at making our lambics, our sour beers.” They are also building a distillery on the grounds.

Most vacations are working vacations, checking out beer ingredients. A handful have been real getaways — “To Disney, when the girls were little,” says Deb.

Dan: “We went to the Loire Valley, that was a vacation.”

Pause.

Deb: “Fifteen years ago.”

There have been many offers to buy the brewery.

“We could have cashed out to obscene, ludicrous, stupid amounts of money,” Dan days. “But that would have been wrong. Evil.”

“I don’t think I could get drunk enough to live with myself, behaving that way,” says Deb.

Instead, in 2015 they created an ESOP, an employee stock ownership program, that will ultimately transfer ownership of New Glarus to their employees. It was a complicated, year-long process “but a satisfying thing,” says Deb. The Careys are “focused on longevity” and want to ensure the brewery will still be part of the community in 300 years.

“When we started, my goal was to make world-class beer, but that’s somewhat vain and egotistical,” says Dan, “and it is fleeting. It’s a goal that can never be completely satisfied.”

“Neither of us ever thought that we would be anywhere near this big,” says Deb. “That was not our dream. It was my goal to try to be part of the fabric of Wisconsin.”