Founded by brewing school graduate Brian “Spike” Buckowski and University of Georgia graduate John Cochran, Terrapin was built on brewing knowledge and credit-card debt. The brewery’s Rye Pale Ale won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival when it opened in 2002, but it relied on brewers in Maryland and elsewhere in Georgia to produce its beer under contract.
Terrapin wouldn’t get its own brewery for another five years, and only after taking money from a group of Athens investors. After a large expansion in 2008, Buckowski says he and Cochran ran into “an artistic difference” with the group of investors and decided to buy them out. They went to banks and other breweries for help, but the MillerCoors distributors who put their beers on taps and shelves suggested they speak to Tom Cardella, who was the head of MillerCoors’ newly formed craft beer segment, Tenth and Blake.
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MillerCoors and Tenth and Blake, then a joint venture between Molson Coors TAP, +0.92% and SABMiller US:SBMRF, loaned Terrapin the money to buy out its investors, but Cochran and Buckowski turned that loan into a minority stake in the company. Terrapin kept MillerCoors’ stake at less than 25% to stay within the confines of the Brewers Association craft beer industry group’s definition of a craft brewer. Last July, Cochran and Buckowski flipped the equity stakes and sold the majority of the business to MillerCoors — now owned solely by MolsonCoors after SABMiller was purchased by Anheuser-Busch InBev BUD, +0.98%.
Since then, Cochran took a buyout and purchased another brewery, UpCountry Brewing, in Asheville, N.C. Buckowski stayed behind and still owns a stake in Terrapin. Despite MillerCoors’ ownership, Buckowski says he’s still using all of the same malt and hop suppliers he did before and did his own legwork to get permission from “The Walking Dead” creator Robert Kirkman to make a pair of beers carrying the Georgia-based comic book and television series’ brand.
“People think there are these dump trucks full of cash dumping cash in our parking lot here, and it’s not like that at all,” Buckowski says. “We still have to run under our numbers, we still have to hit our numbers, we still have to look at EBITDA, all that stuff, so we still operate under Terrapin P&L. We don’t take more money from them; we have to pay it back.”
But some things certainly have changed. Terrapin’s releases have switched from bottles to almost exclusively cans. Terrapin could also stop leasing kegs and start using MillerCoors kegs. Most importantly, though, it gained increased access to MillerCoors’ distributors and, as a result, has more space and better positioning in grocery store and big beer store chains.
However, that advantage comes at a time when craft beer’s approach to sales and distribution is shifting dramatically in Georgia. Just this year, Georgia passed a new set of laws allowing breweries to sell beer directly from their own taprooms and brewpubs, as brewers can in many other states. That means they can now sell pints of beer, a case of beer per customer each day and bottles of special-release beers.
While that’s great for Terrapin’s taproom now, Buckowski acknowledges that such a law may have changed the way he did business if it had been in place years earlier. We spoke to Buckowski about Terrapin’s first year of ownership under MillerCoors, its expansion into the Atlanta Braves’ new ballpark and its alternate reality as an Athens-based brewer with small breweries all over the Southeastern United States:
MarketWatch: Georgia is getting ready to relax beer laws a bit and make it easier for breweries to sell beer out of taprooms and pubs and to self-distribute their beer. What has it been like for Terrapin growing in that more-restrictive environment?
Buckowski: For us, it’s kind of a double-edged sword.
When you look at it as part of the big picture, wow, we’ve been at it for 15 years being what I like to call the head of the plunger. Now that these laws have passed, will it help us? Absolutely, but we’ll also get a lot of new breweries in here that will have access to these laws that we never did.
For us, we’re totally looking forward to the new law changes, but for the past 15 years growing our business without those laws in place has been pretty challenging. We’re going to do, hopefully, about 84,000 to 85,000 barrels this year. But if these laws were in place 15 years ago, dollars to doughnuts we’d be well over 100,000 barrels this year.
That’s just the environment we grew up in. You had to look at distribution help because you couldn’t sell any products out of your door. Strategy-wise, I think you’ll see a lot of brewers starting up on a smaller scale because they don’t need a distribution house to distribute their beer. They can make a lot of money with people coming right through the door and put that money right back into their brewery.
For all these years, we had to rely on distribution and distributors to sell our product in the marketplace. It’s a good change, but I don’t think you’re going to see Terrapin change its business model that much because it’s different for us. We’re in 15 states and growing, where if I was starting up today I think my business plan would be different. I would rely on a lot of the sales coming right through my brewery because you make so much more money selling beer at your brewery
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MarketWatch: What part of that taproom sales model do you like best?
Buckowski: Personally, for me, just cash availability. When you’re selling a keg through a distributor and make 100 bucks, you can turn around and pour $5 pints. That’s approximately 150 pints, or 140 with foam, and that tasting room becomes a lot more valuable.
I think the biggest thing is infrastructure and growth. Putting that money back into the brewery and growing and not relying on banks and investors and things like that, I think the business can grow a lot quicker through the money that you’re making in your tasting room and through special releases, starting Sept. 1, than you could up until now.
If I was opening a brewery right now, I don’t know if I would build a brewery that would brew 150,000 to 200,000 barrels or maybe put a 5,000- to 6,000-barrel brewery in Athens, then put one in Atlanta, then put one in Nashville, then one in Florida. Where the laws are friendly to sell beer out of your taproom, I might want to look at something like that. I think it’s a better strategy because everyone’s so caught up with local beer, so how do you become relevant in a state where you’re not local?
MarketWatch: When a brewer opens facilities like those in your last example, it can be a boon for the surrounding community, but it can also make real estate a big portion of your overhead. Do you feel that craft beer has reached a point where the risk of real-estate cost is outweighed by the rewards offered by direct sales in multiple satellite taprooms?
Buckowski: In some areas, yes.
But if you’re in a part of town that really needs redevelopment, I would be going to those cities and their officials and say “Hey, we’d like to revitalize this area.” If you’re taking over an old jean factory that’s abandoned and in a part of town that’s really not growing, you may become the anchor. As you grow your business, other businesses might come in.
Let’s take Nashville, which is one of the hottest Southeastern cities right now: Would you take real estate in downtown Nashville where it’s $400 a square foot, or would you go out into an area that will be growing and spend half as much there? It’s kind of “yes” and kind of “no” at the same time.
MarketWatch: Did the success of satellite tasting rooms factor into Terrapin’s decision to open a location at the Braves’ new home in Cobb County’s SunTrust Park?
Buckowski: That was just a fantastic opportunity for us to get into the Braves’ stadium.
Working with the Braves and Mizuno and MillerCoors on that whole project was just fantastic. It’s basically a stadium surrounded by restaurants, shops and bars called The Battery outside the stadium. People can go there hours before the game and have dinner before going to the stadium, or they don’t even have to go to the stadium. If you had that opportunity to put a little brewpub in a baseball stadium that gets 80 home games a year or so, that stadium holds 40,000 people. Having the opportunity to market your beer to 20,000 to 30,000 people a night was powerful stuff and it was definitely a big win for us.
MarketWatch: How much of this was in your field of vision when you first started Terrapin. Did you imagine one day getting into the old Turner Field?
Buckowski: No, man, c’mon. I started this brewery out of my bathtub.
When I was brewing Rye Pale Ale back in 1994 or 1995, even before I went to brewing school, I had no idea. I knew I didn’t want to be in my current line of business pushing audio-visual carts around hotels. I basically took a leave of absence and went to brewing school in late 1996, became a professional brewer and started in the brewing industry.
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Obviously the industry has changed so much. When my partner and I first got into this business, we put everything on a credit card. We didn’t have a brewery of our own until we were five years into the business. We were contract brewing in Atlanta and then contract brewing in Maryland before we were hooked up with these investors that helped us start this brewery in Athens.
Some people still do start this way, but I see a lot of breweries — whether they’re ex-Coca-Cola guys or ex-investment bankers or just a bunch of friends with a bunch of money — throw $5 million or $10 million at a brewery and go. Times have definitely changed, and I’m not saying people don’t start breweries on credit cards these days, but there are a lot more popping up now than there were when we started in 2002.
MarketWatch: One of your neighbors in Georgia, SweetWater, had to sell a share to private-equity firm TSG Consumer Partners to keep growing. They now sell 220,000 barrels in nearly 20 states. For your growth strategy and SweetWater’s to remain viable for smaller brewers, will they have to sharpen their elbows and sell a stake to outside investors as well?
Buckowski: I guess it all depends on where the money comes from.
I see a lot of brewers start out with a lot of money, but I don’t care how rich you are: I don’t think you want to lose money. My concern is: “How does everybody fit on the shelf?” On-premise is one thing: It’s just rotation nation. You’ll be on a tap handle one week and won’t be there again until three weeks later because these bars are just rotating beers in and out so quickly that you can’t get a stronghold anymore. You used to be able to stay on a good year. So how do you make money that way?
Off-premise, are the Krogers and Publix of the world making their shelf space that much bigger? Are they going to keep adding rows and rows of beer? I wouldn’t assume so. I’d assume, at some point, they would say: “We need our produce section back; we can’t have beer in our produce section.” That’s going to be a challenge, as well as how much beer is going to fit on the shelves. If you’re a mom-and-pop package store, can you bust down a wall and add another 6,000 or 7,000 square feet for all these new breweries coming in?
Do I think there’s more room in Georgia for breweries? Sure, and the new law is going to help. But I would start a lot smaller than I did before. With the laws changing now, you can make a lot more money in your taproom than you did before, but a lot of breweries are going to be squeezed off the shelf because there’s just no more room.
MarketWatch: There’s been a lot of discussion about “independence” in craft beer lately, especially after the Brewers Association created an “Independent” seal for craft brewers’ packaging. When you look at the time you worked with your original investors and compare it to the time you’ve spent with MillerCoors, when did you feel the most unencumbered?
Buckowski: I think if you spoke to me five years ago about selling the business to a larger brewery, I would have said “you’re crazy.” It just wan’t happening and just wasn’t out there.
But I think you have to look at each individual’s situation. When we sold the majority last year, we were doing 55,000 to 60,000 barrels. I call that the Bambi stage, where you’re not this cute little local brewery that’s doing 2,000 to 3,000 barrels and is the cute new guy on the block. But you’re not a regional brewery either. You’re just this gangly brewery where if your canning line blows up, it can put a big dent in your profits and hurt you pretty quickly.
So where do you want to get your cash flow? Is it private equity? That’s fine, but they’re going to be looking for a return in three to five years. Are you just going to get sold in another three to five years? Where does the money come from? Are they into fracking, do they invest in mink coats?
Investors? Yeah, investors are great if you can get along with them, but you’re going to have to pay them back, too. Then you look at strategic breweries and I kind of laugh. Because when I look at private investment, it’s great, but let’s say I took $2 million from private investment. That’s all fine and good, but let’s say I call him back and say: “Hey, man, I’ve got a stuck fermentation on this lager. Can you help me out or can I send something to the lab for you to look at?” I feel very comfortable with the MillerCoors organization because that’s what they do: They do beer.
I can pick up the phone and I can ask about hops, ask about malt and get beer tested. I don’t know why there’s a big dustup about getting money from a brewery vs. private equity. Me personally, I want to be in a beer house. These guys have distribution, they know how to make beer and those are the people I want to be with. I’d rather be with a partner that knows and makes beer.
Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.
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