SeasonalSELECTIONS - Origlio Beverage

BrewerHIGHLIGHT
Tony Magee
Lagunitas Brewing Co.
LAGUNITAS IS KNOWN FOR
its unadulterated representation
of bold West Coast brews with
quirky names and label designs.
Equally famous is its non-conformist
founder, Tony Magee who has
been called a brewing genius with
a great sense of humor. Magee
denies both of these assertions.
The brewery was established in
1993 when Magee transitioned
from a career in printing and
music to one in the craft beer industry. Twenty years later,
Lagunitas, located in Petaluma, California, is undeniably
a success story. It is one of the fastest growing craft breweries in the
country (the 6th largest in America) and one of the most beloved. Later
this year, the new Lagunitas brewery, located in Chicago’s Douglas
Park neighborhood, will be fully operational. The 300,000-square-foot
brewery with a 1.7 million barrel capacity, will nearly double the
brewery’s production when it opens.
“Humor and optimism are the only philosophies that justify even getting
out of bed in the morning, which I do almost every day,” says Magee.
His humor and creativity shine through in many facets of his work
including the cool, retro Lagunitas beer labels, which he designs. “The
reason they have a retro look could be because I’m a total amateur
designer and have no idea what I’m doing.”
As a musician, Magee sees many similarities between music and
brewing, “Everything in life is a form of music. Music is a language
without words, one that everyone understands regardless of culture or
language. I see our brand as an extremely long-form composition; a
20-year long symphony.” As far as choosing which styles of beer to
brew, Magee again uses the symphony analogy, “If you’re lucky, and
we have been so far, then the composition takes on a life of its own
and the page talks back to you and tells the composer what to write
down. We certainly do things that are interesting to us, but we are also
very much in the world, so we listen to it as well. In more ways than
not, I’d say that our customers have been driving the bus and writing
the recipes from the very beginning and we also like what they seem to
want. Was that as confusing for you as it was for me?”
Magee’s latest opus is his new book, Lagunitas Brewing Company, The
Story; So You Want To Start A Brewery…? “It is as true as the day is
long,” he says. “The stories are ones we have told a thousand times
and I just wanted to write them down. When you’re living your life, you
cannot connect the dots looking forward, but looking back, the path
seems obvious. By writing it down and seeing how even the hard stuff
was all so logical and even inevitable, I think it gives us more
confidence in our decisions going forward into the murky future. I also
thought that beer lovers might enjoy a peek behind the curtain into the
fear and rage that sometimes give birth to something better than itself.”
Although he
has not
actually brewed
for 19 years,
Magee created
the recipes until
recently. “I
realized long ago
that there are
people who are far
better physical
brewers than I ever
was. But, as in
music, if I compose a
string quintet, I might
have written the notes
on the page, but I
should not pretend to
also play cello or French horn if I expect to
hear it back the way I wrote it down!”
Magee is excited about the new brewery in
Chicago. He explains how the idea came
about. “My wife, Carissa handles all of the
brewery scheduling and trucking logistics.
One morning she was bemoaning the price
of shipping beer east, during California
harvest times and I asked her how many
trucks were now east-bound each week.
She said ten. I asked how much we paid
for a reefer-truck to NYC and she said six
grand. Chicago is a little less and Florida is
a lot more. So, I started thinking, ‘our east
coast markets are mostly growing at 80% to
150%. Ten trucks now will be 20 next year.
Six thousand times 20 trucks is
$120,000… Whoa.’ I entered a $120k
payment into a mortgage calculator and
saw that I could borrow more than enough
to build a brewery with that amount.
Chicago was the obvious choice since I
knew the landscape there, but it is also the
trucking rail center of North America and a
beautiful city with a great 100-year-old,
beer-loving culture. It seemed obvious. A
week later I went and found the perfect
building and signed a lease right then and
there. Now you know the story.”
For the entire interview
with Tony Magee visit
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