In our April cover story, senior staff writer Ligaya Figueras spoke with 11 visionaries who have altered St. Louis’ culinary scene. They told us their experience in their own words. And all month long, we’ve been revealing the parts of the interview with these men and women that you didn’t see right here in Extra Sauce. First we brought you more from Joe Edwards, then it was Karen Duffy, Patrick Horine, Pat Shannon-VanMatre, Suchin Prapaisilp and Trip Straub. Now, we bring you more from Game Changers and co-founders of The Saint Louis Brewery Tom Schlafly and Dan Kopman.
Tom Schlafly, co-founder of The Saint Louis Brewery I like being involved in community activities. I’ve been active in a lot of civic boards. The brewery gives me a great platform. I have a standing that I wouldn’t have as one of 8,000 lawyers in St. Louis.
Maybe liberal arts majors are, in their DNA, explorers and experimenters, and more attracted by the romance than the science. I honestly don’t know. Majoring in liberal arts teaches one critical thinking, innovation, improvising. What you learn as a liberal arts major is very useful, but I’m not sure I would recommend that as a business plan for anyone else.
When we announced we were going to do an Octoberfest [in 1992], I got panicked phone calls from one of our neighbors and our insurance agent, who thought we were going to have 300,000 people in the streets on Locust.
The dedication of our north bar – we had it blessed by a rabbi, an Episcopal priest and a Catholic priest. Julius Hunter introduced the story for the evening news: “So a rabbi, a Catholic priest and an Episcopal priest go into a bar …”
The opening of Bottleworks was on April 7, 2003, the 70th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. The enthusiasm with which Maplewood embraced us was heartwarming.
Dan Kopman, co-founder of The Saint Louis Brewery When you build a brewery in the town that was then the world’s largest brewer, you don’t think about size. We’ve never had an aspiration to be the biggest. We never had aspirations to be a national brewer.
Some of the insanity can be related to not just creating a new brewery, but where we were trying to do this and the way we went about doing it: … we were a brewery and a restaurant in a part of town that not all St. Louisans were comfortable coming to. If we can create a place where, over time, people can get comfortable with the idea of something different, then that would provide a solid foundation. It was a very slow way to go about it. It means that, one customer at a time, we had to bring them here as opposed to putting the beer in all sorts of stores.
We only sold the beer on the premises, a little over 1,000 barrels the first year. Hopefully we’ll be at 40,000-plus this year. We sell 80 percent in the St. Louis metro area, the next 10 percent within 100 to 150 miles. The last 10 percent within 300 miles.
A business like this is a series of small victories.
We had to figure out the transition from a restaurant with a brewery attached to a brewery that has a restaurant on-site. In some ways, we are still going through that transition.
Drinking beer is about taste and occasion, and that’s what this place has been about since day one.
There’s room for many [local brewers]. We’re 1.5 percent of the market. The challenge: How do we individually and collectively earn the support, financially? How do we earn their dollars? It can’t be purely the fact that we’re local.
I spend a fair amount of time on legislative issues for small breweries because there are critical issues to us as a company and a lot of small brewers.
This article appears in April 2011.