The story of craft beer in Chicago in 2014 is the story of Lagunitas. The Petaluma, Calif.-based company opened its first Chicago facility this summer, the largest brewery in Illinois. Behind the you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it 300,000-square-foot Douglas Park factory is Tony Magee, Lagunitas’ unconventional and outspoken founder. Though he runs the fifth largest brewery in the country (based on Brewers Association’s 2013 data), Magee, 54, is emphatically not a typical CEO. He curses. He plays in a band called Alice Drinks The Kool-Aid. His Twitter (@lagunitasT) is a stream-of-consciousness jumble of industry rants and fragmented poetry. Some might call him a bit crazy, but they’d be wrong if they didn’t follow that with “… like a fox.” I sat down with the Magee, a Chicago native, over a glass of Brown Shugga ale to reflect on Lagunitas’ breakout year in Chicago and what’s ahead for 2015. [email protected] @redeyeeatdrink
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Describe your 2014.
It was like this transcendental, existential experience. Synergies and luck and good fortune and the good will of people at all levels of the city just coalesced around this thing. If I told the story of everything that happened exactly right for this to occur in the time frame it did, you’d think I was making it up. I would float from this one bit of good fortune to the next, hoping not to disturb it by imposing my own will on it.
How was opening your Chicago brewery different than opening the brewery in Petaluma?
Our tale of coming up in Petaluma is that the [bleep]ing city didn’t get it. The city at first thinks you’re cute, and then they think you’re a big problem because of traffic, and then they think you’re a polluter and then a neighbor complains … When I came here from Petaluma, though, I had all of those bad experiences under my belt. You know what the misunderstandings will be and you know which fights to pick and which to work around. The good news is that the success of this is going to make it a lot easier for everyone that comes after us. I hope they stay friends and don’t decide to take up arms against us.
Why didn’t the city of Chicago give you as hard of a time as Petaluma did?
Good fortune, among other things. We came with a very simple story to the city. The reason why it had to be here and why we had to move so quickly was because I had to add capacity beyond Petaluma. We weren’t shorting orders, but we were on the verge of a disaster. We [could] hardly add tanks quickly enough. But if I built it there, I was going to be forever shipping beer across two mountain ranges and a desert just to get it to Iowa. I had to put it here very quickly. It had to happen fast. I knew I could come to Chicago and find a building and I thought that I understood enough about the culture here that we could just step in and start making friends. It was really a capacity question and it had to happen here in a short window.
Lagunitas’ motto is “Beer speaks. People mumble.” What are you trying to communicate through your beer?
I don’t think we’re even in the beer business. Maybe we never were. We’re in the tribe-building business. Tribes are held together by ideas and shared stories, so we’re trying to build excitement around ideas that we think are interesting and stories we think are important. And we’ll see if we can’t find people who are like us and a little tribe forms around that.
Is it possible to be brought into that tribe just by drinking a beer?
On all of the beer labels, there are stories, because I want to create lots of points of interaction to animate the liquid with the story of the humans that are involved with it. I don’t really want it to be a glass of beer; I want it to be a little adventure.
How tough was it to find a building this big?
There were all sorts of interesting buildings at 15,000 square feet and I was looking for 150,000. If I went out to Cicero or Berwyn or Bedford Park, I could find buildings like that relatively easily. But I wanted the label to say Chi-[bleep]ing-cago. We saw 20 buildings, none of them were really going to work out well. The realtor said, “Tony, there’s one more building I know of, but the owner’s very, very picky, but I can show it to you.” So we drove around the back, walked in the door right down there behind those tanks, and I was like “Oh my God. This is the building.” It was like love at first sight.
You are a musician and an artist and you seem to embrace DIY culture. How do you reconcile that with owning something of this magnitude? Is there a tension there?
The DIY is pretty much alive and well because the business is growing so fast that even though there’s a large organization with H.R. and marketing and 11 people in the finance department, I can’t have anything to do with that. But out here on the fuzzy edge, the front edge, the nose cone, it’s DIY every day. That’s something I work hard to do is keep myself from being too immersed in all of the day-to-day stuff so I can do the same stuff I did on the first day [of owning Lagunitas].
What do you hope for in 2015?
Getting these two teeth redone. I’ve got a crown over here and I’d like to get my teeth redone. But really, I’d like to take a little break in 2015. There’s no rest for the wicked, though. We’re all so knee-deep in trying to determine how fast we have to move on a third facility. There’s reasons to build it on the West Coast, whether it’s all the way up in Idaho or all the way down in Los Angeles, because Petaluma is the brewery that will run out of capacity before this one does.
Anything else you’d like to say?
They say fish swim in water but they don’t know what water is. They only know what “not water” is. For us, what’s the water that we brewers are all swimming in here? I like to pull back far enough so I can see the water. The global beer industry is being handed over to the next generation of brewers. You have to just keep your eye on the ball so that you’re standing there to catch it rather than worrying about who else is trying to catch it, too.
Twitter: @redeyeeatdrink
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