Big accolades of late for Bearpaw River

Wasilla’s Bearppaw River Brewing Company’s taking first place at this year’s Anchorage Press Dr. Fermento’s Beer Bracket Challenge caught some people off guard, including the brewers and owners — not that they don’t make good beer.

Standing out against 35 other beers across broad categories that include breweries with long standing reputations of making the best of the best is indeed an accomplishment. More interesting is the brewery’s Mat Maid Milk Stout besting their own and Odd Man Rush’s IPA, and King Street’s noteworthy Hefeweizen. IPAs reign supreme in the beer world today while stouts have taken a patient back seat as beer continues to evolve, even 35 years after the start of the craft beer industry. By the way, Bearpaw River Brewing Company's only been around since December of 2015.

Four brothers — Jake, Jed, James and Jack founded the family brewery and it's been growing ever since.

"You know, when I was a homebrewer, I won some awards in entered some competitions to get feedback about my beer. Our win at 'Koots a couple of Saturdays ago was particularly special because it's the first competition I've won as a professional brewer,” says head brewer Jake.

Jake especially liked that it was the populist vote, both whittling down the brackets and especially at the final around at Chilkoot Charlie's that brought the award home, not a panel of seasoned judges. Judges drink the beer, too, but it's people that keep breweries in business and allow them to grow.

"I appreciated that we got voted in and that it was the people that got to pick what they liked, not pre-conceived notions,” says Jake. The panel to select Alaska’s best beer was sourced from the crowd. “It’s a great venue. Any local competition or state competition is good for promoting the industry; that’s what’s important.”

The April 10 Brewer’s Association press release announcing that Bearpaw River Brewing Company is one of America’s 50 fastest growing small and independent craft brewing companies in 2017 shouldn’t come as a surprise then, but it did to the Wades and it did to me too. I figured more “noticeable” breweries like Denali Brewing Company, 49th State Brewing Company, King Street or Midnight sun might earn this distinction; all have expanded in big ways over the last couple of years.

“To be honest with you, I haven’t read the stats. We more than doubled our capacity from 2016 to 2017. No, we don’t make as much beers as Midnight Sun, Denali, Kenai River, King Street or others, so maybe it’s a percentage of increase,” says Jake.

The statistics are telling, though. Bearpaw River is one of the breweries that drove the overall median growth of small, independent craft breweries to 216 percent in 2017 and pushed the median brewery size from 284 barrels to 963 barrels last year. We Americans love our craft beer; that’s for sure.

Bearpaw River’s growth isn’t part of some protracted plan to take over the brewing world. Instead, growth is in response to customer demand and a careful approach to meeting it.

“I was telling James yesterday that as long as people keep drinking our beer, we’ll ramp up to meet the demand,” says Jake. But this growth isn’t spastic.

“I wouldn’t say our focus is 100 percent on growth; the focus is on doing what we are doing the best and we’ll let growth follow that,” he says. “That’s what we’ve done so far and it works so it’s what we’ll continue to do in the future.

There’s risk in growing too quickly. “There are so many things going on in a brewery, particularly in stages of fast growth. Orders come in from distributors that we have to meet, new beers come out, and production is very high which can create room for errors and mistakes. It would be easy to steer away from the most important thing which is making sure that the beer that’s going out is what we want it to be which is high quality and consistent,” says Jake.

James, who lives in England and is the marketing guy in the bunch, agrees. “We’re chuffed about this distinction, of course, but to be honest, we only care about growth insofar as it’s the goodness inside the glass that’s leading more and more Alaskans to pick up a Bearpaw River brew,” he wrote in a brewery press release after hearing the news.

Teaming up with local distributor Specialty Imports increased demand logarithmically. “The next step in the brewery’s evolution – and this was a big step – was our partnership with the awesome team at Specialty imports who started out selling kegs of Frontiersman IPA, Mat Maid Milk Stout and Sluice Box Belgian Ale from Fairbanks down to the Peninsula,” writes James.

In 2017, the brewers installed more tanks, and most importantly a canning line toward the end of the year. This pushed the brewery’s capacity to just over 2,000 barrels a year. “We more than doubled our capacity from 2016 through 2017,” says Jake.

Canned craft beer is important to Alaskans that like to take their beer with them in our intensely outdoor lifestyle here. Adding a canned beer format allows a brewery to get its beer in the hands of more people, especially with a system that allows on-the-spot labeling rather than being burdened with having to buy 100,000 or so pre-printed can blanks.

“One of the fun things we get to do in addition to producing our core lineup is canning one-off, small batch beers, which is possible with putting our own labels on the cans. We did that out of necessity; we’re a small business first, despite being named one of the fastest growing. It allows us to be creative on a budget,” says Jake.

Indeed, this flexibility allows the brewers to have fun rather than just crank out production flagship beer. “With the system comes the ability to brew, say, a Mexican lager or something like that. It gives us new ideas for beers and labels. We have a lot of fun with the canner and the canning process. It’s been challenging but it’s still feels really fun and new.”

The canning line pushes Bearpaw River beers into more consumers’ hands than just having beer available at the brewery, at local draft accounts and in bomber bottles in liquor stores. “There are people that go to bars and restaurants and there are people that like bombers, but there are a whole lot more people that buy six packs. It’s another route to get the beer in the hands of more people,” says Jake. “It’s just so cool,” he says.

Bearpaw River’s recent win in the Beer Bracket challenge and their distinction as one of America’s fastest growing small, independent craft breweries is inspiring to me. Small breweries really do define the craft brewing scene in Alaska and increasingly put us on the map in a rapidly evolving beer world where quality and demand drive growth, not the other way around.