JR Wheeler has been co-0wner and national accounts manager at Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado, since the beginning of 2015, and has been with the company since 2003. Originally aspiring to own and operate his own restaurant as the chef and kitchen manager, it can be seen that JR has fared pretty well in a field that wasn’t even his top focus to begin with.
I had the pleasure of taking a private tour around the brewery with JR while asking him some questions about Odell, his thoughts on the craft beer industry and who he is as a person. I even got to taste a few beers that have never been released or tasted by anyone other than the people who brewed them.
This Q&A has been slightly edited for minor errors.
Hornaday: What job did you start out doing when you first came to the company?
Wheeler: I started with the brewery doing whole sale distribution and was delivering all of the kegs and shipments to stores and restaurants all throughout Fort Collins. About three years after I started, they moved me into Southern Colorado and I represented everything from Arapahoe Road to the New Mexico border, and then out to Utah and Kansas.
Hornaday: How big do you want to get here at Odell?
Wheeler: That’s a really good question. You know, we really, really try to go deeper into every market instead of wider. I think if you were to ask any of the bar managers or general restaurant managers in Colorado who they see the most of any brewery rep, I would hope they say it’s us because we have so many people in the state.
We are going to do about 135,000 barrels of beer this year out of our current set up, so we have tons of room to grow. We also just opened up our 14th state last week when we went to Illinois, so we are selling a bunch of beer in a very small area. We try to grow at about 10% a year regardless of what the industry does. The last couple of years we have been on the lower end growth only because the industry was booming at 18–20% every year. Last year, craft brewing hit a little bit of a brick wall and only grew at about 8%, but here at Odell we grew about 10.5%, so we are very happy with that. Our goals this year are to grow about 7% since craft is only projected at around 5–6%.
We would much rather own Fort Collins, Larimer County and Colorado first and then begin to branch out from there.
Hornaday: I noticed that you actually worked for Odell outside of Colorado in Phoenix. How was working there a different experience than working at the actual brewery itself?
Wheeler: When I moved to Arizona in 2009, I was the first person to not live in Colorado and work for the brewery. Now we have about 15–18 co-workers that live outside of Colorado that represent our beers in the rest of the market, two of them being in Arizona.
Hornaday: Have you ever thought about opening up another brewery in a different state?
Wheeler: No. No, not production wise. We can do everything right out of here. We don’t have aspirations to be a nationwide brewery, it doesn’t make sense to us at this point. There is so much good beer out there, so why even try to go into someone’s backyard where you could possibly make a big splash when you get there, but then quickly level out? It wouldn’t really do us any good.
Now, we have talked about potential small pilot breweries. We’ve talked about things like that in Chicago and maybe Denver at some point, just little five-barrel brewing systems to give people an experience of the process. As far as production wise, everything is going to come right out of this building. It’s just a lot easier to do things that way for now, we aren’t big enough for anything more. Now in 10–15 years… Who knows? If we are suddenly in 40 states and it makes sense to have a facility on the east coast, then maybe. But it’s not where we are thinking right now.
Hornaday: Do you do a lot of sales out of the brewery and your taproom? Is this going the busiest place to come to get your beer?
Wheeler: *Waving his hand to the packed taproom* Well, this is obviously our taproom and it is a pretty popular place for the most part. It has caused some ruffles with some local bar owners because we are much busier right now than they are, but we try to be very cognizant of that. We are the most expensive place in town to buy our beer. Do not come here to get a six pack, just go to a liquor store. We match the highest price in town, so if a big store is selling it for $8.99 but a little market on the corner is selling it for $9.99, we are going to be $9.99. We truly don’t want to compete with our customers, which is why we also don’t have a restaurant and are not in the food business.
Hornaday: Speaking of the food business, your education and background is in that area, correct? How did you end up in this business?
Wheeler: Yeah, I actually graduated from the Culinary Institute of America back in 1995 and I’ve been cooking since I was 12. I opened up the Steakout Saloon in Old Town with the owners of the Trailhead Tavern in August of 1999. But when we cut the menu down significantly in 2003, I decided that I didn’t need to be there anymore.
When I started here in 2003, Doug [Odell] asked me, ‘Why do you want to work here?’ I said that besides it being really cool, I would like to hopefully someday run the restaurant here when you open one, and he said, ‘Oh, we’re never going to do that. I have an account right across the street that buys our beer, and if I open a restaurant and take 20% of his business, how will I convince him to keep buying our beer?’
It all makes complete sense from a business stand point, too. We try not to infringe on their customers. Our worst reviews on Yelp either say that we close too early and we have a fast bar clock, but its because we want you out of here at 7 o’clock. Go drink our beer downtown, plus its cheaper.
Hornaday: So do you do anything along the lines of food trucks, or just no food at all?
Wheeler: We actually have food trucks every day. We have to have something here for people to eat, so we have a rotating schedule of the same people every day of the week. It gets slower in the winter time but crazy in the summer, so we say if you want to have you food truck here in the summer, you have to stick with us through the winter.
Hornaday: As the co-owner of a craft brewery, what are your thoughts on Anheuser-Busch InBev and what they’ve been doing over the years?
Wheeler: They are a necessary evil. Where we struggle with people like AB InBev is when they buy Breckenridge [Brewery], Four Peaks, Golden Road, Elysian. They buy these breweries whether or not they’re making good liquid, that’s not the point, but they have the marketing arm to be able to get that beer everywhere. That leaves us out of a lot of places, so we are still trying to really push the independence of the market. You know, you’re standing in a building that’s owned by six majority principle owners and 135 co-workers. We are all owners in this company, and we have no intention whatsoever of ever selling out to a group like that. We are here because of the independence and how we like to do things.
Do I like them? No. Do I go over to their brewery and drink their beer? Yes. I get free coupons from them every month, so each month I will go over and drink that free pint of Goose Island IPA, not buy anything else, and I’ll be on my way.
Hornaday: Well how could any of us turn down a free beer?
Wheeler: Exactly.
Hornaday: Do you ever collaborate with customers or create customized beers for special occasions?
Wheeler: We do a lot of brews with accounts. Say we have a group that has one location and has been a customer of ours for 10 years. If they have an anniversary coming up, we’ll congratulate them and ask them to come brew a beer with us. People that get married here will also brew a beer with us. Old Chicago is a great example. Last year we did a brew for them called ‘The Big Cookie’ which was a vanilla oatmeal stout that we tried to get to taste just like their big cookie dessert. It’s just a nice way for us to give back to our accounts.
Hornaday: I’ve always been a huge fan of Odell’s artwork on bottles, packaging, and everything else. Do you hire and collaborate with artists on the designs or are they all created in-house?
Wheeler: For any of our 12 ounce bottles or cans that go into 6 packs or 12 packs, we have an agency that we work with in Denver that we collaborate with on the idea. We also have an artist living in San Fransisco that we privately go through. We will send her a creative brief and let her know what we are doing, and she has designed all of our labels. For our 750ml’s, we do those ourselves in-house.
Hornaday: What is your favorite beer that you brew?
Wheeler: Oh, that is tough. It’s like asking me who’s my favorite kid! Obviously the cheesy answer is the one I’m drinking right now, but that isn’t totally true. I am a huge fan of Levity, I love our amber ale. My favorite style is pale ales. I’m drinking Drumroll right now, but my favorite would have to be either Levity or our Five Barrel.
Hornaday: What kind of identity do you want Odell to be associated with? When someone hears “Odell,” what do you want them to think about your brand?
Wheeler: A couple things, actually. First off I’d want them to think of quality. I think we make some of the best liquid that there is out there. The beer you drink here is going to taste like our beer that you would drink anywhere else, and that is really what we strive for. We want to be known as innovative and also good stewards to the environment. Making the beer is extremely taxing on the environment, and we are down to a 3.6:1 ratio of barrels of water needed to produce a barrel of beer, almost half of the average 7:1 ratio.
We want to be fun as well, I mean look around the taproom. When you walk in here, we want the environment to embody that. And last but not least, we want to be known as good partners. We strive to operate efficiently, practice good ethics and always be true to our customers. We have this new program called the Brew-Bro Brew-Sis where they pair tenured employees with brand new co-workers. I was the first one to have a brew bro, and I told him this saying I have that goes, ‘One, don’t be an asshole. And two, if you feel like you are taking advantage, you probably are.’ I think that is a pretty good way to live. We are all here having fun and it’s just beer, it’s not rocket science. We just want to sell our beer and have a good time with it.
