The potential of a major winter ice storm KO’ed the original date of Cabin Fever, a popular, in-house Schlafly beer festival held on the spacious parking lot of the Bottleworks. While that may’ve disappointed folks who woke up that day to a largely-ice-free St. Louis, the pushback to Saturday, January 21 allowed attendees a chance to check out a brand-new interactive feature at Schlafly’s Maplewood brewery.
Featuring the entire, expansive portfolio of the Schlafly brand, the brewery’s roughly six-dozen core and seasonal beers can now be explored on a giant, digitized board near the facility’s Crown Room. On Friday, the day before the Cabin Fever re-launch, a trio of Schlafly representatives - James Pendergraft, Wil Rogers, and Stephen Hale - took time to meet with both members of the press and passing-by patrons, each of them giving their take on both the wall and the beers presented on it.
And while all three were able and knowledgeable about its features, any discussion about Schlafly beer has to include some real time with Hale, now an “ambassador brewer” for the company and a gentleman who goes waaaay back to the beginnings of the operation. Talking regional brewing trends with Hale is like trading notes with Noah about animal husbandry; you know you’re getting the source material.
Eyeing the wall, Hale (right) remembered that when beer began pouring at the Downtown St. Louis Tap Room in the brewery’s first full year of 1992, back when “we had a dozen taps. Now, that wasn’t a dozen beers; we had six beers on one side and the same six on the other.” Even as early as that, Hale remembers sitting with Tom Schlafly and Sara Choler (later Sara Hale, his wife), looking at brewing calendars and dreaming about future “sours and meads and ciders.”
Hale neatly sums up the brewing game, from then-to-now, by noting that “there were 312 breweries in the United States when we opened. There are roughly 5,100 breweries operating in this country today and there are 7,200 permitted, which means that you have another 2,000 that have the paperwork to open, and are working hard to get things like money and equipment and people to work at them. While we opened with around 300 breweries in the entire country, now, within a one-hour drive of St. Louis, you have about 62 breweries
Hale stresses the word about there, as St. Louis is being treated to a new brewery every few months, some offering hyper-niche fare, others attempting a wider array of styles.
Seasonality, of course, adds to every brewery’s release schedule, too, and Schlafly’s long been involved in that world. As Hale said, “I don’t think there’s a brewer out there that does not do seasonal beers. Which means that somebody, sometime will not be able to get that seasonal beer at that time of year. That’s unfortunate, but it’s also keeping alive the interest in seasonality, which I think is really important.”
(Mind you, as he said “unfortunate” here, Hale varied his voice and titled his head, indicating that he doesn’t think seasonals being off-tap is unfortunate, at all; it’s just life.)
Peering at the board, which is a still a work-in-progress, Hale noted that the only info that he found lacking were the specific release dates of some of the seasonals; it’s info that he said can, and will, be added soon. Everything else, though is pretty much represented on the board, from each beer’s IBU and ABV to basic, descriptive information about flavors and ingredients.
Pendergraft, catching onto that conversational riff, noted that the idea for the board “came in June of last year” and that info like seasonal release dates could easily enough be added. Like Oz parting the curtain, Pendergraft asked a few folks standing near the board to step around a wall, pointing to a medicine cabinet-sized hole inside said wall. Inside it, a blend of routers and wires and digital do-dads were housed; here was the expansive wall’s compact brain.
Noting that the board was “an original idea,” not a copycat of another brewery’s work, Pendergraft figured that the information was something of interest to both beer nerds and the casual drinker. Most folks passing by would learn something about brewing in general, and of the Schlafly brand, in particular noting that “not everyone’s as involved in beer as Stephen Hale.”
Hale, in his trademark Schlafly cap and utilikilt may, or may not, be circulating through either Schlafly brewery on your visit. If he is, he’ll bend your ear and open your eyes to the brewing industry, in terms as understandable as they are detailed. If he’s not, the Bottleworks offers you a whimsical, wall-sized surrogate for your educational needs.
