Lore of the Lakes — Great Lakes Brewing Company, Cleveland, Ohio

It’s a Thursday morning in late October on a quaint side street in Cleveland, Ohio, but it could easily be the week before Christmas. The temperature in the historic Ohio City neighborhood hovers around 40° Fahrenheit, and a chill breeze periodically rustles the leaves along the brick-lined street and tugs at the red plaid scarves of a quartet of carolers singing holiday standards. Revelers wearing Santa hats, strings of battery-operated lights, and costumes from favorite holiday movies line the sidewalk. It’s time for Great Lakes Brewing Company’s First Pour, the annual taproom release of its beloved Christmas Ale, and everyone is in the yuletide spirit.

The event is much more than a fall publicity stunt for social media or a marketing event to boost sales on a slow weekday. Christmas Ale is the best-selling brand for the 19th-largest craft brewery in the country, and the furious two months of sales that begin on this Thursday morning are of paramount importance to the business’s bottom line. Moreover, Great Lakes opened in 1988 in this very building and first brewed Christmas Ale in 1992, making this the iconic brand’s 30th anniversary. Over the next 12 hours, the taproom’s three draft stations will pour an average of a pint of the Spiced Ale every five seconds. 

Seasonal brands are extremely important to Great Lakes, with its Oktoberfest performing strongly in late summer and early fall and Conway’s Irish Ale taking the baton from Christmas Ale in the first quarter. Bizarrely, the time of year this large regional brewery has the most trouble selling beer is spring and early summer—traditionally peak beer-buying season, when other breweries are finding their greatest success. 

This seasonal paradox is just one of the challenges facing Great Lakes as it adapts to the modern beer scene and looks toward the future. After losing sales in the late 2010s, the brewery has brought in new executive perspectives and revamped both its beer portfolio and marketing strategy to try to reach a newer, younger audience while still retaining the loyal fans of its legacy brands. 

It’s a dichotomy facing all of the country’s first-generation craft breweries, but Great Lakes seems to be turning its struggles of recent years into a sustainable future. After long serving as an example to younger, smaller breweries opening in its wake, the company is now hoping to demonstrate to its legacy peers how to survive and thrive in a beer scene worlds apart from the one it helped pioneer decades ago.

SKATING TO THE PUCK

Great Lakes’ origin story feels emblematic of many breweries of its era. Brothers Pat and Dan Conway traveled to Europe as young men and returned with a love of flavorful, classic beer styles that were unavailable at the time in the U.S. They founded Great Lakes in 1986 to brew the beers they wanted to drink, and opened in 1988 as Ohio’s first modern craft brewery. 

The Conways’ first beers reflected the tastes of craft beer drinkers at the time, and developed into flagships that still form the foundation of the company’s portfolio today, many of them referencing regional or familial lore. Their Dortmunder Export Lager won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival in 1990 and was quickly dubbed Dortmunder Gold. Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, named after the eponymous iron ore freighter that sank on Lake Superior in 1975, became a regional favorite. Burning River Pale Ale was named for a shameful occasion in which the highly polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire in 1969, leading to legal action to clean up the river and hold Cleveland’s manufacturers to higher ecological standards. 

“We just weren’t skating to where the puck was going. We were resting on our laurels and the history and heritage, but I think you can do both. You can still take pride in what you’ve built over the years and step into the modern times. Too many companies have fallen on their sword by trying to tell consumers what they want rather than giving them what they want.”

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, these beers and others—like Eliot Ness Amber Lager and Commodore Perry IPA—allowed the company to become one of the largest craft breweries in the country. In 2014, it brewed 150,000 barrels of beer—a high water mark, and the beginning of a protracted downturn. By 2019, Great Lakes was brewing only 125,000 BBLs annually, a number which took a further dip the following year during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think one thing that Great Lakes failed to do is they didn’t adapt to the consumer,” says CEO Mark King, who was hired in 2019. King got started in beer by driving a delivery truck in Milwaukee in the early 1980s. He eventually became a vice president at Anheuser-Busch until leaving in 2007 to work with a series of other beverage companies. When he arrived in 2019, Great Lakes was still packaging primarily in bottles despite an industry—and consumer—shift toward cans, and IPAs represented less than 8% of the Great Lakes portfolio despite $5 out of every $10 spent on craft beer at the time going to IPA, a number that has only continued to grow. 

“We just weren’t skating to where the puck was going,” he observes. “We were resting on our laurels and the history and heritage, but I think you can do both. You can still take pride in what you’ve built over the years and step into the modern times. Too many companies have fallen on their sword by trying to tell consumers what they want rather than giving them what they want.”

After King’s arrival, the brewery began rapidly updating its portfolio, packaging, and marketing in an effort to stem losses and stabilize the company. It built an expensive new canning facility in Strongsville just outside the city, and developed new products. The pandemic slowed things down temporarily, but in 2021 the brewery slightly exceeded its 2019 sales, and expects to report a continued rebound in 2022.

“Craft beer in Ohio grew 70% from 2013 to 2018, but Great Lakes lost 20%. We weren’t competing,” says King. “Last year we were the top-performing top-20 craft brewery, and we stabilized our legacy business.”

From a numbers standpoint, that stabilization has been more about slowing losses than posting gains for most of the brewery’s legacy brands, but King believes new branding and packaging options will fuel a turnaround for those older beers as well. Perhaps more important to the overall rebound of Great Lakes is the development of newer product lines that appeal to modern drinkers. The brewery has debuted half a dozen new IPAs and Double IPAs since the beginning of 2019, as well as a low-calorie citrus Wheat Ale and a lime-infused Mexican Lager. While many of these brands, such as Hazecraft IPA and the imminent Vibacious Double IPA, are aimed at year-round buyers, the brewery is still looking for the elusive fix to its strange seasonal problem: It can’t seem to sell enough beer during the one time of year consumers buy it the most.

SEASON IN THE SUN

In early 2022, Great Lakes hired long-time Boulevard Brewing Company brewmaster and Belgian expat Steven Pauwels as its new COO. Pauwels’ task has been to not only lead new product innovation, but to figure out how to do it in a facility that’s 130 years old. When he came on board, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing when he looked at the brewery’s season-by-season numbers. 

“The first time I came here, it was just mind-blowing,” he says. “I thought I was misunderstanding. But it’s almost a luxury for a brewery that the second quarter in your year is the one quarter that you have the least sales.”

King thinks the need to update the brewery’s portfolio is tied to its search for its second-quarter powerhouse.

“Nobody likes green beer on March 18th, and we have to find something that can sell between March 18 and Labor Day,” he observes. Options like Crushworthy Lo-Cal Citrus Wheat have done well the last couple years, but still aren’t providing the seasonal boost the brewery is looking for as Lake Erie begins to thaw each spring. 

Emmett Conway, Pat’s son, works in the Great Lakes sales department handling national on-premise accounts for bar and restaurant chains. During his time with the company, he’s seen the brewery cycle through warm-weather options, looking for a hit.

“I’ve been in the sales team for nine years, and I think that slot has changed nine times,” he says. “We’ll move things around and go, ‘Man, can we get a Bell’s Oberon around here or a [Leinenkugel’s] Summer Shandy, something that people clamor for?’ We’ve had plenty of great beers, we just haven’t been able to get that.” 

“The first time I came here, it was just mind-blowing. I thought I was misunderstanding. But it’s almost a luxury for a brewery that the second quarter in your year is the one quarter that you have the least sales.”

He believes the brewery might have found its answer in a classic concept with Mexican Lager with Lime.

“Mexican Lager is for sure the focus for next year,” he says. “Just look at what Constellation keeps doing over and over again with Modelo and Corona stats. There’s clearly a hankering for that style. It’s so easy to wrap your head around what it is. Lager with lime? Yeah, for sure.”

Innovating with new products is one thing, but how does a 34-year-old brewery market new products like a Hazy Double IPA when its brand stories and history are tied to styles fewer and fewer new drinkers are interested in? Great Lakes is justifiably proud of its legacy brands—excellent beers all—though the need to attract younger drinkers with trendy styles while providing older drinkers with the classics could easily create an identity crisis. It’s not hard to see an uneasy tension between the brewery’s past and present focuses.

“You almost become two different companies,” observes Pauwels. “You have your brands that have been there forever and people know you from these brands, but then on the other hand, you have to really create these new brands and you have to resonate with the younger consumer. We have to resonate with people that are a lot younger than our current consumers. With all respect, that’s just a fact.”

The dichotomy is further complicated by the different needs of Great Lakes’ various distribution markets. The brewery is an institution in Cleveland and around northeastern Ohio, where its legacy brands do well. The farther you get from home, the less anyone cares about an ore freighter that called at Cleveland’s port half a century ago, especially when younger drinkers and, in many cases, their parents weren’t alive when it sank. 

“We do a huge amount of business in our own backyard, so places around here—chains included—are very familiar with the portfolio,” says Emmett. “There’s this sense of holding the line with those sales because something like Dortmunder sells really well. But I’m not gonna go to a new market and walk in with a Dortmunder-style Export Lager. You wouldn’t have the IRI [market research] data, you wouldn’t have any compelling stories outside of your own backyard. In my role, where it’s expanded out to multiple states, having those new products is really key.”

At the same time, Pauwels sees debuting new IPAs in markets farther from home as a difficult task due to market saturation, and the brewery still generally leads in new spaces with products like bottled six-packs of Edmund Fitzgerald, its most widely distributed brand. King points out that while “Fitz” is an excellent beer, Porters are only 1% of craft beer consumption nationally.

“If you go to Wisconsin or Chicago or Michigan, Eddie Fitz is our top seller, so we’re not walking away from Fitz, but we realize if we double the Fitz business, doubling 1% is still just not a lot of business,” he says with a wry laugh. 

Still, the variety within the Great Lakes portfolio does distinguish the brewery from some of its younger in-state competitors, such as Rhinegeist Brewery in Cincinnati, the state’s second-largest craft brewery, which heavily pushes six- and twelve-pack cans of its flagship Truth IPA. The two breweries—far and away the state’s largest craft players—have operated with profoundly different strategies both in portfolio and sales channels.

“We don’t do well in convenience stores,” observes King. “We outsell [Rhinegeist] in the state of Ohio in grocery by almost double, but they outsell us by 30% in convenience. Why is that? Well, we don’t have a convenience store strategy. We don’t have a single-serve strategy. We aren’t creating brands that the convenience store customer is migrating to. Almost 70% of convenience store dollars are IPAs. We don’t have a year-round Imperial IPA right now.”

The brewery is about to release Vibacious, a hazy Double IPA hopped prominently with Citra and Cashmere hops, to address that last issue, and hopes to aggressively leverage its new canning facility to offer a range of packaging options, including 19.2oz cans that typically sell well in convenience stores. King commented that the facility came at great expense, but it was the only way to move forward, and the sales team agrees.

“For a while we were kind of stuck just in the dark packaging with dark glass bottles as our only format,” recalls Emmett. “Once you remove some of those shackles that were holding you to that stuff you get to open up, and I think that’s where some of this opportunity lies with something like Vibacious. It’s easy-drinking but at 9% it’s a value play, especially now that we’ve introduced more capability to make 19.2oz cans.”

These are market discussions the Conway brothers never could have imagined in the late ’80s when they laid the foundation for Great Lakes. But for the company to continue thriving decades into the future, these conversations are now a critical part of doing business.

HISTORY AND ITS LIMITATIONS

“When Schmidt’s closed in 1984, it ended 150 straight years of brewing in the city of Cleveland,” reflects Pat Conway when asked about the early days of the brewery. “I looked under ‘B’ in the phonebook for breweries and there were none. I called the local union representing brewers and soft drink workers and told them I was looking for brewers in the city, and they said, ‘They’re gone. They’re all gone.’”

Cleveland’s brewing history follows a classic Midwest trajectory. A wave of German and Czech immigrants landed in the city in the mid-19th century, bringing with them a taste for Lager beer and the acumen for brewing it. This industrial city on the water, supported by manufacturing and shipping, enjoyed ample options for honest, easy-drinking beer for over a century. The Philadelphia-based C. Schmidt & Sons Brewing established a major plant in Cleveland in the 1960s, when the city’s brewing industry was already in decline. There were nine breweries in the city at the dawn of World War II, five when Schmidt’s came to town in 1961, and none when it shut down for good in 1984.

Despite interrupting the city’s brewing legacy, the closure proved fortuitous for the Conways, who had a desire to brew beer but lacked the know-how to do it themselves at the time. The man at the union who told Pat all the breweries were closed gave him one last crucial piece of information.

“He told me, ‘The former Schmidt’s brewmaster owns a little antique store. You might want to ask him,’” he says. “So I called up Thaine Johnson and we talked and he said, ‘I’d love to be a part of your operation. I’ve brewed for 40 years and it’s still in my blood’”

Armed with a veteran brewmaster, the Conways began looking for a brewery around the country that might be available for purchase, but found little success. On a flight back to Cleveland, Johnson suggested they build their own.

“I told him, ‘You’re a brewmaster, not a brewing engineer,’ and he said, ‘No, but there’s this guy named Charlie Price who ran our million-barrel-a-year brewery. Let’s get him involved.’ If it hadn’t been for those two gentlemen, God knows if we would’ve even gotten off the blocks.”

The original 7-BBL system Great Lakes started out with is still used in the brewpub for small-batch beers. The brewpub itself is a proud part of the brewery’s—and city’s—history. Famed lawman Eliot Ness, who helped to take down Al Capone, is rumored to have frequented the bar in the 1930s when it was known as Market Tavern. There’s even a bullet hole behind the bar that legend holds is from a gun fired at—or by—Ness himself (it’s marked now with a small flag that read “BANG!”) The brewery admits this is highly unlikely, but does hold that Ness might have frequented the bar at one time.

Across the street from the brewpub, the Great Lakes production facility occupies the former stables of the Leonard Schlather Brewing Company, a large pre-Prohibition outfit. This historic building turned modern brewery is charming for all the reasons it’s also an inconvenient place to try to brew and package a large amount of beer—its ceilings and doorways are low, hallways and staircases are tight and winding, and space is at a premium. King notes that they have to order half-pallets of bottles because the archways are too low to bring full pallets through on a forklift. It’s exactly the kind of antiquarian, serpentine building guests love to walk through on a tour, and the last kind of space where a modern brewer wants to sort out the logistics of production and innovation. One of the reasons Pauwels was brought in was to wring the most out of the facility before looking at a possible move to a new production space.

The most beautiful area in the aging structure is the brewhouse itself, with the three 75-BBL vessels sunk into the brick floor and their exhaust columns extending to the ceiling, with tall windows running the length of the room letting in natural light that glints off the stainless steel. Despite limitations, Pauwels, brewmaster Mark Hunger, and the brewing team have made recent gains in how to use the space.

“We just sent more beer out of this brewery in October than we’ve done in many, many years,” observes King. “We have the potential now with some of the due diligence Steven has brought in that we think we can get 180,000 barrels out of this building. But this building is not going to be something that will carry us into the future.”

King, Pauwels, and Pat Conway all commented on the need for a new production facility, and this tension between historical charm and present reality is emblematic of the crossroads at which Great Lakes finds itself.

STORIES OLD AND NEW

Pat is named after his paternal grandfather, who was a traffic policeman just a few blocks from where the brewery now sits. In a time before ubiquitous traffic lights, he would stand in the middle of the street guiding motorists and pedestrians by way of semaphore. He was beloved by the community, and family legend holds that around Christmas he would often have chocolate, cigars, and whiskey surrounding him in the middle of the street from neighborhood friends who had left him gifts.

It’s a curious family lore to be born into, let alone employed by. 

“My sister was born in ’87, Great Lakes opened in ’88, and I was born in ’89,” Emmett tells me. “So we kind of all grew up together.”

The stories behind the brewery itself—and the familial and local histories its core beers are built on—are more than just interesting anecdotes for Pat’s son, a fact that might make him something of an outlier as a millennial trying to sell beer to people his age or younger.

“My grandmother was Eliot Ness’ stenographer. My dad was friends with the son of the first mate on the Edmund Fitzgerald,” he says. “It hits a little differently for me when we talk about this stuff.”

I’ve just asked him if there’s any way in which those very stories—for so long the legends that have informed Great Lakes’ marketing—could be anachronistic liabilities when marketing to folks in their 20s who have watched their parents and grandparents drink those same beers.

“In some ways I’m not the right person to ask, but I think even if you asked a sales rep in some place like Virginia or anywhere away from Cleveland, I think it’s a breath of fresh air that we have kind of weird best-sellers like Ness and Fitzgerald,” he says, though he acknowledges the longevity of those brands can limit the range of styles people are prepared to expect from Great Lakes. 

“I think you get people wondering [about innovative new styles], ‘Does Great Lakes do that?’ Yeah, we’re a professional brewery, we can make these styles. We just need people to know about them. We want to be best represented with the styles people are drinking, and for a while we maybe didn’t have the portfolio to match that. We get a lot of local pride and fervor around our brand, but we have to think about the other 14 states we sell into, and I think we can do both legacy and innovation. Story still matters.”

But how do you leverage story for new beers that don’t really have one? Emmett and others in the company believe the answer lies in the foundational values his father and uncle built the company on. 

Not too many casual fans are aware Great Lakes is an employee-owned ESOP, or that it’s donated millions of dollars to environmental preservation through its Burning River Foundation. Breweries like New Belgium have been justifiably praised over the years for similar initiatives largely because they’ve done thoughtful awareness campaigns to bring attention to those good works. The Conways have taken care of their employees and local ecology, but have mostly done so quietly. That’s admirable on the one hand, but perhaps a missed opportunity from a marketing standpoint, particularly as the company seeks to lure younger consumers.

“We can do so much more with that,” says Pauwels of letting people know about the company’s benevolent practices. “When I interviewed, I had no idea. I was like, ‘This is fantastic. How come nobody else knows about this?’”

“I think you get people wondering [about innovative new styles], ‘Does Great Lakes do that?’ Yeah, we’re a professional brewery, we can make these styles. We just need people to know about them. We want to be best represented with the styles people are drinking, and for a while we maybe didn’t have the portfolio to match that. We get a lot of local pride and fervor around our brand, but we have to think about the other 14 states we sell into, and I think we can do both legacy and innovation. Story still matters.”

Mark King expressed a desire to see the brewery spend more on marketing in general, but good works alone don’t sell; Great Lakes needs the relevant products to entice those younger buyers. For a long time, breweries like Great Lakes were the examples newer breweries followed. Mary MacDonald, executive director of the Ohio Craft Brewers Association, thinks that influence might have to reverse for Great Lakes to find new consumers.

“I think it’s going to take emulating the success of smaller breweries,” she says. “In today’s market, there’s not the same loyalty to beer there was before. Variety is what it seems like a lot of drinkers want. It’s a matter of adjusting their model to meet that.”

Pauwels agrees. While he’s used to helping out smaller breweries and answering their questions, he’s started picking up the phone more often to ask those breweries questions in turn. 

“There’s a lot of smaller breweries that have been around for only a couple of years that I’m in really good contact with, and I talk to them a lot and say, ‘Okay, what do you do?’” he explains, referring to the development of newer, trendier beer styles. “That’s the beauty of this brewing industry, isn’t it? That you can just talk to anybody. If somebody from down the street calls me, I’m more than happy to give them whatever I know. And in exchange, they’ll do the same.”

Pauwels mentions a number of younger brewers he’s been able to learn new tricks from, including Neil Fisher at WeldWerks Brewing Co. in Colorado and Peter Kiley at Monday Night Brewing in Georgia. When asked about that reciprocal relationship, Kiley at first expressed surprise that Pauwels felt he had been on the receiving end of anything the younger brewer had to share. Ultimately, he feels the key to Pauwels’ being able to adapt newer practices from smaller breweries is his ability to help people open up and share their own knowledge without realizing their brains are being picked by one of the best in the industry.

“When you’re around the greats, you listen, because you’re not always given that opportunity,” says Kiley. “But one of the reasons Steven is so great is he is one of the best people at asking questions. One of the qualities of a great leader I learned from Steven is that people do better when they feel liked and respected. He asks questions so well.”

Kiley recalls a particular occasion when he and Pauwels had a conversation at the Craft Brewers Conference about sterile filtration methods. They were sparring a bit about different methods of pasteurization, and it was only later Kiley realized what Pauwels had been gleaning from the conversation. 

“I had made a hard seltzer using real fruit, and he was asking how I was doing that,” he recalls. “That’s one of the times I got to see how his brain works.”

When asked how he thinks that mindset will serve an older brewery like Great Lakes that’s seeking to stay relevant in a modern market while honoring its legacy, Kiley says the key is that very curiosity Pauwels has modeled for him.

“Ultimately, you have to stay curious,” he says. “I’ve met a lot of their team through Steven since he came on board, and I appreciate they’re taking on the challenge of staying curious. Follow the beers that brought you to the dance, dance with them, but innovate around those beers. Innovation allows you to tell a new story but inside the same book.” 

The access to new information provided by these relationships with younger breweries will only become more important as Great Lakes explores not only new beer styles, but products beyond beer altogether. The brewery hasn’t ruled out anything, including hard teas, seltzers, and ready-to-drink beverages. It’s a bit disorienting to Pat to see the brewpub he and his brother established three-and-a-half decades ago considering these products, but he recognizes the need to meet consumers where they are.

“I was surprised that the younger group ended up drinking the cocktails that my grandparents drank when I was a bartender in Chicago many years ago,” he says with a chuckle. “When I was in grad school I was making Manhattans and martinis and gimlets and all that, but it was for a much older crowd. To see my son and my daughter and their friends drinking those alcohol concoctions is a bit surprising.”

Rather than diminishing or watering down the brewery’s identity, Emmett thinks leveraging the Great Lakes name to sell these other products actually makes a lot of sense. 

“If there’s a consumer we can engage with, why write them off? If it’s hard tea they’re drinking, why not get it from us?” he asks. “How many of them are kind of nameless and faceless and just put out there to hit a shelf spot? I think we benefit from being true to ourselves.”

There’s a lot here for the brewery to sort through, but there’s a sense within the Great Lakes team that the reins have been loosened of late, and they’re excited to figure out how to move forward. Uncertainty and change themselves are part of that enthusiasm.

“10 years ago if you had asked me to tell you what I thought craft beer would be like in 2022, I would have taken a guess,” says Hunger, who’s tasked with figuring out how to brew new products on a large scale after a quarter decade of brewing classic styles. “Now if you asked me to tell you what I think it will be like two years from now, I wouldn’t even attempt that. It’s actually a lot of fun. You get to really flex your skills and use different techniques.” 

THE LEGEND LIVES ON

At 7:10 p.m. on November 10, 1975, Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a terrific storm on Lake Superior. The 729-foot steel freighter was weighed down with 52 million lbs of taconite iron ore when her captain’s last words to sister vessel Arthur M. Anderson were spoken just minutes before she disappeared from radar: We are holding our own. 

My family has vacationed in the small town of Grand Marais on the Superior coast of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula since before I was born. The Fitz sank just a few dozen miles from the tiny outpost town, and the area is soaked in the lore of the lake and the lives of the sailors lost on its temperamental waters. One summer in the mid-aughts my family met up in this seaside town for the first time since I’d left home after high school. At the time, I drank beer when I drank at all, but knew nothing about beer styles. My sister and I wandered into the town’s only gas station and perused its cooler of six-packs looking for something interesting. There were bottles of a beer with the Fitz proudly displayed on their labels, and we bought them without the slightest idea what a Porter was. We loved it. 

Talking with drinkers around the Midwest, Edmund Fitzgerald Porter figures in a high percentage of their craft beer origin stories, its ubiquity around the Lakes providing an early baptism into the region’s brewing traditions. It doesn’t fit into current trends and its sales are slowly slipping, but it’s become a part of the canon of Midwestern craft beer, much like Christmas Ale.

On the blustery October day of First Pour, market trends and sales quotas aren’t on anyone’s mind, especially for the fans decked out in ugly Christmas sweaters, holiday pajamas, or three-piece suits cut from festive fabric. The folks at the front of the line drove overnight from Indianapolis and are wearing the “deranged Easter bunny” footie pajamas from “A Christmas Story,” which was filmed nearby. 

At 10:45 a.m. an antique truck parks at the end of the street. The ceremonial first keg is unloaded from the bed and a man carries it to the front door on his shoulder. Inside the pub, members of the press, local dignitaries, VIP winners, and the Conway brothers crowd around the small bar. The mayor of Cleveland praises the brewery’s role in the community, and Pat and Dan share amusing stories from the beer’s 30-year history. At 11:30, the first pint is pulled, and the chaos begins. For the next 12 hours, it won’t relent. MacDonald finds me in the crowd and we compare notes as jolly fans sip glasses of a 7.5% winter warmer before noon on a Thursday. This isn’t the kind of event a social media campaign can conjure with targeted marketing. It’s been built layer by layer for decades. We run into Dan and Pat, looking a bit flushed but contentedly happy, and they seem more tipsy on the crowd’s excitement than they are on their best-selling beer. 

Christmas Ale has scaled in a major way from the limited local releases of its early days. The brewery uses an astonishing 200,000 lbs of honey to brew the year’s full run of the holiday favorite, along with about 7,000 lbs each of cinnamon and ginger. King calls it a “beast,” Hunger a “juggernaut.” Pat Conway, removed from the production bustle, has a more relaxed description: “When I taste it, it’s like I’m wearing a sweater.”

Great Lakes doesn’t have everything figured out yet. The brewery grew like wild for a quarter of a century, lost ground for half a decade, and is now sitting at a critical inflection point. It’s recovered some of its lost sales, but is still trying to convince new drinkers it can brew a Hazy as well as it can brew a Porter, and—more to the point—as well as the smaller, buzzier breweries around it. The 19th-largest craft brewery in the country is still trying to figure out how to sell beer during beer’s busiest season annually. 

It’s not all smooth sailing ahead, but for the first time in years, there’s significant optimism around Ohio’s oldest brewery. Unlike the namesake of its best-known beer, “holding its own” isn’t a doomed confidence. Great Lakes is sailing into the wind, meeting the waves, and steaming ahead.

Words + Photos
David Nilsen