Innovation in beer meant throwing every possible ingredient into a brew kettle or conditioning tank and seeing what resulted. Breakfast cereal, marshmallows, lobsters, smoked goat brains, all have been tried, probably more than once. After decades of kitchen-sink and all style experimentation, the nature of innovation in craft beer today takes shapes beyond pushing the ingredient envelope.
At Bierstadt Lagerhaus in Denver, Ashleigh Carter understands a brewer’s drive to experiment but she advocates taking a different approach. “Look, I’m a brewer, so I get it right,” she laughs. “Like everybody else, I had a little notebook with a bunch of stuff in it on how I was going to mix these ingredients together.” Over time, however, her perspective changed. “Just taking some stuff out of the hat is not innovation, it’s tired,” she says. “I think that’s a very narrow idea of innovation, just changing your ingredients. The idea that some new ingredient is gonna change the whole game, it’s not the world we exist in. Almost everything has been done. I do truly believe in some way, if you’re thinking about it, somebody’s done it already.”
For Carter, her approach to innovation starts with the ingredients and continues throughout the process. “I think we’re constantly being tested by our ingredients anyways, so I think how you use them all kind of changes,” she says. “How do I fix my processes to make those ingredients make the beer taste the same,” she ponders. “We’re constantly trying to get efficient, but not lose quality to efficiency.”
Carter also likes to quote her husband, business partner at Bierstadt, and fellow brewer Bill Eye, who often says, “if everybody’s running one way, maybe you should just run the other way.” “To me, innovation is looking at what everybody is doing and deciding that I’m not going to do any of that.”
Beyond producing world-class lagers, including its iconic Slow Pour Pils, Bierstadt is known for innovative uses of its massive and roaming space in Denver’s RiNo District. The brewery has hosted wrestling matches, giant-sized yard games including cornhole played with bean bags for tossing, and holiday events, such as the Pumpkin Spice Circus.
Carter credits business partner Chris Rippe for spearheading the events side of the operation. She considers herself “the general no person” among the owners and laughs that when Rippe comes up with a new idea, she just says “no, no, no, no, we’re not doing that,” Carter says with a laugh. After her initial riff of negatives, she then will say “okay, now tell me this idea and I’ll try to be open to it. I definitely take some talking to but Chris has done a great job of keeping this place fresh and hiring the right people to do events and thinking outside the box a little.”
“The wrestling event that we do is absolutely bananas,” she says. “It’s completely bonkers. We have this big echoey building and it just creates a different atmosphere. We did an erotic market for Valentine’s Day and that was absolutely wild. There was pole dancing and dildos, and I think that’s kind of uniquely where we are. For us, we try not to do the same, recycled events that a lot of people are doing. And I think that that takes some innovation.”
If they were on their own, Carter says, Bierstadt would likely offer a very different experience. If Eye had full control, she says, he’d turn the tap room into a “very German place.” She credits him for wanting Bierstadt to be “the brewer’s brewery,” a goal they have certainly achieved. Ask any brewer who has attended the Great American Beer Festival, and it’s likely their first stop was at Bierstadt for a Slow Pour Pils. For Carter and her staff, Slow Pour Pils is the beer they want to drink, presented the way she wants to drink it. She credits her time in Italy and Germany with having beers served with ample foam and little doily paper skirts on the base.
“It’s not like some deep marketing tool,” Carter says. “It’s just inherently who we are and what we want to be doing.” The approach has led to countless Instagram posts and thousands on thousands of memorable beer experiences, simply by executing beer service in a thoughtful and innovative way for the United States market.
In offering advice to the broader industry, Carter suggests staying true to yourself and mining your own interests in service of the customer instead of chasing trends. “I don’t do anything I don’t want to do,” she says. “Everybody’s like, “oh, you should do what the customer wants, and we have to be more customer focused. There’s so many customers out there, maybe just try to find your clan, find your group, try to tell people why they should be having this thing that you care so much about. By the time ten people have done it, the idea is tired. If you’re not the forefront of that, then it’s just a recycled idea.
While Carter appreciates that the customer is the one buying your products, she counsels against chasing them. “What is it that you want to be doing? What is it that excites you and gets you out of bed every morning? What is the thing that makes you want to give the customer an experience they haven’t had before, or that they want to come back to, because there’s a lot out there that they can choose from.”