At Other Half Brewing in Brooklyn, New York, Brewmaster Sam Richardson and his team are constantly thinking about innovation and applying it in a thoughtful way. “When it comes to beer and beer brands, we’re always trying to innovate. We look at it from the perspective of, is it an add on for the customer? Is it something that’s going to change their experience? Is it making the beer better?”
After years of pushing the envelope with ingredients, Other Half has focused its innovation on tightening up its processes, improving its core brands, and experimenting with new hops and hop combinations. “We’re always looking at innovation on the production side, like, how can we do it better,” Richardson says. “How can we do it better for our teams so we’re not stuck in place. We’re always trying to move forward.”
We talk with Richardson to get Other Half’s Take on innovation
Improving Your Core Brands
While Other Half developed a reputation for releasing plenty of new beers, in recent years the company has noticed a change in consumers. “I think we’ve always been a big innovator and also we’ve always pushed on new stuff,” Richardson says. “And I think people expect that from us. But there’s more customers in the market kind of stepping back and trying to find beers that they just trust are going to be good. Right now, I would say that we’re not in a phase where people are going out of their way to buy crazy stouts and beers that much anymore. I think that the innovation on our end is just continuing to make the things we already make and make them better.”
Richardson suggests that breweries always strive to improve all of their beers, not just generate new ones. “So while we’re always trying to keep the variety up so that people are interested and engaged, we also have our year round brands as well,” he notes. “We do have core brands, and even with those, we’re always looking at ways to make them better. We’re not changing them constantly. That’s too much for core brands. But we’re always looking at ways you can improve them, both on our end and for customers.”
Trying New Hop Combinations
A major focus of innovation at Other Half, where New England-style India Pale Ale comprises the vast majority of its production, is experimenting with new hops and in different combinations. “There’s a lot of interest out there in trying new things and trying new hops, new hop varieties, new hop combos, with a lot of customers,” Richardson says. “We’re really focused on that, on the hop end of things. We’re always looking for new hops and for new hop products to work with.”
To foster its innovation, Richardson and his team work with farmers, hop cooperatives, and other businesses to stay at the cutting edge of hop development. Other Half works with NZ Hops Ltd’s Bract Brewing Programme, which takes trial hops grown in the Tasman region of New Zealand and delivers them to selected brewers around the globe. The growers then take feedback from Bract brewers to help them decide which varieties to plant and further cultivate.
“We see a lot of the new varieties coming out of that and we brew with them,” Richardson says. “We’re always looking for new things coming out of New Zealand, which is a pretty exciting place right now for hops.”
Other Half also works with hop growers in the Pacific Northwest and Richardson and his team spend several weeks in Yakima in the fall for hop selection. “We’re always looking at what’s new, what they have coming out,” he says. “It’s just constant contact with the brokers and farmers. See the effort we put into finding these hops and creating the relationships with the farms, the brokers. So that’s kind of been our thing, impactful, differentiating hops that people can identify.”
Festivals Are An Opportunity To Learn
Richardson credits collaboration beers as an opportunity to work with and learn from brewers he respects but he also says the after hours get-togethers at beer festivals offers a similar opportunity. “Beyond just the collab itself, I think the festival circuit is almost a bigger driver because that’s when people are really talking and hanging out and sharing ideas,” he says. “And then a lot of times it goes, it morphs from that into a collab. But I do think that the big change we saw between 2014 and 2019 and what people’s feelings about what craft beer was and what it became, was driven by just all of the excitement and communication. People were very hyped on learning how to make their beers better, and trying to do fun, new, innovative things for their customers. And I think that is really driven by all of that interaction between brewers.