Tomme | November 6, 2006

Every so often, I find myself acting like a patron at our bar. Only, the curious thing about sitting at our bar inside of Port Brewing is that we haven’t rolled out the red carpet and furnished it with overstuffed chairs. Like most brewery projects, we opened our doors with great expectations and “almost” enough money to finish our project. This is not to say that we are going out of business anytime soon.

However, as we went about remodeling the bathrooms, painting and designing a thoughtful and colorful office area, we spent all of the money budgeted for improvements. I guess, we never really looked at the 25 foot long bar and thought about the need for bar stools while we were slaving away. Still, at the end of each day, we would be exhausted from all the construction work.

One day, in a moment of amazing clarity, (some would say divine inspiration) I looked around and noticed that inverted kegs seemed to be almost the right height for bar stools. That was the day I ended the pain and suffering of soles everywhere and soon, we started kicking back after work on stainless steel bar stools. Seems the price for these was mighty choice as FREE works especially well if you have tapped the bank account trying to get open.

Weeks went by and we kept plugging away on our construction never really giving much thought to replacing the bar stools we were using. We spent April brewing and got in our first shipments of malt. Since we needed some Dextrose (Sugar) for our Avant Garde and Lost and Found beers, we suddenly had some nice, almost soft, tops for our bar stools. It wasn’t the best thing in the world for comfort sake but form doesn’t always follow functionality.

May approached and with it came our opening. We had a party for the Stone employees on Cinco de Mayo. Sensing the need for more bar stools for our friends, I ordered up some extra bags of Dextrose and we suddenly had a bar full of happy customers and friends. It felt good to look out over the bar and see people enjoying our beers while actually seating down. The following day we opened for business and our first customers rolled in.

I was very nervous about the lack of proper seating but everyone soon took it in stride. We met Sage and his wife Terri. They showed up the following weekend and she had her own bar stool in tote. This started a mini trend. Next thing I knew, Ken rolled up with his own hot rod bar stool. We began discussing more bar stools and I was really getting motivated to buy some for the bar.

But then a funny thing happened. I started to see people appreciate the simplicity of our design and they took to the character of the sacks. In my mind, these customers reached a whole new plateau of awareness and I started referring to them in my head as the “Sugar Sack Gang.” These people, like us, cared more about the beer in the glass then their proverbial comfort. And that is pretty damn cool.

Let me also state that I am neither their leader nor the Grand Pubbah of this band of merry drinkers. Rather, I am only one of them. There are many days when I can be found sitting on these bags of sugar. Even now, I am composing this from there. Perhaps the most interesting nugget about these bags is that more often than not, they start off pretty soft. We’re not talking Charmin two ply soft here. Rather, we are talking I’ve sinned this week and a little punishment for my sins kind of soft. This happens every so often when the malt company loads them on the top of the pallet and I swear my song is sung to the angels on high. Of course, there have been weeks were I sinned enough to banish those bags to the bottom of the pallet whereby, they were smashed under the weight of my indiscretions.

But I am here to tell you that these people in my “Sugar Sack Gang” are really smart. And I know, they know that you should never look a gift horse in the mouth. Although a bag of rock hard sugar seems like less than a gift, it still has the ability to get two soles off the floor after a very long day and for that, I am thankful.

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Tomme | November 1, 2006

5 Months?

When we show people our Lost Abbey labels, they unanimously approve of the artistic impression that they make. Nothing makes me more proud than to hear the words “your labels are so beautiful.” It tells me that it was all worth it. And then they talk about the beer inside and I know we are on the right track. For an inspired life is a life worth living.

Starting last October, Gina, Jim, myself and Vince met every Wednesday night after work and began working on the artistic direction for the new brand. When developing a brand as rich in connotations as The Lost Abbey, everything has to be perfect. Wanting things to be “just right” required an enormous amount of energy. There were always revisions and corrections to be made- week after week. For those who care to see the process, we have archived many of the versions at our brewery and you can view them on our walls and see the progressions of our meetings.

It’s not easy to develop a new brand and identity from scratch. It’s your baby and the artistry of a label can and sometimes is the one thing that people will look at before purchasing. It has to be powerful. It needs to be approachable and ultimately, it needs to convey the spirit of the brewery. The success of brands is not by accident.

In developing The Lost Abbey, we set out to tell a story. Every brewery has its own unique story. It revolves around the same premise. There are hundreds of brewers making the best beer in the world. Many of them take the same 4 ingredients blend them together to make beer. How they tell the story of their existence determines their success in the business.

Each of our beers will tell the story of beer as art. It starts with a talented artist. His name is Sean Dominguez. You can view his work at www.artbydomo.com. Working with Sean has been tremendous. His ability to paint and sketch the visions for our beers has been first rate. As we are still developing new beers each month, we get to meet and see the artist at work. One of the best parts of the project is each month when the new art for our labels show up. There is nothing cooler than seeing an acrylic oil painting on canvas in your conference room of a beer that you have brewed. If you have visited the brewery, you probably have seen these pieces hanging from our walls.

As a writer and a creative person, I am tasked with completing the wording for the labels. In my quest to tell the story of the brewery and each beer, I am sometimes more verbose than space permits. As such, you will find only a fraction of what is known as the back story on each label. If you dig a little deeper on our website, you can read the entire back story for each beer and my inspiration for brewing the beer.

I typically write these stories at the end of the day after working in the brewery. These stories remind me that while we work in a concrete stainless jungle each day, there is a deeper connection to life found in the stories behind our beers. It is my job as a brewer to create the story of the beer in the bottle and on the label of the bottle. But most importantly, I must also find a way to make the story memorable enough that our patrons want to retell the story. Mankind’s history has been one of stories and symbols. And for many years, it was an oral history passed down from generation to generation in the form of stories. It is my hope that The Lost Abbey and our storied beers will inspire a similar oral tradition replete with rich symbols, art and tales worthy of being told and retold.

So please read along as we develop new stories for each one of our beers. I get almost as much pleasure out of writing these pieces as I do brewing. For me, they are both creative opportunities to express myself and my thoughts to The Lost Abbey faithful. If you like what you see, pass it on or drop me a line at tomme@lostabbey.com

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