More beer, more jobs from craft brewers

Jason Gutierrez monitors a brew kettle during a beer cooking session at the Southern Star Brewery. Jason Gutierrez monitors a brew kettle during a beer cooking session at the Southern Star Brewery. Photo: Jerry Baker, Freelance Photo: Jerry Baker, Freelance Image 1 of / 35 Caption Close More beer, more jobs from craft brewers 1 / 35 Back to Gallery

Houston's craft breweries have had the "Help Wanted" sign out a lot lately, a fact that will no doubt be emphasized to lawmakers come January as they consider regulatory changes for the industry.

Saint Arnold Brewing Co., the city's oldest craft, has 43 employees and is in the midst of hiring at least three more, founder Brock Wagner said. That is about double the staff before production shifted to a new brewery with more capacity 2½ years ago.

"We've been able to turn it into a place where you can have a career," Wagner said, noting such benefits as fully paid health care, a generous 401(k)-match program and paid vacations.

The employment growth is actually greater considering that several volunteers who used to help set up Saturday tours at the original brewery were given paid part-time positions to handle the weekday and Saturday tours at the new place.

Karbach Brewing, which marked its one-year anniversary Sept. 1, already has tripled its staff, from the original seven.

"Obviously, our growth was higher than anticipated," marketing chief David Graham said.

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An ongoing boom in craft-beer sales is boosting hiring nationwide.

In a speech during last month's Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper noted this statistic from the Colorado Brewers Guild: While craft beer accounts for less than 5 percent of beer produced in that state, the 150 craft breweries there provide 64 percent of the brewing jobs.

That's because major breweries, like Houston's Anheuser-Busch plant, produce millions of barrels annually, compared with the Saint Arnolds and Karbachs in the tens of thousands of barrels. The difference in scale enables the big players to utilize a lot of cost-saving efficiencies.

In contrast, said Dave Fougeron, founder of Conroe-based Southern Star Brewing, "We do things backward and slow."

Fougeron and other supporters say this laborious process results in better-tasting beers and more diversity for consumers.

Wagner said maximizing profits is not the top consideration among craft brewers, and he does not plan to change his approach even though he expects production to increase enough over the next three years to warrant more than 20 new hires.

"We like doing the things that got us here, which are labor-intensive," he said. "That means adding people."

In Austin, the Texas Craft Brewers Guild is already using job figures to bolster its case for relaxing some of the restrictions on breweries and restaurants that make beer on-site. This summer, the guild released a study predicting law changes could help make craft brewing a $5.6 billion industry here and add 52,000 jobs by 2020.

The analysis estimated the state's smaller, independently owned craft breweries had a $608 million economic impact in 2011.

Wagner said Saint Arnold will pay right at $1 million in payroll, income and excise taxes for 2012.

Proposed changes to the alcohol code include allowing shipping breweries to offer a limited amount of beer directly to consumers and allowing brewpubs to package some of their beer for off-site retail sales as is allowed in Colorado and other states.

Similar efforts in Texas have failed in the last three legislatures.

Regardless, the industry is attracting workers and putting a premium on brewing skills.

Southern Star has a staff of 11, following three new hires in 2012. That includes a brewer who moved here from California. Fougeron said he'd also talked to a candidate from the U.K.

"Right now, professional brewers with any experience are in really high demand," Fougeron said.

Graham, from Karbach, said that after turning over distribution duties to an outside company, the brewery is amply staffed going into next year. Hiring could resume later in 2013, depending on market conditions. But he agreed there's no shortage of motivated job seekers.

The trick is matching people to specific positions - and making sure those eager applicants understand the physically taxing nature of life in a commercial brewery.

"It's a lot more work than you might see from the outside," he said.

ronnie.crocker@chron.com twitter.com/rcrocker