Late nights after a brew day, Laffler spends a good deal of time closing down shop on his own, seeing few, if any visitors for the day. He's alone with his process and his thoughts the way a painter or a writer might want to be. He seems to be energized by these long, but satisfying days of productive solitude until he heads out for a drink and starts Tweeting at Boulevard's Jeremy Danner like pen pals at summer camp. Bleitner, on the other hand, splits his time with accounts in the field. Hardly the salesman type, he simply tries to establish relationships with bars and restaurants that align with the Off Color approach — smart, playful recipes that reward curiosity. He's learned a lot about the particular challenges of getting your product noticed in a booming market where consumers have more taphandles to choose from than ever before.

"With as much press and exposure that we've gotten, there's still a helluva lot of people that have never heard of us. And you find that out really quickly visiting accounts. The market is just so competitive on-premise, even from a year ago" explains Bleitner. "The challenge for the small producer is that your typical neighborhood bar won't put in the time to do research. But they know they have a Lagunitas rep that comes by every week and chats them up. Revolution has done a really good job with that too. They're everywhere. And there's an arms race with distributors right now so they're trying to rep 50 brands. They can't sell every brand with the same commitment at the same time."

Competing in a Growing Market

The competition isn't quite as simple as traditional press would have us believe. The Big Beer vs Little Beer ignores the complexities of a market where many new craft-focused bars might not even have a Budweiser handle to steal anymore. And if they do, it's one of 75, backed by a bottle list that goes into the 100s.

"The dirty little secret that nobody wants to talk about is that the number of breweries opening up is not on pace with the number of new accounts and new tap handles. We're not all taking handles away from fucking AB as much as everyone wants that to be the ethos and the story. They think we're all in this together and we're fighting the big guys. That story died in the early 2000s" explains Laffler. "And so you get brands like Deschutes selling in Chicago because it's impossible for them to continue growing in their own market any further, partly because there's little guys like us there now. So they look for markets like ours where we're still developing. They're just trying to figure out where they can sell beer."

Telling a story from grain to glass is a challenge for any brewery. Every pitch is like a game of telephone, from the distributor, to the sales rep, to the beer buyer, to the bartender — sometimes the important stuff gets lost in translation. And selling beers with a bit of an obscure edge to them doesn't make things easier. In recent weeks, Bleitner has stopped trying to teach many accounts what a Gose is. He just refers to it as a "tart wheat ale" and things smooth out.

"We're doing stuff that isn't well know. Everybody that knows what a gose is, already knows that this is a gose. So there's really no point in continuing to tell other people because they don't know what that is. For every one person that asks what it is, there's a dozen that never ask and maybe find it off-putting that they don't know. Some people just don't like to ask questions or feel left out and avoid it completely. So we focus on the process rather than the technical style. Big Star put it on their board as Off Color Wheat Beer and it was our number one account for weeks. So we call it a blended wheat beer. Then they ask what it's blended with and we can start talking about our lacto fermentation and blending process. That's been a lot more approachable."