CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Great Lakes Brewing Co. founder Patrick Conway loves to tell the story of a tipsy patron who wanted to buy some beer at the gift shop.

"I want Christmas Ale," he slurred, "and I want a lot of it."

The bartender refused, saying the patron had already had quite enough to drink.

After squabbling, the man finally left - only to come back first thing in the morning, slap $3,000 cash on the bar, and buy out all the Christmas Ale in the shop - 60 cases.

Conway still laughs at the punchline and flashes his impish grin, shaking his head at the lengths to which people will go to get their hands on his family's Christmas Ale.

Not that he's complaining.

The cultlike devotion (and occasional hoarding) that the brews have inspired have made Great Lakes Brewing the nation's 22nd-largest craft brewery in terms of output (91,189 barrels in 2010).

Behind the success is Conway, a 63-year-old Irishman known as a trailblazer and environmentalist, one who learned frugality from Depression-era parents and a taste for better beer from the best brewpubs in Europe.

Conway came up with the idea of starting his own brewery and brewpub in the early 1970s, while attending Loyola University's campus in Rome and soaking up the pub scene in Germany, Belgium and England, and while bartending in Chicago during graduate school.

Today, his nearly 23-year-old company, while facing increasing competition, has just capped off a $7 million expansion in Ohio City that doubled its beer-making capacity to 240 bottles a minute.

The company also is hiring for a third shift to keep its bottling line jangling 24/7.

Both the brewery and restaurant, which he co-owns with his brother Dan, anticipate another year of record sales (up to $30 million this year) and a third straight year of 20 percent growth.

If that weren't enough, next weekend marks Great Lakes' 11th Annual Burning River Fest, a two-day fundraiser he started and named for when the Cuyahoga River was so polluted it caught fire eight times.

The event has raised more than $246,000 for efforts to promote a cleaner Cuyahoga, a healthier Great Lakes, and a purer source of water for their craft beers.

To make it truly feel like Christmas in July, Conway will also untap 50 kegs of Christmas Ale for thirsty environmentalists.

As a businessman whose products are 90 percent water (he jokes that commercially brewed beers are 99 percent water), Conway said he can't afford not to protect the water supply.

"The Great Lakes is one-fifth of the world's fresh water and 75 percent of the U.S.' fresh water," he said.

"For us, it's our Yosemite, it's our Grand Canyon."

Children of immigrants

Patrick Francis Conway is the second of nine children and the eldest son of Jack and Margaret "Marge" Conway. His father was a self-made tax lawyer, while his mother was a former stenographer for Eliot Ness, the Cleveland safety director and head of the crime-fighting Untouchables.

Pat and wife Jeanne have a grown daughter and son.

Daniel John Conway, 50, co-owner of the brewery and brewpub, is the youngest of the five brothers. Dan and his wife, Eorann, have five daughters, ages 13 to 21.

Being reared by Irish immigrant parents who grew up during the Depression fueled a lifelong habit of saving, scrimping and reusing whatever they had.

Pat remembers spending childhood vacations visiting national parks, watching his father pick up other people's litter, and supplementing their meals with vegetables grown in the back yard of their Rocky River home.

"We didn't call it 'sustainability' back then," Dan said. "We called it 'common sense' and working with nature."

Wandering through some of the world's poorest countries after graduate school, Pat was struck by the way people made the most of every scrap, from not wasting food to flattening tin cans to shingle their roofs.

"They're so poor, but they used everything they had, and look how wasteful a country we are," he said.

When he returned home to open his own bar, one of the first people he called was Dan, who was then working as commercial loan officer at Huntington Bank.

Dan not only invested in the company, he also started pitching in at the restaurant and refining the business plan. After about a month of juggling both jobs, he joined the enterprise full time.

"We named it 'Great Lakes Brewing Co.' because we ultimately wanted it to grow into something that could serve the region," Dan said.

While Pat and Dan are equal owners of brewery and beer pub, Pat is the frontman of the company.

He's usually the one making presentations, shaking hands, working the room and leading tours of the brewery, while Dan is more often backstage, crunching numbers, paying the bills and making sure the beer gets where it needs to go.

"Pat is probably better at being the spokesman for the company, and that's fine by me," Dan said.

"I see what other work needs to be done and focus my work accordingly. I'm the one that deals with the lawyers, bankers and accountants."

Their parents also instilled in them a deep sense of family and civic pride, which survives in the names of their Conway's Irish Ale (named after their traffic policeman grandfather, Pat Conway, whose photo adorns the labels), Eliot Ness lager, Burning River pale ale, Edmund Fitzgerald porter, Lake Erie Monster pale ale and Wright Pilsner (named after Wilbur and Orville Wright).

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While Great Lakes beer is sold in 13 states, from Minnesota to North Carolina, 90 percent of the Christmas Ale never leaves Ohio.

Christmas Ale, available only for eight weeks starting Nov. 1, is the company's second-biggest seller after Dortmunder Gold.

"What if we only sold it here?" wondered brewer Jason Gompf. "You know how much business we'd bring to Ohio?"

Conway raised his hand, which Gompf gustily high-fived.

"That'd be great!" Conway said.

Conservation culture

Margie Flynn, principal and co-owner of BrownFlynn, a boutique sustainability consulting firm in Highland Heights, said the Conway brothers were passionate trailblazers in conservation and taking care of the planet long before everyone else.

"That has been key to defining their success over the years, and Pat is committed to ensuring that that part of the company's culture remains intact," she said.

"I hold them up as shining examples of people who are so generous with their time and contributing their products, because that's just core to who he is."

From the biodegradeable carry-out boxes to the brewery pretzels made with spent barley to the "Fatty Wagon" that runs on used restaurant oil and emits french fry-smelling exhaust, the Conways have tried to recycle and reuse all of the byproducts that come from their business.

Mitchell's Homemade Ice Cream churns its leftover beer into handmade pints of Edmund Fitzgerald Chocolate Chunk ice cream served at the restaurant.

"I must have gone back with revised recipes five or six times, changing just a touch of this or that," said Mike Mitchell, company president.

"He was so obsessed with matching the actual ice cream to the ideal of it in his imagination. He wanted it to have a more pronounced beer flavor, but of course it had to be delicious ice cream. So it can't really taste simply like beer. . . . I'm the same way, so I relate to that about him."

Conway's latest project may be the ultimate homage to the past.

He is exploring creating a limited-edition beer inspired by the ancient Sumerians, depicted sipping pots of unfiltered beer through long reed straws in exhibits at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.

Because no written instructions survive for how to make what they were drinking, he and his brewers must approximate the ingredients and technique they might have used.

"Should we stop there? Should we make an Egyptian beer? Should we go up through the Middle Ages?" Conway asked. "Or is that too ambitious?

"The very first beer we make would probably taste god-awful," he added.

Pub brewer Joel Warger agreed: "It would definitely have kind of a sour, earthy aroma. It would be pungent."

Products and principle

As much as people love his beer, Conway craves the status of brands like Harley-Davidson, Nordstrom or Southwest Airlines.

"People will do anything they can to support those companies," he said. "They have almost a cult following, but it's not just the products, it's their values and principles that surround the product."

If Great Lakes rejuvenated the neighborhood around West 25th Street, newer watering holes like the Bier Markt, Bar Cento and the newly opened Market Garden Brewery & Distillery next to the West Side Market have transformed the area into a hip entertainment district.

Former brewmaster Andy Tveekrem, who spent nine years at Great Lakes Brewing and now works for the Market Garden Brewery, said his former bosses have little reason to worry about the new competition.

"They've got such a tried-and-true clientele that we're not stealing away their customer base as much as bringing more young people into the area," he said.

Conway shrugged. "A rising tide lifts all boats."

Sharon Barson, president of Educational Advantage Inc. in Chicago, a longtime operations consultant for the company, said: "The absolute passion, energy and dedication with which Pat operates is just as strong if not stronger than it was 16 years ago."

She said that in the notoriously high-turnover restaurant business, they have an unheard-of level of employee loyalty.

"He's got one server who I think just turned 70," she said. "They really respect the people who work for them, and it shows."

Some former employees say the persistence and single-mindedness that makes Conway a successful entrepreneur didn't always make him the easiest person to work for.

Critics who have butted heads with him are reluctant to talk about it for publication, saying he has a fiery temper and a long memory. Which may speak to the influence Conway now yields.

"No one can be successful without burning bridges and stepping on toes," said Kurt Steeber, former executive chef at the restaurant who is now chef and nutritional alchemist at The Ranch at Live Oak Malibu in California.

Tveekrem said of his former boss: "He's very tenacious when he has an idea, and even if it takes years to get where he wants to be, he'll always end up getting there.

"He can be really charming and a lot of fun, especially if he has a few beers in him, " Tveekrem said.