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Eli's bartender Gentry McShane pours a Montucky Cold Snacks.
Photo: Blair Heagerty / SFGateEli's bartender Gentry McShane pours a Montucky Cold Snacks.
Eli's bartender Gentry McShane pours a Montucky Cold Snacks.
Eli's bartender Gentry McShane pours a Montucky Cold Snacks.
In an average week, Zoe Clisham estimates Eli’s Mile High Club, the Oakland bar she manages, sells a staggering 40 cases of Montucky Cold Snacks.
Those aren’t actual snacks, mind you — at least, not the kind you can eat — but 4% light lagers, a craft competitor to macro-brewed beers like Bud Light and PBR, sold by a brewery of the same name in Bozeman, Montana. And since Eli’s switched from its house mass-produced domestic beer a few months ago to Montucky, they’ve been regularly selling out. During warmer weeks, they’ll sell up to 60 cases.
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Cold Snacks is the most popular beer you’ve never heard of. That’s not by design, necessarily, though the beer was originally exclusively sold in Montana to bars and ski resorts, and even to a few brewery taprooms. Since then, Montucky has moved into new territories — including California.
Six months ago, sales rep Bill Cleveland — who identifies ‘round these parts as Montucky Bill — arrived in Oakland to spread the Snack Gospel.
He’s hard to miss. Long brown hair flows from under his cowboy hat. He has a short beard and browline glasses decorated with a pastel floral print, and he wears a technicolor button-up and two Polynesian fish hook necklaces, neither of which obscure his chest tattoos.
“I have the old elevator pitch,” he says. “We’re the rootinest, tootinest, straightforward American lager this side of the Mississippi, but we're getting on the East too. No corn or rice grain filler; it keeps the hangover quotient nice and low, great in the sun and in the snow.”
Like most of the Bay Area, the manager of Eli's hadn’t heard of Montucky Cold Snacks before Cleveland arrived in town. But he made such an impression she decided to rotate the beer into Eli’s popular $5 Working Person special, which includes a house domestic beer and a shot of whiskey.
“We were trying to get away from really huge brands — big industruous AB InBev companies that mass produce inexpensive beer — and go towards smaller sources for our products,” she says. “The initial reception was people were a little squirrely; people are a little afraid of change. But [now] people like the beer itself. It’s really light and clean, and it’s significantly better than other cheap beers I’ve had.”
Eli’s is now Montucky’s best client nationally, but it’s hardly the only place in town where the beer is sold. Some of Oakland’s most popular bars — The Good Hop, Beer Revolution, Tiger’s Taproom, the Avenue, Stork Club, even The Rare Barrel in Berkeley — carry and sell out of the beer regularly.
“We are a comically small operation,” Cleveland says of Montucky’s employees, “[But] last numbers I had, I think the only thing [outpacing] our growth is White Claw [hard seltzer], and that's on its own astronomical trajectory. There's not a beer outgrowing us.”
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The plan wasn’t always to only make just one beer, as Montucky co-founder Jeremy Gregory explains. Gregory had been a firefighter for close to 10 years, and decided to leave the profession to start a traditional brewery with a new friend, Chad Zeitner, who had a similar goal.
But banks in 2011 in Montana weren’t as keen on financing the idea, believing the local craft beer scene had already reached capacity.
“They literally laughed in our face,” Gregory recalls, adding that while he was off fighting fires, a meeting that had gone sour had a banker liken the proposal to Zeitner as “Bill and Ted’s excellent beer adventure.”
“I’ll always remember that,” Gregory says.
So Gregory and Zeitner reformulated their plan, deciding to focus on making just this one beer. And doing it really well.
“Being a ski bum at heart and always having an idea of light lager — it’s built in as a subset,” Gregory says. “College kids drink lagers and PBR on the hill, ski bums drink light lagers. It would be fun to run with. We could run with the marketing, and we could give portions of proceeds back to the state and nonprofits.”
That, it turned out, was the winning plan. It eventually prompted Zeitner and Gregory to pursue distribution in neighboring states.
“From then on it’s been a conversation around slowing down,” he says. “Expanding is so capital-intensive. We’ve been on the market for seven-and-a-half years and we’re in 15 states, but on the same measure, it’s a lot to tackle on shoestring funding.”
The money conversation is made tougher by that promise to give back a fairly substantial portion of their profits. Montucky Cold Snacks donates 8% of each beer’s proceeds to carefully selected charities in whatever market it’s sold in. In Oakland and around Northern California, they’ve worked with City Slicker Farms in Oakland, the Sacramento SPCA and the Transgender Gender-variant and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP).
“I'm completely new to the Bay — never set foot here until almost six months ago,” Cleveland says. “And so learning about all these charities... It's a task, but it's enjoyable to just become part of the community. You can't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.”
That philanthropy pledge was a big selling point for Eli’s.
“[Cleveland] told us about the charity work that they were doing, the 8% proceeds [donated],” Clisham says. “When we first launched Montucky, $1 of every beer sale went to a charity of our choosing. We did TGIJP, and then Causa Justa. We were making so much money we spread it around.”
Ask Montucky Bill, and he’ll attribute the early success of the beer in the Bay Area to the design of the can — a sky blue and cobalt-striped can with the shape of a white horse in front of a colorful outline of mountains — and to the fact that the popularity of light lager on the whole just hasn’t wavered.
“Domestic beer’s not going to go away,” Cleveland says, “but it's been ages since somebody really took the realm on.”
It’s a simple product, but Cleveland and Gregory hope drinkers consider it as more of a lifestyle product than just a beer.
“It’s fun, almost irreverent,” Gregory says of the company’s branding. “It resonates with a lot of people. It’s great to have an alternative [to macro beer] that’s exciting, intriguing. Obviously it’s new; it’s an independent company coming out of left field. It’s the little guy story, the David versus Goliath.”
Alyssa Pereira is an SFGate digital editor. Email: alyssa.pereira@sfgate.com | Twitter: @alyspereira
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