These days, you can’t go far in northern Michigan without finding yourself at the doors of a craft brewery. Long before Traverse City was a recognized beer town, though – and before Michigan even had 10 craft breweries to its name – an Ohio transplant named Jack Archiable took a chance on a property in Williamsburg and started a business called Traverse Brewing Company. It was the birth of craft beer in northern Michigan, and a place many of today’s brewing luminaries got their start.
“I have brewing in my DNA,” Archiable tells The Ticker. That trait started with his great grandfather, who once worked as a brewmaster for a brewery in Hamburg, Germany. It continued with his grandfather, who immigrated to the United States, got a job at a brewery in Brooklyn, New York, and worked his way up to an assistant brewer position.
The heritage meant that Archiable was raised in a culture of beer from a very young age. “I started drinking beer when I was about 10 or 12 years old,” he recalls. “My dad used to call me ‘the Beer Baron.’” Unsurprisingly, when Archiable went off to college and grad school, he found himself working around beer. And as a bartender at the University of Cincinnati Student Union, he invented his first makeshift brew.
“I would take a pitcher, and I would pour a bottle of Guinness in it, and then I’d fill it up the rest of the way with Rolling Rock,” he says. “It caught on and people loved it. We called it a ‘super black and tan’ and it sold like crazy.”
One night, after enjoying a few super black and tans with friends, Archiable met the person who would become his mentor.
“As we’re leaving the bar, this guy follows us out and says, ‘So you guys like beer, huh?’” Archiable says. “And we’re like, ‘Yeah, what’s up?’ And he says, ‘Well, I make beer. Would you like to try some of my homemade beer?’ So we followed him back to his house, and he took us down to the basement, and he had about eight batches of beer bubbling away.”
Despite the slasher film undertones, that moment changed Archiable’s life. He and his friends immediately fell in love with the stranger’s home-brewed beer, and Archiable became the guy’s unofficial brewing apprentice, learning the ropes of making beer in a dingy basement in Athens, Ohio.
Those basement lessons gave Archiable the knowledge, experience, and beer-brewing chops he needed to start his own brewery, which he did in January 1996 at 11550 US-31 South in Williamsburg, in the building now occupied by 365 Outdoor. Traverse Brewing Company became the seventh licensed craft brewery In Michigan; today, there are more than 300. It also had the distinction of making the first beer brewed in northern Michigan since the prohibition era, an honor that belonged to Archiable’s Manitou Amber Ale.
If the Manitou Amber sounds familiar, that’s because you can still find it on tap and on store shelves throughout Michigan. Today, it’s brewed by Traverse City’s Brewery Terra Firma, whose founder John Niedermaier was just one of several notable figures in local beer who got his start working at Traverse Brewing. The alumni list also includes Joe Short and Russell Springsteen, who would go on to found Short’s Brewing Company and Right Brain Brewery, respectively.
Niedermaier, Short, and Springsteen were all passionate homebrewers when they came to work at Traverse Brewing Company, but had never held jobs in a commercial brewing setting. From converting homebrew recipes to commercial batches to the entire process of making, marketing, and selling beer as a business, the three stumbled through the learning curve of commercial brewing along with Archiable. Today, all three credit Traverse Brewing with giving them the skills and knowledge they would use to launch their own businesses.
“Traverse Brewing was really a think tank,” says Niedermaier. “It was a lot of smart, creative people that were really into brewing, into beer, and into the science behind it, the art behind it. It was a great incubator.”
Short was only 20 years old when he landed his job at Traverse Brewing, getting his foot in the door not by filling out an application, but by bringing in a few bottles of his homebrewed beer (“They graded a few of [my beers] and then told me to come back when I was 21,” Short laughs). Short only stayed at Traverse Brewing for six months, but he recalls the experience as being extremely formative.
“It was certainly a super special time for me,” Short says. “It was magical to be a part of something that was just on the brink of explosion, as an industry, and to experience that while being so naive and so young, and just full of excitement and ambition.”
Eventually, the story came to an end. In January 2008, Archiable found an unwelcome notice on the door to his brewery. It was from the Michigan Liquor Control Commission (MLCC), effectively ordering Traverse Brewing to shut down over allegedly unpaid beer taxes. It took months for Archiable to convince the MLCC that they’d made a mistake, and when he did, there was still a caveat: If Archiable wanted to keep brewing, he’d need to reapply for licenses at both the state and federal levels – a process that would take months and leave him unable to operate his business in the interim. As far as Archiable saw it, it was game over either way.
And so Archiable let Traverse Brewing die. He stopped making loan payments and let the bank take over the building, the equipment, and the branding. He then went to work for Short’s for 10 years.
Today, Archiable is retired, but his influence still lingers over northern Michigan beer. Soft Parade, for instance – a flagship beer at Short’s – is a tip-of-the-hat to Traverse Brewing, named after the Doors album that Archiable would play at the end of every brewing shift. Niedermaier, meanwhile, is still brewing beer on the old Traverse Brewing system, including several recipes – the Manitou Amber, the Sleeping Bear Brown, the Batch 500 IPA, among others – that Archiable invented at Traverse Brewing.
As for Springsteen, he says the local brewing scene would likely look very different if Archiable hadn’t come along 25 years ago.
“We all owe a lot to Jack,” Springsteen says. “He pioneered through a lot and he paved the road for all of us. He’s the Godfather of northern Michigan brewing.”
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January 31, 2021 at 12:00PM
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When Craft Beer Was Born - Traverse City Ticker
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