NOLA Brewing
Credit: NOLA Brew History
Nola Brewing has come a long way since its conception after Katrina. Kirk Coco was sitting in a bar, drinking a Dixie beer when he read on the label that it was made in Wisconsin; this infuriated him. Since his return to post-Katrina New Orleans, he had been thinking that he wanted to start a business in the city. He did not know what sort of business until he realized that New Orleans’ last vestige of brewery greatness was no longer functioning in the city. He thought that one of his friends, Byron, an experienced home brewer, should start a brewery; Byron shot that idea down, but then he said ‘you should do it.”
So, he did. Byron put him in contact with Peter Caddo, who had been brewing for over 20 years and had served as a brew master for Dixie Beer for many of those years. Nola Brewing Co. was officially founded in 2008 and has been growing ever since. The first batches of Nola Beer, used to develop the recipes for the Brown and Blonde Ale, were being brewed in Caddo’s backyard on his home brew equipment.
“we made a bunch of beers in his back yard on his home brew stuff, just sitting there all day getting to know each other working together.” -Kirk Coco
NOLA Brewing Co. from goNOLA.com.
Nola Brewing started with their Brown and Blonde Ales and it took them about a year and a half to get on the market, mainly due to hold-ups with state and city laws. They have since added Hopitoulas, Hurricane Saison – SPRING SEASONAL, 7th Street Wheat, and this year Irish Channel Stout WINTER SEASONAL. Nola Brewing has since spread and is now distributing in all of Louisiana, Southern Alabama and along the Florida panhandle. Coco loves the growth of his business and hopes to see other craft brewers in the area soon.
“I think this city needs 5 or 6 microbreweries, very realistically. That’s not going to happen until the state law changes a little bit and we are working on that right now. Its very hard to start a microbrewery, I mean I had to build up this brewery, most cities and states where you have brewing going on, somebody starts with either a brewpub or starts with a backyard small system and sells to a few bars and restaurants and slowly expands out and then builds a big brewery like this one. I built this brewery and then pumped out beer and if no body had liked those beers I would have lost three quarters of a million dollars really quick, so its not a very realistic way to open brewery; unfortunately the way the state law is written right now it’s the only way you can open a brewery.” -Kirk Coco
The next step for Nola Brewing is the hopes of adding bottles to the brewing process, which will give Nola Brewing a bigger market presence. Nola Brewing is meeting with local banks seeking for funds for this major step.
The people at Nola Brewing have a true love for beer, New Orleans, and the history of New Orleans beer. We were honored to sit down with Kirk Coco of Nola Brewing for an interview in November 2010. Check out the details below! Click here to contact Nola Brewing or to find out more about them.
Andrew Rowland
Digital Recording
November, 11th 2010
NOLA Brewing and their Ongoing History
Kirk Coco
Andrew: Basically, I am doing a project I started last year. It is focusing on the older breweries in New Orleans, so I wanted to integrate some of the breweries starting out in the city now. What made you want to get into the microbrewery business after you got out of the navy?
Kirk: Nothing in particular. I know it sounds kind of weird. I came back after Katrina got out of the navy to just help rebuild the city. I knew I wanted to open a business that made something, but I didn’t know what I wanted to make and I was drinking Dixie beer pretty religiously and one night was reading on the bottle that it was made in Wisconsin and that got me a little pissed off that they weren’t actually making beer in the city anymore. So, then I tried to convince one of my friends, a guy named Byron, to start brewing beer because he is a very good home brewer and he needed to open a brewery; but he wouldn’t do it. But he said ‘you should do it’; I have this guy that used to brew beer. His name is Peter. He brewed beer at Dixie for 18 years’ and he put me in touch with him. I said, “you know I think that would be a pretty good project to work on”. So, we started working on it; lo and behold we actually got beer out on the market.
AR: So, you didn’t know how to brew beer when you started out?
KC: I had done some home brewing, but it was terrible, you wouldn’t want to drink it.
AR: So, after you met him (Peter) did you know automatically you wanted to work with him, or was there a list of people you thought about?
KC: I didn’t really know a lot of brewers, so there wasn’t really a list. I talked to him and I had some of his beers real early on too; his beers are phenomenal. He doesn’t brew a bad beer. So, I knew he was a good brewer and my friend Byron, who I trust a lot, was like this is the guy if you want to do it. I don’t know if he (Peter) necessarily knew I could get a brewery off the ground and I think there was a little dis-trust in the beginning, ‘like people have come to me before, they always have a lot of promises, but nothing has ever comes from it’. More of us just getting to know each other and we made a bunch of beers in his back yard on his homebrew stuff, just sitting there all day getting to know each other, working together, that kind of built the relationship.
AR: You said that it took you a little while sitting in the backyard brewing beers, is this where you stumbled upon your fist ‘flagship’ or ‘staple’ beer?
KC: What we did was, we kind of thought about what we wanted to do as our initial beers, like what people would be receptive to in New Orleans. This is not a big craft brew town, like his first thing was ‘lets do an IPA’ and I was like ‘we can’t start off with an IPA’ people are going to go, ‘ew this is to bitter I don’t like it and I don’t want to buy any of their beers’. So, we decided to start with a blonde and a brown ale and the brown ale would be uh, we kind of had some conflict on that, but I wanted it to be real light and he wanted a little heavier. What we ended up doing is going with a pretty mild, like an English mild brown ale, which is 3.9% alcohol, is what ours is. I wanted that because really if you go any heavier its hard to drink during the summer and we wanted it to be year around beer. But, we made up for that this month, by bringing out the “Irish Channel Stout” which is our nice, big, strong, dark beer. But, the brown ale we had two different really good brown ales, one was around 5.5% and one was the 3.9%. We kind of fought over which way to go on that one and we ended up doing an open vote at East Jefferson’s General Hospital’s up on the roof event. It’s a big fundraiser that they do every year with beer and just let everybody who tasted it vote. Mine barely won out; it was close.
AR: In the beginning how many brews were you planning on making, was it just you wanted to stick with those two, or was there automatically thoughts of expansion?
KC: I think our concern in the beginning was just, could we even get these two beers out and would anybody want to drink them.
AR: How many gallons of beer did you brew at first, to sell?
KC: To sell, we started with our brew house. The fist batch that went out the door we did 40 barrel batch the first time and 60s after that. Our first batch were two 40 barrels just to make sure we were doing it right and it came out okay and the after that 60 barrels at a time.
AR: Do you distribute just in New Orleans right now?
KC: No, we are in all of Louisiana, Alabama from Montgomery down to Mobile, and the Florida pan handle.
AR: How long did it take to start out?
KC: About a year and half to get beer out the door.
AR: So, that was pretty quick then?
KC: Not bad, but I would of liked it to be a lot quicker, because no one has any money during that time. If it hadn’t been for some delays by the city and the state we probably could of gotten it out in a year.
AR: Are the ingredients locally grown, or are they shipped in?
KC: Malted barley, there is nobody that does that locally, so we get malted barley from several different malt distributors. Peter is kind of crazy about his malt selections and gets really obscure malts and a lot of different malts in each of the beers. Our Irish Channel Stout has eight different grains in it; that’s a lot. Macro beers have one grain and corn syrup in it, most craft beers usually dealing with two or three grains maybe. So, Peter is somewhere between 5 and 8 grains for each of the beers we make. That makes itcomplex to get grains, because he will pick a grain and we will find out the distributors we have don’t distribute any. So, you have to go to someone else to get that grain from them. But, we try to let him have whatever he wants because his beers are very good and the flavors do result from the different choices of barley he uses and hops of course. So, that is our side of the game. We just have to figure out how we are going to get the stuff after he chooses what he wants to make it with.
AR: So, basically you are the business side of it totally?
KC: Right.
AR: However, do you collaborate on the beers?
KC: We do collaborate on the beers, I don’t brew, Dylan (the other office staff) could brew, but he doesn’t because he is too busy doing this stuff on this side too. We all do package and keg cleaning and stuff like that whenever it needs to be done; I mean there is only five us so everything ends up falling into everyone’s hands at one time or another. I will help Peter if he needs help with the brew. I can grind in grains and stuff, but the actually brewing is either Peter or Melanie, who’s our head brewer. Today is a perfect example of that, it’s a brew day, and Peter came in early. He is doing one brew that will run till about four Melanie comes in around 11 o’clock.
AR: So, is there anything you consider unique to NOLA Brewing?
KC: On the marketing side, the tap handles, the names of beers, we try to give ourselves a very distinct New Orleans feel. The beers themselves, we are just trying the best beers we can make. A unique thing we do is our Seventh Street Wheat. We use fresh lemon basil leaves, which I don’t think anyone else in the brewing industry is doing right now, but that was just a solution to a problem that we had, I didn’t want people throwing oranges in our wheat beer because I think you shouldn’t have to add something to a beer once you have made it.
AR: Do you have any pans from here?
KC: Well, bottles is a big, big plan. That’s what we are really aiming for right now, because we can incorporate all these beers into bottles and have a much bigger presence retail and in a lot of bars and restaurants that don’t do draft. So, that will help us grow immensely. From there we would like to do some more specialized beers, you know, double IPA’s, and Imperial Stouts.
AR: Do you think from your start, that you guys have opened a lot of people’s eyes in the city to micro brewing?
KC: I like to think so, I think Abita really did the biggest job on that; they have been here for 24 years. They definitely were the forerunner there and opened up the doors for anybody else that comes in the market. But, I think being local and having the NOLA name got us into the hands of some people that would have never tried craft beer. That’s just how New Orleans is, New Orleans is very much, if there is something being made here, we will give it a try. So, we probably got a few people who never had a craft beer before who said ‘let me give that a try’.
AR: Do you see other microbreweries that come into the city as competition, or partners?
KC: I see them as partners, I really do, this city is still a year ago at least 95% bud, miller, coors. So, the more craft beers that come to the market (this city had tons of breweries and they were all booming) we could do great if everybody just started drinking craft beers. So, that’s really the goal, is to get more craft beers into peoples hands and then we will all do really well. I think this city needs 5 or 6 microbreweries, very realistically. That’s not going to happen until the state law changes a little bit and we are working on that right now. Its very hard to start a microbrewery, I mean I had to build up this brewery, most cities and states where you have brewing going on, somebody starts with either a brewpub or starts with a backyard small system and sells to a few bars and restaurants and slowly expands out and then builds a big brewery like this one. I built this brewery then pumped out beer and if no body had liked those beers I would have lost three quarters of a million dollars really quick, so its not a very realistic way to open brewery, unfortunately the way the state law is written right now it’s the only way you can open a brewery, because we can’t self-distribute in Louisiana event if you are producing a very small amount and so you have to have a distributor sign you on and distributors don’t want to sign you unless there is enough beer coming in that it can be profitable. So, its not a very realistic environment for the brewing industry to grow correctly.
AR: Do you think the economy has had an effect on the brewery?
KC: You know, I have been real fortunate because we are in New Orleans and we’ve ridden out the storm a little better than most cities. I think the BP thing definitely affected us though. Just like it did every restaurant and bar in the city, this past summer when tourism normally comes in and really hits hard it was just dead and I feel it slowly starting to pick up again, but we are a gulf coast distributed beer and the BP thing, nobody was coming down to the gulf coast.
AR: Well, that is all for now, but I will surly be back. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me.
KC: Sure.
