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08-09-2021, 13:31
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The bell tower of the former St. Patrick Irish Catholic Church in the Northside neighborhood of Cincinnati catches the morning sunlight before any of the surrounding surfaces, shimmering like a lighthouse at the break of day. The light creeps down the tower to the tiled roof of the church, built back in 1873, before reaching the textured brick walls. And it’s about there that it hits the Alamosaurus and Tyrannosaurus dinosaurs colorfully painted onto a large grain silo behind the church.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631042690886-MBP0FFAMUYJSMB3ZX52G/urbanartifact_collage4.5.jpg?format=1000w This former place of worship is now the home of Urban Artifact, a brewery focused almost exclusively on fruited Sour Ales. The juxtaposition of cartoon dinosaurs and classical architecture may sound peculiar, but it’s actually a fitting image for the brewery’s adventurous but thoughtful spirit.
The church building sits on a raised parcel of land, which lifts it like an island above the sea of warehouses on the surrounding blocks. Northside is a former industrial enclave of Ohio’s most populous metropolitan area, and like many such neighborhoods across the country, it now balances that blue-collar legacy with eclectic shopping, dining, and entertainment options. It’s far enough from Downtown, however, to have avoided the full gentrification that claimed the now-hip Over the Rhine district in the early 21st-century, and it still has the feel of a living, working neighborhood.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631042710714-8F2LD4SBHUW4Q2F3AVUN/urbanartifact_collage2.jpg?format=1000w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631042775037-7DUS7IHPPVD3NRS79ZH1/UA+20210707+church+exterior+details+%289%29.JPG?fo rmat=1000w At Urban Artifact, founders Scotty Hunter, Bret Kollmann Baker, and Scott Hand are hard at work as well, chipping away at the calcified perceptions of what a craft brewery can be, and carving out new channels to get their beverages to customers. Since opening in 2015, the brewery has morphed and changed several times in response to what drinkers want, but its founders haven’t chased trends. They’ve just attached less of their identity as brewers and as a brand to specific styles than many have. They love fruit, and they love acidity—and as long as they can keep playing with both, they’ll make what customers want to buy. Inside its 150-year-old monument to the past, Urban Artifact is brewing for the future.
FINDING A NICHE “The plan was always to have a niche,” says Kollmann Baker as we sit in the empty Urban Artifact taproom in the basement of the church, morning sunlight streaming through the windows. Every time I meet him, Kollmann Baker looks and sounds like he just got off from third shift at the factory. His voice is deep and gravelly, and his well-loved brewery T-shirt is already fruit-stained and sweaty just an hour into his day.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631043016616-WV0ZQ03VESDYDN1TAZKQ/UA+20210707+Bret+%26+Scotty+%282%29.JPG?format=100 0w When Urban Artifact opened in 2015, the plan was for that niche to be general sour and mixed-fermentation beers. The founders saw no growth potential in being an everything-for-everybody brewery in a city that already had Rhinegeist Brewery and MadTree Brewing, and thought that funky, barrel-aged oddities would set them apart. Unfortunately, the public didn’t turn out to be as sustainably interested in that time-consuming branch of brewing as they were.
“We fell into the trap that everybody else fell into, of thinking that with the barrel-aged Sours and funky stuff, the pie was going to keep growing,” says Kollmann Baker. “So all the players kept coming in, but the pie stayed the same size. The slices just got smaller.”
They were already using fruit in a few beers, and saw an avenue to distinguish themselves by focusing on quicker Sours with vibrant fruit expressions. By 2018, Urban Artifact had become defined by brands like The Gadget, the flagship beer of its Midwest Fruit Tart line of heavily fruited but shelf-stable Sour Ales. The Gadget is brewed with blackberries and raspberries, and has become the brewery’s best-seller.
“We fell into the trap that everybody else fell into, of thinking that with the barrel-aged Sours and funky stuff, the pie was going to keep growing. So all the players kept coming in, but the pie stayed the same size. The slices just got smaller.” — Bret Kollman Baker, Urban Artifact“We always had some fruited Sours planned,” says Hunter, tall and bespectacled, with the look of someone who invests more in his road bike than his car. “I don’t think either of us really understood the level of success we would see with those styles specifically.”
Adopting quick Sours wasn’t purely a concession to commerce, however. There was always a little madness behind the science at Urban Artifact—Kollmann Baker, for instance, harvested his current Lactobacillus culture from the church’s bell tower. In the early days, he put out over 100 jars of wort around the property and did sensory tests on all of them before settling on the culture from the highest point of the church, which leant a clean, peachy acidity. They had it plated and banked, and it now sours most beer that leaves the building.
Most of the spontaneous beers they brewed when they first opened have now been relegated, appropriately, to what they call their Dinosaur series. These small-batch beers are 51% beer and 49% fruit (to remain legally “beer” according to the Alcohol and TobaccoTax and Trade Bureau), and are fermented with a fully spontaneous mixed culture Kollmann Baker also captured on the property. And the traditional, non-fruited sour and Brett beers?
“They’re basically dead,” says Kollmann Baker.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046118975-KBMGOL46IFXVOGQXUTH7/UA+20210707+packaging+%288%29.JPG?format=1000w The folks here display a startling lack of attachment to their pet beer styles and brewing habits. In a landscape where breweries launch with mantras like: “We brew what we want to drink” and close with unsold boxes of T-shirts still emblazoned with those sentiments, Urban Artifact has done what organisms have always done to survive in a competitive ecosystem: evolve. Find a niche. Thrive in it until you need to evolve again. Use resources other organisms aren’t using. Be wondrously weird.
“We looked at what successful businesses do, not just what successful breweries do,” says Hunter. “They have something that’s unique in the marketplace and they lean on it to stand out.”
“Ultimately, it’s a balance of what the consumer wants meeting with what we want as well,” adds Kollmann Baker. “Gone are the days of, ‘We brew for us.’ You can’t do that shit anymore.”
GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN Being a chameleon has gone well for Urban Artifact. The brewery has seen double-digit growth every year since opening, and expects to see 20-25% growth for 2021, a number that would be higher if not for a delay in getting an expansion online this past winter. Its current production pace is around 15,000 barrels per year, up from 7,000 just two years ago. There’s space to expand to 50,000 BBLs a year on the existing property, and the founders have eyed that number since opening.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046176477-OUQG01LES7EIXVXISKN4/UA+20210707+warehouse+%282%29.JPG?format=1000w “We had that in mind because we’d be able to pay our employees the best in the industry, and take care of our people and ourselves, and not have to grow anymore and just be a sustainable business,” says Kollmann Baker. “There has to be a stopping point. The whole capitalism mindset of growth growth growth is just crazy.”
Much of that growth has been achieved by spreading out in strategic distribution. “I think of it less in terms of a production number than where we want to be geographically,” says Hunter. “There are a lot of states we’re still not in that we’d like to be.”
“You hear people love variety and want the new thing, but that’s bullshit. The Gadget wouldn’t grow 30% if people wanted variety. If you don’t have something unique and distinct in the market, people want variety because they’re not going to come back to it. When you have something that good, people will.” — Scotty Hunter, Urban ArtifactUrban Artifact distributes to 12 states currently, and is eyeing more. A wide footprint was once the goal of many breweries—but as the craft beer market became saturated in the mid-2010s, as distribution dried up and shelves got congested with brands, more and more breweries pulled back and refocused on local markets and taprooms. But Urban Artifact, as the rare brewery that focuses exclusively on fruited Sours, isn’t selling what most of those breweries are selling, so it’s able to fill a niche in almost any new market it steps into.
“As people were focusing on taprooms, to me it was a response to the fact that they couldn’t get distribution otherwise. They couldn’t get their beer selling in a different market,” observes Hunter. “There are breweries in Ohio that can’t sell in opposite corners of the state because they’re that do-everything brewery. I can go and talk to a distributor in pretty much any state and get an audience.”
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046225085-BA3ZHDZ8GAN15A66OMJL/UA+20210707+tap+handles+%281%29.JPG?format=1000w Urban Artifact is also selling to that audience wherever it can through direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels. Ohio and some other states have laws allowing alcohol producers to ship to a customer’s front door, and Urban Artifact is doing that in 10 of the 12 states it currently distributes to. When the COVID pandemic began, the brewery began shipping beer through its website almost immediately, in part because it had already planned on bringing that sales avenue online.
One pivot led to another. Initially, DTC offered the brewery a one-to-one replacement for its lost taproom sales. That ratio has dropped off as taprooms have reopened, so Urban Artifact adapted its model again, and has since focused on a subscription club that allows it to find an audience for some of its more esoteric beers. That new approach is not a huge volume-mover, but the founders believe it has more long-term growth potential than their taproom, concert, and event spaces do. They’re keeping a close eye on legislation that will allow them to ship to consumers in new states in the coming years.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046526458-53AUOQLSUGFSXZURCVE1/UA+20210707+tap+handles+%283%29.JPG?format=1000w Still, the centerline of the Urban Artifact model is getting six-packs of its Midwest Fruit Tarts and related beers in front of consumers in bottle shops and grocery stores, and the ability to do that is driving most of its growth. The Gadget is currently up 30% year-over-year.
“It’s starting to become the defining product of Urban Artifact that we thought it could be,” says Hunter. It’s difficult to qualify why this particular combination of berries and acidity has caught on so pervasively with consumers, but it has, and Urban Artifact will push it as long as that popularity continues. Hunter thinks it has a stable future.
“You hear people love variety and want the new thing, but that’s bullshit,” he says. “The Gadget wouldn’t grow 30% if people wanted variety. If you don’t have something unique and distinct in the market, people want variety because they’re not going to come back to it. When you have something that good, people will.”
AN EXPLOSIVE TOPIC It is impossible in 2021 to talk about fruit beer without talking about exploding cans, a fact of which Urban Artifact’s sales team is all too keenly aware. The brewers here take great pride in their heavily fruited Sours being shelf-stable at room temperature, but are constantly having to explain to customers and retailers that a fruit beer can even be shelf-stable.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046299097-18J2Y1RS1E6MGI8GLBFR/UA+20210707+Amaretti+Paperweight+%284%29.JPG?forma t=1000w The problem of exploding cans has been an ongoing conversation (https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/sightlines/tick-tick-boom-regulatory-consequences-for-exploding-cans-a-potential-time-bomb-for-small-breweries) over the last several years, as sweet beers made with real fruit have grown in popularity. Fructose (fruit sugar) is highly fermentable, and if that fructose is not fully fermented out of a beer—and that beer is not pasteurized after packaging—refermentation of those sugars can occur inside the can if it isn’t kept cold. This raises the beer’s alcohol level and builds carbon dioxide pressure that can lead to the can exploding, creating a mess, wasting beer, and potentially injuring customers.
This has ignited debate over whose responsibility it is to prevent exploding cans—the customer’s or retailer’s by keeping the beer refrigerated, or the brewer’s by fully fermenting and/or pasteurizing the beer—and worry over possible regulatory consequences if the problem continues. Beer cartoonist Em Sauter even reimagined a popular meme (https://www.pintsandpanels.com/www.pintsandpanels.com/this-is-fine-the-state-of-craft-beer-in-2021) to poke fun at the problem.
The Urban Artifact founders have been vocal on Twitter in their criticism of those who foist this responsibility onto consumers and retailers, insisting breweries need to sell shelf-stable beer in the first place. Their own beers are loaded with real fruit, but the fruit sugars are fully fermented out, leaving behind dry-bodied beers that can tolerate warm temperatures without risk of detonation. Still, the broad assumption now seems to be that fruit beers can explode if kept warm, and that’s bizarre and frustrating to Hunter.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046358393-YWZAIEBUZAQ6MPUR3NH9/UA+20210707+brewery+details+%284%29.JPG?format=100 0w “It’s crazy to me to have to answer the question of if our beer needs to be cold or not,” he says. “I get it from retailers in all kinds of markets. I want it to be kept cold, because generally it’s going to sell better, but it doesn’t have to be.”
He explains that distributor reps in new markets might not fully understand the distinction, which in turn means his brewery’s due diligence won’t be explained to retailers, and some of those retailers won’t bring in Urban Artifact’s beers because they don’t have refrigerator space for them. If they understood what the brewery is doing to protect its product, its customers, and its business partners, they’d perhaps be less hesitant to stock these beers on a warm shelf and to get the brand moving.
The problem doesn’t have an easy or quick solution, as unpasteurized beers bursting with fructose continue to earn high rankings on beer websites.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046430213-F4TH9ILG12ICJULM930G/UA+20210707+Kaleidoscope+%282%29.JPG?format=1000w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046465221-H79XY4M1VWRMVS26KIDQ/UA+20210707+Gryoscope+%281%29.JPG?format=1000w “There’s nothing wrong with selling juice-beer hybrids, but if you’re going to sell a juice-beer hybrid, invest in a pasteurizer,” says Kollmann Baker. “Look to the food industry. Look at what other manufacturers are doing and copy their practices. There’s a reason some juices can sit on the shelf warm, and it’s because they’re pasteurized after packaging. It’s not unreasonable to expect a brewery should do that, and if you can’t, you’re just being negligent.”
He acknowledged a customer is unlikely to be seriously injured by an exploding can, but does worry about the risk of increased regulations on the beer industry or on working with fruit if breweries releasing these fragile products don’t clean up their acts.
“That could impact a lot more people than just you putting out your juice-beer hybrid and selling it for $25 a four-pack and demanding it be in a cooler,” he says with obvious frustration. “It’s just dumb. It’s lazy and it’s dumb.”
Urban Artifact has experimented with adding different phrases to its label copy to try to reassure consumers. At one point, it even included the words “Won’t Explode,” though the TTB made it discontinue that. Now the cans say simply, “Shelf Stable.”
MILLIONS OF PEACHES Urban Artifact uses a lot of fruit. It orders about half a million pounds annually, and Kollmann Baker estimates that on any given day, there are 60-100,000 pounds of fruit in the building waiting to be used. He uses no flavorings, extracts, or concentrates of any kind. Every beer is brewed with single-strength, 100% fruit puree, made from flesh, skins, pulp, and juice. The only thing Kollmann Baker has removed before fruits are shipped to him is the seeds, because of their added weight and the complications they can cause during brewing.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046692839-E44QO6F7RR7MZF2KCJVF/UA+20210707+packaging+%285%29.JPG?format=1000w For a handful of beers, Kollmann Baker partners with specific fruit farmers. In the late summer, when wild Ohio pawpaws are ripe, he works with local foragers to acquire this esoteric fruit, which tastes like an alchemy of banana, mango, and forest floor. For most of his fruit needs, however, Kollmann Baker turns to a broker who works directly with farmers around the country and overseas. If he wants a fruit of a specific varietal or from a specific region, he only has to ask. I spoke with Bret’s fruit broker under the condition of anonymity, as this fruit-loving brewer wants to protect his ingredient pipeline. We’ll call him T.
“I have contacts in Brazil, Vietnam, Costa Rica, and a lot of different places because back in the day, people used standard fruits. Now people want the new and unusual. Bret comes up with an idea for a fruit beer, and he trusts me to go find it. ‘You have more connections than we do, go track this down!’ And then my search begins.” — T, fruit broker“I usually work with somebody who is processing raw fruits and they have their own growers,” explains T. “But with Urban Artifact, I’m working with growers to actually produce these non-standard fruits. We’re working on a contract for golden raspberries in Washington, which primarily have only been available in a few farm-owned retail stores.”
These golden raspberries will be grown exclusively for Urban Artifact. Occasionally, the brewery will send T an even more unusual request, as in the case of a soon-to-be-released beer featuring caja, also known as hog plum or yellow mombin.
“They tasked me with going to find it,” says T, with the eager tone of a prospector who was given the vague location of a buried treasure. “I have contacts in Brazil, Vietnam, Costa Rica, and a lot of different places because back in the day, people used standard fruits. Now people want the new and unusual. Bret comes up with an idea for a fruit beer, and he trusts me to go find it. ‘You have more connections than we do, go track this down!’ And then my search begins.”
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046793050-XRST0QDCJCNRLD9MDEF3/UA+20210707+brewery+exterior+%283%29.JPG?format=10 00w A bigger—and more concerning—sourcing problem right now is one that’s completely outside the brewery’s control. Climate change is making many fruit varieties harder and more expensive to source. Kollmann Baker says that these changes are affecting fruit growers in North America in two primary ways.
“Climate change is causing false-spring early blooms which then get crushed by regular late-season frosts, which ends up killing fruit yields,” he explains. “This is largely hurting fruit trees like apples, cherries, pears, and peaches. Cherry prices have gone up roughly 125% over the past two years.”
The second problem is related to the abnormal heat waves that have been punishing the West Coast and Pacific Northwest.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047105609-VEGPPRL0HMLU552R0R7P/urbanartifact_collage3.jpg?format=1000w “This has been absolutely decimating berry harvests,” he explains. “The fruit is just cooking on the vine and rotting before it even gets fully ripe. Raspberry prices are up over 300% in a single year. Blackberry prices are up over 100%. While peaches or apricots are easy to source from Europe, the majority of raspberries for food manufacturing are grown in the Pacific Northwest. It is not feasible to simply make a raspberry anything anymore. There are manufacturers cutting whole product lines that include raspberries.”
So what is a brewery focused on fruit-forward beers to do in the face of this, especially since its best-selling beer features raspberries and blackberries?
“Same as we always have done, roll with it and adapt,” Kollmann Baker says with a shrug. “We’re shelving some of our berry-forward Midwest Fruit Tarts for a year or two—except for The Gadget—while leaning heavily on tropical fruits, whose prices have not gone significantly up.”
'NICE ACIDITY AND NO FUNK' Whether it’s something as common as blackberries or as unusual as the hog plum, the real logistical challenge begins when the fruit arrives at the brewery. “All of our fruit is frozen because it tastes better that way,” says Kollmann Baker. “That way the farmers wait till it’s ripe on the plant and then puree and freeze it. It doesn’t come in a bag, it doesn’t sit in a warehouse for a year, and it doesn’t get heated.”
He explains that the ripe, frozen fruit maintains its flavor better than more processed formats, but frozen fruit presents its own challenges.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047147749-5OV1I7WRKJSZOE71063Y/UA+20210707+brewing+equipment+%286%29.JPG?format=1 000w “We usually have to get fruit two to three weeks ahead of time. It comes in drums and they’re just solid blocks of ice. Especially in the winter, it takes a lot of time to thaw. It’s a lot of work managing incoming frozen fruit, fruit we need to brew with this week, fruit we need to brew with next week, and how frozen it all is. We have a freezer, a cooler, and some dry, warm storage areas where we thaw. It’s a lot. Actually, it’s a pain in the ass.”
The volume of fruit the brewery processes led it to purchase a dedicated fruit cooker tank to improve quality and consistency.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047199915-B8WPSUYRE09JFWRJLL0Y/urbanartifact_collage5.jpg?format=1000w “I think we’re probably one of the few if any breweries in the country who has a dedicated tank to mix fruit, heat it up, get a low-temperature pasteurization,” says Hunter. The brewers heat the fruit and beer to around 145° Fahrenheit and hold it there for 45 minutes before adding it to a fermentation tank. The relatively low temperature prevents any off-putting cooked vegetable flavors, and in the case of certain fruits, like strawberries and blueberries, the gentle cooking actually coaxes out the flavor so it’s more in line with what customers are expecting.
In the Midwest Fruit Tart series, Urban Artifact uses about three pounds of fruit per gallon, which equates to about 30% of the fermentable base of the beer coming from fruit. Because fructose is so highly fermentable, Saccharomyces yeast will often prioritize it over slightly more complex sugars like maltose, the most common sugar found in wort. Depending on conditions, this can lead to fermentation stalling out before the desired level of attenuation is reached. To prevent this, Kollmann Baker begins primary fermentation of the base wort several days before adding fruit.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047252600-7ZDSEH1GT1ZOI2G06BBP/UA+20210707+brewing+equipment+%288%29.JPG?format=1 000w “We ferment just the beer base for up to five days and let it get down near terminal gravity, about 1.020. Then we’ll get our fruit in there to restart fermentation, and then the yeast will dry that out completely,” he says.
That means the process that leads to fruit beers from many breweries exploding on shelves is being completed in the fermentation tanks at Urban Artifact. “We don’t want to drink sweet, thick slop beers,” says Kollmann Baker. “There is a market for that and it’s fine if that’s your thing, but it’s not our thing. We found the balance for us to be fully fermenting our beers, drying them out, and not over-acidifying while still meeting customer demand of fruit-forward beers with nice acidity and no funk.”
THE ART OF BEING A HEEL It doesn’t take long to realize Kollmann Baker doesn’t pull punches with his criticisms of other members of the beer community, whether it be calling out other brewers over exploding cans or taking on the Brewers Association (https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/gbh-podcast/2020/7/27/sl-024-can-you-hear-me-now-nbsptrying-to-talk-race-and-beer) for responding poorly to the George Floyd killing, the subsequent racial justice protests in 2020, and the calls by Black industry voices for greater equity within craft beer.
“I have no qualms calling bullshit when I see it. I think more people should,” he says. “I guess I can thank my mom for that.”
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046624241-U7GQPSFZ5U7BU7FRV1ZM/UA+20210707+merch+%283%29.JPG?format=1000w Freely dishing out criticism requires the ability to take the backlash, and Urban Artifact has dealt with its own share of that in return. Kollmann Baker and Hunter are comfortable with that dynamic. “Sometimes you rub people the wrong way and people don’t like you for it,” says Kollmann Baker. “In the brewery we liken it to professional wrestling. Urban Artifact is a heel. We are 100% a heel brewery, and we’re okay with that. Everybody loves a good heel.”
“Sometimes you rub people the wrong way and people don’t like you for it. In the brewery we liken it to professional wrestling. Urban Artifact is a heel. We are 100% a heel brewery, and we’re okay with that. Everybody loves a good heel.” — Bret Kollmann Baker, Urban ArtifactThat posture and tone aside, these two are also enthusiastic cheerleaders for people they see as moving beer forward. Despite the bluster, they still love this industry.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047893912-TICNVMWT8XA8L3MONW7B/UA+20210707+church+exterior+details+%283%29.JPG?fo rmat=1000w “I love beer and I love everything that beer is and encompasses,” says Kollmann Baker, just a moment after comparing craft beer to a wrestling pageant. “At times I disagree with a lot of breweries and the choices people make, and I generally don’t think that the beer industry is as friendly and noncompetitive as people make it out to be, but I still love everything about it. I just love it. It’s not what people say it is, but I love everything that beer actually is.”
So what will happen if he’s no longer brewing it?
SELTZER EXCITEMENT While reports of craft beer’s demise in the face of hard seltzer have been exaggerated, the seltzer segment is still growing rapidly. Unlike many breweries, Urban Artifact is welcoming the trend with open arms. It had been planning to add a lower-calorie, lower-ABV line for some time, and seltzer provided the ideal vehicle. The brewery released its own line of fruited seltzers in early 2021, and it’s not treating these beverages very differently from how it brews its beers.
“We use real fruit and we don’t use any flavoring or extracts or additives,” explains Kollmann Baker. “We do the same process [as our beer] but just with dextrose instead. We sour it first with our house Lacto and then boil it. We send it to the fermentor, add our yeast, and a couple days later add our fruit. Two-and-a-half weeks later, we have a seltzer that tastes more like Urban Artifact than any seltzer on the market.”
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046577770-B3LRH7S5VOFT8BVL1IHD/urbanartifact_collage4.jpg?format=1000w The response so far has been nothing but positive. Hunter sees an opportunity for seltzer to become 20-25% of Urban Artifact’s volume in the next year. The brewery is still testing the market waters, though, and has so far only distributed cans and kegs in Ohio and Kentucky.
“One of our Cincinnati reps who has worked in distribution for years said he’s never before had a product where he got a 100% yes rate like this,” says Hunter. “And that’s on- and off-premise. The excitement is there. It’ll just be—like with our other beers—people tasting it and getting familiar with it.”
Hunter and Kollmann Baker are quick to point out this wasn’t a move of reluctance or desperation. It was a proactive choice with a bit of future-proofing mixed in. Because these real fruit seltzers have lower malt costs, they also help offset some of the brewery’s increased fruit costs related to climate change as well. Both co-founders are clearly enthusiastic about the new line.
“I’ve never seen the brew team as excited about a new product since we first came out with Gadget and developed the Midwest Fruit Tart style,” says Kollmann Baker. “It’s been four years since I’ve seen the team get that overwhelmingly excited. Like, accidentally get drunk on a canning day excited.”
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047828703-ZIIT8T7W4WXOO1UR0VET/urbanartifact_collage6.jpg?format=1000w That excitement is affirmed when I speak with Leslie McCarraher, Urban Artifact’s taproom manager. McCarraher came to Urban Artifact after years working in the craft beer crucible of Asheville, North Carolina (she was the fourth woman in the state to pass the Certified Cicerone exam), and while she loves all things beer, the new seltzer line is the first thing she mentions when asked about her favorite Urban Artifact products.
“They’re crisp with good fruit flavor, and most importantly you don’t taste any kind of fake alcohol flavor,” she says, referencing criticisms that have been levied against some other seltzers and flavored malt beverages. “They’re just pure, beautiful creations.”
Still, for former engineering students who followed the classic path of turning homebrewing into a career after meeting in college, is anything lost in switching to seltzers? If sales dictate that he brew 90% seltzer in the coming years, will Kollmann Baker feel any kind of identity crisis?
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631048016110-Q4TTWVOTXDZW52QHP7A7/UA+20210707+sign+%283%29.JPG?format=1000w “Nah, I don’t give a shit,” he responds without hesitation. “We’re still going to do our passion stuff, we’re still gonna do the Dinos, we’re still gonna do small-batch pilots and the fun technical beer things. But if we’re just dumping fucking dextrose into hot water and then adding nutrient and fermenting it with our house cultures, whatever, I don’t care.”
Seltzer wasn’t always the plan, but it became the plan, and the Urban Artifact founders allowed that to organically feed into the brewery’s identity. It’s a path of natural rather than forced adaptation that not all breweries are able or willing to follow.
“If brewing what we want to brew means making things that aren’t selling, then we’re not going to brew what we want to brew anymore,” says Kollmann Baker, before adding a defining qualification that summarizes Urban Artifact’s ability to organically evolve when needed. “Or I just change what I want to brew. I didn’t want to brew seltzers three years ago; now I’d be happy only doing seltzers.”
EVOLVING TO THRIVE By midday the Urban Artifact property is drenched in summer sunlight, and the brewing area—housed in the church’s gymnasium, built in the mid-20th century—is bustling with life. One of the rare Dinosaur beers is being bottled, a forklift is stacking packaging supplies on the sidewalk, and fruit puree is being hosed from the concrete floor. The founders chose this building because it was affordable, available, and beautiful, making it an apt symbol for the brewery’s product-driven philosophy.
In the church basement, McCarraher is just beginning to prepare her subterranean domain for the afternoon opening. During the week, the taproom is mostly the dominion of regulars, but on Saturdays, newcomers show up and McCarraher and her team get to introduce them to the drinks that make Urban Artifact unique.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047298930-9CNZCY4HCHVIDNWOYW30/UA+20210707+Ankylosaurus+%282%29.JPG?format=1000w “Sometimes we have to do a little talking them into trying these beers and eliminating their expectation of what ‘sour’ means,” she explains. “Nice thing about our beers is if you’re a wine drinker or a cocktail drinker, we’re going to be able to find you a beer among what we make.”
From the founders’ Twitter personas to the colorful label artwork to descriptions of the beers themselves, you would be forgiven for thinking Urban Artifact was an irreverent, hard-edged brewery. Wandering the property and neighborhood, however, and hearing Hunter and Kollmann Baker’s genuine interest in the well-being of their employees and community, you get a sense of the deep roots that keep this always-shifting brewery anchored to this blue-collar corner of Cincinnati. As we stand in the church’s former auditorium, sunlight streaming through the restored stained-glass windows and painting the hardwood floor with a blurred kaleidoscope of colors, Hunter reflects on the changes in Urban Artifact’s identity over the six years it’s been open.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047761978-NKBKAV8WY7E5GB00QU2H/UA+20210707+pouring+beer+%281%29.JPG?format=1000w “You’re right that the focus has shifted,” he says, “But to me it’s always been sour products. That’s always been the guiding light that made us excited. It’s the specific products that are less relevant.”
For Kollmann Baker, the idea of sticking to an identity is stifling in itself. Change is Urban Artifact’s identity.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047927412-XFIHBOVIX7AIJ74IRDVF/urbanartifact_collage1.jpg?format=1000w “I just get excited about making new stuff and trying to push back against tradition. Brewers love tradition, and I get it, but also tradition’s stupid. Fuck tradition. Doing things because they’ve always been done that way without understanding why is the dumbest thing. A lot of what we do is looking at that and blowing things up and saying the way you do it is dumb and here’s why.”
He considers. “As long as we can keep doing that, that’s just fun to me. It’s learning and also being subversive. It’s leaning into that heel life. Yeah, I’ll be sad if we ever get rid of Gadget, but I’ll get over it and adapt. At the end of the day there’s still going to be Pilsner Urquell. Life’s good.”
In modern craft beer, you’re either a chameleon or a dinosaur. You evolve or you go extinct. The thing about chameleons is that the organism underneath stays the same, even as its skin changes into different vibrant colors. Urban Artifact is still Urban Artifact, changing its skin over and over around the bones of the old church, and this evolutionary adaptation is allowing it to not only survive, but to thrive.
http://goodbeerhunting.com/assets/authors/Nilsen.png (http://forums.pubsgalore.co.uk//goodbeerhunting.com/authors/david-nilsen) Words + Photos
David Nilsen
More... (https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/blog/2021/9/7/an-ever-evolving-organism-urban-artifact-in-cincinnati-ohio)
The bell tower of the former St. Patrick Irish Catholic Church in the Northside neighborhood of Cincinnati catches the morning sunlight before any of the surrounding surfaces, shimmering like a lighthouse at the break of day. The light creeps down the tower to the tiled roof of the church, built back in 1873, before reaching the textured brick walls. And it’s about there that it hits the Alamosaurus and Tyrannosaurus dinosaurs colorfully painted onto a large grain silo behind the church.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631042690886-MBP0FFAMUYJSMB3ZX52G/urbanartifact_collage4.5.jpg?format=1000w This former place of worship is now the home of Urban Artifact, a brewery focused almost exclusively on fruited Sour Ales. The juxtaposition of cartoon dinosaurs and classical architecture may sound peculiar, but it’s actually a fitting image for the brewery’s adventurous but thoughtful spirit.
The church building sits on a raised parcel of land, which lifts it like an island above the sea of warehouses on the surrounding blocks. Northside is a former industrial enclave of Ohio’s most populous metropolitan area, and like many such neighborhoods across the country, it now balances that blue-collar legacy with eclectic shopping, dining, and entertainment options. It’s far enough from Downtown, however, to have avoided the full gentrification that claimed the now-hip Over the Rhine district in the early 21st-century, and it still has the feel of a living, working neighborhood.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631042710714-8F2LD4SBHUW4Q2F3AVUN/urbanartifact_collage2.jpg?format=1000w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631042775037-7DUS7IHPPVD3NRS79ZH1/UA+20210707+church+exterior+details+%289%29.JPG?fo rmat=1000w At Urban Artifact, founders Scotty Hunter, Bret Kollmann Baker, and Scott Hand are hard at work as well, chipping away at the calcified perceptions of what a craft brewery can be, and carving out new channels to get their beverages to customers. Since opening in 2015, the brewery has morphed and changed several times in response to what drinkers want, but its founders haven’t chased trends. They’ve just attached less of their identity as brewers and as a brand to specific styles than many have. They love fruit, and they love acidity—and as long as they can keep playing with both, they’ll make what customers want to buy. Inside its 150-year-old monument to the past, Urban Artifact is brewing for the future.
FINDING A NICHE “The plan was always to have a niche,” says Kollmann Baker as we sit in the empty Urban Artifact taproom in the basement of the church, morning sunlight streaming through the windows. Every time I meet him, Kollmann Baker looks and sounds like he just got off from third shift at the factory. His voice is deep and gravelly, and his well-loved brewery T-shirt is already fruit-stained and sweaty just an hour into his day.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631043016616-WV0ZQ03VESDYDN1TAZKQ/UA+20210707+Bret+%26+Scotty+%282%29.JPG?format=100 0w When Urban Artifact opened in 2015, the plan was for that niche to be general sour and mixed-fermentation beers. The founders saw no growth potential in being an everything-for-everybody brewery in a city that already had Rhinegeist Brewery and MadTree Brewing, and thought that funky, barrel-aged oddities would set them apart. Unfortunately, the public didn’t turn out to be as sustainably interested in that time-consuming branch of brewing as they were.
“We fell into the trap that everybody else fell into, of thinking that with the barrel-aged Sours and funky stuff, the pie was going to keep growing,” says Kollmann Baker. “So all the players kept coming in, but the pie stayed the same size. The slices just got smaller.”
They were already using fruit in a few beers, and saw an avenue to distinguish themselves by focusing on quicker Sours with vibrant fruit expressions. By 2018, Urban Artifact had become defined by brands like The Gadget, the flagship beer of its Midwest Fruit Tart line of heavily fruited but shelf-stable Sour Ales. The Gadget is brewed with blackberries and raspberries, and has become the brewery’s best-seller.
“We fell into the trap that everybody else fell into, of thinking that with the barrel-aged Sours and funky stuff, the pie was going to keep growing. So all the players kept coming in, but the pie stayed the same size. The slices just got smaller.” — Bret Kollman Baker, Urban Artifact“We always had some fruited Sours planned,” says Hunter, tall and bespectacled, with the look of someone who invests more in his road bike than his car. “I don’t think either of us really understood the level of success we would see with those styles specifically.”
Adopting quick Sours wasn’t purely a concession to commerce, however. There was always a little madness behind the science at Urban Artifact—Kollmann Baker, for instance, harvested his current Lactobacillus culture from the church’s bell tower. In the early days, he put out over 100 jars of wort around the property and did sensory tests on all of them before settling on the culture from the highest point of the church, which leant a clean, peachy acidity. They had it plated and banked, and it now sours most beer that leaves the building.
Most of the spontaneous beers they brewed when they first opened have now been relegated, appropriately, to what they call their Dinosaur series. These small-batch beers are 51% beer and 49% fruit (to remain legally “beer” according to the Alcohol and TobaccoTax and Trade Bureau), and are fermented with a fully spontaneous mixed culture Kollmann Baker also captured on the property. And the traditional, non-fruited sour and Brett beers?
“They’re basically dead,” says Kollmann Baker.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046118975-KBMGOL46IFXVOGQXUTH7/UA+20210707+packaging+%288%29.JPG?format=1000w The folks here display a startling lack of attachment to their pet beer styles and brewing habits. In a landscape where breweries launch with mantras like: “We brew what we want to drink” and close with unsold boxes of T-shirts still emblazoned with those sentiments, Urban Artifact has done what organisms have always done to survive in a competitive ecosystem: evolve. Find a niche. Thrive in it until you need to evolve again. Use resources other organisms aren’t using. Be wondrously weird.
“We looked at what successful businesses do, not just what successful breweries do,” says Hunter. “They have something that’s unique in the marketplace and they lean on it to stand out.”
“Ultimately, it’s a balance of what the consumer wants meeting with what we want as well,” adds Kollmann Baker. “Gone are the days of, ‘We brew for us.’ You can’t do that shit anymore.”
GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN Being a chameleon has gone well for Urban Artifact. The brewery has seen double-digit growth every year since opening, and expects to see 20-25% growth for 2021, a number that would be higher if not for a delay in getting an expansion online this past winter. Its current production pace is around 15,000 barrels per year, up from 7,000 just two years ago. There’s space to expand to 50,000 BBLs a year on the existing property, and the founders have eyed that number since opening.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046176477-OUQG01LES7EIXVXISKN4/UA+20210707+warehouse+%282%29.JPG?format=1000w “We had that in mind because we’d be able to pay our employees the best in the industry, and take care of our people and ourselves, and not have to grow anymore and just be a sustainable business,” says Kollmann Baker. “There has to be a stopping point. The whole capitalism mindset of growth growth growth is just crazy.”
Much of that growth has been achieved by spreading out in strategic distribution. “I think of it less in terms of a production number than where we want to be geographically,” says Hunter. “There are a lot of states we’re still not in that we’d like to be.”
“You hear people love variety and want the new thing, but that’s bullshit. The Gadget wouldn’t grow 30% if people wanted variety. If you don’t have something unique and distinct in the market, people want variety because they’re not going to come back to it. When you have something that good, people will.” — Scotty Hunter, Urban ArtifactUrban Artifact distributes to 12 states currently, and is eyeing more. A wide footprint was once the goal of many breweries—but as the craft beer market became saturated in the mid-2010s, as distribution dried up and shelves got congested with brands, more and more breweries pulled back and refocused on local markets and taprooms. But Urban Artifact, as the rare brewery that focuses exclusively on fruited Sours, isn’t selling what most of those breweries are selling, so it’s able to fill a niche in almost any new market it steps into.
“As people were focusing on taprooms, to me it was a response to the fact that they couldn’t get distribution otherwise. They couldn’t get their beer selling in a different market,” observes Hunter. “There are breweries in Ohio that can’t sell in opposite corners of the state because they’re that do-everything brewery. I can go and talk to a distributor in pretty much any state and get an audience.”
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046225085-BA3ZHDZ8GAN15A66OMJL/UA+20210707+tap+handles+%281%29.JPG?format=1000w Urban Artifact is also selling to that audience wherever it can through direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels. Ohio and some other states have laws allowing alcohol producers to ship to a customer’s front door, and Urban Artifact is doing that in 10 of the 12 states it currently distributes to. When the COVID pandemic began, the brewery began shipping beer through its website almost immediately, in part because it had already planned on bringing that sales avenue online.
One pivot led to another. Initially, DTC offered the brewery a one-to-one replacement for its lost taproom sales. That ratio has dropped off as taprooms have reopened, so Urban Artifact adapted its model again, and has since focused on a subscription club that allows it to find an audience for some of its more esoteric beers. That new approach is not a huge volume-mover, but the founders believe it has more long-term growth potential than their taproom, concert, and event spaces do. They’re keeping a close eye on legislation that will allow them to ship to consumers in new states in the coming years.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046526458-53AUOQLSUGFSXZURCVE1/UA+20210707+tap+handles+%283%29.JPG?format=1000w Still, the centerline of the Urban Artifact model is getting six-packs of its Midwest Fruit Tarts and related beers in front of consumers in bottle shops and grocery stores, and the ability to do that is driving most of its growth. The Gadget is currently up 30% year-over-year.
“It’s starting to become the defining product of Urban Artifact that we thought it could be,” says Hunter. It’s difficult to qualify why this particular combination of berries and acidity has caught on so pervasively with consumers, but it has, and Urban Artifact will push it as long as that popularity continues. Hunter thinks it has a stable future.
“You hear people love variety and want the new thing, but that’s bullshit,” he says. “The Gadget wouldn’t grow 30% if people wanted variety. If you don’t have something unique and distinct in the market, people want variety because they’re not going to come back to it. When you have something that good, people will.”
AN EXPLOSIVE TOPIC It is impossible in 2021 to talk about fruit beer without talking about exploding cans, a fact of which Urban Artifact’s sales team is all too keenly aware. The brewers here take great pride in their heavily fruited Sours being shelf-stable at room temperature, but are constantly having to explain to customers and retailers that a fruit beer can even be shelf-stable.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046299097-18J2Y1RS1E6MGI8GLBFR/UA+20210707+Amaretti+Paperweight+%284%29.JPG?forma t=1000w The problem of exploding cans has been an ongoing conversation (https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/sightlines/tick-tick-boom-regulatory-consequences-for-exploding-cans-a-potential-time-bomb-for-small-breweries) over the last several years, as sweet beers made with real fruit have grown in popularity. Fructose (fruit sugar) is highly fermentable, and if that fructose is not fully fermented out of a beer—and that beer is not pasteurized after packaging—refermentation of those sugars can occur inside the can if it isn’t kept cold. This raises the beer’s alcohol level and builds carbon dioxide pressure that can lead to the can exploding, creating a mess, wasting beer, and potentially injuring customers.
This has ignited debate over whose responsibility it is to prevent exploding cans—the customer’s or retailer’s by keeping the beer refrigerated, or the brewer’s by fully fermenting and/or pasteurizing the beer—and worry over possible regulatory consequences if the problem continues. Beer cartoonist Em Sauter even reimagined a popular meme (https://www.pintsandpanels.com/www.pintsandpanels.com/this-is-fine-the-state-of-craft-beer-in-2021) to poke fun at the problem.
The Urban Artifact founders have been vocal on Twitter in their criticism of those who foist this responsibility onto consumers and retailers, insisting breweries need to sell shelf-stable beer in the first place. Their own beers are loaded with real fruit, but the fruit sugars are fully fermented out, leaving behind dry-bodied beers that can tolerate warm temperatures without risk of detonation. Still, the broad assumption now seems to be that fruit beers can explode if kept warm, and that’s bizarre and frustrating to Hunter.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046358393-YWZAIEBUZAQ6MPUR3NH9/UA+20210707+brewery+details+%284%29.JPG?format=100 0w “It’s crazy to me to have to answer the question of if our beer needs to be cold or not,” he says. “I get it from retailers in all kinds of markets. I want it to be kept cold, because generally it’s going to sell better, but it doesn’t have to be.”
He explains that distributor reps in new markets might not fully understand the distinction, which in turn means his brewery’s due diligence won’t be explained to retailers, and some of those retailers won’t bring in Urban Artifact’s beers because they don’t have refrigerator space for them. If they understood what the brewery is doing to protect its product, its customers, and its business partners, they’d perhaps be less hesitant to stock these beers on a warm shelf and to get the brand moving.
The problem doesn’t have an easy or quick solution, as unpasteurized beers bursting with fructose continue to earn high rankings on beer websites.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046430213-F4TH9ILG12ICJULM930G/UA+20210707+Kaleidoscope+%282%29.JPG?format=1000w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046465221-H79XY4M1VWRMVS26KIDQ/UA+20210707+Gryoscope+%281%29.JPG?format=1000w “There’s nothing wrong with selling juice-beer hybrids, but if you’re going to sell a juice-beer hybrid, invest in a pasteurizer,” says Kollmann Baker. “Look to the food industry. Look at what other manufacturers are doing and copy their practices. There’s a reason some juices can sit on the shelf warm, and it’s because they’re pasteurized after packaging. It’s not unreasonable to expect a brewery should do that, and if you can’t, you’re just being negligent.”
He acknowledged a customer is unlikely to be seriously injured by an exploding can, but does worry about the risk of increased regulations on the beer industry or on working with fruit if breweries releasing these fragile products don’t clean up their acts.
“That could impact a lot more people than just you putting out your juice-beer hybrid and selling it for $25 a four-pack and demanding it be in a cooler,” he says with obvious frustration. “It’s just dumb. It’s lazy and it’s dumb.”
Urban Artifact has experimented with adding different phrases to its label copy to try to reassure consumers. At one point, it even included the words “Won’t Explode,” though the TTB made it discontinue that. Now the cans say simply, “Shelf Stable.”
MILLIONS OF PEACHES Urban Artifact uses a lot of fruit. It orders about half a million pounds annually, and Kollmann Baker estimates that on any given day, there are 60-100,000 pounds of fruit in the building waiting to be used. He uses no flavorings, extracts, or concentrates of any kind. Every beer is brewed with single-strength, 100% fruit puree, made from flesh, skins, pulp, and juice. The only thing Kollmann Baker has removed before fruits are shipped to him is the seeds, because of their added weight and the complications they can cause during brewing.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046692839-E44QO6F7RR7MZF2KCJVF/UA+20210707+packaging+%285%29.JPG?format=1000w For a handful of beers, Kollmann Baker partners with specific fruit farmers. In the late summer, when wild Ohio pawpaws are ripe, he works with local foragers to acquire this esoteric fruit, which tastes like an alchemy of banana, mango, and forest floor. For most of his fruit needs, however, Kollmann Baker turns to a broker who works directly with farmers around the country and overseas. If he wants a fruit of a specific varietal or from a specific region, he only has to ask. I spoke with Bret’s fruit broker under the condition of anonymity, as this fruit-loving brewer wants to protect his ingredient pipeline. We’ll call him T.
“I have contacts in Brazil, Vietnam, Costa Rica, and a lot of different places because back in the day, people used standard fruits. Now people want the new and unusual. Bret comes up with an idea for a fruit beer, and he trusts me to go find it. ‘You have more connections than we do, go track this down!’ And then my search begins.” — T, fruit broker“I usually work with somebody who is processing raw fruits and they have their own growers,” explains T. “But with Urban Artifact, I’m working with growers to actually produce these non-standard fruits. We’re working on a contract for golden raspberries in Washington, which primarily have only been available in a few farm-owned retail stores.”
These golden raspberries will be grown exclusively for Urban Artifact. Occasionally, the brewery will send T an even more unusual request, as in the case of a soon-to-be-released beer featuring caja, also known as hog plum or yellow mombin.
“They tasked me with going to find it,” says T, with the eager tone of a prospector who was given the vague location of a buried treasure. “I have contacts in Brazil, Vietnam, Costa Rica, and a lot of different places because back in the day, people used standard fruits. Now people want the new and unusual. Bret comes up with an idea for a fruit beer, and he trusts me to go find it. ‘You have more connections than we do, go track this down!’ And then my search begins.”
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046793050-XRST0QDCJCNRLD9MDEF3/UA+20210707+brewery+exterior+%283%29.JPG?format=10 00w A bigger—and more concerning—sourcing problem right now is one that’s completely outside the brewery’s control. Climate change is making many fruit varieties harder and more expensive to source. Kollmann Baker says that these changes are affecting fruit growers in North America in two primary ways.
“Climate change is causing false-spring early blooms which then get crushed by regular late-season frosts, which ends up killing fruit yields,” he explains. “This is largely hurting fruit trees like apples, cherries, pears, and peaches. Cherry prices have gone up roughly 125% over the past two years.”
The second problem is related to the abnormal heat waves that have been punishing the West Coast and Pacific Northwest.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047105609-VEGPPRL0HMLU552R0R7P/urbanartifact_collage3.jpg?format=1000w “This has been absolutely decimating berry harvests,” he explains. “The fruit is just cooking on the vine and rotting before it even gets fully ripe. Raspberry prices are up over 300% in a single year. Blackberry prices are up over 100%. While peaches or apricots are easy to source from Europe, the majority of raspberries for food manufacturing are grown in the Pacific Northwest. It is not feasible to simply make a raspberry anything anymore. There are manufacturers cutting whole product lines that include raspberries.”
So what is a brewery focused on fruit-forward beers to do in the face of this, especially since its best-selling beer features raspberries and blackberries?
“Same as we always have done, roll with it and adapt,” Kollmann Baker says with a shrug. “We’re shelving some of our berry-forward Midwest Fruit Tarts for a year or two—except for The Gadget—while leaning heavily on tropical fruits, whose prices have not gone significantly up.”
'NICE ACIDITY AND NO FUNK' Whether it’s something as common as blackberries or as unusual as the hog plum, the real logistical challenge begins when the fruit arrives at the brewery. “All of our fruit is frozen because it tastes better that way,” says Kollmann Baker. “That way the farmers wait till it’s ripe on the plant and then puree and freeze it. It doesn’t come in a bag, it doesn’t sit in a warehouse for a year, and it doesn’t get heated.”
He explains that the ripe, frozen fruit maintains its flavor better than more processed formats, but frozen fruit presents its own challenges.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047147749-5OV1I7WRKJSZOE71063Y/UA+20210707+brewing+equipment+%286%29.JPG?format=1 000w “We usually have to get fruit two to three weeks ahead of time. It comes in drums and they’re just solid blocks of ice. Especially in the winter, it takes a lot of time to thaw. It’s a lot of work managing incoming frozen fruit, fruit we need to brew with this week, fruit we need to brew with next week, and how frozen it all is. We have a freezer, a cooler, and some dry, warm storage areas where we thaw. It’s a lot. Actually, it’s a pain in the ass.”
The volume of fruit the brewery processes led it to purchase a dedicated fruit cooker tank to improve quality and consistency.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047199915-B8WPSUYRE09JFWRJLL0Y/urbanartifact_collage5.jpg?format=1000w “I think we’re probably one of the few if any breweries in the country who has a dedicated tank to mix fruit, heat it up, get a low-temperature pasteurization,” says Hunter. The brewers heat the fruit and beer to around 145° Fahrenheit and hold it there for 45 minutes before adding it to a fermentation tank. The relatively low temperature prevents any off-putting cooked vegetable flavors, and in the case of certain fruits, like strawberries and blueberries, the gentle cooking actually coaxes out the flavor so it’s more in line with what customers are expecting.
In the Midwest Fruit Tart series, Urban Artifact uses about three pounds of fruit per gallon, which equates to about 30% of the fermentable base of the beer coming from fruit. Because fructose is so highly fermentable, Saccharomyces yeast will often prioritize it over slightly more complex sugars like maltose, the most common sugar found in wort. Depending on conditions, this can lead to fermentation stalling out before the desired level of attenuation is reached. To prevent this, Kollmann Baker begins primary fermentation of the base wort several days before adding fruit.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047252600-7ZDSEH1GT1ZOI2G06BBP/UA+20210707+brewing+equipment+%288%29.JPG?format=1 000w “We ferment just the beer base for up to five days and let it get down near terminal gravity, about 1.020. Then we’ll get our fruit in there to restart fermentation, and then the yeast will dry that out completely,” he says.
That means the process that leads to fruit beers from many breweries exploding on shelves is being completed in the fermentation tanks at Urban Artifact. “We don’t want to drink sweet, thick slop beers,” says Kollmann Baker. “There is a market for that and it’s fine if that’s your thing, but it’s not our thing. We found the balance for us to be fully fermenting our beers, drying them out, and not over-acidifying while still meeting customer demand of fruit-forward beers with nice acidity and no funk.”
THE ART OF BEING A HEEL It doesn’t take long to realize Kollmann Baker doesn’t pull punches with his criticisms of other members of the beer community, whether it be calling out other brewers over exploding cans or taking on the Brewers Association (https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/gbh-podcast/2020/7/27/sl-024-can-you-hear-me-now-nbsptrying-to-talk-race-and-beer) for responding poorly to the George Floyd killing, the subsequent racial justice protests in 2020, and the calls by Black industry voices for greater equity within craft beer.
“I have no qualms calling bullshit when I see it. I think more people should,” he says. “I guess I can thank my mom for that.”
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046624241-U7GQPSFZ5U7BU7FRV1ZM/UA+20210707+merch+%283%29.JPG?format=1000w Freely dishing out criticism requires the ability to take the backlash, and Urban Artifact has dealt with its own share of that in return. Kollmann Baker and Hunter are comfortable with that dynamic. “Sometimes you rub people the wrong way and people don’t like you for it,” says Kollmann Baker. “In the brewery we liken it to professional wrestling. Urban Artifact is a heel. We are 100% a heel brewery, and we’re okay with that. Everybody loves a good heel.”
“Sometimes you rub people the wrong way and people don’t like you for it. In the brewery we liken it to professional wrestling. Urban Artifact is a heel. We are 100% a heel brewery, and we’re okay with that. Everybody loves a good heel.” — Bret Kollmann Baker, Urban ArtifactThat posture and tone aside, these two are also enthusiastic cheerleaders for people they see as moving beer forward. Despite the bluster, they still love this industry.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047893912-TICNVMWT8XA8L3MONW7B/UA+20210707+church+exterior+details+%283%29.JPG?fo rmat=1000w “I love beer and I love everything that beer is and encompasses,” says Kollmann Baker, just a moment after comparing craft beer to a wrestling pageant. “At times I disagree with a lot of breweries and the choices people make, and I generally don’t think that the beer industry is as friendly and noncompetitive as people make it out to be, but I still love everything about it. I just love it. It’s not what people say it is, but I love everything that beer actually is.”
So what will happen if he’s no longer brewing it?
SELTZER EXCITEMENT While reports of craft beer’s demise in the face of hard seltzer have been exaggerated, the seltzer segment is still growing rapidly. Unlike many breweries, Urban Artifact is welcoming the trend with open arms. It had been planning to add a lower-calorie, lower-ABV line for some time, and seltzer provided the ideal vehicle. The brewery released its own line of fruited seltzers in early 2021, and it’s not treating these beverages very differently from how it brews its beers.
“We use real fruit and we don’t use any flavoring or extracts or additives,” explains Kollmann Baker. “We do the same process [as our beer] but just with dextrose instead. We sour it first with our house Lacto and then boil it. We send it to the fermentor, add our yeast, and a couple days later add our fruit. Two-and-a-half weeks later, we have a seltzer that tastes more like Urban Artifact than any seltzer on the market.”
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631046577770-B3LRH7S5VOFT8BVL1IHD/urbanartifact_collage4.jpg?format=1000w The response so far has been nothing but positive. Hunter sees an opportunity for seltzer to become 20-25% of Urban Artifact’s volume in the next year. The brewery is still testing the market waters, though, and has so far only distributed cans and kegs in Ohio and Kentucky.
“One of our Cincinnati reps who has worked in distribution for years said he’s never before had a product where he got a 100% yes rate like this,” says Hunter. “And that’s on- and off-premise. The excitement is there. It’ll just be—like with our other beers—people tasting it and getting familiar with it.”
Hunter and Kollmann Baker are quick to point out this wasn’t a move of reluctance or desperation. It was a proactive choice with a bit of future-proofing mixed in. Because these real fruit seltzers have lower malt costs, they also help offset some of the brewery’s increased fruit costs related to climate change as well. Both co-founders are clearly enthusiastic about the new line.
“I’ve never seen the brew team as excited about a new product since we first came out with Gadget and developed the Midwest Fruit Tart style,” says Kollmann Baker. “It’s been four years since I’ve seen the team get that overwhelmingly excited. Like, accidentally get drunk on a canning day excited.”
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047828703-ZIIT8T7W4WXOO1UR0VET/urbanartifact_collage6.jpg?format=1000w That excitement is affirmed when I speak with Leslie McCarraher, Urban Artifact’s taproom manager. McCarraher came to Urban Artifact after years working in the craft beer crucible of Asheville, North Carolina (she was the fourth woman in the state to pass the Certified Cicerone exam), and while she loves all things beer, the new seltzer line is the first thing she mentions when asked about her favorite Urban Artifact products.
“They’re crisp with good fruit flavor, and most importantly you don’t taste any kind of fake alcohol flavor,” she says, referencing criticisms that have been levied against some other seltzers and flavored malt beverages. “They’re just pure, beautiful creations.”
Still, for former engineering students who followed the classic path of turning homebrewing into a career after meeting in college, is anything lost in switching to seltzers? If sales dictate that he brew 90% seltzer in the coming years, will Kollmann Baker feel any kind of identity crisis?
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631048016110-Q4TTWVOTXDZW52QHP7A7/UA+20210707+sign+%283%29.JPG?format=1000w “Nah, I don’t give a shit,” he responds without hesitation. “We’re still going to do our passion stuff, we’re still gonna do the Dinos, we’re still gonna do small-batch pilots and the fun technical beer things. But if we’re just dumping fucking dextrose into hot water and then adding nutrient and fermenting it with our house cultures, whatever, I don’t care.”
Seltzer wasn’t always the plan, but it became the plan, and the Urban Artifact founders allowed that to organically feed into the brewery’s identity. It’s a path of natural rather than forced adaptation that not all breweries are able or willing to follow.
“If brewing what we want to brew means making things that aren’t selling, then we’re not going to brew what we want to brew anymore,” says Kollmann Baker, before adding a defining qualification that summarizes Urban Artifact’s ability to organically evolve when needed. “Or I just change what I want to brew. I didn’t want to brew seltzers three years ago; now I’d be happy only doing seltzers.”
EVOLVING TO THRIVE By midday the Urban Artifact property is drenched in summer sunlight, and the brewing area—housed in the church’s gymnasium, built in the mid-20th century—is bustling with life. One of the rare Dinosaur beers is being bottled, a forklift is stacking packaging supplies on the sidewalk, and fruit puree is being hosed from the concrete floor. The founders chose this building because it was affordable, available, and beautiful, making it an apt symbol for the brewery’s product-driven philosophy.
In the church basement, McCarraher is just beginning to prepare her subterranean domain for the afternoon opening. During the week, the taproom is mostly the dominion of regulars, but on Saturdays, newcomers show up and McCarraher and her team get to introduce them to the drinks that make Urban Artifact unique.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047298930-9CNZCY4HCHVIDNWOYW30/UA+20210707+Ankylosaurus+%282%29.JPG?format=1000w “Sometimes we have to do a little talking them into trying these beers and eliminating their expectation of what ‘sour’ means,” she explains. “Nice thing about our beers is if you’re a wine drinker or a cocktail drinker, we’re going to be able to find you a beer among what we make.”
From the founders’ Twitter personas to the colorful label artwork to descriptions of the beers themselves, you would be forgiven for thinking Urban Artifact was an irreverent, hard-edged brewery. Wandering the property and neighborhood, however, and hearing Hunter and Kollmann Baker’s genuine interest in the well-being of their employees and community, you get a sense of the deep roots that keep this always-shifting brewery anchored to this blue-collar corner of Cincinnati. As we stand in the church’s former auditorium, sunlight streaming through the restored stained-glass windows and painting the hardwood floor with a blurred kaleidoscope of colors, Hunter reflects on the changes in Urban Artifact’s identity over the six years it’s been open.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047761978-NKBKAV8WY7E5GB00QU2H/UA+20210707+pouring+beer+%281%29.JPG?format=1000w “You’re right that the focus has shifted,” he says, “But to me it’s always been sour products. That’s always been the guiding light that made us excited. It’s the specific products that are less relevant.”
For Kollmann Baker, the idea of sticking to an identity is stifling in itself. Change is Urban Artifact’s identity.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5055e59ce4b02b42cb30023c/1631047927412-XFIHBOVIX7AIJ74IRDVF/urbanartifact_collage1.jpg?format=1000w “I just get excited about making new stuff and trying to push back against tradition. Brewers love tradition, and I get it, but also tradition’s stupid. Fuck tradition. Doing things because they’ve always been done that way without understanding why is the dumbest thing. A lot of what we do is looking at that and blowing things up and saying the way you do it is dumb and here’s why.”
He considers. “As long as we can keep doing that, that’s just fun to me. It’s learning and also being subversive. It’s leaning into that heel life. Yeah, I’ll be sad if we ever get rid of Gadget, but I’ll get over it and adapt. At the end of the day there’s still going to be Pilsner Urquell. Life’s good.”
In modern craft beer, you’re either a chameleon or a dinosaur. You evolve or you go extinct. The thing about chameleons is that the organism underneath stays the same, even as its skin changes into different vibrant colors. Urban Artifact is still Urban Artifact, changing its skin over and over around the bones of the old church, and this evolutionary adaptation is allowing it to not only survive, but to thrive.
http://goodbeerhunting.com/assets/authors/Nilsen.png (http://forums.pubsgalore.co.uk//goodbeerhunting.com/authors/david-nilsen) Words + Photos
David Nilsen
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