Jeremy Cowan - Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah: How It Took 13 Years, Extreme Jewish Brewing, and Circus Sideshow Freaks to Make Shmaltz Brewing an International Success

Shmaltz Brewing Company was awarded the gold medal for 2010 as Best American Craft Beer and the overall Best in Show by Beverage World Magazine. A recipient of the Distinguished Business Award from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, Shmaltz was also ranked one of the Top 20 Fastest Growing Bay Area Companies in 2009 by San Francisco Business Times.

Established by Jeremy Cowan in San Francisco in 1996 with the first batch of 100 cases of Hebrew Beer bottled, labeled, and delivered by hand, Shmaltz has sold over eight million bottles of beer to date. Along with the acclaimed line of Hebrew Beers, Shmaltz introduced its sideshow-inspired Coney Island Craft Lagers in 2007. Proceeds help Coney Island USA, a 501(c)(3) Arts Non-Profit fulfill its mission to defend the honor of lost forms of American popular culture in Brooklyns historic Coney Island neighborhood.

Hebrew Beer and Coney Island Craft Lagers are available in over twenty-five states through more than thirty wholesalers at nearly two thousand retail specialty shops across the U.S. including Beverages & More, Whole Foods, Total Wine, select Krogers and Publix, and Cost Plus World Market.

Shmaltz Brewing beers have appeared in such distinguished media outlets as The New York Times, CNN Headline News, The Onion, Beer Advocate Magazine, NPRs Weekend Edition, Mens Health, MSNBC, San Francisco Magazine, The Jerusalem Report, New York Jewish Week, Washington Post, Forbes, Entrepreneur.com, and Epicurious.com.

Jeremy Cowan has emerged as a noteworthy, march-to-the-beat-of-your-own-drummer personality within the craft brewing world no mean feat in an industry with no shortage of personalities. The fact that hes managed to build an award-winning brand from its genesis as an inside joke and is here to write about it 13 years later is a testament Old Testament, of course to how far the combination of passion, talent and a sincere sense of humor can carry artists and entrepreneurs. Cowans story of Shmaltz Brewing, as told in Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah, mixes comedic self-deprecating anecdotes with general acts of badassery which pretty much sums up the brands he has created.

-Jeff Cioletti, Editor-in-Chief, Beverage World Magazine

When I first met Jeremy, I couldnt believe he was a member of my shul in Los Altos Hills, California. A young kid, with a wacky but interesting concept that my beer partner Mark Bronder had coincidentally discussed years earlier a beer for Jews with the same name (HeBrew), but our initial image was a muscular bicep with a Star of David tattooed on it. Well, we went in a different direction, and I was enthralled with Jeremy, his idea, and his incredible sense of humor and passion. This man knows how to build a brand from scratch, and reading his story is a fascinating, cant-put-the-book-down read. Just dont read it from right to left.

-Pete Slosberg, founder of Petes Wicked Ale

Jeremy Cowan is the Philip Roth of craft beer and Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah is his Portnoys Complaint, a hilariously mind-blowing account of a young Gen J entrepreneur who, armed only with vision, love of things Jewish and few bucks, turns his Hebrew Beer label into an American cultural institution. Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah will bootleg inspiration straight into your heart.

-Alan Kaufman, author of Jew Boy, a Memoir and editor of The Outlaw Bible Of American Poetry

Jews believe in tikkun olam, repairing the world, but in a world beset by natural and man-made disasters, it often seems impossible for individuals to make a meaningful impact. While he may not have cured cancer or ended the Middle East conflict, Jeremy Cowan has performed two exceedingly worthy deeds creating a world-class beer and telling a compelling, entertaining, and engagingly transgressive story. LChaim!

-Richard Block, Senior Rabbi, The Temple - Tifereth Israel, Cleveland, Ohio and president-elect of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR)

In his new book Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah, Jeremy Cowan combines the heart of a brewer with the soul of a two-thousand-year-old rabbinical mensch. A must-read on how to get from there (a crazy dream) to here successfully in beer.

-Tom Dalldorf, Publisher, Celebrator Beer News

A funny, irreverent account of one mans quest to build a beer brand, wandering the desert landscape of bad beer to let his people drink the good stuff. A wry tale of how it took thirteen years to turn Shmaltz Brewing into an overnight sensation.

-Jay Brooks, Brookston Beer Bulletin

Cowan transforms San Francisco into the land of Malt and Hops with humor, an edge and a deep sense of biblical intoxicity.

-David Katznelson,

Co-Founder of The San Francisco Appreciation Society

This is a powerful tale of how one man turned a passion and a pun into a durable brand. It is also a touching illustration of how hard work is really the root of all success.

-Gabriel Kahn, Professor of Journalism, University of Southern California

From the beer label for Bittersweet Lennys R.I.P.A.:

Satire equals tragedy plus time. Lenny Bruce

Emmis, Shmuck! 40 years alive. 40 years dead. And shares of Lenny Bruce commodities are still long-term performers solid! Sure theres been books, posters, films, plays, a box set of course. But the big Four-O inspires innovation, something hip, modern unorthodox a taste that really swings. Ladies and Gentlemen, Shmaltz Brewing Co. is proud to introduce Bittersweet Lennys R.I.P.A. Brewed with an obscene amount of malts and hops. Shocking flavors far beyond contemporary community standards. We cooked up the straight dope for the growing minyons of our nations extreme beer junkies. Judges may not be able to define Radical Beer, but youll damn well know it when you taste it. Bruce died, officially declared a pauper by the State of California, personally broken and financially bankrupt simply for challenging Americas moral hypocrisies with words. The memorial playbill read: Yes, we killed him. Because he picked on the wrong god. Directed by, the Courts, the Cops, the Church and his own self-destructive super ego. Like Noah lying naked and loaded in his tent after the apocalyptic deluge: a witness, a patron saint, a father of what was to come. Sick, Dirty, Prophetic Lenny: a scapegoat, a martyr, a supreme inspiration. From Burlesque to Broadway, Carnegie Hall to the Courtroom, Long Island to Lima, Ohio to L.A., savor the provocative spirit of Bittersweet Lennys R.I.P.A., our HEBREW monument to the richness, the bitterness and the sacred sweetness that is life LChaim!

- Jeremy Cowan, proprietor

ALSO BY JEREMY COWAN

Fiddler on the Roof, (Tevye) Menlo School spring musical, 1987

Projector, Zine, New Orleans, 1992

Beer Label Shtick: 1996-present

Press Releases 1996-2006; edits to Jesses 2006-present

Shmaltz Business Plan, 1999: leading to complete loss of all friends-and-family investment by 2001

Maxing out all personal credit cards, and surviving to shatter all previous Shmaltz Brewing sales records, 2003-2010

Decision to ask close friend James Sullivan

to co-write Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah, 2009-2010

because check out what hes handcrafted:

ALSO BY JAMES SULLIVAN

Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon

The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America