On a dreary Sunday morning in the middle of July, hundreds of people could be seen lined up outside a nondescript brick office park in Everett, next to the Best Buy. Some were standing, drinking coffee. Others had settled into lawn chairs or plopped down on the sidewalk. Despite the early hour, everyone was chatty and excited. They had been waiting for this day for a long time.
This isn't just a day job for us. This is our 24/7 day and night shift.[/pullquote]
It wasn't yet 7 a.m. and already the queue was forming. The doors wouldn't open for another four hours. Soon the line would be snaking up the street. Around 8 a.m., a four-piece mariachi band would arrive to help set the mood and pass the time. People had come from as far away as Florida, California, Germany, England and Iceland.
The throng here at Night Shift Brewing had arrived for the super-limited, revolving release of El Lechedor, this one an apple brandy barrel-aged horchata-style milk stout. A total of 1,400 bottles were brewed with a limit of four per customer.
Before it was all said and done, more than 1,000 people would shuffle through the line.
Less than two hours after it was made available, El Lechedor was gone.
----------
Belly up at any Boston bar or liquor store and the abundance of beer brands thrown in your face is staggering. Some you will recognize. Many you will not. But rest assured, whatever suits your fancy – a juice bomb of an IPA, say, or a local grapefruit shandy – there will be something for you. Probably several. It's an embarrassment of riches for the modern craft beer drinker.
The prevailing sentiment in a craft beer industry that's become more saturated, and thus more competitive, than at any other point in its history is that good beer always wins. It doesn't matter if your brand is one of 10 or one of 100 on the liquor store shelves. If it's made well, with pride, quality ingredients and techniques, the consumer will find it. And when she does, she will look for it at that next trip to the bar. She'll tell her friends. They'll grab some when they're hunting for something new. The brand, and its following, will grow.
Sounds romantic, right?
It's time you got to know the most important person at Night Shift Brewing you've never heard of. In October 2013, Joe Mashburn responded to a job posting from Night Shift for a "Jack of All Trades." The brand, then in its infancy, was looking for someone who could do it all: brew, clean, market, whatever. After spending some time interning at Tree House Brewing Co. under Nate Lanier, Mashburn was ready to blaze his own path.
Fast forward some three years and he is up to his elbows in it, managing a brew team of 10 and working around the clock to keep up with the type of demand that will lure massive crowds out on a rainy Sunday summer morning.
“I actually have a cot out back," Joe told me during a recent visit to the Everett brewery and taproom.
Night Shift has grown from humble beginnings in 2012 to become one of Massachusetts' most well-known craft breweries. Ask a bartender or liquor store cashier which brand among their many sells the most, and they'll tell you in the same breath, without hesitation, it's Night Shift.
All across America, right now, an average of two new craft breweries are coming online every day. And Massachusetts is right there in the thick of it.
Many breweries fail to take off, while some wither on the vine entirely. But Night Shift has exploded. And it's showing no signs of slowing down.
----------
Ask Mike Oxton and Rob Burns, who launched Night Shift in 2012 with Mike O'Mara, whether they ever thought they'd get this big this quickly, and their reactions are similar.
“Our business plan stopped a long time ago. Which is awesome, but at the same time really tough," Burns told me during a conversation in their taproom. It's a sunny summer Monday in the early afternoon. "We keep trying to figure out what the hell we’re doing and where we’re going on the fly.”
“I think in our wildest dreams, this was the 10- or 15-year plan," Oxton echoed. "So it happened really quickly. We never planned to have a taproom; it wasn’t even in the business plan at all.”
That taproom has become a major boon to their business, representing about 50 percent of the company's total revenue. So much so, in fact, they'll be opening a second taproom – that they're calling The Annex – adjacent to the first sometime this August. With space for 180 more people and 24 more tap lines, it will up their total occupancy to 411.
We never planned to have a taproom; it wasn’t even in the business plan at all.[/pullquote]
There was a time not that long ago when having a taproom wasn't so common. Opening a brewery meant brewing beer, teaming up with a distributor and hoping your product found good placement in good establishments. Now, that's changed. Look at the breweries that have opened around Boston within the past year – Idle Hands Craft Ales, Bone Up Brewing Co., Dorchester Brewing Co., Winter Hill Brewing Co. and Trillium's Canton location. Their approach to beer might vary, but a taproom is a common denominator.
And whereas blasting your product far and wide was once par for the course, now many brands are opting to keep their stuff local, sometimes to a very few select accounts. Night Shift Brewing self distributes to roughly 100 liquor stores and 50 bars in Massachusetts. They've got two full-time drivers. They're about to add a third truck to the fleet.
"I think a lot of it has to do with passion. We live, eat and breathe craft beer," Burns told me when I asked what he attributed their success to. "We love the industry, the culture, the people, the endless styles and the art behind it all. We visit fellow breweries in our free time, we attend beer fests and pour beer to new fans, we travel and learn from compatriots in other industries."
The guys estimate it takes about a million dollars just to get a brewery off the ground. They work a ton. And while they spend a lot of time in the taproom – even, they admit, on their few days off – the act of brewing beer is a messy, cumbersome business.
A serious point of pride is the number of jobs they've created around them. They began the year with 26 employees. Now they're almost double that. And Burns can see them getting to 100 before much longer.
But to really understand what's made Night Brewing bubble up above the competition, you don't need to look any further than the beer.
----------
Night Shift has never pigeonholed itself in terms of beer styles. In fact they've done just the opposite – brewing a ton of different beers (there are 100 listed on their website right now alone) to see what works and what doesn't. Rather than keep their tinkering in-house, they prefer to package it and let the people decide. It's an approach that's come with some misses. And many, many hits.
Their first beer out of the gate was Trifecta, a Belgian pale ale aged with vanilla beans and fermented with three Trappist yeast strains. At 6.7 percent ABV, it's strong for a pale ale. It's a labor- and time-intensive beer to make. But they still brew it the same way they did for the first batch. And it remains a top seller.
Not all early beers saw such success, though. Oxton recounts a couple that didn't turn out exactly as planned, including Bee Tea (a wheat ale with green tea and honey) and Rose (a saison with pink peppercorns, rose hips and honey).
"Hearthside wasn't a favorite of mine, a dark ale with cherrywood smoked malts and juniper berries," he said. "That debuted in the winter of 2012, so an early one. Just too much going on."
But misses like that aren't what put Night Shift on the map early on. It was their willingness to experiment and fail and iterate. Or swing for the fences and win over skeptics with something that doesn't sound like it should work, but does. The best example of this is probably Harborside, a 3.6 percent Gose brewed with a couple hundred oysters from Island Creek Oysters.
Even though my dog is named Growler, I hate them.[/pullquote]
“At any given point, we have a vast array of styles on tap that I think are all what I consider to be really good examples of what they’re supposed to be," Mashburn said. "If people walk into a bar and they don’t like hoppy beer, or they only like hoppy beer, or whatever that wheelhouse is, we have something in it.”
Hop-forward beer is perhaps the best example of Night Shift's evolution.
“Our first year, we were committed to not making any IPAs. We did not make a single IPA because we didn’t want to be just another brewery that made IPAs," said Oxton, referencing the India Pale Ale category that's taken American craft beer palates by storm. "However, we figured out a process for brewing an IPA with our system that worked, and in line with that we realized that people just want something hoppy when they come here. So we slowly, timidly entered the IPA market. And since then, we’ve gotten more interested in fostering our ability to make really good ones and we’ve noticed how much people love them.”
In April 2013, they released Oasis, their first bottled IPA, brewed with cardamom. It wasn't until August 2014 that their first production IPA came out. That was Morph, an experimental IPA series that changed every few weeks. In keeping with the ethos of transparent, experimental brewing, they decided to use Morph as a public test kitchen to determine what their flagship IPA – later called Santilli – would be. Morph was a hit. So much so they've kept it in regular production, making 30 different recipes to date and counting.
Since, they've released The 87, their flagship double IPA, One Hop This Time, which features a different, single hop in each batch, and a sporadic release of their Presidential Series of double IPAs. So the company that "timidly" entered the IPA market is now a major player therein.
But it's Santilli that best illustrates their prowess as brewers and marketers.
Santilli debuted to the masses in May of 2015. Since, it's become not only a top-seller for Night Shift, but a top-selling IPA in all of Massachusetts.
Beer drinkers globally have taken notice, too. Not a year later, Santilli found itself in the American IPA category at the 2016 World Cup of Beer, the Olympics of the craft beer industry. A panel of 253 beer experts from 31 countries sipped and gurgled 275 entries in that single category. When the hops had settled, Santilli was awarded the bronze medal, a staggering feat for a beer – and a brewery – that new.
"We've really refined the Santilli recipe since its debut last year. Not huge changes, but subtle tweaks over time – water profile, hops and malt percentages, fermentation schedule, yeast handling – stuff that isn't obvious, but has gone a long way to make it what it is today," Oxton told me at the time. "The Santilli those judges sipped on is the result of our 'World Class Beer' mantra."
----------
Night Shift Brewing has followed its own rules since day one. From a group of friends and amateur brewers whipping up recipes in the wee hours after coming home from full time jobs was born a brewery that's poised to assume the podium among the best in Massachusetts, and the Northeast.
It's come through tireless dedication and a commitment to quality and community. It's come through trial and error. It's come through putting the best beer they can possibly make in the hands of the people who made them a brewery to begin with, and learning and growing from the feedback they've received batch after tireless batch.
In their first year, Night Shift made 220 barrels of beer. So far in 2016 they've brewed over 4,000, equal to their total output all of last year. With a massive new warehouse in Chelsea and a $3 million bank loan, they're on pace to finish the year around 10,000 barrels.
All the while, they've kept the forward-thinking, never-settle mentality that they were founded on.
"I think you need to question everything you do all the time. That’s just what you have to do but not everyone does it," Oxton said.
Hiring a $400 mariachi band for the release of El Lechedor was an example of thinking outside the box. They've also started hosting weddings at the taproom, another thing that definitely wasn't in any of their early business plans.
On a larger, more industry-shaking level, though, there's this: “I sort of hate crowlers and growlers," Burns told me. "Even though my dog is named Growler. I want to get rid of them.”
Oxton is in the same camp. Every time they have a company-wide meeting, this same gripe arises.
“I know plenty of world class breweries like Hill Farmstead and Tree House that do growlers, but whatever. I hate them," said Burns. “I just don’t think it’s the best for beer. The quality, the oxygen pickup; if they are drank that night or the next day, it’s fine. But that’s not what most people do. I hate the idea of people having a bad growler beer.”
Instead, they're ramping up can output – their preferred vehicle for delivering the freshest beer possible in bulk – and focusing on more limited releases. There's isn't a set plan to abolish growlers entirely just yet, but already they've started phasing them out. And don't be surprised if during a near-future visit to the taproom, you're told Night Shift Brewing won't be offering growlers anymore at all.
It's just the latest in a line of decisions that has people lining up out the door and down the block for a taste of their latest offering.
"We didn't start NSB to get rich, we started it because we love to brew, we love to sip beer with friends and we love being entrepreneurial. This isn't just a day job for us. This is our 24/7 day and night shift," said Burns. "We work tirelessly to make it all happen and drive harder every day to improve. That passion is in every can we produce. That's what makes our beer special and the success is just a cool side effect."