Ask Annie Henderson and Austin Jevne to explain the business model for Forager and Humble Forager, and they describe what sounds like a game of Mouse Trap or a Rube Goldberg device—each piece has to fall into place for their businesses to work. So far, however, those pieces have clicked perfectly, earning both their brewpub and distributed brand a reputation for quality and innovation.
They first founded Forager—a brewpub in Rochester, Minnesota, serving wood-fired pizzas topped with locally raised meats and pouring a range of beers designed by Jevne—in 2015. It wasn’t more than a year before the pair realized there was demand for Forager’s beer beyond their walls, from bars, restaurants, and bottle shops in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Just one problem: Minnesota’s antiquated beer laws don’t allow brewpubs to sell their beers through distribution.
So, Henderson and Jevne got creative: They obtained municipal catering licenses in other cities, and they served kegs of their Rochester-brewed beer at restaurant events, alongside cheese boards or sandwiches, to thus constitute a “catered meal.” Eventually, however, this proved unwieldy and time-consuming; the pair needed a longer-term solution to get their beer into the wider market. They decided to launch a second, separate distribution company—Humble Forager—selling some of the most popular beers from the brewpub.
Another roadblock: Minnesota doesn’t allow a license holder to own both a brewpub and a distribution company. After 18 months of legal research and discussion between Henderson and Jevne, the duo decided to split the businesses between them. Henderson would own Forager, and Jevne would own Humble Forager. Silent investors who wanted to be part of both businesses also had to split up ownership stakes within their households.
Humble Forager, meanwhile, would take its recipes to Octopi Brewing—a contract brewery in Waunakee, Wisconsin, which Jevne knew thanks to Levi Funk of Untitled Art and Funk Factory Geuzeria. (Humble Forager also contracts some production at Fair State Brewing Cooperative in Minneapolis.) With brewing contracts in place, Humble Forager launched in March 2020.
Ask Annie Henderson and Austin Jevne to explain the business model for Forager and Humble Forager, and they describe what sounds like a game of Mouse Trap or a Rube Goldberg device—each piece has to fall into place for their businesses to work. So far, however, those pieces have clicked perfectly, earning both their brewpub and distributed brand a reputation for quality and innovation.
They first founded Forager—a brewpub in Rochester, Minnesota, serving wood-fired pizzas topped with locally raised meats and pouring a range of beers designed by Jevne—in 2015. It wasn’t more than a year before the pair realized there was demand for Forager’s beer beyond their walls, from bars, restaurants, and bottle shops in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Just one problem: Minnesota’s antiquated beer laws don’t allow brewpubs to sell their beers through distribution.
So, Henderson and Jevne got creative: They obtained municipal catering licenses in other cities, and they served kegs of their Rochester-brewed beer at restaurant events, alongside cheese boards or sandwiches, to thus constitute a “catered meal.” Eventually, however, this proved unwieldy and time-consuming; the pair needed a longer-term solution to get their beer into the wider market. They decided to launch a second, separate distribution company—Humble Forager—selling some of the most popular beers from the brewpub.
Another roadblock: Minnesota doesn’t allow a license holder to own both a brewpub and a distribution company. After 18 months of legal research and discussion between Henderson and Jevne, the duo decided to split the businesses between them. Henderson would own Forager, and Jevne would own Humble Forager. Silent investors who wanted to be part of both businesses also had to split up ownership stakes within their households.
Humble Forager, meanwhile, would take its recipes to Octopi Brewing—a contract brewery in Waunakee, Wisconsin, which Jevne knew thanks to Levi Funk of Untitled Art and Funk Factory Geuzeria. (Humble Forager also contracts some production at Fair State Brewing Cooperative in Minneapolis.) With brewing contracts in place, Humble Forager launched in March 2020.
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Cross-State Synergy
Jevne describes the situation like this: People from the Rochester area consider Forager to be a restaurant that happens to brew really good beer; meanwhile, beer enthusiasts from farther-flung cities and states tend to think of Humble Forager as a really good brewery that also happens to have a restaurant. Forager’s brewpub license allows it to serve guest beers, including those from Humble Forager, essentially turning the brewpub into a de facto taproom for both brands.
The nontraditional arrangement has so far done exactly what it was intended to do: Humble Forager has created national buzz around its barrel-aged and dessert stouts, smoothie-style fruit beers, and IPAs, while Forager remains a locally loved brewpub frequented by mid-30s beer devotees as well as their parents and grandparents. Jevne’s recipes provide the connective tissue.
The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic was an early stress test of Henderson and Jevne’s abilities to manage the two distinct businesses, one of which was brand new at the time. Forager closed its doors the week of March 16; just a week before, Jevne had pre-sold 100 barrels of Humble Forager’s first IPA to bars and restaurants. Both companies had to manage the proverbial pandemic pivot: Forager had to figure out how to survive like any other restaurant, while Humble Forager had to figure out how to sell packaged beer to drinkers who’d never heard of the brand before, without the benefit of launch events or bartenders’ recommendations.
“It was definitely every day panicking and not knowing what we were doing,” Henderson says. “We just had to work as hard as possible.”
The imperative at Forager was to keep as many people employed as they could, especially the 25 members of the kitchen staff who had no other sources of income. Seven days a week, Forager offered food and beer for delivery, and the brewpub began selling to-go meal kits that customers could cook at home. (Jevne even recorded what Henderson calls “terrible videos” demonstrating to customers how to prepare the dishes.) Jevne also turned his brewing attention to fast-paced releases of heavily flavored beer styles that would create buzz on beer forums and Untappd, driving sales for the brewpub. The combination of approaches, coupled with government aid programs, kept the business afloat and kitchen staff employed.
“We basically made hype beer that we could get 400 people to buy every Friday and drive down from the cities for,” Henderson says. “We were making all these pastry stouts and ‘Push Pops,’ which are effectively sour beers with a whole bunch of marshmallow and all this fruit. We did that every Friday for four months.”
Photo: Jamie Bogner
Méthode Not-So-TraditionNelle
The success of Forager’s flavored stouts, fruited sours, and double IPAs set Humble Forager on its current path. As a restaurant, the Forager brewpub maintains a range of approachable beer styles on draft. Humble Forager, however, can cherry-pick the “hyped” styles and run with them, distributing to a wider geographic audience.
Case in point: Methode Push Pop. Jevne originally brewed it before COVID as a way of good-naturedly teasing his friend Funk, who was using the phrase “méthode traditionnelle” to describe his lambic-inspired beers. Jevne made his first batch of Methode Push Pop by buying an old keg of sour beer that was about to go out of code, then adding substantial amounts of fruit puree, marshmallow cream, and vanilla powder.
What began as “essentially this joke,” according to Jevne, turned out to be wildly popular. So, in the early days of COVID, Forager began brewing its own sour base around the clock, churning out four to eight different Push Pop variants a year. People flooded in for it.
“We made one IPA a month, and then pastry stout base and sour base because those were the only beers people seemed to want to buy,” Jevne said. While he was eager to get back to brewing a more diverse lineup of beers again once the brewpub reopened, that period of bold flavor exploration not only drew new fans to Forager, but it also taught Jevne some lessons that he now applies to his packaged brand. “Using essentially every fruit we could come up with during that time, that did help us design some flavor profiles for Humble Forager beers.”
Humble Forager’s Enchanted Island line of “imperial tiki sour” beers, for example, developed out of this fruit-packed period. The brand was purchasing a neutral hard seltzer base brewed at City Brewing Company in La Crosse, Wisconsin, then blending that into a sour ale to bump up the final beer’s ABV to roughly 9 percent. Unflavored, Jevne describes the hard seltzer base as tasting like “shitty rum.”
“This doesn’t taste great on its own, but what does shitty rum taste really good in? Tiki drinks,” he says. “We essentially started using this concept of making tiki-inspired, Caribbean beverages with that seltzer base flavor as an additive, plus simple syrups and fruit.”
Today, Enchanted Island is Humble Forager’s fastest-growing line of beers.
Photos: Jamie Bogner
Flavors and Care
While Jevne may have originally created these beers out of business necessity rather than a deep-seated personal passion for seltzer-spiked tiki sours, he says he’s committed to brewing even heavily adjuncted styles with integrity and quality.
He rejects the notion that these beers are gimmicky or simple—at least not the way he brews them. Both Forager and Humble Forager eschew flavorings in favor of whole ingredients, whether that’s real vanilla bean, maple syrup from an Amish family farm, or wild rice hand-harvested in northern Wisconsin.
“I’ve been [asked] by a lot of other brewers, ‘Why are you working so hard?’ Honestly, that’s the impact we want to put back in the world … to support real people,” Jevne says. “I’m fine with breweries making a choice to put flavorings in to make a beer taste like a stroopwafel. But if I wanted to do that, I’d be using real caramel and some other real ingredient to get to that.”
Some people can taste the difference. Louis Livingston-Garcia, a Wisconsin-based beer writer who also briefly interned at Forager years ago, says he can recall the first Forager beer he ever tasted, back before the brewery had officially opened. Livingston-Garcia had heard chatter about Jevne’s skill as a homebrewer among the state’s beer geeks, but he was slightly wary of the praise, knowing that his friends could be exaggerating. When Livingston-Garcia finally tried a barrel-aged sour beer with foraged cherries—an early prototype of a beer that became Gathering in the Woods—he was blown away. He can still describe the flavor of the beer more than seven years later.
“I was like, ‘Oh wow, what people are saying is actually legit,’” he says. “I’ve only had that moment a couple of times in my life.”
Livingston-Garcia describes a conscientiousness in Jevne’s brewing that even extends to his foraging for ingredients: He recalls Jevne explaining how to collect wild berries while making sure to leave enough of them to feed birds and animals.
That thoughtful approach can apply to barrels as easily as it does to fruit. Jevne buys almost all the 15-gallon spent barrels from RockFilter Distillery in Spring Grove, Minnesota; he says the smaller size allows for greater wood contact, which imparts flavors of “leather, tobacco leaves, and gentle ponzu” to his barrel-aged beers. He says this oxidative character is akin to a house thumbprint for Forager’s barrel-aged beers.
Patience is critical, too: Jevne doesn’t even taste his barrel-aged beers until they’ve sat for at least 15 months. When that beer is ready, it isn’t a final product—it’s a thread to be blended with others for a unique and complex whole.
“Be open to looking at your barrel herd as a palate of different colors,” Jevne says. “Don’t only brew one stout and name it and be like, ‘That’s what we’re making this beer into later on,’” he says. “We brew a bunch of different bases, and then age those based off of yeast selection and grist and ABV in selected barrels that will help round those beers out later on.”
Drinkers have responded positively to the results of Jevne’s efforts, whether in the form of a wine barrel–fermented saison or Methode Push Pop. Though it was a winding, headache-inducing road to where Forager and Humble Forager are today, the dual businesses allow Jevne to scratch his creative itches while also selling distributed beers in styles for which drinkers are clamoring.
“Forager loves to produce beers that are friendly for food,” he says. “And because it’s only going to be available there, and we only brew seven barrels, we can experiment with some styles that aren’t super popular and trendy out in the market. That’s allowed us to do some fun things.”
