Roughly eight years ago, when owning a brewery was beginning to seem like a real possibility for Urban South cofounder Jacob Landry, he sat down with The New Brewer’s annual list of brewery-production numbers. With a pen, he circled every brewery that had grown to 15,000 barrels within five years. That was the goal he had for his New Orleans–based brewery-in-planning, and he tried to decipher how each of these breweries had accomplished it. He identified three common threads: good beer, good distribution partners, and good marketing.
Landry bet that Urban South could hit that 15,000-barrel target in five years. Fast forward, and the brewery did it in less than four, and it did so while selling beer only in Louisiana. Through the rapid growth phase, Landry and fellow cofounder Kyle Huling learned a lesson that continues to guide the brewery: Have an airtight business plan—but be willing to revise it constantly.
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“The assumption was we’d have to distribute to Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, etcetera, to get there,” Landry says. “What evolved pretty quickly was the realization that we can get there just in our backyard, and that’s a much more sustainable model. It was a big evolution from the initial plan but also a fundamental part of our success.”
Once Urban South identified an opportunity—the right business model in the right place at the right time—it was all systems go. The brewery topped 17,000 barrels in 2019, opened a second brewery in Houston in 2020, and took home a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival for its Lime Cucumber Gose that same year. A third brewery location is potentially taking shape in another city for 2022.
“They definitely have been so intentional and so prepared and smart,” says Nora McGunnigle, a freelance writer who reported on Louisiana’s craft-beer scene for a decade before moving to Austin in 2019. “As consumers, you feel comforted by that. You can sense that this is a place that knows what they’re doing.”
“Go Big from The Start”
When Urban South opened in 2016, Louisiana law allowed breweries to sell only 10 percent of their beer through a taproom.
“The only viable plan as a production brewery was to go big from the start,” Landry says.
Huling, who had previously worked for the area’s Anheuser-Busch InBev distributor, used that wholesaler experience to do the reverse of what most new breweries did in the mid-2010s: He and Landry planned to use off-premise sales to drive drinkers to their taproom.
“People wanted to come into the taproom and experience what they were experiencing at home and buying at grocery,” Huling says. “That was a huge benefit. Our distributor when we started was hungry. There weren’t many other New Orleans breweries at the time, so they were very eager to kickstart us.”
By McGunnigle’s count, Urban South was the fourth brewery to open a taproom or brewpub in New Orleans. Its cofounders acknowledge this gave them some “first mover” advantage. In stores, they led with easy-drinking, sunny-weather beers—today, the top seller is Paradise Park (introduced in 2017), a single-malt (two-row), single-hop (Hüll Melon) lager that’s priced about a dollar above domestic light lagers. In the taproom, though, the team led by head brewer Alex Flores constantly turned out new, taproom-exclusive styles. They totaled more than 200 unique beers last year.
In both production and variety, they learned to move large amounts of beer, fast. Early on, Urban South invested heavily in its sales team and hired a national accounts manager—who had previously worked for Urban South’s distributor—to spearhead chain retail sales.
“If you have a good relationship with a buyer, you can turn on 30 stores to your new product tomorrow. It’s a lot easier than fighting for the tap handles one by one,” Huling says. “The Walmarts of the world expect things turned around in a matter of hours, not days, so having a person dedicated to that can jumpstart new brands.”
Bright colors, big flavors, and a welcoming atmosphere define the Urban South brand.
Howdy, Texas
Huling and Landry applied what they’d learned in New Orleans to their second Urban South location, a 14,000-square-foot facility with a 10-barrel brewhouse that opened in Houston in February 2020. Houston felt like it offered a similar opportunity to what New Orleans had four years before: a large beer market thirsty for something new. Yet, just opening up distribution there didn’t feel compelling enough to the duo.
“We could start distributing there tomorrow, but why?” Huling says. “I don’t buy Texas beer in Louisiana. Why would someone in Texas buy Louisiana beer?”
Urban South would have to make itself a local brewery for Texans. As in New Orleans, distribution sales could tie back to the brewery’s physical presence, while a taproom presence could encourage off-premise sales. But Urban South was careful not to make the Houston location a cut-and-paste job of the first location; its cofounders encouraged the brewing team there to brew styles that they loved and that local drinkers demanded. Those turned out to be heavily fruited sours and smoothie-style beers, distinct from the session-strength lagers and golden ales popular in New Orleans.
The second location also prompted a companywide redesign of cans and marketing materials. In Houston, Urban South went for a bolder, more graphic, and colorful look than the brewery already had. Growth again afforded a reason to reexamine the brewery’s offerings and make sure they weren’t becoming stagnant.
“As much beer as we were selling in Louisiana, most people in Houston have never heard of us, so [the Houston location] is able to create its own identity,” Huling says. “You’ve got two business models going parallel and also working together at the same time.”
The Texas location further allowed Urban South to evolve in another crucial way: the racial diversity of its staff. Landry says half the staff in the second location are non-white, including 100 percent of the taproom staff. That’s important to the company’s stated goal to better reflect the population of the cities it calls home.
“There was a real opportunity to do this a second time,” Landry says. “It’s hard to increase diversity when you’ve already built a staff of 30 people. We’ve been very intentional about it in Houston.”
At Home and Beyond
Head brewer Flores calls Urban South’s pace of production growth “rapid, incredible, and wild to see.” Fitting in double-brew shifts and brewing on weekends became necessary. Strategically maximizing space to accommodate new tanks required Tetris-like maneuvering. But staying ahead of demand by continually adding capacity makes sense in the long run, he says.
“It keeps you ahead of a lot of stress you might feel if you’re trying to rush production,” Flores says. “Quality can suffer when that happens.”
It’s all part of Urban South’s continuously forward-looking mentality. Plans are always being revised, expanded, and improved. No idea is too precious to cling to—of the brewery’s core brands from 2016, only one—Holy Roller IPA—remains, and its recipe has changed significantly in that time.
“We’ve always taken the approach that we’re not going to let the market force us into something,” Landry says. “Before a beer gets stagnant or before sales decline, we want to be proactive and ahead of it. … Part of what’s kept us at the forefront in our market is being willing to take those risks and to stay ahead of where our beers are.”
The challenge is to keep the team motivated to work at this sometimes-breakneck pace. Flores says mental health and quality of life are something the New Orleans staff—which is evenly split between men and women—actively discuss. During the pandemic, he took a week off for a road trip to reset and refocus, leading his team by example. He’s critical of the industry’s “boys’ club” mentality that doesn’t allow for discussion of burnout or anxiety. He says that open dialogue is what’s helped his team stay mentally strong despite the workload.
That—and the good pay. Huling and Landry say they want jobs at Urban South to be “sustainable” and something workers can remain in for years, so they’ve set the brewery’s base pay at $14.50 per hour. The brewery works with a job-training program that connects it to workers who have struggled to find long-term employment; the goal is to be a good community space not just for drinkers but for employees, too.
Beer writer McGunnigle says it’s clear Urban South thinks about expanding the idea of the South’s craft-beer drinker. She recalls an early event at the New Orleans brewery that was a “mommy blogger” meetup. That was not a typical event for a brewery, but because the cofounders had young kids themselves, it felt natural.
“Their outreach to untapped markets and events was really good,” McGunnigle says. “And they were just—it sounds simple but—super-nice. They built a reputation for real solid beer, real quality, and a good vibe.”
McGunnigle thinks that reputation has the potential to translate to other locations in the South, something Urban South says it is actively considering. When Landry thinks about cities he loves in the region—Charleston, Nashville, New Orleans—he says the common thread is their juxtaposition of old and new, their contradictions, their pace of life.
“I wanted our brewery to be able to travel a little further than just Louisiana,” Landry says. “So I was like, ‘What are those places?’ They’re the Urban South.”
