Why Are There So Many Kids At Breweries?

The craft brewery used to be a place for self-proclaimed beer nerds to sample the hot new IPA. Now, young kids, toddlers, and even infants take up as much space as beer-drinking adults. So how did this happen?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

  My whole extended family and I went to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina this past spring. And I gotta say, I came away feeling like, number one, this is a great family destination. Number two, this is a great place to come all year round. The mini golf alone is probably worth, it's like the mini golf capital of the country. They have the most incredible elaborate mini golf courses. They also have more than 80 championship, full-size golf courses, plus 60 miles of beautiful coastline, all-season sunshine. Of course, you can relax by the beach or the pool. There's also jet skiing, fishing charters, paddle boarding, and of course, food. Oh, man, did we eat well in Myrtle Beach. From fresh local seafood to craft burgers and craft beers to kebabs on the boardwalk. With more than 2,000 restaurants to choose from,

• 0:41Dan Pashman?

  from legendary no-frills seafood shacks to chef-driven dining, Myrtle Beach has it all. Plus, live entertainment at the beach, there's always something epic going on. So, summer may be winding down, but in Myrtle Beach, you're gonna find the coastal vacation of your dreams all year long. Start planning your ultimate beach vacation at visitmyrtlebeach.com. I grew up on Lando Lakes cheese. I still remember going to the supermarket deli counter with my mom and her ordering Lando Lakes American cheese. And now, Lando Lakes cheese and butter are a huge part of my home. There are so many easy weeknight recipes using Lando Lakes cheese and butter that bring delicious restaurant taste right to your table. From chicken parm to weeknight shrimp pad Thai, Lando Lakes has plenty of quick dishes that'll have the whole dinner table

• 1:23Dan Pashman?

  talking. Visit landolakes.com/reцепes/collection for easy weeknight dinners.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  First few months of moving into space, I had a meeting with, you know, the local police department. I remember one of the questions they asked was, "Oh, uh, do you ever have any issues with underagers?" And I mean, they just go like, "Yes, but not in the way that you're thinking." He's like, "Oh, like what?" I'm like, "Yeah, normally, like, ages like three to seven."

• 2:05Dan Pashman?

  This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Before we get into the show, we are looking for Sporkful listeners who want to participate in a top-secret new project or, yes, later this fall, we're gonna have some major announcements. Right now, we're keeping it buttoned up. But if you and a friend would like the Sporkful to send you out to dinner so you can be part of this very exciting, top-secret project, we want to hear from you. Just fill out our short online form, go to sporkful.com/dinner. We'll also have a link in our show notes. Thanks. All right, let's get to the show. We're all familiar with the craft beer boom, right? Over the course of a decade, starting around 2014, the number of breweries in the US doubled.

• 2:51Dan Pashman?

  Today, most Americans live within 10 miles of one. But last year, more craft breweries closed than opened, a first for the industry. This is due to a few different factors. All that growth created a bubble, there's been rampant inflation, and Americans are drinking less in general. Still, some craft breweries are weathering the storm. They're adapting by bringing in a clientele not typically targeted by places looking to sell more beer: kids. But that choice has had some unintended consequences. Sporkful senior producer Andres O'Hara has the story this week.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  A few years ago, my wife and I decided to take our son, who was like 18 months old at the time, to a cocktail bar. We were walking around a neighborhood in Brooklyn that was full of families. It was around 5 o'clock, and there was still plenty of light out. The bar looked empty and quiet. So, why not? We found a table in the corner, a server took our order, and we got our drinks. But 30 minutes later, things had changed. The lights dimmed, the music got louder, and a bunch of younger people came in. My son couldn't look at the books we had brought him, he couldn't hear what we were saying, and we were trapped. We hadn't paid, and we couldn't leave. Our kid wasn't having it. We were taking turns shushing him,

• 4:05Speaker 02

  trying to find the right toy or treat that might calm him down, all while pretending that we were enjoying our $18 drinks. The couple sitting at the table next to us actually just got up and moved to the bar. As the minutes went by, it seemed like the bar had gotten tighter. Every bespoke piece of glassware was now within my son's reach, a touch away from being knocked off the table. I actually had to corner the server with my credit card just so we could make our escape. We learned our lesson. Cocktail bars aren't for kids. But we found a better alternative: a brewery. Instead of dark and loud, breweries are brighter and mellower. There's lots of space where we can spread out with snacks and toys and wipes,

• 4:47Speaker 02

  and there are other kids there who, you know, are sometimes a little wilder than mine. Plus, at a brewery, you order and pay at the counter so you can just leave quickly in the event of a meltdown. Not too long ago, craft breweries were places for self-proclaimed beer nerds. Now, young kids, toddlers, and even infants take up as much space as beer-drinking adults. So, how did this happen? If you want to go back to another time in history when beers and babies mixed, we need to go back to the 1800s.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Going back to pre-prohibition, you know, beer was always part of American culture and there, German beer gardens, things like that.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Beer gardens. This, by the way, is Joshua M. Bernstein. He's been a journalist for 25 years, and he's written half a dozen books on beer in the US.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  These were respectable family places that you'd go to on the weekends. Back in the day, trolley car lines would always end at picnic grounds or so on, where beer was often an offer. So, you'd go ride this and hang out with the family. So, like, beer's really always been interlinked with leisure in America.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  In the 1800s, over 5 million Germans emigrated to this country, and they weren't thrilled with the American way of drinking, which was often done in saloons. A saloon was dark. A saloon was a place to get drunk on whiskey. A saloon had nowhere to sit. German immigrants recreated the beer gardens and beer halls from their homeland. Everyone was welcome at the beer garden: mom, dad, the kids, the grandparents, and great-grandparents. There was lots of seating, there was light beer that didn't get you drunk, there was food and music. Some had dance halls or bowling alleys, or even a shooting gallery. By the early 1900s, thousands of beer gardens and beer halls had emerged. But prohibition killed off the beer gardens, and anti-German sentiment after World War II made it really

• 6:33Speaker 02

  hard for them to return at scale. Some beer gardens still exist from those times, but many, many more never returned. In the 1960s and 70s, people were brewing beer in another family-friendly space: their own homes. Microbrewers, as they were called, were buying hops and malts along with kegs and buckets, and were making their own beer in their basements and garages. Homebrewers were teaching classes and trading recipes. But homebrewing was technically illegal thanks to holdover prohibition laws. In 1978, all of that changed. Jimmy Carter signed a law that basically undid federal regulations around homebrewing. Small brewers now had an opportunity to start businesses. In the 1980s, you saw the rise of Sierra Nevada,

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Harpoon, and Boston Beer Company, the maker of Sam Adams. But there were still many state laws that were making it hard to open and sustain a new craft brewery. Here's Josh Bernstein again.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Some states didn't allow you to brew, some states didn't allow you to self-distribute, some states had artificial alcohol caps on what you could make.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  But in the 2010s, many states changed their laws, making it easier for breweries to operate and expand across the country. And while breweries were expanding, the raw ingredients to make beer were also changing.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Farmers created new hop varieties that tasted like berries, that tasted like papaya and pineapple and tropical fruit. And so, what these new hops did, they allowed breweries to, I think, push beer in directions that didn't exist, because a possibility to make them didn't exist back then.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  All of these things came together to create not just a growing industry, but a subculture of beer. And like all subcultures, it was weird.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  Back then, it was really drinking as a dare. So, it was really about, like, how bitter can we go? How extreme can we make things? There were extreme beer fests, whereas almost like by punishing your palate and pummeling your palate, you proved yourself as a drinker. The more this tasted like an ice cream sundae, the more this tasted like, you know, barbecue, the more sour a beer was. It became this weird marker of excellence.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  People sought out limited-edition beers from across the country. In 2017, Josh wrote about the intense demand for a newer kind of beer: the hazy IPA.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  People could not get enough of these beers, but you could only get them primarily from breweries who had canned them that day, and you'd have to show up and buy them that day. And so, this created this sort of collector slash reselling slash trading community where, if you wanted to get these beers, you had to go out there and show up directly at the brewery.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Some breweries kept these new drops of hazy IPA a secret until the last minute. Others were dealing with crowds forming in their parking lots. Josh covered the scene at a brewery in Brooklyn called Other Half. It was in this post-industrial area next to the Gowanus Canal, a super fun site that, in the 80s, was a dumping ground for millions of gallons of raw sewage. This was not a place to go and hang out.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  People were showing up, oh, gosh, like, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, the night before, waiting in line all night long, drinking outside. You're sitting in gritty, post-industrial Brooklyn, smoking the exhaust from all the cars passing by overhead, standing yourself on Big Macs, and drinking beer with strangers.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Then, just a few years later, a slowdown began. Some places were victims of their own success. A grungy neighborhood with one cool craft brewery eventually becomes a cool neighborhood, and rents get too high for that original brewery to remain. More breweries also means tighter competition and fewer customers. And the prices for everything, from grain to steel to labor, they were skyrocketing. Also, the customers grew up. The generation that had become hooked on craft beer, that would wait all night next to the toxic waste dump to get the latest drop of hazy IPA, they were getting busier, they're having kids, and they were drinking less. But they didn't want to give up their love for breweries. And breweries couldn't afford to give up these core customers either.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  They had to change. But how? Coming up, I hear from two craft brewers on opposite sides of the country who have very different perspectives on what happens when kids, lots of kids, start hanging out in their breweries. That's coming up. Stick around.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  Time to cook up some advertisements.

• 10:45Dan Pashman?

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• 11:30Dan Pashman?

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• 12:16Dan Pashman?

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• 13:01Dan Pashman?

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• 13:24Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman, and as you may know, this show's been around for more than 16 years. So we have a massive back catalog of classic episodes that people are always asking us to reshare, and that's why we've created these Friday Reheats. Every Friday, we reach into the deep freezer and reheat an episode just for you. I love re-listening to these episodes I haven't heard in a long time, and I gather that so many of you do as well, because we're getting tons of requests for episodes that you want to hear. Recently, we've reheated episodes with the hilarious Nagin Farsad, chef Marcus Samuelson, and food writer Michael Pollan. That Michael Pollan interview, I always think about that one, even years later, especially like he talked about cooking with his son, and like how that's a chance to sort of have more substantive conversations. You know, if you have a teenager, it can be hard to break through at times.

• 14:09Dan Pashman?

  He talked about that, he talked about how he doesn't get invited to other people's house for dinner, and that's also something I think about when people don't invite me to their house for dinner. I don't know, maybe there's another factor at play in my case. Anyway, make sure you check out our reheats. And if you have an episode you want us to reheat, let us know. We take requests, send me an email or voice memo to [email protected]. Tell me your first name, location, what episode you want to hear, and why. Can't wait to hear from you. All right, now I'll turn things back over to Sporkful producer Andres O'Hara.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  The first brewer that I want to introduce you to is Damien Fagan. In 1990, during his freshman year of college at Michigan State, he bought himself a home brewing kit and began making beer in his dorm.

• 14:50Speaker 05

  It was uniformly terrible, hard to drink, and of course, we couldn't wait the two or three weeks for the beer to actually ferment and finish. So we ended up drinking five-day fermented beer that had maybe a quarter percent of alcohol in it.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Damien's beers got better, and he kept it up as a hobby. He moved from Michigan to California, he got a day job in design and illustration in San Francisco, but beer brewing kept calling to him. So in 2010, when he was 38, he partnered with a friend and they decided to start a company, Almanac Beer. Almanac specialized in sour beers. They were made in aged wooden barrels, not steel tanks. The beers come in contact with wild yeast and take years to develop, almost like natural wines. They taste acidic, tart, and sour. Making sour beers is a bespoke, time-consuming process. So you might think it would be hard to turn a profit, but it wasn't, because in the early 2010s, people couldn't get enough of these sour beers.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  We would release a beer every month, in some cases, two beers a month, and we would do launch events, and you'd literally have 100 people in line waiting to buy it. And in many cases, you'd sell out in a day or two. We were at one point distributed in 27 states, and we'd go out to these markets, and we were welcomed like rock stars.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  They had started small, making beer in other people's breweries, but now Almanac began winning awards and also growing really fast. Sales were jumping 30 or 40% a year. They needed their own space, they wanted to go big. In 2017, after years of planning, they opened up a 30,000-square-foot facility in Alameda. The new space was filled with these wooden barrels dedicated to brewing sour beers. It gave them the capacity to brew five times what they were making before. But just as production was ramping up, things in the industry were changing. For one, other breweries were catching on to the popularity of sour beers.

• 16:42Speaker 05

  All of these distributors all over the country said, "Well, you know, gosh, there's now a really great sour beer brewery in Atlanta, you know, there's a really great one in Nashville." There were just too many breweries, you know, to make any, you know, one particular brewery like succeed.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  So now there was more supply for sour beer, and there was also less demand. Sour beer was coming down from its peak popularity. This was true of a lot of the other weirder, funkier beers. Craft breweries had offered bold new alternatives to the sameness of mass-produced beer, but even craft beer drinkers wanted something with a touch of the traditional. They wanted IPAs and lagers. Almanac's orders began to slow down.

• 17:22Speaker 05

  You know, we were growing 30, 40% year over year for five years, and then that's, you know, then it was 10%, then it was 6%, then it was flat. Our sales dropped 80% in the span of two years.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Now they were stuck with a new, enormous, and expensive facility.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  We had decreasing business, massive new competition, and an overhead structure that was unsustainable. Those were sort of like the three horsemen of the apocalypse. And the reason my hair is all gray and I have very little left is from 2018.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Were you like losing sleep over this?

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh, I was, it was honestly like one of the most difficult periods of my life. I mean, you know, I was personally guaranteed on all of our debt, by the way. You know, everything I own, my savings, I certainly would have had to file bankruptcy. And then the worst part was, you know, I raised a ton of equity from friends and family, and, you know, looking at these people in the face and saying, "I'm really sorry, but I'm gonna, you know, we're gonna lose your money." I mean, I don't mean to sound like totally dramatic, but it was brutal.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Things had to change, and fast. And unfortunately, the only way to do that was for Damien to take on even more debt, millions of dollars more. He held emergency rounds of fundraising with investors and basically changed the business. They pivoted from barrel-aged sours to fresh beers, like IPAs. All those award-winning beers that took years to develop, they went by the wayside. Then COVID hit, people were stuck at home, and Damien began looking at things differently. They had this giant space inside and a bunch of land outside. This was supposed to be a factory for making beer, but what if it could be something else? Damien set his sights on a dirt lot that was next to the brewery, and he decided to lease it from the city.

• 19:13Speaker 05

  So we said, you know, "It would be awesome if we could spin up some outdoor seating area." And one of the things we did, I told my team, "Let's put in a sandbox." And, you know, they looked at me like I was insane, and I was like, "We need a sandbox, it's outside, there's families that are coming, everybody's stuck in their houses, let's give these kids a place to play." And it was really popular. Like, the truth is, the sandbox would be full even if nobody was drinking beer. Even when we were closed, people were hanging out in the sandbox.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  The lease on the dirt lot ended, and the sandbox went away. As COVID faded, Almanac could let more and more people inside their brewery, and they continued to make changes. They converted their parking lot into this cute little beer garden with palm trees and tiki huts.

• 19:59Speaker 05

  And I told my team again, I said, "I'm putting in a sandbox." And once again, they said, "You're crazy. What do you mean a sandbox? We're a brewery." Like, that's fine when it was across the street, but it's just kind of weird, dude. And it's a huge sandbox, it's 20 feet by 20 feet.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 20:18Speaker 05

  400 square feet. And, you know, it's got little slides, and, you know, we fill it with toys. I'm not kidding, if you go there at 3 o'clock on a Saturday, it's like a mosh pit. There are literally 70 kids having the time of their lives, you know? And parents can hang out with their friends and have a meal and drink. That was the realization, is we said, "There is something here, and we need to lean into this."

• 20:44Speaker 02

  That something was space. Breweries, which were created as factories, had something that was maybe even more valuable than the beer itself, a big space that was open during the day. When beer writer Josh Bernstein became a parent, he began to see breweries in this new light too.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  They're open 11 a.m., 12 p.m. If you're raising a kid, you've been like feeding them all night long, like 11 o'clock may as well be happy hour, right? And so you're going out and you've got your kid and you take them out to a taproom. And then you start seeing parents filling these spaces earlier in the day and then generating income for people and the businesses earlier in the day.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Breweries had stumbled onto a much more profitable business model, selling beer on premises. Selling a beer at the brewery means that you don't have to pay a distributor, you don't have to deal with grocery stores, and you don't even have to can or bottle the beer. Here's Damian again.

• 21:35Speaker 05

  My margins relative to wholesale are almost 3X. You know, I have to sell three beers to my wholesaler for every beer I sell on property. And so as our taproom became busier and busier and our reputation grew, we were able to sell more of that volume across our own bar.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Damian knew that his customers valued the kid friendliness of Almanac, so he leaned into it even more, totally transforming the space.

• 22:02Speaker 05

  So you walk in and you're just met with this just, you know, explosion of color. Everything's rainbows and purple and blue and the shade structures are red. Off to the right, we have this sort of side garden, which has another 10 foot by 10 foot sandbox. You're met with all of this wonderful, fun, cartoon-like animated signage, right? So there's all these like cool posters and weird art. We've got cool taxidermy and model airplanes hanging from the wall. It looks like a museum almost.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Early on in this experiment, Damian's goal was to keep the kids busy so the parents, the beer buyers, would come in and stay for longer. But now the kids were becoming the target customers themselves. It wasn't just about occupying them, it was about making it a place where they wanted to go. Eventually Damian changed the signage outside. He painted over the beer company part of the logo, so it just said Almanac. Then last year, he added the name Adventureland. The word brewery is in small font below it, along with event venue and amusements.

• 23:03Speaker 05

  And that really reflects who we are today, which is we're a gathering place for the community. We love beer, it will always be in our DNA. 2025 is the first year that less than half of our revenue was generated from beer sales. So that's pretty mind blowing.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Today, Almanac makes the majority of its taproom revenue from other drinks, like kombucha, cider, and wine. And in fact, the most popular drink they sell is a non-alcoholic kid slushie. And half a million people came through last year.

• 23:32Speaker 05

  Oddly enough, I don't have children, but all of my beer drinking buddies, male and female and otherwise, like many of them now have children. They have jobs, they've got a mortgage, you know? And we see this all the time in comments on our social media and emails that people send us, which is, thank God, you guys are providing this service. Because yeah, I love craft beer, but you know, I've got three kids now, or I've got a kid, or my parents live with me. So when I go out, I bring them with me and I want to bring them to a place that they'll enjoy.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Almanac still sells beer to stores. They have products at Safeway and a proprietary beer at Costco. But this year, they'll make more money at their one brewery than they will selling wholesale to over 900 stores.

• 24:18Speaker 05

  I'll say something that is taking me a really long time to be able to say. We will be completely debt free by the end of this year, which I can tell you as the person who's personally guaranteed on over $4 million of bank loans, that that goes away this year. We're as healthy as we've ever been and I, I don't want to sound proud, but I sleep really, really well these days.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Coming up, another brewery scales up and parents begin bringing their kids. But this time, the results are disastrous. Stick around.

• 25:03Dan Pashman?

  It's time to open up a can of advertisements.

• 25:08Dan Pashman?

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• 25:38Speaker 06

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• 26:28Speaker 02

  Welcome back. Damian is actually an outlier in the craft brewery world. Most breweries allow kids, but they don't go as far as Almanac, making kids a primary focus. Damian told me that many of the brewers he's talked to would rather just focus on the beer, like this guy.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  My name's Jason Goldstein. I'm the owner, founder, head brewer for Icarus Brewing.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Brewing was much more than a hobby for Jason. It was a college education. He studied food science at Ohio State, got an internship with a brewery in Columbus, and ended up focusing his studies on fermentation. From there, he moved to England and studied under the brewmaster for Heineken Newcastle. In 2017, he opened Icarus Brewing in Lakewood, New Jersey.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  So we were in the middle of an industrial park, you know? Our neighbors made dog food. Nobody was actively going to that industrial park unless you were working there. No one was driving through it unless you were working there. So no one was accidentally ending up at our brewery.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  And yet, in 2017 and 2018, people were still excited enough about craft beer that they showed up. They wanted to spend their evenings drinking beer in what was basically a factory.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  You'd be sitting under a pallet rack, hoping that, you know, that bag of grain that was held by one piece of Saran Wrap, you know, 15 feet over your head, hopefully it didn't slide anymore to hit the table below it. All things you think of when you're looking at a restaurant. You want that prime location, you want the frontage, everything else. We had none of it. But at the same time, you know, on a Friday night, there'd be 100, 150 people in our 50 seats. People wanted to get in, we'd be selling out of cans, clamoring for every single beer we're releasing because we were still providing great beer and a fun experience.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Icarus sold a variety of IPAs, and this was during that IPA gold rush. Other kinds of beers were starting to fall in hard times. And yet, if you could make a really good IPA, people would go out of their way to get it.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Oh, we were booming. We outgrew our space six months in. We were ordering tanks and then figuring out where they could go by the time they got delivered. We'd rebuild our warehouse every day just to like fit an extra pallet in there. You know, there were so many days where I'd bring my dog with me to work because it was, you know, a double brew day. And then it's like, hey, I've got a company coming to can in the morning. I'm finishing that brew day, it's already like 10, 11 o'clock at night. They're going to be at 6 a.m. Why not just sleep on my dog bed with my dog? But like, it's what it took sometimes to get it done.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  And how did the success feel?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  There is nothing quite like brewing the beer and then hanging out in the tasting room. And there's very few other jobs where you get to see, you know, the end user and how happy they are with the product. Like someone thanking you when they're paying $18 for a four pack.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Because, you know, this is their favorite beer, they're so happy they got to get it.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  In 2022, Icarus moved to a new facility. And by this point, they were actually being courted by local governments.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  When we first opened in 2017, and we were trying to ask different towns, you know, if we could open even an industrial park and like, you know, that's not in our code, therefore like you have to pay a ton of money for variances, to get the code changed, this and that. Whereas Brick, the town we're now, was excited about a brewery and proactively did that. I think it was like a passion project for someone who's on the planning board, who just wanted it to happen.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  In Brick, they're right in the middle of a neighborhood. They have bike racks, people walking off the street. They also quadrupled the size of their space, adding hundreds of seats. And they don't have a problem filling the space. Instead, they have a different problem.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  You know, in Lakewood, we might've had like, sometimes it'd be like a kid or two. Now all of a sudden, it's like, hey, on a Sunday, like a third of the groups are families. There's young kids.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Jason figured they could print out some coloring sheets, maybe add some board games. It was a compromise, accommodate the kids without doing too much to attract more of them. But...

• 30:11Speaker 01

  We started seeing bad reviews. And it was bad reviews in every direction, from, hey, like there's too many kids there, so I won't go anymore, or to, hey, the staff told my kid to stop running, so I'm giving you a one star and I won't be there again.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  To Jason, these reviews felt unfair. But then it got worse. The staff were sometimes tripping over kids. Some of these kids would throw gravel from the beer garden, hitting waitstaff and customers alike. Oh, and there was that famous incident.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Once we had a, a kid return to us.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Wait, what?

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So his father and grandfather sat at the bar. They hadn't even been served yet. And all of a sudden, someone comes and apparently driving on the main road in front of us, pulled over because a child was walking on the street. They walk him over to us and it'd be one thing if this like father and grandfather were loaded, like it's our fault, we shouldn't have been serving them. So no, they had, they literally had just ordered and already lost track of their child.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  It did not end there.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  You know, we had someone come in and complain and leave a real fun one star review because their child was able to crawl out from our beer garden. It was something to do with their three year old getting out. My response was, I'm sorry. Did you want us to have, you know, like a trench there, barbed wire? Like, I'm unsure what you expected. Like, how fast was your three year old? They got away from your table, ran over the gravel, crawled under the fence and then got out and then, oh no, you had to go around because you couldn't get under the fence.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Last winter, Jason noticed a kid playing outside the brewery in the snow alone. So he found the person who he suspected was the father and he asked him if he knew where his child was.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  He goes, who are you to tell me this? Like, you know, my, I know where my kid is. They're like, sir, like your kid is outside in the snow. Like, did you know that? And he runs to get his kid.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  In the history of Icarus, there has been one fight ever. And it almost ended being the second fight when a parent tried to attack me because I asked them to keep their kid with them. I'm like, ah, I think you have to leave. I went and I paid his tab, closed the tab, everything.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  So on the way out, they took all their glasses and just broke them all on the ground.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Did you ever just think like, this was not what I signed up for? Like, this is not the way I started my business.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Like, it was repeatedly was like, hey, like, when I took that first internship at a brewery in college and I spent all that time, like, just working on a bottling line, just to get a chance to maybe one day write a recipe and brew a beer. The last thing I was thinking about was other people's children making mayhem. Like, I spent years designing everything here, the layout of the tables, the type of chairs, you know, making it so the beers pour efficiently, the right glassware, just to end up having to realize, not that it actually mattered, all that mattered is, hey, like, what are we going to do about children?

• 33:28Speaker 02

  What were they going to do about the children? While the business was doing well, Jason was also dealing with the same market headwinds as all craft breweries. Sales at the brewery mattered more than ever. Upsetting customers was a big risk, but things needed to change. Jason called a meeting with his whole staff and after some back and forth, they created a new rule.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  We ended up settling on, hey, like Thursday, Friday, Saturday, after 6:00 PM, 21 and up.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  So that was sort of our happy middle ground.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Now, all they had to do was communicate the rule and enforce it.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  It was on our website as a pop up the moment you loaded it. On all social media, the first thing you see. Try to make it everywhere.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  But that didn't always work. Brick, the town they are in, is right on the Jersey Shore. It's a very popular destination, especially for families.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  We set these rules and, you know, the moment it starts raining, everyone clears off the beach. You clear out the beach and you look on Google Maps real fast and you say, hey, where can I go locally? Oh, we'll go to the brewery. Google Maps doesn't have a setting for, you know, family from the hours. Wish it did. You know, the first time a family shows up at like 6:30 and we tell them like, hey, like, you actually can't come in here. That became its whole own, whole new headache.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  You know, a family shows up at 5 o'clock and at 5:30, we call last call for families. A lot of people accepted that, some people not so great.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  It took some time, but the brewery eventually settled into its new rhythm. At 6 o'clock on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, there's a mass exodus, but by 6:30, a new crowd rolls in.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, no, I come by at night now because I know I'll get a seat. I don't have a kid running around me. So a very different crowd shows up and I'm like, well, maybe this does work. But at the same time, like Sundays, every single person who didn't show up Friday or Saturday, they show up. It's loud, it's a lot of children. So if you show up, look at the operation, you'll realize, hmm, maybe this does make sense.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Jason told me that when he tallied up all his sales before and after this rule, they were pretty much the same. His rule had worked. Breweries have always been places of experimentation. At first, the fun new experiments were around beer brewing. What wild and extreme beers could they whip up next? But now, I think the most exciting experiments are with the space itself. There are breweries that host soccer leagues, costume parties, movie nights, dog birthdays, and amateur wrestling matches. These are spaces for all kinds of people to get off their phone and meet in person. But I think one of the most surprising experiments is the one that's the norm now. Many breweries are just expected to be family friendly, at least most of the time.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Whenever I'm visiting a new city with my family, I will always look out for a brewery, not a restaurant, as my go to place to hang out. And it's because I feel totally confident knowing that my son will be welcome there, no questions asked. And this is not just the result of breweries actively courting parents. Sometimes, parents were the ones to make the change. That was definitely Jason's experience. And yet, despite all the issues he's dealt with, he's not upset that this culture has changed.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Some of my favorite customers over the years have been like people who've come in like with their kids, with their families. When I've like given tours of the brew house, some of the best questions I'll get have been from kids. Like, I gave like a kid, it's like little 18, a tour of the brewery and they were asking me so much about the process that like, I actually had to think of like, wait, I've been doing this for 15 plus years. I studied this, I have degrees in this. You know, kids will throw ideas at me, you know, for, this is a silly name for a beer. We'll call it Bricosaurus. It's going to be my new favorite dinosaur. I'm like, cool, we're going to name a beer Bricosaurus.

• 37:16Dan Pashman?

  That's Sporkful senior producer, Andres O'Hara. Next week on the show, we take your calls and food hot takes with two food TV stars, top chefs Gail Simmons and Ayesha Nerjaya, who you see on Food Network often. She's the chef and owner of one of my favorite restaurants, Shuka. That's next week. While you wait for that one, check out last week's show, my conversation with Priya Krishna and Madhur Joffrey about how the perception of Indian food has changed and whether or not you can call Indian food just American food now. That episode is up now. And hey, if you want to hear new episodes of The Sporkful ad free, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com/podcastsplus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice.

• 38:01Dan Pashman?

  This episode was produced by me along with managing producer.

• 38:04Speaker 07

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 38:05Dan Pashman?

  And senior producer.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Andres O'Hara.

• 38:07Dan Pashman?

  It was edited by.

• 38:08Speaker 07

  Camille Stanley.

• 38:09Dan Pashman?

  Our technical director is.

• 38:10Speaker 05

  Jared O'Connell.

• 38:11Dan Pashman?

  Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pash.

• 38:19Speaker 07

  And I'm Nora from Taylor, Texas, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

• 38:37Speaker 06

  Hey, it's me, Teddy Swims. You hear that? That's life. So go grab it. Grab your old friends, grab new friends, grab a White Claw. Grab flavor for everyone in your group. Grab music, laughter, and moments you'll never forget. You'll never regret it.

• 38:58Speaker 06

  Grab new friends, grab old friends, grab life by the glow, White Claw.

• 39:03Speaker 07

  Please drink responsibly. White Claw Celta Works, Chicago, Illinois. Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. And one thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. Because with every fix, update, and renovation, it becomes a little more your own. So you need all your jobs done well. For nearly 30 years, Angie has helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter. From plumbing to electrical, roof repair to deck upgrades. So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at angie.com.