THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 28, 1996 TAG: 9607270346
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 88 lines
Pete Slosberg is to beer what Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are to ice cream.
He's the ``Pete'' in Pete's Brewing Co., maker of Pete's Wicked Ale and Pete's Wicked Lager and Pete's Wicked other beers. He travels the country five months or so each year conducting ``beer educations'' at microbreweries, grocery stores and restaurants.
Slosberg was in Norfolk late this week being a ``beer evangelist,'' as he puts it, at Open Wide on Granby Street and at a gathering of Farm Fresh employees.
Pete's Brewing Co., based in Palo Alto, Calif., is the second largest specialty brewer in the United States, behind only Boston Beer Co. and its flagship Samuel Adams beer.
And get this: Slosberg didn't drink beer until he was 29. Didn't like it. Thought it was boring. The whole thing started when Slosberg and his wife, Amy Margolis, made some wine.
``We discovered it takes five to 10 years for a Cabernet to age,'' Slosberg said. ``That's not a fun hobby to me.''
They switched to brewing beer in their kitchen - and got much quicker results. That was 1979. Slosberg was 29. He spent the next seven years brewing beer and getting friends to taste it.
Slosberg's favorite recipe turned out to be the malty American Brown Ale that later became Pete's Wicked Ale. ``Wicked,'' by the way, doesn't mean potent - it's slang for ``great,'' as in ``That surfer just made a wicked move.''
Slosberg left his management-track job at IBM in 1985, when he and Mark Bronder founded the company. They wanted to put a name on the beer to make their customers feel a personal connection, like Ben and Jerry did with ice cream and Debbie Fields did with Mrs. Fields' cookies.
It was going to be ``Pete and Mark's Wicked Ale,'' but Bronder pointed out that he doesn't drink and said it was fine by him if they just called it Pete's.
Then it came time to decide who would run the business. Slosberg has an engineering degree and a master's of business administration from Columbia University. Both Slosberg and Bronder decided one of them probably could run things, but decided not to take a chance. They contacted a headhunter to find someone to run the show.
``We hired an expert, he runs the company day to day, and I get to go around and be Pete,'' Slosberg says.
Being Pete means educating people about beer ``so they're not scared of it.'' He travels in jeans and a golf shirt with a Pete's logo on. As it turns out, Slosberg resembles a brewmeister, with longish dark hair, a handful of grey hairs sprinkled in a thick beard and just a bit of a roly-poly physique.
But the job is more than looks and more than talking about beer.
Slosberg knows his stuff. He collects beer books from 18th century Germany and Britain. He's writing a beer book that includes historical facts like: The saying ``Mind your Ps and Qs'' derives from the time when pub owners would try to quell rowdy drinkers by yelling, ``Mind your pints and quarts.''
It's fun stuff, but Slosberg is serious about it. Being from computer crazy California, he's developing a database of beers. He's already got a chart showing ``The Wicked Spectrum of Beers'' that displays a couple dozen beers - not all of them Pete's - and lets drinkers know how one compares to another in darkness, body, aroma and taste.
Slosberg's assistant Bill Manger is doing the research necessary for the database project.
``What Bill's going to do is I want Bill to taste every beer in America and give them coordinates,'' Slosberg says.
He figures if he can educate beer drinkers enough to get them to try something other than Budweiser, Miller, Coors and other usual fare, they'll eventually come around to his beer and like it.
Meanwhile, the company went big time last November with a stock offering. Pete sold about 63,000 shares at $18 per a month later, cashing in for about $1.1 million. He still owns nearly 600,000 more shares, but the stock's trading lower now at about $8.
The company sold $17.5 million of Pete's Wicked in its second quarter alone.
``The money is great,'' Slosberg says, but that's not how he knew the venture succeeded.
``I always said here's what I feel is success,'' Slosberg says. ``If I drive my car somewhere, I open the door to step out and I look down and see a Wicked Ale cap in the dirt.''
That happened three years ago when his son found a Pete's bottle cap in the dirt when the two went camping. Slosberg took it home and framed it. ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo by Christopher Reddick/The Virginian-Pilot
Pete Slosberg, of "Pete's Wicked Ale" fame, visited the Open Wide
bar in downtown Norfolk last week. by CNB