Fat Tire takes Milwaukee
The Colorado beer is now available in more than 100 locations
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This weekend Decider finally got around to ordering up a New Belgium Fat Tire beer at a local watering hole. The pride of Fort Collins, Colo. appeared in more than 100 Milwaukee bars, restaurants, and liquor stores for the first time last week, and we’re already hearing stories about the brew selling out all over town. Don’t worry—the brewery is planning a more extensive roll out by the end of June.
So, what took so long to get to Milwaukee? According to New Belgium’s self described “sexy spokesmodel” Bryan Simpson, “we’ve grown our distribution outward concentrically. As we’ve been adding states, we’ve been trying to determine what are the best routes for sustainable trucking, if you can even use the term, in the sense that you don’t want to skip states to get to other states.”
If you haven’t figured it out already, New Belgium is an unabashedly green brewery, so shipping to Wisconsin meant weighing the benefit of being in a big beer market against possible environmental damage. “We did a carbon study of the life cycle of a six-pack of Fat Tire, and the transport was about 14 percent of the carbon,” Simpson says. “Really, the biggest portion is the cold storage at the retail level, which isn’t to excuse shipping, but it’s tricky. One of the things we’ve started doing is producing beer in cans. Cans do ship significantly lighter and burn quite a bit less fuel in that sense. So we’re addressing our carbon footprint through packaging as well with collaborative brewing.”
Decider also asked Simpson about the Tour de Fat, a New Belgium-organized bike race that takes place in 11 states. “We have a big bike parade and then a big party in the park with beer and music. It’s bike advocacy, really,” he says. There’s no plan for a Milwaukee race yet but, really, this sounds like the most Milwaukee thing we’ve ever heard. Let’s drink to that!
