STRICTLY BUSINESS: BREW PUBS: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME

The venerable Clydesdales aside, brew pubs are an idea whose time has come.

Trendy new drinking, eating and meeting places have emerged during the 1990s. They're called microbreweries or brew pubs.

Brew pubs offer the familiar atmosphere of a restaurant bar with a new twist -- beers brewed on the premises, usually within sight of the patrons.

The pale gold and copper-colored beer has a malty sweetness, hoppy bitterness and foaming heads of fresh brews, made from the natural essentials -- water, hops, malted barley and yeast.

These beers are rarely bottled, but pasteurized for filters, and, as aficionados say, "the beer doesn't get any fresher or finer than this."

Some of the new brew pubs -- there are more than 600 now in existence in the U.S., with 195 of them opening within the past year -- offer as many as 50 different beers to go along with a menu of more traditional food.

Brew pubs are both restaurants and pubs, and the attraction is for people who are just looking for a nice place to eat.

Microbreweries foaming

New microbreweries are also really foaming.

Microbreweries and brew pubs are not the same. The main difference, it seems, is economics.

Brew pubs are restaurants first and pubs second.

A brew pub can make a profit by brewing about 1,000 barrels a year. A microbrewery needs to brew five times that amount.

Unlike microbreweries, brew pubs don't have to worry about the high cost of packaging, distributing and marketing.

While the overall beer market has been essentially flat for the past decade, production at micros and brew pubs is growing at 30 to 40 percent a year.

The new "designer brews," range from light wheat beers to heavy stouts and cost twice as much ($7 or so a six-pack) as leading national brands.

But beer drinkers want the new tastes, claims Beer Marketers, a trade magazine that says microbreweries have the mystique that imports used to monopolize.

Mystique? Look at the names

Mystique?

You bet. Who can resists 12 cool ounces of something called Wild Goose Amber, Texas Cowboy, or Rogue Ale?

The micro-brew systems were created in 1992 by entrepreneurs who wanted to meet the taste buds of some local customers. Even with the growth of the microbreweries and brew pubs (about 1.7 million liters a year), the big breweries have little to worry about.

The minis make less than 1 percent of the nation's brew.

Anheuser-Busch can brew more beer in a 12-hour shift than microbreweries make in a year.

Brew pubs are not numerous in Missouri, but some notable names have emerged -- Trailhead Brewery in St. Charles, the Iron Horse in Joplin, Old 66 Brewery in St. Louis and Flat Branch Pub at Columbia.

Downtown Cape next ...

St. Louis, Kansas City and Springfield each have three or four brew pubs. Another brew pub is on tap in the historic downtown Cape Girardeau area.

It was announced recently that the Buckner-Ragsdale building, constructed in 1916 and once the home of Buckner-Ragsdale Co., a Cape Girardeau family clothier for years, had been purchased by Cape Girardeau Brewing Co.

Plans for the two-story building, on the corner of Broadway and Main streets, include a micro-brewery. The recently-formed company is headed by Mark Sprigg and Phil Brinson, both of Cape Girardeau.

Sprigg, who works at St. Francis Medical Center, has long been interested in brewing beer and has been a home brewer for more than 20 years.

Brinson is owner of Rufus Mudsuckers, a restaurant and lounge that opened this year at Main and Independence in downtown Cape Girardeau, and Jeremiah's at Sikeston.

A timetable has not been established, but interior cleanup is already under way.

The owners have toured several brew pubs and feel theirs will be a good attraction -- and, good business for the downtown area.

B. Ray Owen is business editor for the Southeast Missourian.