THE BUSINESS OF CRAFT BEER, CRAFT GLASSES
Through a narrow door downtown, three focused young men race around a work zone labeling, taping and packing orders into shipping boxes. All business, they have no time to talk.
After the mailman has come and gone, the beer starts to flow, the pool balls fly and the jokes get progressively worse. It’s the other side of the Pretentious Beer Glass Company.
The company is the brainchild of Matthew Cummings, ’07 fine arts, who spent most of the fall moving from Louisville, Kentucky, to Knoxville.
The move has not been as simple as packing a U-Haul.
Cummings and his team of Appalachian Center for Craft alumni have dealt with commercial leases, business plans, plumbing and electrical problems, and city inspections. They are building their equipment by hand, welding furnace frames and designing spaces without cost-prohibitive computer-aided design renderings.
All of it has been a challenge.
“I’m dealing with how hard it is because I’m not doing it for myself. I’m doing it to build a community. From 9 to 5, we bust out making beer glasses and then 5 comes along and we clock out and make art,” Cummings said. “This is my retirement plan. Artists don’t get 401(k)s. I’m doing this for the kids I’m going to hopefully have. I’m doing it for my friends.”
The Knoxville space is designed for more than making glasses. There is gallery space, a hot and cold shop to blow and manipulate glass, and bar seating for guests to drink and watch it all happen. Next door is a bar and brewery (the Pretentious Beer Glass Company has its own microbrewery and original recipes), a shop and beer garden.
When Cummings opened the Pretentious Beer Glass Company on the online retailer Etsy in 2012, the store sold about 30 glasses a month; enough to help even out an artist’s income. The pace has sped up; in one day, two people make between 55 and 75 glasses. Even at that pace, merchandise is often on back order.
But the artists say the effort is worth it.
“The best thing about working here is the people. I’m surrounded by two guys who are super smart, they have an eye for detail, they’re super creative but at the end of the day, they’re still fun to have a beer with,” said Thoryn Ziemba, ’10 fine arts. “The worst part is being so invested in this. I care so much that I can get a little hung up on a detail that doesn’t matter as much.”
The details are what make Pretentious Beer Glass special; Cummings, Ziemba and Sam Meketon, ’14 fine arts, are not making glasses in shapes solely based on other designs. Cummings did his own research and testing to learn more about how shapes enhance the taste.
“The more research I did, I felt like the beer glass was a problem that was hiding in plain sight,” Cummings said. “I poured different beers in the right glasses and then poured them into the wrong ones. Then I made the best guess I could about what made the glass function really well and what I could play with in the design.”
Of about 30 prototypes, the final glasses feature mustaches, pumpkin-shaped bottoms and multiple waists. All are designed to highlight different beers, to fit comfortably in a hand and be fun.
One glass is patented; all are copyrighted. If Cummings has a favorite glass, he won’t tell. He says they are his “babies.” All but one of the eight glasses must be made by hand.
The babies, and the business, are increasingly popular. The business has been featured in food and craft beer blogs, on websites like the Huffington Post and Food Beast, and in magazines including “Wired,” “Men’s Lifestyle,” “Paste Magazine,” and “Southern Living.” Cummings has a waiting list of 60 wholesalers eager to carry the glasses, mostly craft beer stores and a few restaurants.
“I think his business plan is amazingly ambitious and clever,” said Curtiss Brock, professor and head of the glass department at the Center for Craft. “I’m 70 percent pumped up and ready to support them, 30 percent concerned. But like any parent, you have to back off. These guys aren’t messing around anymore; they are betting their livelihoods on this.
“If these three guys can’t pull off something, I don’t know who can.”
Though all but Meketon have been away from the Center for Craft for years, each of the three credits Brock’s teaching for their successes so far.
“My best memory of the Craft Center was probably early mornings Tuesday and Thursday going to work for Curt,” Meketon said. “You knew you were going to get yelled at, you knew you were going to learn something and it’s probably the thing that best prepared me for what I’m doing now.”
While at TTU, Meketon won a student NICHE Award, one of North America’s top fine craft competitions, and was nominated twice more. Ziemba won a Windgate Fellowship, one of the country’s most prestigious and competitive awards for emerging artists. Cummings earned a master’s in fine art from Illinois State University.
“Working with Craft Center people is a testament to the caliber of people Curt puts out,” Cummings said. “I have my dream team. I didn’t choose them because they’re TTU. I chose them because they are super, super talented. I chose the two people I wanted to work with and they just happened to be Craft Center.”