USA: Lazy Magnolia beats competitors in 2 categories

In Kiln, Mississippi, Lazy Magnolia Brewing Company, which brewed its first beer in January 2005, scored two bronze medals during April's 2006 World Beer Cup in Seattle. The competition, held every two years, is considered to be the Olympics of beer. It had the largest turnout of competitors ever this year, with more than 2,000 beers entered in 85 categories, the Sun Herald posted May 15.

Some of the great philosophers throughout history have ruminated on the essence of beer.
Benjamin Franklin said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Plato, who, among other small feats codified the modern state, said, "He was a wise man who invented beer." Homer Simpson, the animated American philosopher, weighed in when he said, "Ummmm, beer."

"I would say that it is unusual for such a new brewery to accomplish this," said Jennifer Reimer, a spokeswoman for the Brewers Association, which runs the World Beer Cup. "It is something they should be very proud of."

They took the prizes in the rye beer category, for Amberjaque, an amber rye ale, and the specialty beer category for their Southern Pecan, a pecan brown ale made with local nuts.

Lazy Magnolia beat out five competitors in the rye beer category and 14 in the specialty group.

Leslie and Mark Henderson, the husband and wife team in their early 30s who own the brewery, have made developing a relationship with customers the company's mission, along with never compromising the high quality of their product.

"If we don't have a relationship with our customers, we've got nothing," Leslie said. "It's our lifeblood."

The couple have made several smart marketing decisions. They chose to focus bar and restaurant sales on small, five-gallon kegs that slip between standard 15-gallon kegs in the coolers, "so (bars and restaurants) can offer their regular beers and a specialty beer while using no extra space," Mark said.

The brewery also opted out of expensive bottling lines. Instead, Lazy Magnolia beer is offered in grocery stores only in mini-kegs, called party pigs, that sell for around $30 and hold the equivalent of a case of beer.

"It's important to note that party pigs do fit in the refrigerators of FEMA trailers. We know from experience," said McKiernan.

The medal win could not have come at a better time for a microbrewery, also called a craft beer producer.

After idling for the past couple of years, beer sales have shown steady growth in recent months, said Nick Lake, a beer expert at ACNielsen, a marketing information company. Last year, national beer sales totaled $4.071 billion, up about 1.4 percent from a year earlier, according to ACNielsen. Most of the increase came from double-digit sales increases for imports and the craft brands.

"There are people here who want more than yellow, fizzy beer," she said. "We did the market research and found that people wanted better than big beer companies were giving them credit for. Mississippi had a demand for it."

Mark said that demand that they saw did not make starting a brewery easy.

He said the permit they needed to sell beer required that the brewery already be built, which it wasn't when they decided to start a beer-making business, so they had to take a leap of faith.