There's a love story behind New Glarus Brewing, the maker of Spotted Cow

The New Glarus Brewing Co. story — the brewery celebrates its 25th year this year  —   is a love story. Dan and Deb Carey met as 23-year-olds working at the same brewery in Montana.

It's also a rags-to-riches story that winds from a single-wide trailer to a multimillion-dollar brewery at the top of a hill overlooking lush Wisconsin farmland, with a smaller specialty brewery down the road.

And it's the story of Spotted Cow, the farmhouse saison beer that took off in 1997 and helped make New Glarus the 16th biggest craft brewery in the country; 26th if you count all breweries including MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch.

No big deal except that New Glarus beers — last year 240,000 barrels were produced —  are sold only in Wisconsin.

First, the love story. 

'Just a total bummer' 

They met at Kessler Brewing in Montana. Deb was a single mom who was running a graphic design business, cleaning toilets and going to college. Dan was hired out of the University of California, Davis to help start the brewery. 

Their first "real" date, which followed meeting for coffee and going on hikes, was at the trailer Deb owned. Dan was a potential boyfriend until the moment he came to the door with two six-packs in hand. 

"My dad's alcoholic and there's plenty of drinking in Montana, so you can imagine my dismay, when I'm thinking, 'Oh yeah, there's this really cute guy and he's coming over and I open the door and he's got two six-packs of beer,' " Deb said. "I was like (expletive). This is not good, dammit, I kind of like this one. This is just a total bummer." 

She heard him taking out all her glassware. "I'm literally walking around the living room with no furniture in a circle trying to think of how I'm going to get rid of him before he's drunk. I don't want him in my house if he's going to be drunk," she said.

Dan opened the beer and poured small amounts into each glass. He asked Deb to taste them, and recorded her reactions in a notebook.

"He's earnestly asking me questions, and I'm thinking now he's dirtied all my dishes. This is just going from bad to worse," she said. She went back to the living room and heard him pouring beer down the drain. Expensive beer, she thought. 

He turned around with two bottles of beer — one for each of them — and queued up the movie. Deb laughed. "So we hung out and watched the movie. At the time, that's not how beer drinking had been done in my life."

Now beer is her life. 

Taking aim at Wisconsin 

Dan Carey is a diploma master brewer, the highest credential in the industry. He created Spotted Cow and a lineup of beers from Moon Man, a hoppy pale ale, to Champs Rouge, a beer that is spontaneously fermented with New York Rougeon grapes and sold only in the brewery's beer depot. Dan figures he has designed more than 200 types of beer. 

Deb Carey is the founder and the face of the brewery. After a nomadic lifestyle that had the by now married Careys and two young daughters moving to Oregon where Dan worked as an equipment fabricator, traveling to help others build breweries. Then to Fort Collins, Colo., where he had a job working rotating shifts with Anheuser-Busch.

"We're just not corporate people," Dan said. 

Deb, a Milwaukee native, offhandedly told Dan she would open a brewery and hire him as her brewmaster. 

"He's had worse bosses," Deb said. 

She laughed as she said it, but she did draw a circle around Madison (the demographics were good) and sent Dan to Wisconsin to scout the area.

"I thought I could do this for a couple years and get the brewery going. He could hire people," Deb said. "It was not a big grand vision of this, just a vision of us being able to spend some time together and have some stability." 

Deb takes charge 

The business started on a shoestring, with Deb trading stock in the brewery for setting up shop in a former plastics factory.

Everyone had an opinion on what they should brew. A wholesaler told Dan he had to have an amber beer in his lineup, the most popular craft beer style of the 1990s. Dan declined. They told him that, as a craft brewer, he couldn't make a light lager brew.

"Watch me," he answered, and brewed Totally Naked lager.

"We've always tried to have our own voice, and it's served us well because our brewery is very unique," Dan said. 

Back then, Deb was the sales force — force being the operative word. She didn't back down to wholesalers who would make her wait or wouldn't show up for a scheduled appointment. Or wouldn't meet with her at all.

When that happened, she would call the guy, usually a guy, "and tell him what an (expletive) he is and what does he think he's doing to me," she said. Other craft breweries went through the same thing at the time. But the owners worked through attorneys to settle things.

Not Deb.

"Do you think the attorney is going to argue more passionately?" she asked them. "Grow a pair. That's the only way you can do it." 

She talked frankly and threw expletives even before she had to call on dive bars, some that wouldn't turn off the porn they were watching when she walked in. Frustrated with the drive and the politics of selling beer in Chicago, Deb and Dan stopped sending beer to Illinois. Their time and money were better spent on expansion in Wisconsin and their school-age daughters. 

A lightning rod 

That they couldn't have it made out-of-state drinkers want it all the more. Beer writer John Holl, author of "Drink Beer, Think Beer: Getting to the Bottom of Every Pint," in a 2013 interview recalled going to a wedding in Dubuque, Iowa, but while his wife primped, he sped to New Glarus Brewing to stock up on one of his favorite beers — unavailable where he lived on the East Coast. 

Spotted Cow is the brewery's bestselling beer, with Moon Man right behind it. You can see shoppers wheeling handcarts of Spotted Cow out of the brewery's beer depot to their cars.

But not everyone appreciates the style. A warning on the menu posted at respected craft beer bar Romans' Pub, 3475 S. Kinnickinnic Ave., reads "No Spotted Cow. Not Now. Not Ever." People still try to order it. 

"I sell their other stuff," said owner Mike Romans, who has tangled with Deb over his insistence that Spotted Cow is "pablum for the masses."

That's his nice description.

Romans acknowledges that "I have nothing but respect for her husband as a brewmaster." But he also said Deb took him on a personal tour a few years ago.

To bar owners in particular, Deb is a lightning rod. For some, it's her politics.

In 2013, she was invited to attend President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech and seated near Michelle Obama. She was named a Champion of Change by the Obama White House.

That got her tagged a liberal, although she said she has given to the Republican Party.

Kirby Nelson, brewmaster and founder of Wisconsin Brewing, which is not 20 minutes from New Glarus, has heard the tales. His beer replaced New Glarus at one bar after the owner grabbed the Spotted Cow tapper in front of him and threw it out the door as he called her a "liberal (expletive)." 

In Nelson's mind, the bar owner had it wrong.

"What she is more than anything else is she is Deb Carey," he said. "Look at their business and let's talk. I would argue they are the most successful craft brewery or microbrewery in the country, and they've done it on their own turf."

Won't back down 

Deb shares another well-known tale: that she's anti-gun. "We own guns," she said. "I know how to use guns. I was probably the first girl who graduated from Wisconsin's hunter safety course in 1973, and if anybody wants to know how I am with guns feel free to come by any night. I've got a quarter-mile clear shot up my drive. Let's find out how anti-gun I am." 

She doesn't back down or soften her stance. She doesn't see the need.

"I think I'm solidly in the middle. I think at this particular juncture it is a very sad state of truth that being pro-people suddenly gets you labeled as an extremist, and I don't think that I am," she said. "I want people to have education. I'd like them to have health care. I'd like them to have healthy living conditions and fair wages. And I understand all those things will benefit us as a business community." 

The exit strategy

The couple insist that 25 is just a number. But their 25-year story is told in photos and captions in a special room at the brewery.

The business, they say, has worked beyond the original mission. 

"We were just trying to think of a way to raise our family," Deb said. "I knew that there was a really good chance that it would work out, and Dan for sure knew that. I just felt like he has such a great talent and he should have the chance to do it."

The Careys are 58 years old, and while they aren't planning on leaving New Glarus anytime soon — "I'm sure we'll probably both die right here in the brewery somewhere" — their 27 stockholders wanted to know their exit strategy.

The company started an Employee Stock Ownership Program. "Employee owned" is printed not far from the "Only in Wisconsin" tagline on every label. 

"Collective ESOP is a good solution because there's strength in numbers," Dan said. "In over 25 years, we have a 1% turnover and we have really the best, most loyal, hardworking, smartest people that are going to be able to step in and move the ball forward for us. That's a better solution than putting the onus on the shoulders of our daughters."

Deb agreed.

"It is a great deal of wealth to give away, but I think it's fair because the people who've built this brewery will benefit and I hope that gives them all stability and retirement in a time that I really think things are not stable, and I'm concerned about Social Security and what are people going to do for health care," Deb said. "When I'm old, I want to sleep well at night knowing I did the best I could." 

What you might not know about the makers of Spotted Cow

• One brewery turned into two: the original one, called Riverside, where Dan introduced the first koelship in Wisconsin; and the ever expanding Hilltop brewery. Hilltop is the one most people visit. Tours are self-guided and beers are served on the patio, designed to look like ruins on a hilltop overlooking the brewery's Swiss-themed namesake the town of New Glarus. 
• There's a distillery in the works, something Deb has been asking for. Dan calls it "an exploration." 
• New Glarus has a wild fruit cave, where Dan makes his sour and experimental beers. It was designed by the couple's daughter Katherine, an architect. Their other daughter, Nicole, lives out east. 
• They are crazy about animals. Dogs are welcome in the offices. Last spring, Deb got a call from a friend who needed help with a baby squirrel. She came to the rescue. "I brought him to work and fed him out of an eye dropper, and he rode around on my shoulder under my hair and played at night," she said. As he became stronger, she released him back to the wild.