It’s a bright morning in Fort Collins, Colorado. An overnight fog has just lifted. And inside the New Belgium Brewery headquarters, a big, glassy barn of a building, the craft beer producer’s CEO, Steve Fechheimer, is facing a firing squad.
“There’s been some concern around Mural,” he says, referring to the company’s most significant new product launch in four years. It’s an “agua fresca cerveza”—a low-alcohol, lower-calorie fruity beverage resembling a shandy that’s the opposite of a typical beer drinker’s beer. And New Belgium, the fourth-largest craft brewery in America, has built a reputation on making beer for people who like beer.
The crowd that Fechheimer is encountering today isn’t an investor group or a board of directors. It’s a roomful of employees, a hundred or so, who’ve gathered for the company’s monthly meeting. Lately, employees have been emailing Fechheimer, expressing their doubts that Mural can compete with hard seltzers, the refreshingly light malt beverages that have been stealing share within the $38 billion U.S. beer market. One person at the meeting asks if New Belgium is spending enough on marketing, to make sure people “get” Mural. Another wants to know if the company plans to play up the wellness angle on the packaging. Maybe this new offering was just too complicated, too different from the company’s other brews, such as Fat Tire and Voodoo Ranger IPAs, and not enough like those boozy seltzers from competitors White Claw and Bon & Viv. Mural is . . . well, it’s weird.
Fechheimer, a 6-foot-tall executive with close-cropped hair and a clean-shaven face, who joined New Belgium in the summer of 2017 after a stint as chief strategy officer for Beam Suntory (as in: Jim Beam), stands out from the generally scruffy New Belgium employees. Yet he stands fully among them, never doing the imperial, political, CEO thing. There is no patronizing “Good question” response before pivoting away to safer turf. He simply admits: “Confidence in the [Mural] plan is lower than where I’d like it to be.”
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