Rogue’s Slow, Deliberate Reinvention

Rogue is an enigmatic brewery, a fact that goes all the way back to its origins in Ashland in 1988. Ashland, you say? Indeed, the original brewpub was located in Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley, not on the Coast—hence the name. Its second location was Newport, with which it is now heavily associated. The “Rogue” name still fit, though, and through the 1990s anchored a sophisticated branding strategy in a decade when those were few among little breweries. While it was associated with legendary brewery John Maier for 31 years, until his retirement in 2019, it may well have gotten more of its personality from its irascible founder, Jack Joyce, who brought a marketing sophistication to the company earned from his time as an executive at Nike.

Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, Rogue was a very forward-looking company that anticipated most of the trends that would pass through craft beer. It was early to embrace strong and flavored beers, and Rogue was one of the first to recognize that novelty drove sales. The company gamified the drinking experience and introduced a very early membership program. Finally, Rogue saw that pubs were important for the bottom line and branding, and started planting them around the Northwest. The brewery is 36 years old, however, and time eventually changes everything. Rogue has become a legacy brand with a flagship older (32 years) than many of the drinkers it wants to attract. Inevitably, Rogue’s heritage became more central to the company than looking around the next corner with a new batch of experimental beers.

Jack Joyce was a huge personality with a strong vision for Rogue, one his son Brett carried through as President after Jack’s death in 2014. During the Joyce era, Rogue was extremely ambitious. The company had always wanted national distribution, but it also began making spirits and ciders, and pursued a farm-based approach to their beverages. On the beer side they became more and more baroque, including the infamous collab series with Voodoo Doughnuts, which ran from 2011-2016. A lot of those initiatives were aimed at expanding beyond beer, but it sometimes seemed to come at the expense of regular beer drinkers.

Yet in many ways, it is now a newer, younger company. The post-Joyce period began in 2018 when Brett stepped away from Rogue. What followed was a tighter focus and more conventional approach to beer. We’re fully post-Joyce, and new President Steven Garrett is younger than the brewery. John Maier is gone, and current Brewmaster Joel Shields is looking forward for inspiration. Instead of gimmicks, Rogue started making more accomplished, modern beer, including IPAs, which they had strangely never seriously pursued.

Then, about a year ago, the brewery set about clarifying its brand by leaning into their flagship while simultaneously updating it with a Dead Guy line extension. Now the little Mayan-esque icon appears on four other beers: IPA (a West Coast style), Pilsner, Pale, and Imperial IPA. Yet while that’s the most visible part of the brewery’s evolution, it’s only one component. Midway through their fourth decade, Rogue is quietly conducting a full and foundational reinvention.

The Dead Guy Line

Line extensions and brand families have become pretty common among larger breweries, but they commonly follow a headliner into a particular realm of beer. Sierra Nevada, New Belgium, and Deschutes, as obvious examples, launched hoppy lines with the “Little Thing,” Voodoo Ranger, and “Squeezed” series. While a Dead Guy line may look superficially similar, it actually inverts this architecture. “Dead Guy has always had a life, a personality, a following of its own,” Steven told me. “What we learned is that over time, Dead Guy had become just as big a brand as Rogue. People liked it for different reasons. We thought maybe Dead Guy is its own thing and deserves to be pulled out from under the Rogue banner and shine on its own.”

Unlike those other brewery lines, Dead Guy is also, notably, not an IPA. In fact, it’s a serious throw-back beer. Styled a “maibock-style ale,” it harkens to an earlier era, when ale breweries weren’t set up to make lagers. Rogue may have invoked maibock, but few Americans knew what that was. What they did know was amber ale, which Dead Guy resembled. That’s not the kind of beer that can be pulled and shaped into a full line the way hoppy ales can, “Dead Guy” became a brand rather than style family.

Rogue started researching its brand and market position years ago, and discovered something important. They had multiple audiences: beer geeks, of course, but also a cohort that likes craft beer but isn’t looking for endless variety. This second group was larger. They like a few styles and they stick with them. They want the buying and drinking experience to be frictionless. These are the customers the Dead Guy line was designed to serve.

“Craft beer is just part of the fabric of the community here. It’s what we do. If you go to a dive bar, there’s ten handles of craft beer. If you go out to dinner at a nice restaurant, there’s craft beer. As craft beer has matured, it isn’t just people pursuing that next next next. They’re okay with just ordering a beer. They don’t want to think about it quite as much.”

For that reason, they chose the classic styles they thought would most appeal to principally Oregon/Northwest drinkers. Instead of funneling hoppy fans to the beers they like, it’s more like a buffet of the key styles people drink. Throughout their research process, the company also looked for what you might call “DNA signatures” that define Rogue. When he was designing the recipe for Dead Guy IPA, Joel Shields stuck with the house traditions. “John [Maier]’s signature, in my opinion, was always Munich malts. So we threw a little bit of that in there.” It is a surprisingly dark IPA in 2024, and you can see in that hue a wink to Maier. “We only use 1-3% on those. So the color does come from those malts, but it’s not heavily malty like our old-school brews were,” he added. With the pilsner, they echoed a different element from the core beer. “We wanted a nice, clean profile,” Joel said. “Sterling hops, nothing too crazy, just like we use on Dead Guy.”

The IPA and pilsner are both built with an eye toward familiarity. The IPA is a bit sweeter than many modern versions, and the pilsner uses clean, domestic malts for a more American palate. The one exception to this approach is the ultra-fruity Dead Guy Pale, which uses thiolized yeast, oats, wheat, as well Sabro and El Dorado hops. They felt the pale ale style had been so defined on the west coast by Deschutes and Sierra Nevada that they needed to go a different direction.

Trimming and Refocusing

The Dead Guy line was only one component of a larger brand reconsideration. Refocusing and tweaking a brand is critical as a brewery starts stacking up the decades, but I confess I always brace when it happens. The problem most breweries encounter is failing to see their brand clearly. They tend to conflate actual brand equity with a brand’s potential, and kid themselves about their strengths and weaknesses. They create a heroic self-image and convince themselves this is how the world sees them. They made a clear-eyed appraisal and as I listened to Steven, Joel, and Marketing Director Caitlin Hopkins describe how they understood Rogue, I recognized the same brewery.

For a brewery that has always been relentlessly, sometimes counter-productively on-brand, it was refreshing to hear them describe Rogue this way. “What people love about Rogue is that a lot of the beers have a twist and they have a story that starts with ingredients,” Steven said. “Hazelnut brown has hazelnuts, Honey Kölsch has honey, Chocolate Stout is chocolate, and on and on and on.” I guess I hadn’t really thought of it this way, but the brand image, he said, were beers that included a “twist on a traditional style.” Even Dead Guy, which has always been an IPA-strength amber, fits the mold.

Rogue was one of the first breweries to go heavily into new beers—this dates back twenty years or more. Ultimately, that created a lot of noise. Now the brewery is stripping back and focusing. Beyond the Dead Guy line, there are just three core beers: Batsquatch, Honey Kolsch, and Hazelnut Brown. They’ll have limited seasonal offerings, as well, but everything else is going. “We’re really cleaning up the portfolio,” Steven said. “Everything [else] we’re in the process of discontinuing.” This is partly an acknowledgement that with so many breweries in the marketplace and shrinking shelf space, breweries have to be selective and focused. But beyond that, it gives their pubs new relevance—that’s where you will find a wide variety of one-offs, specials, experimental beer, and revivals.

The core line will grow over time, but slowly and intentionally. They are currently working on an IPA that will include fruit. It’s in trials, and they’ve been working with berries (hewing to that tradition + a twist formula). That hints at a new focus on Oregon, which Steven acknowledged was a priority. That means a little fan service in the form of going into the archives for popular beers. “Brutal Bitter was one of our big beers back in the day,” Joel said. “It still has a cult following, especially in Newport, so we had a big party around that and put it on at the Newport pub.” He was pretty pleased with the revival and said, proudly, “John Maier came in and gave it a pass. That’s about the best you can hope for.”

So far, the results have been positive. Sales of the new Dead Guy line have been strong. I have been impressed with Dead Guy Pilsner, which has a distinct and familiar American flavor, and the Pale, which shows a legacy brewery that isn’t stuck in the past. Every large brewery has to confront its own age and how to position its heritage in a way that will attract the next generation of drinkers. Rogue has done the hard work of looking at its brand architecture and repositioning it for the mid 2020s. A brand refresh, along with the line changes, will be phased in over 2024. I have long given up trying to predict what will and won’t work in the beer industry, but Rogue’s changes are informed and foundational, not mere window-dressing. In an industry that still prizes authenticity and a sense of voice and place, it seems like Rogue has made smart choices.

The Business of BeerJeff AlworthFebruary 6, 2024