Mother's Brewing Company will sell beer in St. Louis this year

A widely known Springfield craft brewery announced Tuesday that it will begin beer sales in the St. Louis market this year.

In a Facebook post, Mother's Brewing Company quipped, "How long does it take to drive this van the 216 miles from Springfield to St. Louis? Oh, just about 7 years."

Beer will go on sale in the Arch City on Feb. 20, the post stated.

Mother's owner Jeff Schrag told the News-Leader on Wednesday that he began looking at St. Louis about 18 months after founding the central Springfield brewery in 2011.

Mother's will be working with three St. Louis-area distributors: Krey Distributing, Grey Eagle Distributors and Lohr Distributing Company.

Schrag does not yet know how many St. Louis stores will be selling his brews, but he said that St. Louisans have been after Mother's beer for a while.

"The No. 1 place where we have social media interaction but we don't sell beer is St. Louis," he said. "The No. 1 place it's requested where we don't sell beer is St. Louis."

The craft brew market in St. Louis matured early, Schrag said: St. Louisans consume more beer than the national average. Breweries of all sizes are located there.

The region also has more capacity for beer consumption.

Greater St. Louis is roughly six times larger than metro Springfield, with 2.81 million people, according to census data. Its median household income per year, $56,483, is about $12,000 more than the Springfield median.

"Every time we've expanded to a market, the question has been whether we should go to St. Louis instead," Schrag told the News-Leader.

"St. Louis is such a great beer town and such a competitive market that we've always thought, well, maybe this other market we're looking at is a little less competitive, a little less mature."

"Plus, you know, you have to have a bit of reverence because it is the home of Anheuser-Busch," Schrag said.

Anheuser-Busch is the largest-producing brewery in St. Louis and the United States, according to the Brewers Association.

It is a division of AB InBev, the 600-year-old Brazilian-Belgian corporation that acquired Anheuser-Busch in 2008 over the objections of then-Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt and then-Sen. Barack Obama.

Schrag noted that many St. Louis residents work for Anheuser-Busch or have family who do. "There's just still a lot of ties, a lot of loyalty," he said.

Mother's most recent expansion was to Lawrence, Kansas, in 2015. Schrag characterized the college town as a "good market."

Mother's first major expansion was to Kansas City, in 2012.

"We were lucky," Schrag said of Kansas City. "We got in early."

The City of Fountains had been home to Boulevard Brewing Company since 1989, but by 2012, it had many more breweries, with talk of even more to come.

"We were able to get into Kansas City and make a nice name for ourselves," Schrag said, noting that he has no idea if he'll sell more Mother's beer in St. Louis than he does in Kansas City.

Part of the reason is that competition among U.S. craft breweries is increasingly tough, Schrag said.

According to Brewers Association data, there are about 6,000 craft breweries as of 2017, the vast majority of which are microbreweries and brew pubs rather than regional breweries.

Schrag said there were only 1,700 of them when he started Mother's.

At that time, the number of U.S. breweries began a seven-year spike.

Schrag said the spike is now at its end.

"The category is growing," not the number of breweries, he explained.

According to the Brewers Association, craft beer sales were up 10 percent in 2016, the most recent year with available data.

Mother's produced about 4 million bottles last year, flat over the previous two years; Schrag expects about a 10 percent increase in 2018.

Missouri has 78 craft breweries, the Brewers Association reports, with 1.8 of them per 100,000 residents. That puts Missouri in 32nd place among the 50 states for concentration of breweries. The state's industry has an economic impact of $1.047 billion per year, about 1/23rd of the national total.

Ten breweries exist in the Ozarks region, according to previous News-Leader reports. Since 2015, breweries have opened in West Plains and Ozark. 

Springfield has five: Springfield Brewing Company, Mother's and White River Brewing Company, along with two that opened in the past 12 months: Lost Signal Brewing Company and 4 By 4 Brewing Company.

A sixth, Timber & Tie Beer Co., expects to open April 1, the News-Leader reported in December.