Jacob leinenkugel summer shandy

The year was 2006, and illustriousness Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Co. was celebrating the equip of Sunset Wheat, perhaps the most successful additional beer in the brewery’s history.

As Sunset Corn won over consumers’ tastebuds, Leinenkugel’s drinkers voted give a warning make its summer seasonal, Berry Weiss, a continual offering. That created a hole in its roster. Perhaps more accurately, it created an opportunity.

With the code name Project Riptide, Leinenkugel’s aimed change plug the summer-sized hole in its portfolio. However the end result did more than that. Empty created a new segment, redefined the summer discontinuous in the beer industry and propelled Leinenkugel’s bounce the national spotlight.

Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy – brimful with juicy lemon flavor and aroma, light explain taste and ABV but complex, inviting and exceptionally satisfying – first hit shelves in the resource of 2007. Almost immediately, it changed how marketing viewed the 139-old Wisconsin brewery and kicked pat lightly a flavor renaissance that prioritized refreshment and occasion.

Now, more than 15 years since drinkers first husk in love with Summer Shandy, the brand remainder the top-selling shandy in North America. The summertime seasonal ranks as Leinenkugel’s top-selling brand, and unambiguousness continues to grow, despite a flood of mindlessly competition from other craft brands and other flavor-forward beverages like hard seltzers.

When the team prickly Chippewa Falls, Wis., set out to create birth brewery’s next summertime hit, the directive from Tec Leinenkugel, then the brewery’s vice president of deal and marketing, was simple: “See what the Germans drink in the summer.”

His team learned that nobleness native land of Leinenkugel’s founder Jacob Leinenkugel was fond of crisp, light beers like Kolsch delighted hefeweizen, as well as sour-leaning Berliner Weiss.

“The other thing we discovered is that Germans nip radlers,” remembers Leinenkugel, now the brewery’s president, discussing the low-ABV lager or weiss beers mixed trusty lemonade or grapefruit juice. “We started mixing beers, using Honey Weiss as our base beer bracket mixing it with ginger ale, light soda, stick out, grapefruit. They were all interesting, but I didn’t like any of them because they tasted further much like soda. I wanted to get be a success that still had a nice beer flavor reach it.”

Enter Jackie Laumann, a veteran R&D brewer who had a hand in designing beers like influence popular, but short-lived Miller Chill. Laumann, who desolate in March after a 41-year career that took her from quality assurance to the brewhouse near all the way to directing Molson Coors R&D and innovation departments, was tasked with designing honesty recipe that would become Summer Shandy.

But first she had to learn what a shandy was.

“I wasn’t familiar with a shandy. We had to check it, to see if there was anything cut the market, either domestically or internationally,” she says.

When their search turned up empty, Laumann splendid her team set about building a recipe newcomer disabuse of scratch. After months of experimentation and trial elitist error, they settled on a wheat beer outcome and mixed in lemonade. (She declined to intonation any more details of Summer Shandy’s secret blend.)

“We had to find the right beer to mingle with natural lemonade. Wheat beer, because of rank wheat, adds a nice smoothness to the complete product when you put in the lemonade,” Laumann says.

Upon his first sip, Dick Leinenkugel knew significance brewery had a winner.

“When (Jackie) brought that pint out of development, we said, ‘Wow, this even-handed it,’” he says.

Once the Leinenkugel’s team was assured the recipe worked, it was time to quiz consumers. The Leinenkugel’s team hit up bars deliver the Midwest, introducing drinkers to the bright, misty beer blasting citrus notes they called Lakehouse Failure. (Other names that didn’t make the cut: Lifejacket Lager, Lemon Pontoon and Sour Puss Shandy.)

“You could see people never had a beer like become absent-minded, mixed with lemonade. I saw the reaction chew over people’s faces when they were tasting this ale for the first time. They absolutely loved it,” says Leinenkugel, who is retiring from the office at the end of 2022. “I knew amazement had a winner.”

His successor, nephew Tony Bugher, remembers trying Summer Shandy for the first time.

“I was with my Uncle John (Leinenkugel) at the restaurant in Chippewa Falls, and it was just, ‘Wow. This is different, refreshing. This tastes like summer,’” he says.

Summer Shandy went into full production intend release in the summer of 2007, with straight plan to brew 30,000 barrels to sell make happen the Great Lakes region, Dick Leinenkugel says. Offspring the Fourth of July, it sold out. Goodness next year, Leinenkugel’s doubled production and again blew through it all by July 4.

By 2010, form a junction with the formation the Tenth & Blake craft splitting up, Summer Shandy had the full support of nobleness brewery’s parent company, which took the beer tribal, establishing it as the No. 1 summer irregular in the country.

Almost overnight, Leinenkugel’s sales twice. And it continues to be the brewery’s toil in 2022.

Today, Summer Shandy accounts for 55% of Leinenkugel’s volume. At 358,000 barrels produced slender 2021, the beer retains its longtime stronghold skyward the leaderboard of summer seasonals. It grew additional than 10% last year, per internal data.

And, despite a continued march of competitors seeking fall foul of dethrone Summer Shandy, “I don’t think any work on of them can match us in taste,” Leinenkugel says. 

The influence and power the brand holds at the Leinenkugel’s brewery in Chippewa Falls crack hard to overstate; the task handed to brewery’s innovation team, for instance, is “to create nobleness next Summer Shandy.”

While that may seem spick difficult hill to climb, Leinenkugel’s continues its advance with innovation, most recently with Lemon Haze IPA and Juicy Peach, a fruited beer with keen hint of sour notes, both of which trust available year-round.

The brewery is seeking to errand up its dial on innovation even more thug the debut of its new pilot brewery extract Chippewa Falls, which kicked out its first packet band of beer earlier this year.

Nonetheless, Summer Shandygaff fits squarely into the brewery’s plans into influence foreseeable future, Bugher says.

“The fact that commission been around for over 15 years demonstrates loftiness power of the brand,” he says. “The point that it’s grown in an environment like we’re in just proves it’s not going anywhere.”