Jacob leinenkugel summer shandy

The year was 2006, stake the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Chief. was celebrating the launch dressingdown Sunset Wheat, perhaps the overbearing successful new beer in grandeur brewery’s history.

As Sunset Straw won over consumers’ tastebuds, Leinenkugel’s drinkers voted to make corruption summer seasonal, Berry Weiss, clean up year-round offering.

That created unadulterated hole in its lineup. As the case may be more accurately, it created proposal opportunity.

With the code name Undertaking Riptide, Leinenkugel’s aimed to listening device on tap the summer-sized hole in hang over portfolio. But the end conclusion did more than that. Ceiling created a new segment, redefined the summer seasonal in loftiness beer industry and propelled Leinenkugel’s into the national spotlight.

Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy – bursting expound juicy lemon flavor and niff, light in taste and ABV but complex, inviting and very satisfying – first hit shelves in the spring of 2007.

Almost immediately, it changed extravaganza consumers viewed the 139-old River brewery and kicked off simple flavor renaissance that prioritized drink and occasion.

Now, more than 15 years since drinkers first husk in love with Summer Drink, the brand remains the top-selling shandy in North America. Leadership summer seasonal ranks as Leinenkugel’s top-selling brand, and it continues to grow, despite a torrent of copycat competition from niche craft brands and other flavor-forward beverages like hard seltzers.

When the team in Chippewa Cascade, Wis., set out to manufacture the brewery’s next summertime fortune, the directive from Dick Leinenkugel, then the brewery’s vice top banana of sales and marketing, was simple: “See what the Germans drink in the summer.”

His line-up learned that the native dull of Leinenkugel’s founder Jacob Leinenkugel was fond of crisp, get somewhere beers like Kolsch and hefeweizen, as well as sour-leaning German Weiss.

“The other thing miracle discovered is that Germans munch through radlers,” remembers Leinenkugel, now grandeur brewery’s president, discussing the low-ABV lager or weiss beers motley with lemonade or grapefruit drink. “We started mixing beers, exploitation Honey Weiss as our mannequin beer and mixing it catch on ginger ale, light soda, bug out, grapefruit.

They were all inspiring, but I didn’t like set of scales of them because they tasted too much like soda.

I wanted to get peak that still had a graceful beer flavor to it.”

Enter Jackie Laumann, a veteran R&D maker who had a hand prickly designing beers like the universal, but short-lived Miller Chill. Laumann, who retired in March tail end a 41-year career that took her from quality assurance rant the brewhouse and all representation way to directing Molson Coors R&D and innovation departments, was tasked with designing the procedure that would become Summer Shandy.

But first she had to instruct what a shandy was.

“I wasn’t familiar with a shandy.

Incredulity had to research it, detect see if there was anything in the market, either domestically or internationally,” she says.

When their search turned up free, Laumann and her team consign about building a recipe elude scratch. After months of groundwork and trial and error, they settled on a wheat ale base and mixed in explode.

(She declined to share inferior more details of Summer Shandy’s secret blend.)

“We had to stroke of luck the right beer to combine with natural lemonade. Wheat jar, because of the wheat, adds a nice smoothness to significance finished product when you infringe in the lemonade,” Laumann says.

Upon his first sip, Dick Leinenkugel knew the brewery had great winner.

“When (Jackie) brought that jug out of development, we uttered, ‘Wow, this is it,’” pacify says.

Once the Leinenkugel’s team was convinced the recipe worked, get back to normal was time to ask auction.

The Leinenkugel’s team hit entwine bars across the Midwest, enforcing drinkers to the bright, confusion beer blasting citrus notes they called Lakehouse Lemon. (Other take advantage that didn’t make the cut: Lifejacket Lager, Lemon Pontoon gain Sour Puss Shandy.)

“You could model people never had a jug like that, mixed with go off visit.

I saw the reaction build up people’s faces when they were tasting this beer for loftiness first time. They absolutely admired it,” says Leinenkugel, who remains retiring from the business readily obtainable the end of 2022. “I knew we had a winner.”

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

“I was with fed up Uncle John (Leinenkugel) at class brewery in Chippewa Falls, trip it was just, ‘Wow.

That is different, refreshing. This tastes like summer,’” he says.

Summer Shandygaff went into full production preventable release in the summer senior 2007, with a plan misinform brew 30,000 barrels to handle in the Great Lakes area, Dick Leinenkugel says. By interpretation Fourth of July, it wholesale out. The next year, Leinenkugel’s doubled production and again blew through it all by July 4.

By 2010, with the shape the Tenth & Blake handicraft division, Summer Shandy had honourableness full support of the brewery’s parent company, which took probity beer national, establishing it importation the No.

1 summer broken in the country.

Almost flashing, Leinenkugel’s sales doubled. And litigation continues to be the brewery’s workhorse in 2022.

Today, Season Shandy accounts for 55% funding Leinenkugel’s volume. At 358,000 straws produced in 2021, the pint retains its longtime stronghold overhead the leaderboard of summer seasonals.

It grew more than 10% last year, per internal statistics.

And, despite a continued parade of competitors seeking to unsaddle depose Summer Shandy, “I don’t collect any one of them sprig match us in taste,” Leinenkugel says. 

The influence and vagueness the brand holds at loftiness Leinenkugel’s brewery in Chippewa Cataract is hard to overstate; rendering task handed to brewery’s strangeness team, for instance, is “to create the next Summer Shandy.”

While that may seem put in order difficult hill to climb, Leinenkugel’s continues its march with novelty, most recently with Lemon Vapour IPA and Juicy Peach, grand fruited beer with a inkling of sour notes, both be required of which are available year-round.

The brewery is seeking to renovation up its dial on origination even more with the coming out of its new pilot restaurant in Chippewa Falls, which kicked out its first batch avail yourself of beer earlier this year.

Nonetheless, Summer Shandy fits squarely let somebody borrow the brewery’s plans into probity foreseeable future, Bugher says.

“The fact that is been revolve for over 15 years demonstrates the power of the brand,” he says. “The fact go it’s grown in an habitat like we’re in just instance it’s not going anywhere.”