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Rouses Means Local brands

Abita Beer by Robert simonson

year-round flagship brews. The Abita Amber and Purple Haze raspberry lager are arguably the best-known. Other year-round products include Wrought Iron IPA; Turbodog, a dark brown ale; Old-Fashioned Pale Ale; and Abita Light Lager. There’s also a variety of seasonal ales, which come out only during a specific period each year (Pecan Ale and Christmas Ale are two); limited-release beers, which are designed to disappear completely after a short stay on the market (Macchiato Espresso Milk Stout and Office Party, a holiday- season brew, were two recent attractions). For the teetotaler, there are Abita Root Beer (flavored with herbs, vanilla, yucca and Louisiana sugarcane) and Vanilla Cream Soda. (Patton sold his stake in the company in 1997, and he passed away in 2012. Cumming also left the company, and he passed away in 2016.) Today, Abita is a national brand with a presence in nearly every state in the union. I personally first encountered Abita at Vaughan’s Lounge in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans in 2006, when I tossed back a couple of Ambers while listening to Kermit Ruffins play his Thursday night set. Today, I have no trouble finding Abita in New York, including at The Gumbo Bros, a New Orleans-style eatery just blocks from my Brooklyn home; and at Clover Club, one of the best craft cocktail bars in the city. On the Gulf Coast, meanwhile, Abita still has a dependable home at every Rouses Market, including the one on Highway 190 in Covington, which sits just a stone’s throw from the brewery. And Rouses — which is locally renowned for its exhaustive craft beer selection — is ever eager to know about anything Abita might be up to. “We want to be the first to market anything they have with our customers,” said Acosta. He mentioned Abita’s Strawberry Lager, which was introduced more than a decade ago. While at first glance a strawberry lager might seem like a head- scratcher, the flavor mash-up was a natural one for a Louisiana brewer like Abita. The state’s “berry belt” dates back to the 1800s, when immigrants from Italy and Hungary began planting the fruit in large numbers. Some consider them the best-tasting strawberries in the country — not as large as the California version, but much sweeter. The refreshing, pilsner- and wheat-based beer, which was created to coincide with the local Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival, caught the public’s fancy, and Abita upped production fairly quickly. Rouses’ savvy marketing expertise likely had a little something to do with that. The market’s approach to selling the product was to match like with like. Bottles of the Strawberry Lager were displayed beside containers of actual Louisiana strawberries. The Strawberry Lager was, for its first 15 years, a seasonal product, but in 2019 Abita announced it would be available year-round. The brewery said it will use a whopping 120,000 pounds of strawberries to make the brew a 365-day-a-year thing. Abita appreciates such cheeky ingenuity. David Blossman, the

Leo A. Basile, vice president of sales for Louisiana’s Abita Brewing Company, knew about Rouses Markets well before he came to work for the craft beer giant. He went to school in Thibodaux, in Lafourche Parish, where the company was founded in 1960 and where the first store christened Rouses opened in 1974. So when Rouses opened a store in Metairie, just across Lake Pontchartrain from Abita’s headquarters of Covington, Basile was interested, to say the least. He wanted in. “It’s one of the stories I always talk about,” said Basile. “I was an extremely ‘rookie’ salesperson. But I knew Tim a bit.” Tim is Tim Acosta, the director of advertising and marketing at Rouses. The two men were standing in the beer aisle of the Metairie store one day when Basile just came right out and asked what it would take to get an Abita mention in one of Rouses’ promotional advertisements. “Abita was a local craft brewery,” recalled Acosta. “We had heard about them. They were just getting starting. We like to work with local companies, and this was one of the first local beer people we got to know. We had carried their product. We had it stocked on our shelves. Leo said, ‘We’d just love to get in one of your ads.’ I said, ‘That’s no problem. I’m the one who sets up the ads. Just give us a deal and we’ll set it up.’” And so began a lengthy, symbiotic relationship between two iconic Gulf Coast businesses that continues to this day. The relationship is not unusual in a certain respect. As a proud local enterprise, and in the spirit of forebears J.P. and Anthony Rouse, Rouses has long maintained a dedication to local businesses. “It is common,” observed Basile. “In Louisiana, locals try to help locals.” And there is no craft brewer more associated with Louisiana than Abita. Abita was founded on in 1986, by two home brewers, Jim Patton and Rush Cumming. It is named after the small town of Abita Springs, and the brewery uses the artesian water from those springs (regarded as some of the purest water to be found in the area). Abita’s arrival on the scene was welcome and needed. The beer landscape in Louisiana at that time was pretty bleak. Prohibition had done its demolition work and, by the end of the 20th century, only Dixie Beer was left among the old local brands. It can be said, without exaggeration, that the opening of the Abita Brewery officially kicked off the craft beer boom in the state. Abita was only the 13th craft brewery to open in the United States — and the first in the South. Moreover, for their first couple of decades in business, Abita remained the only craft beer maker in the area. As is often the case with start-up craft breweries, Abita was for several years only available on tap; Abita Amber and Golden were its first releases. With the help of the Munich-trained brewmaster Mark Wilson, Abita started its ascent by placing the beers in two bars — one in New Orleans and one in Mandeville. By 1989, the beers had become available in bottles. In its first year of business, Abita rolled out a modest 1,500 barrels of beer. Today they brew more than 100 times that, including several

president and CEO of Abita and one of the original investors in the brewery, observed that Rouses is “very good for marketing products.”

A similar sort of promotion was built around King Cake Soda, which was introduced by Abita in early 2016. Perhaps the most local product imaginable, the

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