Kevin Bowen's Career at Fox River Brewing Comes to an End

Kevin Bowen is leaving Fox River Brewing Company. He’s moving to France and ending his 10-year run as the brewmaster for Oshkosh’s largest brewery.

Kevin Bowen in the Fox River Brewhouse in Oshkosh, 2016.

Bowen's tenure at Fox River is notable for several reasons, not the least of which is the dramatic growth he oversaw while running the brewery’s facilities in Oshkosh and Appleton. Since becoming brewmaster in 2009, Fox River's production has increased by more than 250 percent. The brewery went from limited distribution to sending beer into nearly every part of the state. Along the way, Bowen has picked up his share of awards while hueing to an approach that has informed his brewing from the start. "I just wanted to make balanced, clean, flavorful beers," he says. "We had some successes doing that."

Charlie Papazian presenting Bowen with a World Beer Cup award in 2012.

Bowen began his career with Fox River in 1998 bussing tables at the brewery's Appleton brewpub. He was 16 years old. "It was really my first job," he says.

The beer-making side of the operation immediately caught his attention. Before long he was helping out on the brewery's makeshift bottling line. "I went from the bottom up," Bowen says. "It was like an apprenticeship and I was bursting at the seams. I was in love with what I was learning."

By 2002, he was working full time in the brewery under Fox River brewmaster Brian Allen. “Brian took me under his wing,” Bowen says. “We wound up having a great mentor/protégé relationship. I learned the ropes by doing grunt work.”

In 2005, Bowen attended the Siebel Institute on a brewing scholarship. A year later he became brewmaster at the Hereford and Hops brewpub in Wausau. Bowen took over the position from Kevin Eichelberger, who went on to launch Red Eye Brewing.

Bowen was all of 24 years old and in his element. "It was an oversized brewing system, with plenty of capacity, so I could put a lager into a fermentor and not have to worry about it tying things up," he says. "That's where I really started getting passionate about lager beer and really figuring out how to brew them."

Bowen returned to Fox River in 2008, just prior to the departure of Brian Allen. "Brian and I worked together for a few months again before he left and I took over as the brewmaster," Bowen says. "Brian had been brewing mostly ales, and I brought back that lager flair that I was doing up at Hereford and Hops. I wanted to bring my own flavor to the brewery."

Bowen had re-entered Fox River at the beginning of its most subdued period. Following the financial crisis of 2007/2008, the brewery had retrenched; abandoning its forays into Green Bay, Madison, and Milwaukee and discontinuing most of its distribution. "Things were kind of at their quietest right then," Bowen says. "It gave me intimate time at the brewery to work it myself. That's also when the hop shortages of 2010 and 2011 hit."

The shortages forced Bowen to rework Fox River’s recipes. One of those he remade was Fox Light, a Kolsch-style beer that was among the brewery's top sellers. In 2010, he submitted his reformulated Kolsch to the biennial World Beer Cup and took a bronze medal. "It was the first brewer’s conference I had been to and it was for a German-style,” he says. “The panel was made up of German judges and I was going against several German brewers. To win that award at that time was huge for me.”

With that, came change. Production at Fox River began inching upwards and as the hop shortage eased Bowen brewed a series of hop-forward beers that challenged the brewery's norms. He became the first brewer in Oshkosh to produce modern, American-style IPAs. "It was crazy," said Jay Supple, CEO of Fox River Brewing. "All of a sudden, we were bringing IPAs out and they'd be gone in six days."

As production climbed, the brewery re-entered distribution and in 2015 installed a new bottling line at its Appleton location. "That led to us really building the brand," Bowen says. "It was that bottler that really got us out there." Much of what went into those bottles was BLU Bobber, a fruit beer introduced at Fox River by Brian Allen in 2004 and reshaped by Bowen over the ensuing years. Under Bowen, BLU grew into Fox River's best-selling beer.

"Retailers were continually asking us for more, but we had hit our absolute maximum capacity," Bowen says. "It was stressful for sure, but it was exciting, too. To get that embrace from ownership to go into this with me and for me to lead this thing for them was great. It was what I wanted for sure."

To circumvent the capacity issue, Fox River contracted with Hinterland Brewing in 2018 to produce BLU Bobber at its new facility in Green Bay. "We wouldn’t have been able to go statewide and continue to develop the relationships we already had if we hadn't done that," Bowen says. "It took us a good six months to get the recipe into their system and really dialed in so that it was the same as the beer we produce here."

Last year, between the breweries in Oshkosh and Appleton and the production he oversaw in Green Bay, Bowen pushed 3,587 barrels of beer through the Fox River pipeline. That's over 600 barrels of beer more than the brewery produced in its previous peak year of 2017.

"I guess that's what I'm most proud of," Bowen says. "The growth has been fantastic to see. It boils down to the beer being well received and the demand for it consistently growing 20 to 30 percent a year. I hope it continues to grow. Right now a lot of that is about servicing parts of the state we're just now hitting."

But that’s no longer going to be Bowen's concern. He leaves the brewery August 16th. On September 1st, he will be on his way to France.

"I had a bit of a milestone," Bowen says. "I'm not old enough to call it a mid-life anything, but I've been here for 10 years and I'm really proud of what we've done, but a lot of the hustle here is maybe more of a young guy's thing to wrestle with."

That's not entirely why he's going to France, though. "Well, on top of that I'm chasing a girl," he says. "We met a year ago, and it's really good. Her primary residence is in France. We had to decide if she would come back here or if I would go there."

"It was tough to make the decision, but I'm ready for that next step," Bowen says. "I'm ready to explore some different opportunities. I guess I'm a traditional brewer and I'm still passionate about traditional beers. Not that I'm really against or fed up with anything, but a part of why I'm going to Europe is because I've been enamored with that tradition that I learned through beer. Moving there is literally living out my beer-geek dream.”

“I looked at myself at 37 and said if I don't do this now… I don't know how to describe it really. Right now, I just want to immerse myself in that culture and see if I can get a job at a brewery there. I want to keep growing myself into a better brewer. I have these ambitions. I want to build a brewery, eventually. Partly, this is about learning how to take risks. I'm risking a lot. I'm letting go of something very stable that I've been a part of for a long time. Hopefully, it's the right thing to do and proves that risk is worth taking."