Adam Carlson, Ruby Owl, and a Decade of Craft Beer in Oshkosh

For a decade now, Adam Carlson has been putting his stamp on the Oshkosh beer scene. You've known his influence if you've ever purchased beer at Gardina's Kitchen & Bar or The Ruby Owl Tap Room; each located on North Main Street in Oshkosh. In addition to being part owner and manager of Ruby Owl, Carlson curates the beer line-up for both venues. The taplists at these places tend to stand apart from what you'll find in other taprooms in town. That's because Carlson is not your typical, Oshkosh beer purveyor.

Adam Carlson

Carlson came to beer from the wine world. His drinks career began in 2010 as bar manager for what was then called Gardina's Wine Bar & Cafe. There, his nascent interest in craft beer got the better of him. It led to Gardina's installing a draft-beer system that Carlson filled with an ever-rotating cast of hard-to-obtain specialty ales. “The focus from day one was to be all craft all the time,” Carlson says. The success of the endeavor led to the opening of the beer-centric Ruby Owl in 2016.

Since then, Ruby Owl has become the benchmark bar for craft beer in Oshkosh. When Ruby Owl was launched five years ago, craft beer here was still something of a niche product. It went mainstream in the interim. And with that has come a new type of consumer.

"The snobby seriousness attached to the early days of craft beer has fallen," Carlson says. "We see a lot of people now that just want to enjoy a beverage and if that beverage happens to be beer, well that's great. But they're not involved in the minutia or the provenance. They just want something that's going to taste really good, something that might even transcend beer."

Which has led to Carlson pouring beers of a sort that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. "There's now a lot of overlap with things like hard seltzer and cocktails," he says. "The distributors will come to us with beers that are so packed full of fruit purees, and milk sugars, and those sorts of adjuncts that they barely qualify as beer. That's not to denigrate those things, but if you're a beer purist, that's not going to appeal to you."

The point, he says, is to draw from a larger pool of consumers. "The breweries are marketing these beers to compete in other categories. In a way, that's brilliant. We see where it's engaging a segment of the market that in years past would not have been at all interested in traditional beer."

"I can see a similar arc with wine, where it was a trend started by vinophiles and it picked up steam and hit the mainstream and you had an explosion of mass-marketed wine. It's not traditionally acceptable to do to wine what is being done to beer, but similarly to beer, these are wines made to attract that mainstream consumer who just wants something fruity and fun to drink."

Carlson isn't judgmental about the direction the market has taken. "To point these things out is not an indictment of anything," he says. "It's not that a brewery is wrong for making something like a marshmallow pina colada sour. It's just the cycle of things." The current cycle may not end anytime soon, but Carlson is noticing that some consumers appear to have grown weary of it.

"We're seeing more people coming in looking for lagers and for some bitterness in their IPAs," he says. “We’re also seeing more people who want less alcohol. Eventually you come to the realization that it's as much about the people you're with as the beer, and that you'd rather have two or three 4.5 percent beers instead of one super-high alcohol beer. There's a growing demand for well-made beer that doesn't have anything to hide. It's reverting back to something that's clean and crisp and refreshing."

That's a segment that Carlson likes to encourage. "A lot of what I put on tap is driven by what I want to drink," he says. "There are a number of breweries I'm loyal to that make consistently good beer. Breweries like Lakefront, New Glarus, Lazy Monk. I find myself coming back to their beers. They may not be flashy, but everything is always well made and their prices are fair. Those aren't the breweries that are going to set us apart, but I always like to have them in the mix."

All of which hasn't made Carlson's job any easier. Curating a tap list that can satisfy such diverse expectations has grown increasingly challenging. "When I started, the options were so limited," he says. "But now there are so many vendors, distributors, and salespeople out there vying for your draft lines, and vying for your time, that it's become dizzying. Everything is moving at such a hyper-speed that it's kind of crazy. It's never been like this before."

A slightly different version of this story appears in today's Oshkosh Herald.