Old Nation Brewing Co.: Finding success the old-fashioned way

After Old Nation Brewing Co.’s M-43 IPA put the Williamston brewery on the map in 2017, one could hardly blame the business for chasing its success. But owner and brewer Travis Fritts said the company’s practices haven’t changed: It’s focused on consistency, professionalism and making the best beer possible.

Though if a beer takes off, that’s a welcome bonus.

“It may be possible that we’re more capable of predicting trends because of our market experience,” Fritts, who’s been brewing in Michigan since 2003 and founded Old Nation in 2015, said. “But the conclusion we came to is that we need to just figure out who we are, find our tribe and stay consistent.”

Fritts said trends in the brewing industry “always seem to be cyclical.”

“The actors change, but the performance is the same every night,” he said. Comparing Old Nation’s flagship M-43, a New England IPA, to Bell’s Brewery’s iconic Two Hearted IPA, he said the most successful beers balance familiarity with novelty.

“When I started brewing in Michigan, West Coast IPAs like Two Hearted were a relatively new thing here,” he said. “It wasn’t completely novel, but that someone here in Michigan was doing it at such a high level was completely new to folks. Twelve years later, I watched something similar happen with my company.

“That’s not something we can really presuppose,” he added. A number of Old Nation beers that fit the bill failed to catch on, despite being “great beers.”

“With experience, you find that running around trying to chase what comes next is kind of a fool’s errand,” he said.

Rather than predicting what new beverage will overtake the scene, Fritts predicts “a return to philosophy-driven brewing and consumption.”

“We recognized a cycle in the late ‘90s. There was a bevy of options. Craft beer was almost brand-new in Michigan, and people would go spend their money and take a chance on a new craft brewery,” he said. “Then it built up to a critical mass and they got burnt out, and then in the late aughts, it built up again.

“So, if you accept the theory that we’re in a similar cycle as before, I think it’s reasonable to say the trends in the short-to-medium term won’t be based on a particular style of type of fermented beverage, but rather a return to folks going to breweries they trust,” he continued.

Raymond Holt for City Pulse

Raymond Holt

He also isn’t concerned about beer alternatives such as seltzer, which he said represent “a percentage of the market, maybe 10 to 15%, that just churns.”

“In the aughts it was Mike’s Hard, then toward the teens it became ‘malternatives,’ then over the pandemic, health concerns made seltzer seem like a healthy alternative,” he said.

As for THC beverages? He doesn’t expect them to infringe much on a business whose customer base already uses cannabis.

“The Venn diagram of people who use cannabis and people who drink craft beer is more or less a circle,” he said. “Those people were already doing that.”

At the end of the day, Fritts says there’s “no silver bullet for the market.” Decades of experience watching the market cycle have taught him that it’s better to focus on making the best beer possible. The rest follows naturally.