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February 28, 2007

B-Sides: Tapping into source of Champagne Velvet

Mark Bennett

TERRE HAUTE — It doesn’t show up on the label, but Champagne Velvet contains a bit of Mike Rowe’s blood, sweat and tears, metaphysically speaking.

CV’s actual primary ingredients include roasted barley, corn flakes and chocolate malt. But watching Rowe draw a mug of his hometown’s trademark beer, it’s easy to sense a dose of pride and inspiration flowing into that glass, too.

If not for him, a beverage that became synonymous with Terre Haute would’ve remained a dusty footnote in American history. When the old Terre Haute Brewing Co. shut down in 1958, its popular Champagne Velvet beers disappeared, too. Even after Rowe and his wife, Teri, stumbled upon the beer’s original recipe while renovating the original brewery building on Poplar Street, that magical discovery was simply a handwritten paper from an assistant brewmaster in the early 1900s, found tucked inside a book.

It took Rowe’s ingenuity and endurance to spend years tracking down and purchasing the Champagne Velvet trademark, re-creating its taste and producing it again.

A decade passed between the day in 1990 when the Rowes purchased that old brewery building and the moment in 2000 when Rowe, brewmaster Ted Herrera and assistant Tim Hobson unveiled the first new batches of Champagne Velvet since Dwight Eisenhower was president.

Thanks to Rowe, CV and an industry dating back to 1837 in Terre Haute has enjoyed a revival ever since.

As he walked through the cool air of Champagne Velvet’s home in the cavernous Terre Haute Brewing Co. building at 401-403 S. Ninth St., Rowe downplayed his role in the city’s beer-making history.

“It’s still such a small piece of that puzzle that goes all the way back to the 1800s and those German immigrants,” Rowe said of Terre Haute’s first brewers.

Nonetheless, any town with a hint of spirit can only hope that a native son such as Rowe would risk his own resources to revive a piece of its cultural past.

With some prodding, Rowe acknowledged the amount of work it took to develop a microbrewery capable of turning out 3,000 cases of beer a month with a crew of five full-time and four part-time employees. That capability led Brugge Brasserie, a brewing company based in Indianapolis, to negotiate a deal with Rowe to launch bottling and distribution of its hand-crafted Belgian specialty beers. That deal, still yet to be finalized, would bring production to the Terre Haute Brewing Co. and help Brugge offer its beverages to a broader Indiana market. Brugge also would train and employ 20 people by next year.

On Tuesday, Rowe and Brugge’s Ted Miller expressed excitement about the prospective deal.

As Rowe spoke, he stood behind the bar of the Brewhaus, where Terre Haute Brewing Co. hosts banquets, parties, beer tastings and tour groups, alongside the shiny brewery vats and machinery. That bar is decorated with vintage CV clocks and posters.

“I’ve poured a lot of everything I have — in effort and in resources — into this,” he said. “I think it’s a positive thing for Terre Haute. It’s one of those legacies of this town I’d like to see continued.”

The next chapter in the Champagne Velvet story is yet to be decided. The crew produced the most recent batches over the holidays, and they have enough on hand to fulfill their current draft beer contracts. If the deal with Brugge is finalized as expected, production of those Belgian beers would begin in May. Still undetermined is whether CV would continue to be produced at the South Ninth Street facility or at a new site, perhaps downtown, in a smaller, brew pub-style business. Rowe also noted that Champagne Velvet, its trademark and the business have not been sold. (He also emphasized Tuesday that the Brewhaus banquet operations would continue without interruption and that current reservations would be honored or refunded.)

In the early days of CV’s revival, its three lagers — pilsner, amber and bock — anchored a brew pub called The Tap Room, at the site of the original brewery on Poplar Street. The prospect of re-opening a brew pub, where the CV line could be expanded to include a stout, brown ale, pale ale and root beer, excites Rowe, though that remains speculation right now.

Since its rebirth in 2000, Champagne Velvet and its memorabilia have proven popular. Rowe described the demand nationally as “huge,” while acknowledging that distributing to that demand is an expensive process.

No matter which path CV follows into its future, Rowe deserves credit for re-injecting that brand name back into the 21st-century Hautean vocabulary. He hurdled some complexities. Back in October 2001, just three weeks after the 9/11 attacks on New York City, truckers began hauling the brewing equipment Rowe had purchased from a company in Rockefeller Center. At one point, Rowe got a call that the costly shipment was stuck because of problems surrounding the Lincoln Tunnel. Eventually, the trucks reached Terre Haute, and Rowe and his staff kept on working.

Rowe smiles now as he recalls that story and others that helped bring CV back to life.

“It’s one of those old businesses that I’ve had a small, minute part in, that I’d like to see continue,” he said.

Here’s to that spirit and the future.



Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.

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