Lost Forty Reflects on 10 Years in Little Rock

Lost Forty Brewing co-owners Albert Braunfisch, left, and John Beachboard at the brewery in Little Rock. (Steve Lewis)

The success of Lost Forty Brewing in Little Rock may lie as much as anything in the fact that two of its founders — John Beachboard and Scott McGehee — are restaurant industry veterans intent on listening to the customer.

“Beer is a food product,” Beachboard said. “We come from the food world first. How it’s handled and how it tastes are important to us.”

Lost Forty’s focus on taste and quality led to the brewery’s decision at its launch 10 years ago to distribute only in Arkansas, the reasoning being that jostling and warehousing beer for long periods only hurt quality.

“There were some times where we kind of toyed with the idea of going to Tennessee or Missouri, but we just kind of soon found that we were able to do more and offer more variety and really focus on quality if we had it more closely held,” Beachboard said.

Despite this decision, Lost Forty, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary in December, is the No. 1 craft brewery by production volume in the state, producing 505,858 gallons of beer in 2023, a 4% increase over 2022. Its brews are carried by 11 different distributors in Arkansas and are available in about 1,000 locations, Beachboard said.

That said, Scarlet Letter Beverage Co. of Springdale, formerly Core Brewing & Distilling Co., is closing in on Lost Forty, producing 463,140 gallons in 2023, an increase of 77% over 2022 (see Largest Breweries list on Pages 12-13) and making it the No. 2 brewery in the state.

Lost Forty, which operates under a microbrewery restaurant license, declined to release revenue figures, but Albert Braunfisch, a co-owner with Beachboard, McGehee and Russ McDonough, said the 4% increase in production reflected the increase in sales in 2023.

In 10 years, the brewery and taproom, at 501 Byrd St. in Little Rock’s East Village, have grown from occupying about 19,000 SF to 35,000 SF. The brewery has a three-vessel, 30-barrel brewhouse, three 30-barrel fermenters, two 60-barrel fermenters, 10 90-barrel fermenters, two 300-barrel fermenters, a centrifuge and a canning line that has expanded from a three-head filler to a five-head filler.

Braunfisch said Lost Forty’s sales this year are on track to be up slightly over 2023, and Beachboard noted that the brewery had just added 10% to 15% capacity.

Camp Taco at Lost Forty, at 822 E. Sixth St., serves as the research and development arm of Lost Forty, where new beers are developed.

Like Lost Forty, Camp Taco features a restaurant, but it also operates a microbrewery, producing 15,500 gallons in 2023, up from 6,355 in 2022.

The Lost Forty brewhouse employs 23 workers, the taproom, 51, and Camp Taco, 59.

Lost Forty’s chief brewers are Grant Chandler, who is in charge of operations, and Jerry Gorman, lead brewer. “But they really kind of share those responsibilities,” Beachboard said.

Lost Forty is just one brand of the Little Rock restaurant group Yellow Rocket Concepts. Others include Big Orange, Local Lime, Zaza and Heights Taco & Tamale. Beachboard and McGehee both have extensive backgrounds in the restaurant industry and were partners in developing Zaza, Big Orange and the other Yellow Rocket restaurants.

Lost Forty’s revenue accounted for about 17% of Yellow Rocket’s total revenue last year, said Tim Thompson, president and CFO of Yellow Rocket Concepts.

In terms of developing products, “everybody has a voice,” Beachboard said. “It is a very collaborative process,” Braunfisch said. “The culture that’s been developed at Lost Forty and Yellow Rocket as a whole really accentuates everybody feeling like they have a voice.”

A Maturing Market

When Lost Forty started in 2015, it was riding a wave of craft brewery openings in Arkansas and around the country. A 2015 Arkansas Business article about tourism and the growing interest in craft beers listed 24 native brewer and microbrewery permit holders. This year’s list of state-licensed small breweries and microbreweries in Arkansas, ranked by production in 2023, now includes 47.

But the market has matured. Overall U.S. beer production and imports declined 5% in 2023, the Brewers Association reported, while craft brewer volume sales dropped 1%. That brought small and independent brewers’ share of the U.S. beer market by volume to 13.3%.

Retail dollar sales of craft beer rose 3% last year, to $28.9 billion, and now account for 24.7% of the $117 billion U.S. beer market, the association said. “The primary reasons for the larger dollar sales increase were price increases and slightly stronger onsite sales growth versus distribution,” the Brewers Association said.

And though business at Lost Forty remains good — hence the addition of capacity — the brewery has followed the example of other craft breweries in the United States in recent years, moving into ancillary products like low-alcohol or nonalcoholic beer, hard seltzers, ready-to-drink products like canned cocktails. They have also responded to a new interest in lagers.

Lost Forty offers a number of hard seltzers, and in May launched its first ready-to-drink cocktail, a canned margarita. Its debut was a way to mark the brewery’s 10th anniversary, and it includes triple sec from Rock Town Distillery of Little Rock. “Our goal is to incorporate Arkansas flavors and inspirations into our products,” Amber Brewer, Lost Forty’s chief marketing officer, said in a press release at the time.

In March, Lost Forty produced an themed beer, Ar’ Clipse of the Heart, to mark the April 8 total eclipse.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying shutdowns in 2020 were a shock to the Lost Forty system, as they were to the entire economy. But the Lost Forty partners learned important lessons.

“Like everybody in the food service industry, we had to re-examine how we went to market, how we connected with consumers,” Braunfisch said. Lost Forty added outdoor seating and to-go capacity, for example. “We’re very gratified that we saw the demand for our product increase, particularly for the beer.”

He added: “The pandemic just sharpened that focus, on listening to the consumer.”

A Changing Market

Starting out, Beachboard said, he was more focused on “micro-trends” in the craft beer industry, such as “what was going on in Colorado or California or whatever.” But he and the market have changed. Lagers, for example, have grown in popularity among craft brewers and their customers.

Rockhound IPA and Love Honey Bock remain Lost Forty’s best-sellers, but 2nd Rodeo Light Beer, which is brewed using rice grown in Arkansas, is a strong seller as well. Beachboard calls 2nd Rodeo Lost Forty’s “mass market beer,” adding, “but in reality, it’s the hardest beer for us to make consistently. There’s a lot of craft involved in that. Lagers are extremely hard to make. They take a lot more time, they take a lot more care, they take a lot more energy.”

So converting a 30-year Bud Light drinker to 2nd Rodeo is particularly meaningful to Beachboard, as it is to Braunfisch. “I don’t know 10 years ago that I would have anticipated something like a 2nd Rodeo that’s really converting a macro beer drinker into the products that we’re selling at the rate that we are,” Braunfisch said.

As for the future, Lost Forty plans to add brewing capacity in the next 12 to 18 months, possibly including a new canning line. And the partners would like to open a taproom in northwest Arkansas in the next one to three years.

“We’ll just continue to listen to the Arkansas consumer and ultimately try to respond to what they’re asking for versus trying to force something that doesn’t necessarily make sense,” Braunfisch said.

Whatever new products Lost Forty might launch, Beachboard said, “it still has to pass the sniff test of, Would we drink this?”