Operations
Tailgate Brewery proves pizza belongs with beer
TailGate Brewery in Nashville is paving the way for pizza and beer. The brewery has 30 signature beers on tap and makes pizza from scratch.
August 1, 2024 by Mandy Wolf Detwiler — Editor, Networld Media Group
There's no doubt about it — pizza and beer go hand in hand, and TailGate Brewery, founded by Wesley Keegan in 2014, is leading the charge in the Nashville market. The brand has opened six restaurants and taprooms in just two years focusing on made-from-scratch pizza and craft beer.
The brewery didn't have food initially, and they tried to bring in food trucks and partner with outside restaurants but quickly learned that wasn't going to work. People would come in for a beer and then leave to go get food. Slowly, they got into the food business themselves, though Keegan admits he wasn't a restaurateur, starting with salads and sandwiches.
"That was great, but it wasn't enough," Keegan said in a phone interview. "We got a convection oven and we just started making pizza from scratch. We just started learning it and how to do it, what to do with it, and we had a pretty simple approach: anybody can make a pepperoni pizza. What's the best pepperoni in the business? What's the best mozzarella? How do we make our own sauce? It just sort of evolved from there, and concurrently our business mindset … where we take the approach of if we can keep it in house, we do."
Keegan said at the time, craft breweries had a reputation of being good at either food or beer but not both, and TailGate set out to remedy that.
Today the brand has eight traditional locations and one airport unit. The restaurants are open seven days a week.
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Photo: TailGate Brewery |
On the menu
The staff at TailGate call it craft pizza. The crust is thick without being too heavy. They do both a traditional round pizza and a Detroit-style pizza and use the same dough for both but manipulate prep and proofing for the Detroit. Research and development took two years for the Detroit-style pizza, and they added it because there was only one other venue making it in Nashville at the time.
"It was an underserved category," Keegan said. "I think it's an incredible product."
Though he used to make the dough himself, creating it to scale was difficult, so he now has outside help making the dough.
Sauce is made in house, vegetables are chopped by hand and meats are prepped in the kitchen. A local bakery makes fresh bread for TailGate every day.
More than 60% of sales is food, and pizza accounts for 70% of food sales.
Chefs have a lot of leniencies in the kitchen when it comes to LTOs, and they've done a number of unusual pizzas like whipped ricotta and honey, a Chicago hot dog pizza and a General Tso's Chicken pizza. "You name it — if it can go on a pizza, we do it," Keegan added.
Operations
A second brewery and restaurant followed the first. "Number two was something that I knew early on that we had to do," Keegan said. "Craft beer is one of those industries that's been evolving. It's a lot like the restaurant industry — there's a really low barrier to entry but it's a big capital investment."
Beer is distributed, and to be able to sustain market growth with a brewery and a pizzeria tied together, Keegan knew he had to do more. "It was a goal right from the outset," he said. "With craft beer, you don't get to control your sales to a pizza restaurant, for example. In most markets, you can't sell direct to them. So, what we wanted to do was work with a distributor, which was a different business model entirely. And then we wanted to be able to expand a full pizza kitchen with 30 beer taps attached to it."
The brand has managed to maintain uniformity as it grows through a "painfully consistent commitment to quality," Keegan said. "There's no other secret to it."
Growth had been challenging, Keegan added, with no investors or partners. "We only grow if we do good business," he said.
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Photo: TailGate Brewery |
The brewery
With six locations open in two years, the brand won't budge on its standards. That adherence to process has helped them build out their spec books and recipe guides.
"We had to formalize and grow up quickly," Keegan said.
What sets TailGate apart from the competition? Keegan said the brand is a brewery first – that's what made the business. They have a large production brewery that in its own right is a big business. TailGate is a pizzeria with a brewery centered around it.
"I've always referred to our taproom as an Apple store because people come in and they try to get to know us. They know our brand. It's just bigger than a regular restaurant," Keegan said. "We've found that every time we open a taproom, the distribution in that direct area grows over 20% and that includes bars and restaurants."
TailGate makes more than 300 unique beers every year. At every taproom there are 30 beers on draft.
"Right from the very beginning, we were going to do this great or we're not going to do this at all – full stop," Keegan said. "It a pretty simple metric and litmus test where we say we're going to be the best brewery in Tennessee, and that's something we talk about with our team. That translates to pizza. Pizza helps people stay in our taprooms because that's what they're coming in for, and that's great. But it's got to be awesome. When that pizza's in the expo window, it's got to be exactly what we set out to be or we're not going to do it. That's the same approach we take to everything top to bottom."
About Mandy Wolf Detwiler
Mandy Wolf Detwiler is the managing editor at Networld Media Group and the site editor for PizzaMarketplace.com and QSRweb.com. She has more than 20 years’ experience covering food, people and places.
An award-winning print journalist, Mandy brings more than 20 years’ experience to Networld Media Group. She has spent nearly two decades covering the pizza industry, from independent pizzerias to multi-unit chains and every size business in between. Mandy has been featured on the Food Network and has won numerous awards for her coverage of the restaurant industry. She has an insatiable appetite for learning, and can tell you where to find the best slices in the country after spending 15 years traveling and eating pizza for a living.
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