After more than four years of leading Salt Lake City-headquartered Uinta Brewing, Jeremy Ragonese is stepping down as president, effective June 30.
Noah Brown, Uinta’s VP of sales, will assume the presidency, starting July 1.
The transition comes as Ragonese’s family prepares to return home to the Kansas City area, and he passes the baton to his first hire from when he took over as president in 2019. The shuffle was announced during a town hall meeting with employees last Wednesday.
“I’m really, really proud of where we’re at,” Ragonese told Brewbound. “We’ve built a fantastic team here at Uinta. We’ve got some of the best and brightest folks that we’ve had in my history here.”
Although Ragonese is vacating the top role with Uinta, he isn’t leaving the 30-year-old company. He will remain with Uinta’s parent company, U.S. Beverage, working remote, to build the company’s contract brewing business.
Ragonese’s return to the Kansas City area is a homecoming, and a decision that he described as “now or never.”
“We spent a couple of weeks really wrestling with that decision,” Ragonese said of his family, “because a) we love it here, b) I really do think that we’re at a high point with our new ownership and some of the investment coming into the brewery, and just the amount of energy and excitement that’s going on here.
“I thought, ‘Well, if you’re going to depart and hand the keys over to the next president of Uinta, I don’t think it could be at a better time in our history.”
Ragonese joined Uinta in June 2016 as chief marketing officer, just as the brewery was beginning its national expansion. He’d previously led the marketing efforts of Boulevard Brewing Company for more than a decade.
Ragonese assumed the president role in March 2019. The first hire he made was bringing back Brown, who had previously led national chain accounts for Uinta (2016-2018) before leaving to lead national accounts for Rhinegeist Brewery in Cincinnati.
Brown credited Ragonese with stabilizing the culture of the brewery and improving employee retention. Ragonese called Brown “an instrumental part of our executive leadership group” and praised his work leading the sales team.
“There’s nobody better both culturally, from a fit standpoint as well as just that continuity of what we’re doing,” Ragonese said. “Noah lives the lifestyle. He lives and breathes the brand Uinta and will do an incredible job taking over here.”
Brown’s VP of revenue role will not be filled immediately, although the company is looking to hire for an operational leadership position. The rest of Uinta’s executive team will remain unchanged, with Rebecca Britter, controller/director of purchasing, and Jeremy Worrell, director of marketing, remaining in their roles.
In 2022, Uinta Brewing produced 35,722 barrels of beer, a -5% year-over-year decline, according to the May/June edition of the Brewers Association’s New Brewer Magazine.
Around 85% of Uinta’s volume is sold in its home state of Utah, Brown shared. Volume is down about -3.5% in the state year-to-date through May, with package sales down -10%. Those trends are “consistent with what the rest of the industry is doing,” Brown said. However, the company’s draft business has “buoyed up our trends to create a hell of a lot more stable scenario.”
In fact, Brown pointed to March as “one of the best months for draft sales in the state of Utah,” and Uinta’s “largest month we’ve had in five years,” due to the snowfall in the state.
“We’ve seen the benefit of tourism and locals flooding into the mountains,” he said. “We set ourselves up going into this winter with some of the best on-mountain, on-premise distribution that we’ve ever had. So setting up with the winter that then came, our Q1 draft numbers were up +18%, and I think we’re up +12% year-to-date.”
Although year-to-date dollar sales may be down in off-premise scans, Uinta is outperforming the craft category in the state and gaining share in its home market, Brown said.
Uinta holds around 25% share of the Utah craft beer market, Brown shared. He believes the brand has an opportunity to go even deeper in its home market by expanding occasions. The company has already found success by introducing 19.2 oz. singles this year for the convenience channel and 16 oz. 4-packs such as Freeze Frame Cold IPA, which has given the company a 12% share of the 16 oz. can market in the state.
Earlier this year, Uinta launched a cocktail-inspired hard seltzer brand called Blue Jay Hard Seltzer, which has quickly become the company’s second best-selling 12-pack in the market and is outpacing sales of the company’s Westwater Hard Seltzer line, Ragonese said.
The nearly 36,000 barrels of owned production left Uinta with around 12,000 barrels for contract production, which is expected to become a bigger part of the business moving forward. Uinta added packaging capability for 12 oz. sleek cans, as well as 16 oz. and 19.oz cans, while ceasing bottle production in April 2022. Ragonese said the company is adding a packer to run different formats such as 16 oz. 4-packs with wraps and 12 oz. sleeks with wraps and also automating its variety pack capabilities.
Additionally, the company is adding a tunnel pasteurizer to go with a flash pasteurizer. They also shared that the company is doubling its quality control space and adding flexible fermentation capacity for small batch offerings.
Sales and marketing firm U.S Beverage acquired Uinta Brewing in December 2021 as part of a joint venture with Colorado-based family office Crestone. The investment bought out Golub Capital, which acquired a controlling interest in the brewery in 2019.
U.S. Beverage president Justin Fisch told Brewbound that the company is both interested in creating its own owned brands but also partnering with additional craft breweries. The company previously announced a sales and marketing agreement with Captain Lawerence in March.
“We’d be crazy not to kick the tires of creating brands, not only that we own but also bringing in other partners that USB from a sales and marketing standpoint could be a platform to support those brands’ growth, whether it’s import, craft, whatever,” Fisch said. “And, if we can produce for those partners as well, it’s kind of the perfect scenario. So we’re open to everything and all.”