(Escondido, CA) – Remember Heat Seeking Wheat?

Yeah, me neither.

It’s so ‘in the past’ that you can’t even find reviews on Beer Advocate or RateBeer. One man remembers that beer though. Stone Co-Founder and CEO, Greg Koch. Koch talked about the beer with the Bobby Likes Beer blog when asked about mistakes the brewery had made in the past.

There is a lesson to be learned here for start-up breweries…

Well, the one that instantly comes to mind is the Stone ‘Heat Seeking Wheat’. We actually had a wheat beer out – a filtered wheat beer that was a little hoppier than the wheat beers were at the time, but it was not something we’d consider a ‘Stone style’ beer today. We made this beer because we were desperate for volume – we were struggling to reach the critical mass we needed to be profitable. Although I respected the beer – it was a good, quality beer – it wasn’t really us. What I learned from it was, well, ultimately, it failed. And that’s a good thing. I’m glad it failed. We learned that we need to focus on what we do – what’s really important to us – and trust that that’s going to take us where we need to go.