John Lenore, soon to turn 80 on Aug. 8, was never one to take the easy road. He was always up for a challenge; in fact he sought out many of the challenges he faced growing up in the Appalachia region of the United States during World War II.

Born into an immigrant Sicilian family that settled in West Virginia, Lenore was raised on three principles, he says—family, faith and hard work. And whether he was working on a section gang on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to support himself at age 14, attending West Liberty College while working nights in the coal mines of West Virginia during the beginning of his marriage, or learning the ropes of the beverage business while working for Dr Pepper or Hamm’s Brewing Co., it was those three principles that have kept him on course, as they say.

Today, Lenore is president and CEO of John Lenore & Co., a New Age beverage and craft beer wholesaler based in San Diego that he founded in 1966. Proud to say that he built the company from the ground up (along with a handful of others, including a leasing truck company, PJJ Enterprises; a real estate company, JDL Properties and Logret Import & Export Co.), Lenore makes a point to credit his upbringing. He says that when visitors walk into the entrance of the John Lenore & Co. offices, they are greeted by a large photograph of his maternal grandparents, to which the company is dedicated. “This company was founded on the principles of family, faith and hard work; that in this country, you can be whatever you want to be if you want to work hard enough and that is what it’s all about. So we did.”

As a beer distributor in the early days of the company that didn’t have Bud, Miller or Coors in its portfolio, Lenore found himself in a position where he had to make things happen by being creative. Part of that creativity led to John Lenore & Co. becoming one of the early distributors to take a chance on an unknown non-alcohol brand—Snapple. Lenore also played a role in the rollout of SoBe. According to company literature, Lenore assisted as a major distributor in the United States, helping to develop marketing strategies and to convince other distributors around the country that SoBe was a brand to invest in. John Lenore & Co. is still a distributor of the Pepsi-owned brand today.

As Lenore says, “That’s where the future is—creating new products and God gave me the ability and the talent to do that, not just to deliver stuff.” And create he has.

After steering the company away from delivering beer in recent years for what Lenore explains as “a multitude of reasons” adding that the brands that John Lenore & Co. carried, like Pabst and Hamm’s, “just couldn’t endure with the Buds and Millers at the time,” he now is re-entering that realm, but this time with craft brews of his own creation.

Lenore is owner of Cold Spring Brewery (Cold Spring, Minn., USA), formally known as Gluek Brewing Co., where he produces and bottles beverages for Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch and Hansen’s Monster Energy, among others, and recently acquired a private label contract of Monarch Beverage Co. Lenore also is set to release a line of craft brews incidentally named Cold Spring. The line of four craft brews—Honey Almond Weiss, Ebony Wheat, Moonlight Ale and Pale Ale—were launched in Minnesota and are scheduled to hit the streets of San Diego this month.

Lenore also has another beverage set to launch this month, a project that he says is, “the thing that is closest
to my heart.” John Henry, a brand name that Lenore has owned for about seven years, will be resurrected into a “craft-style product” that is designed to represent the time period Lenore spent working on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad where he broke the record for the number of ties spiked in one day—135. On the John Henry label, Lenore relays, there is John Henry, the legendary steel driver, doing a full roundhouse swing with a spike maul and the words ‘3 Licks Spiker Ale.’

Brewed with chips from bourbon aging barrels, John Henry is described as having the aroma and hint of bourbon flavor. “It’s going to be one of the Top 10 best sellers in the United States before I’m done with it,” attests Lenore, who is setting up a national distribution system for the brewery. A Cold Spring hard lemonade also is in the pipeline.

Aside from the fact that creating new products and creating new activity is what Lenore loves to do, it also helps John Lenore & Co. offset some challenging aspects of being a beer wholesaler today, which are consolidation and the slowing sales of mainstream brews. “I have tremendous respect for Bud and Miller, but they can’t dominate the industry anymore,” he says. “And the days when (wholesalers) could count on the breweries keeping their numbers up…it’s tough now. The industry has changed dramatically.”

Among those changes has been the shift toward good-for-you beverages. So Lenore plans to launch in the near future functional beverages including Guadalupe, Aztec Power, and to take full advantage of Cold Spring Brewery, which sits on Lake Aziv, a prehistoric glacial lake, Cold Spring mineral water.

“My background was tough,” says Lenore, who lost his father when he was 5 at the height of the Great Depression. “People came (to the United States) with nothing, with one thought in mind: to work hard and create a future for their children and grandchildren and that’s exactly what (my grandparents and parents) did for us. We never asked for anything. We just took advantage of the opportunities that are out there and we worked hard. Not bad for a Sicilian immigrant from West Virginia who worked in a coal mine, huh?”

VITAL STATS
JOHN LENORE & Co.
PRESIDENT & CEO:  John Lenore
HEADQUARTERS: San Diego, Calif., USA
’07 CASE VOLUME: Nearly 3 million
EMPLOYEES: About 150
GOALS: To create a legacy for its employees, its community and the Lenore family that will endure for a long time.

From Beverage World May 15, 2008