Ears Up, a premium craft beer from Fernson Brewing Company, debuted just in time for the 110th edition of South Dakota State University’s homecoming, Hobo Day, this past fall.
To say Jackrabbits fans were excited about the beer is an understatement.
“I don’t think any of us were really anticipating just how big of an outpouring of support we got from Jackrabbits fans and beer drinkers in general,” said Derek Fernholz ’08, co-founder of Fernson Brewing Company. “It’s been awesome.”
According to Blake Thompson, co-founder of Fernson Brewing Company, Ears Up is the fastest-selling beer they’ve ever created. The easy-drinking beer became available at select Brookings and Sioux Falls locations on the Tuesday morning before Hobo Day, and by that afternoon, all locations had been cleaned out. That’s not to say Fernson wasn’t prepared for the release—90 barrels of beer were brewed in preparation.
On social media platforms, requests for the beer have come in from around the country, from North Carolina to Texas to California. Since the initial release, Ears Up has been distributed to vendors around the region and is also now available to Jackrabbits fans at Frost Arena and Dana J. Dykhouse Stadium.
“It was everything we could do in the first few weeks to try and get the beer on the shelves,” Fernholz said. “It was selling as quick as we could make it.”
The idea behind an SDSU-specific beer began about one year ago, between Ben Lucas, former general manager of Learfield’s Jackrabbit Sports Properties, and Fernholz, a 2008 SDSU grad.
Lucas had experience developing a collegiate craft brew at Colorado State University, and Fernholz was eager to create a local craft beer for his alma mater.
“We—(Director of Athletics) Justin Sell, (Deputy Athletic Director) Slade Larscheid and myself—were looking at the beer category, and we just said, we feel like we can do a craft beer,” Lucas explained.
Having kicked around the idea for a while, the project got started in earnest after the South Dakota Board of Regents made a policy change last spring, allowing for beer and wine to be sold in general admission seating areas at BOR university events.
“We started the project knowing we wanted this (beer) to be approachable, familiar and on the lighter side so hopefully anybody who can and does drink beer could find some enjoyment,” Fernholz said. “We kind of settled on that lighter style right off the get go.”
The team at Fernson began brewing sample batches and sending it over to the SDSU team for taste tests. They went through around eight to 12 different batches of beer before coming up with the final product.
“Tweaking the batches is very much like a scientific approach—one variable at a time through a few batches until you walk things into where you had it in your mind,” Fernholz said.
Once all parties involved approved of the final batch, Fernson scaled up the recipe and went from there.
The final thing to do before the beer hit shelves was come up with a name and can design. Five or six options for the name were thrown around between Jackrabbits Athletics and the University Marketing and Communications team.
“It was late this past summer, and we received a message from President (Barry) Dunn,” Larscheid said. “He said, ‘You don’t have to go with this, but I really like Ears Up as the official name.’ The stars aligned because that was our No. 1 choice as well based on availability and best fit for branding our official beer.”
With the president’s office, the athletics department and University Marketing and Communications all in alignment with the name Ears Up, the last step was to design the can.
With input from the athletics department, the can, which incorporates SDSU’s logo and the traditional yellow and blue endzone checkerboard, was designed by Micayla Standish in SDSU’s marketing department. As Larscheid notes, the can’s design fits nicely with Fernson’s other brews.
Despite only being available for two regular-season home games, Ears Up was the fourth-highest selling beer this season at Dana J. Dykhouse Stadium. The 2022 Hobo Day game vs. Indiana State was one of the highest-attended games in SDSU football history, and more than 4,000 cans of Ears Up were sold there. Further, attendance at football games has reached new heights this season, with an average of 15,561 fans—the highest-ever season average in the stadium’s history.
“This project is special,” Larscheid said. “We had a lot of people behind the scenes pulling everything together. It also gave us an opportunity to cross collaborate with multiple areas of campus while planning and teaming up with Fernson Brewing.”
With such strong support from the Jackrabbits faithful, it appears Ears Up will become a mainstay in refrigerators, restaurants and bars around the region.
“From our standpoint, we’d like to keep the project going indefinitely,” Fernholz said. “It will for sure be around for years to come.”
Fernson has distributors throughout South Dakota and parts of Iowa, North Dakota and Minnesota, including the Twin Cities. Ears Up is widely available at locations throughout South Dakota and select vendors in the region.
Addison DeHaven
