In 2018, researchers at Johns Hopkins University took seven California two-spot octopi, put them in a three-chamber tank custom built for their experiment, and gave them a bunch of ecstasy.
Humans and octopi are separated by more than 600 million years of evolution. Unlike human brains, octopus brains are decentralized, with the majority of their neurons extending down each arm, up to 10,000 in each sucker. And yet, when you dose the animals with MDMA, the scientists found, they respond just like humans do. The eight-limbed sea creature has the same wiring as us, just a completely different orientation.
Isaac Showaki is no marine biologist. The Madison, Wisconsin-based entrepreneur is, through and through, a businessman. But only in the most adaptive use of that term. He is a person of roving appetites, whose Neptunian curiosity is only satisfied through the ever-fluid work of being the founder and president of Waunakee contract brewer and beverage co-packer, Octopi Brewing.
“There’s a lot of symbolism with that animal that I love,” Showaki says. “It has many tentacles, so it can do a lot of things at once. It’s underwater. It’s in constant motion. And it’s an invertebrate, so it can switch shapes really fast.”
Showaki stops short of the most interesting parallel: size. Animals and companies grow to all different proportions, but the most captivating are the giants. Octopi (the brewery) has multiplied in size almost every year of its existence. In 2020, it became certified megafauna, growing +443% in production volume because of its ability to fulfill an influx of pandemic-era contract requests. Known before that time primarily for its beer brewing prowess, Octopi has transformed into one of the most sought-after partners for drinks businesses of all kinds in need of new capacity.
By 2023, Octopi became the 13th largest, Brewers Association-defined craft brewery in the U.S., evolving from a 10,000-barrel juvenile to a 1 million barrel leviathan in the process. Showaki’s company has produced beer for a high-end roster of brands such as Mikkeller, Golden Road Brewing, Omission Balanced Brewing, Pollyanna Brewing, Collective Arts Brewing, and MobCraft. According to Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau records, Octopi registered nearly 1,000 different packages of brands since 2020 alone, including products for Four Loko, hard tea and alcoholic juice for Twelve5 Beverage. The company has made numerous other seltzers, functional drinks, coffees, and teas—“anything that can be put into a can,” Showaki says.
This all came in just nine years, a runaway near-decade in which revenue and capacity periodically doubled and, at worst, outpaced craft beer’s national averages by leagues. It’s no wonder all this activity attracted a much larger predator.
On January 5, 2024, the Europe & International division of Japanese brewing conglomerate Asahi announced that they’d acquired Octopi, a bid to move production of beers like Japanese rice lager Super Dry to the United States. According to Asahi, Octopi will continue its contract operation, with Showaki remaining on as an executive. It was a gobsmacking move that few saw coming, but one that Showaki, with his submarine brain chemistry, had been preparing his business for since the very beginning.
“I’ve never said, ‘I’m never gonna sell,’” Showaki says. “I’m open to anything. If it makes sense, I pursue it—acquisition, new business, new product lines, new equipment. When you’re closed off, that’s where people miss a lot of opportunities.”
In 2010, if you liked beer enough, you opened a brewery.
It was common sense. Legal restrictions around packaging, ABV, and production were falling off across the country, banks were taking notice, and for the first time in a century, craft beer was booming. That year, 250 breweries opened, bringing the total number of breweries over 2,000, and well-heeled brands like Stone Brewing and New Belgium Brewing announced big expansions. Everyone was either making beer or more beer.
“There’s a lot of symbolism with that animal that we loved. It has many tentacles, so it can do a lot of things at once. It’s underwater. It’s in constant motion, just like the beverage world. And it’s an invertebrate, so it can switch shapes really fast.”
Showaki graduated from Boston University in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, which led him to his first job as an analyst at Bain & Company. Showaki moved to his native Mexico to work for the management consulting firm before flying out to Panama for his first contract. The job was for Heineken, an engrossing project where Showaki was working 100-hour weeks, “literally living in an office space at the brewery”, and waking to the smell of malt in the morning.
All that time in the brewery made Showaki fall in love with the beer business. He went on to jobs at Florida Bebidas in Costa Rica and Cervecería Cuauhtémoc-Moctezuma in Mexico, developing a knack for projecting breweries’ futures and scaling production. Along the way, he worked with one of Bain’s other consumer packaged goods experts, Andres Araya. Showaki and Araya spent hundreds of hours working together, and it wasn’t until, at 4 a.m. on a Sunday, that the two shared their dreams of quitting the megabrewery grind and opening something much smaller and more creative—something similar to the craft breweries exploding in growth in America.
They dreamed in parallel, fantasizing about imbuing American craft beer with Latin flavors. In January 2011, the pair moved to Chicago and opened 5 Rabbit Cerveceria, the first Latin-themed craft brewery in the United States. Some of their earliest beers were 5 Lizard, a witbier made with coriander, fresh lime peel, and passionfruit purée, and 5 Vulture, a Oaxacan-style dark ale with piloncillo sugar and ancho chili.
The business model was as unique as the recipes. Showaki and Araya decided to contract brew their beers for three years while they built the 5 Rabbit brand. But Araya quickly turned sour on the idea. Handing the beer-making process to a company like Wisconsin’s Minhas Craft Brewery or New Jersey’s Cold Spring Brewery meant throttling their creativity.
“When we started, we wanted to be a creative force, super inventive, lots of ideas. Beers that were unique and revolutionary,” Araya told Good Beer Hunting in 2014. “But contract brewing kind of destroyed that for us. Not everyone is going to peel two hundred limes for you, or roast your ancho chiles, or cold steep something overnight. So we had to choose recipes that fit the contracting model.”
Neither Showaki nor Araya have publicly disclosed every contractor 5 Rabbit used, though they launched out of South Side’s Argus Brewery. Whoever the partner, it wasn’t working, and soon after opening, Araya wanted to change course and open a brewery of their own. Showaki resisted. His neurons were wrapped around another idea. He wanted to develop more equity in the brand before they took on a capital-intensive project like building a brewery, which at the time could’ve cost up to $500,000. Even so, he saw the difficulty in trying to train a factory-grade contractor on craft beer standards. Showaki capitulated, and the pair opened 5 Rabbit’s brick-and-mortar location in 2012.
The disagreement over the taproom was minor compared what would happen next. Over the next several months, Showaki and Raya's partnership devolved into “a deeply personal dispute,” involving accusations of embezzlement, stock price fixing, and a pair of defamation lawsuits.
Showaki ended up exercising an out clause in his contract with 5 Rabbit, forcing Araya to buy him out. It was an acrimonious end to an ingenious dream, but the “nightmare” experience of finding a contract brewer to execute 5 Rabbit’s vision sparked the idea for Showaki’s next venture.
“If I had to do it again, I would open a contract brewery right away,” Showaki says. “We couldn't get the volume, the pricing, the quality, it sucked. Literally, as soon as I opened, I'm like, ‘Shit man, there's a huge need for a good contract brewery in the Midwest.’”
Have you ever seen those videos of aquarists giving octopi their dinner inside of a jar? It’s a fascinating spectacle, seeing this pile of arms wrap around a man-made puzzle to free the fish inside. These are the actions of not only a hungry animal, but a hungry brain. Octopi want to hunt. They want to gather their bodies in new forms, to sharpen their minds with every pursuit.
The partnership with Araya was lost, but there was one vestige of 5 Rabbit that Showaki held tight in his beak. With all the growth in craft beer, and the absolute dearth of quality contractors who understood the new paradigm, there was an opportunity. Showaki married his wife, Marissa, in 2014, and the two started hashing out the idea for a co-packer and contract brewer that was acutely focused on helping craft breweries scale production and extend product lines. The two took their honeymoon in Italy and France, and during the trip, they finalized a business plan.
Craft breweries are not agile animals. Despite the hundreds of thousands in construction, equipment, and planning, the return from opening one is never guaranteed. Even if you are successful—even if you find a niche in the increasingly crowded ecosystem—your reward could wind up being another capital-intensive, ownership-diluting expansion project. Their contractor would give them flexibility, agility, and access to unprecedented economies of scale. Marissa suggested they call it Octopi.
When Showaki approached Adam Vavrick with his idea to build Octopi, he immediately recognized the opportunity at hand. Vavrick had met Showaki during the 5 Rabbit days, and the Binny's Beverage Depot brand manager was well known around Chicago for his thick Rolodex of contacts. Showaki told him horror stories about trying to find a contractor and laid out his vision for Octopi. He offered Vavrick the role of “second-in-command” as director of sales and marketing.
“It was at a time of irrational exuberance,” Vavrick says of the beer market at the time. “Everything was great, money was flowing in. One of the best ways to capitalize on that would have been to push up beer rather than make a real estate investment or expand or whatever. I thought the concept [of Octopi] was absolutely fantastic. I love the idea of taking inferior processes and product away from people that shouldn't be doing it and doing it right.”
With five employees on his bankroll, Showaki opened Octopi on Dec. 23, 2015. Their facility was a brand new, $5 million, 50-barrel warehouse in Waunakee. Showaki and Vavrick were on the road all over the midwest talking to clients. Showaki estimates they made 70 brewery visits in the first year. They took on their first client, Madison’s One Barrel Brewing Co., and that year, they turned out 11,200 barrels of production, making Octopi quickly among the top-5% of craft breweries by volume in the U.S.
Vavrick was brought on to kickstart 3rd Sign, Octopi’s in-house beer brand. Vavrick envisioned 3rd Sign as a brewery on the vanguard, highlighting all the strengths of Octopi’s system. In the early days, they hit well ahead of trends, turning out English barleywines, dank West Coast IPAs, hazy IPAs dosed with New Zealand hops, and a Sumatra coffee English mild.
But the job also involved trying to court more contracts for Octopi. It was an uncomfortable mid-tide. Vavrick spent all his time exhausting his contacts, learning the Wisconsin market, and trying to launch a brand with an atypical business model, all while hocking a product that was, in Vavrick’s words, “average at best.”
“This was zero to 60 in 5 seconds,” Vavrick says. “Grabbing contracts for that first year and a half was a bit more of a struggle. It was a little early for 50-barrel, just an extraordinary amount of beer.”
The tides shifted tremendously over the next two years. When Octopi opened, Showaki stated that his “absolute dream” would be to hit the 50,000-barrel mark. That dream was exceeded before their fourth year in business. From 2015-2017, Octopi grew over +100% year over year, making it one of the Midwest’s fastest-growing companies of all industries. Meanwhile, 3rd Sign was losing focus, and Vavrick was getting more and more frustrated. He longed to move back to Chicago.
3rd Sign swapped wholesalers several times in a scant two-year run, shipping out beer that was past its prime and quarreling with distributors who didn’t want to push their beer at the necessary volume. In March 2016, Vavrick quit. A year later, Octopi shut the 3rd Sign down amidst a legal battle with River City Distributing of Watertown, who would not relinquish rights to the brand until Showaki paid $93,000.
“It was apparent to me and everybody else in the market that 3rd Sign was not long for this world,” Vavrick says. “I think expectations were fairly mismatched, and the quality, the consistency, and some of the decisions around that really, really, really crapped out on me.”
The relationship between Showaki and Vavrick dissolved with the brand. But as with prior wreckage, Showaki moved on unabated. By that point, he’d already started up Untitled Art, a venture he still co-owns with Funk Factory Geuzeria founder Levi Funk. Untitled Art and its collection of on-trend and high-quality fruited sours, high-ABV stouts, and hazy IPAs did what 3rd Sign could not, elevating Octopi’s reputation amongst brewers in the region. As a result, Octopi started securing huge contracts, including exclusive rights to make the in-house beer lines at Aldi and Trader Joe’s.
It was these large-scale relationships that allowed Octopi to flourish during the pandemic. While small breweries were being ravaged by lockdowns, Octopi broke ground on a $72 million expansion that included a 200,000 square foot distribution facility and an additional 100,000 square foot of production space.
Across the United States, 319 breweries closed, openings decreased, 568,000 jobs were lost, and meanwhile, Octopi was reaching for the 1 million barrel mark—20 times the capacity Showaki dreamed of when he opened Octopi. And he’d need every liter of space, because his supermarket clients were calling Octopi to triple orders as shoppers shifted to the off-premise.
“We were seeing some crazy numbers from the pandemic, where everybody was just buying stuff from the supermarket,” Showaki says. “I grabbed my CFO [Joel Yaeger], and I was like, ‘We’re either gonna go bankrupt, or we're gonna have the best year of our life, and we have to prepare for both.’”
As Octopi grew, it began to take the shape of the huge corporations that sustained it. While other craft brewers suffered under CO2 shortages and skyrocketing aluminum prices, Showaki was able to broker deals with his biggest clients to get the materials he needed to can products. The clients grew with the capacity, and Octopi also raised mandatory minimums in stride. Some of those foundational clients like MobCraft and Eagle Park Brewery fell out of the fold, and bids went out to Anheuser-Busch InBev and Coca Cola.
Octopi was outgrowing their habitat. Where once it was a haven for upstart craft brewers in the Midwest, now it was set to outbrew Minhas by about 60,000 barrels. There were stumbles, something Showaki freely admits. Octopi shipped bad beer. It missed shipments. People who were once foundational to the business grew disillusioned and left. But the quality got better. Showaki brought in high-end beer talent and automated his processes. He bought equipment that would change the direction of the business forever. As a result, the consistency got better.
Craft wasn’t growing, and its rapid pace had slowed considerably. In 2022, it stalled completely. What once was a riptide in 2010 now felt like a receding tide. Local and regional craft beers had gotten Octopi to the point where it could succeed without them, and if there’s one thing that Showaki learned from the failures of 5 Rabbit and 3rd Sign, it’s that you need to know when to change direction. Even if it means leaving some wreckage. After a half-decade of trying to twist the cap off the craft beer industry, Octopi pivoted to bigger prey.
“When I wrote the business plan, it was all craft beer, all contract brewing,” Showaki says. “Very quickly, I'm like, ‘Yeah, I can't bet on this.’ It’s unsustainable, there’s not enough money. Thousands of entrants came in, and the category was full.”
Ringo Starr was in Sardinia in the 1960s when a boat captain inspired a song.
According to a probably apocryphal story, Starr was eating a plat of squid, which prompted the seafarer to explain the difference between the two long-appendaged marine mollusks. Octopi possess a clever mischief, he explained. They collect things, shiny trinkets that bewitch fish and hide their bulbous bodies. The story led Starr to write “An Octopus’s Garden,” the jaunty 1969 Beatles song about finding refuge in the wilds of the sea.
Scotty Hunter was on an expedition of his own in 2019, looking for a way to scale his brewery, Cincinnati’s Urban Artifact Beer. Urban Artifact had been through a few small expansions since opening in 2015, including a batch of new fermenters in 2018, but the concept of a large construction project or a second facility seemed like overextending the business.
When Hunter came to Octopi, it was a moment of inspiration. “Contract brewing” had been a dirty secret for decades, but Octopi had done a lot of work to change that perception, especially amongst Urban Artifact’s peers in the craft beer world. That fall, Urban Artifact offloaded the production of their seasonals and one year-round beer to Octopi. Not only did Octopi’s larger tanks allow them to produce more beer at once, it freed up brewery space to work on their line of fruit and tart beers at home. Hunter knew their recipes were a tall order for any contract partner, but he soon found Octopi’s quality was up to the standards he would enforce in Cincinnati—something only a co-packer hyper-focused on craft could have accomplished.
“To be honest, they were one of the few people that would even take on our type of brewing, our style, and the way we produce things, it’s not normal in the industry,” Hunter says. “I think there's better quality contract services being offered today because of what they did. It kind of shook up that segment in the industry.”
Urban Artifact’s experience with Octopi echoes many of the partners that the co-packer had in their early days. Through the peaks and follies of those years, Octopi had found its stride, and it was dominating its niche. Octopi helped Minnesota brewpub Forager Brewing expand into Humble Forager, a flavor-bending purveyor of hazy IPAs, pastry stouts, and fruited seltzers. Its facilities turned Milwaukee’s Eagle Park Brewing into a hard smoothie trendsetter.
Despite the mutual satisfaction, Urban Artifact’s contract didn’t last long. That’s the roving nature of Octopi’s business, and contact brewing in general. Contractors come and they go, needs change, relationships end. That’s why Showaki never launched a brand out of Octopi in exchange for equity.
“You can be aligned for a little bit, but you're never aligned for the long run,” Showaki says.
“When I wrote the business plan, it was all craft beer, all contract brewing. Very quickly, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I can’t bet on this.’ It’s unsustainable, there’s not enough money. Thousands of entrants came in, and the category was full.”
Urban Artifact ended its run at Octopi after about a year, Hunter estimates. Octopi was shifting its focus toward helping craft brewers launch new product lines. Hunter recognized that their needs were diverging, and he knew Urban Artifact was a short-term guest in the octopus’s garden.
“I probably would be shocked to see what their current like minimum commitments are,” Hunter says, commenting on their growth since 2020. “I would expect that they'll continue to grow and won't be on the backs of craft beer.”
St. Louis’s 4 Hands Brewery was the kind of client Showaki was hunting for at the time. Octopi was undergoing a transformation. With alcoholic craft beer sales down or flat, Showaki had eyed non-alcoholic (NA) beer as a boom market, and he focused on building out equipment that could help well-reputed regional breweries like 4 Hands take advantage of the booming $287 million market opportunity that was opening.
Showaki was unfortunately early to the trend. He’d invested in a flash pasteurizer in hopes it’d be enough to become a market leader. He even tried to court Athletic Brewing co-founder Bill Shufeldt, but the equipment wasn’t up to Athletic’s standard. Instead of contracting with Octopi, Shufeldt went on to open the largest non-alcoholic brewery in the world, capturing 55% of the non-alc market and $37 million in revenue in 2021.
What Showaki needed was a tunnel pasteurizer to pair with his dealcoholizer, but a machine like that didn’t exist yet. So Showaki pulled together the scraps he had around him. He found a manufacturer willing to engineer a custom machine that would, on one side, strip alcohol from finished beer and, on the other, spit out an ethanolized malt base that could be used to make hard seltzer—much like the one now made by ABV Technology.
Showaki’s dedication to flexibility paid off. As hard seltzer took over as the hottest seller in beverage alcohol, Octopi started selling their hard seltzer base to “a lot of multinational suppliers” (Showaki could not disclose which). Untitled Art became known as leaders in wacky, over-fruited seltzers and, to a lesser extent, high-concept NA beers.
“I was wrong, and NA didn't take off right away, but hard seltzer took off like crazy,” Showaki says. “Then, two years later, the NA market started taking off, but because we already had expertise and equipment, we got really, really good at making NA beer.”
But gradually the paradigm flipped, and Octopi became the go-to for breweries like 4 Hands that were moving beyond hard seltzer and into NA. CEO Kevin Lemp recognized the benefit immediately: using Octopi, he could get an NA version of their City Wide Pale Ale into the market quickly without having to go through the trial-and-error of doing it themselves.
“At one point, we were thinking about building a whole new brand and using the dealcoholization method of making non-alcoholic beer, but we’ve got bunch of equity and a handful of brands and in our market, why not just lean on the equity of those brands and create a line of non-alcoholic beer with an established brand that the customer already knows?,” Lemp explains. “Octopi had technology that allowed us to do that.”
“I think there’s better quality contract services being offered today because of what they did. It kind of shook up that segment in the industry.”
When Russ Klisch of Lakefront Brewing heard that Octopi could help his Milwaukee brewery jump into non-alcoholic beer, he didn’t hesitate. Like Lemp, he had a storied brand, but Lakefront was big enough that they weren’t going to take a chance launching an extension that didn’t measure up. Working with Octopi let them take advantage of the contractor’s years of experience in NA, all while avoiding the $250,000 it would cost to buy the equipment needed to do it themselves. Lakefront launched their Extended Play NA “near beers” out of Octopi in the spring of 2022. Klisch calls it “the biggest success story over the last couple of years” for his brewery.
“To me, it was important to get the market share right away,” Klisch says. “NA is one of those things where, once you get the market share, it's harder for somebody to take it away, compared to if you have a market share for a double IPA.”
Non-alc beer lends itself naturally to contract brewing, so much so that NA Beer Club called it the industry’s “hidden secret.” Since the start of 2020, almost 150 different non-alcoholic beer brands have been registered by Octopi with the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. In early 2022, NA was roughly 30% of Octopi’s sales, and they had NA beers in 40 states. Not only does the brewery now produce NA beer for Untitled Art, 4 Hands, and Mikkeller, but they’ve also launched new, standalone portfolios like Best Day Brewing. Showaki might’ve been too early to get on Athletic, but Octopi has gone on to produce NA lines for the likes of Golden Road Brewing—an AB InBev-owned brewery that would rather outsource to Octopi than use AB’s own equipment.
“I can say right now that we make the best NA beer in the market, period,” Showaki says. “So, we started attracting a lot of big clients that want to launch NA beer and have no clue how to do it, so they call us.”
Zookeepers have always told stories of octopi escaping their enclosures in a way that gives the animals personality.
In the tale of a rescued cephalopod named Inky who slipped out of the New Zealand National Aquarium, the protagonist is presented as a precocious prankster, whose escape was written off as “hijinks” by The Washington Post. In the 1980s, an octopus at the New England Aquarium was discovered sneaking rare fish from neighboring tanks, and since then, the facility has taken to custom-designing locks that evade the animal’s puzzling mind. But perhaps the most famous story comes from an 1873 incident at the Brighton Aquarium, where an octopus was caught scaling a rock wall to eat lumpfish, an incident that brought the “marauding rascal” a great deal of regional fame.
The genius of octopi is unknowable. They are mercurial and plotting animals. They make their dens in wreckage.
Nearly a decade into operating Octopi, Showaki still operates with an unpredictable cunning, channeling his underwater muse. When Asahi bought the contractor, there was considerable surprise—and plenty of concern, especially from the NA beer fans that the company has courted, who feared it’d mean the end of Octopi’s contracting business. Asahi downplayed the move as a strategic play to get closer to the American market. Showaki was similarly nonchalant when discussing how the move happened. In August 2022, he saw that the Japanese brewer was looking to make “a full-scale push” into North America. Shortly thereafter, he offered his tanks.
“I emailed them like I email every potential client,” Showaki says. “I told them, ‘I have a big expansion, I have a lot of capacity, if you want to co-pack.’ That's how it started.”
“At one point, we were thinking about building a whole new brand and using the dealcoholization method of making non-alcoholic beer, but we’ve got bunch of equity and a handful of brands and in our market, why not just lean on the equity of those brands and create a line of non-alcoholic beer with an established brand that the customer already knows? Octopi had technology that allowed us to do that.”
Asahi flew out to Waunakee that December, and they were impressed with the facility. The location was advantageous for brewing and distributing to both the United States and Canada, where they control the rights to Asahi Super Dry. They liked the investments Octopi had made into sustainable energy practices. Asahi asked Showaki if he’d entertain an acquisition. He told them to make an offer.
“Ultimately, Octopi was the best fit for what we want to achieve,” Victoria Segebarth, Asahi’s Managing Director for EMEA and the Americas, told Forbes. “It is a modern facility, and it is located perfectly for us to brew beer to serve both the American and Canadian markets.”
The offer was good. While the sum of the acquisition is still undisclosed, it was substantial enough for Showaki to take notice. Importantly, Asahi didn’t want to cut any staff or end the contracting business. Its goal was to take what Octopi had built and make it even bigger. Showaki took the offer to his investors, and they agreed. He talked to clients, and they supported it. So the two companies began an arduous, 14-month due diligence process that culminated in the sale being announced in early 2024.
Deal secured, Asahi will begin setting up Octopi to produce beers like Peroni and Asahi Super Dry. While the contract facility won’t be expanding their footprint, Asahi will be importing specialized equipment to make their beers. Asahi is also kicking off two major sustainability projects at Octopi: a new wastewater treatment facility and a CO2 recovery system, part of their commitment to be carbon neutral by 2030. Showaki is remaining on as managing director of Octopi, with the hope that these advancements will mean better service for the contracting clients he continues to serve.
“There’s a long term, they bought Octopi because they want to be here for the long haul,” Showaki says. “I think they're even going to supercharge our growth to a much higher tier than we were before.”
It’s early days, but Showaki is used to marauding in new waters. As he sits, embedded in a megabrewer once again like his work with Heineken years ago, his journey feels anything but cyclical. Showaki has completely redefined his surroundings yet again, much to the astonishment of folks watching from the other side of the glass. Enclosures don’t mean much when your brain is going eight directions at once. And there is always prey to be won for those who dare to reach out and ensnare it.
“I thought it was gonna be like a crazy change personally, but I'll be honest, I haven't seen it,” he says. “There's definitely less stress, it's different, but I still love a challenge. I still love to work. I’m still in the same boat I was before, and I love it.”
Words by Jerard FagerbergIllustrations by Colette Holston
