 Luke Purcell DCB: What got you into brewing, and how’d you end up at Great lakes? GL: Personally, homebrewing in the basement and by chance I met the master brewer at the time down here at Great Lakes, who was an avid homebrewer at the time… he probably still does it knowing him. He’s a brewer at Dogfish Head now, who I keep in close contact with for when I need help. He invited me to his basement and I homebrewed with him a few times. I was layed off of work so he invited me down here to drag hoses around for a couple months and a couple months turned into almost 12 years now. Kind of accidentally found out what I wanted to do. DCB: Did you ever take a course? GL: Yeah, I’ve been to a couple Siebel courses [a professional brewing school in Chicago], we send all our people to Siebel. They try to send a couple people, not every single year, but when the time is right and we have the ability. These guys (GLBC) are real good with brewer education. We’re big time into education for our staff. DCB: So you’re the pub brewer we were told. Do you have a different brewery for here than for production?  The basement of the pub with tanks in back. DCB: Talking about growth, you’ve been here 12 years, how have you seen it change from a 30 bbl system? And were you here when they were just a pub still? GL: I came in about a year after they started on the 30bbl system, so I learned on both. I didn’t see that startup, but I did see the startup of the new production plant we’re in now. It’s almost like I’ve worked at 3 breweries, that’s one of the things that’s helped me stay here this long. You’re across the street brewing Dortmunder [Lager] everyday. It starts wearing on you, when you’re just producing beer with no creativity. The guys over there, I try to keep them involved in pub stuff now just to keep that excitement and artistic side of it going. DCB: There’s been the trend of big/extreme beer, but then the breweries now that are focusing more on session ales and new flavors in styles people know and love. I would call your brown something like that. Not what’s expected from a brown, but more of a session beer. Has that always been a conscious decision to not gravitate to the huge hoppy beers? GL: We do a double IPA, so we hit that side of it… but even those we try to keep it more balanced than some people are doing. That’s more of a product of just how I learned from Andy [brewer mentioned earlier]. That probably sounds funny since he’s at Dogfish Head. But, even recently, I talked to him… I’m making a barleywine and it’s aging downstairs… and I was in the thought process when I was going to do it and I was thinking I need to get this thing to 12%-15% and get it big and the alcohol beefed up. Luckily I called him and he talked me out of it. He said, “just make a nice balanced beer, that’s what you guys are about.” He brought me back to where we’re supposed to be… maybe he didn’t want the competition. We make an effort to keep it balanced no matter what style we’re doing. DCB: It seems like it’s the new trend, balance that is. More people are experimenting with the session beers now. GL: There’s a beer here now that’s been on since I came on… called Nosfaratu. We call it a Stock Ale, but there’s no style it fits. At GABF the closest thing is a red ale, but it’s too big for a red ale and too small for a double red ale. It doesn’t get sent to competition because it doesn’t fit, but that goes way back. It has a lot of hops, but it has a lot of malt to balance it. That’s the kind of way I learned.l DCB: The first thing we ever had from you was the Blackout Stout, your imperial stout. It was just like, wow, that’s delicious. It’s not the overwhelming alcohol, but the roasty notes are there. It’s no 12% beer, which is nice. GL: What happens is, to get it up to there, people have switched their yeast and people will create flavors they weren’t expecting because they haven’t used that yeast before. That’s what Andy taught me with this barleywine. Just use what you know. We use Wyeast 1028 London Ale for a lot of our ales, probably a majority. It’s easy for me, when I’m experimenting with a beer, to grab it than build up a new one. That’s what I used for the barleywine based on his adviced. Ethanol bomb was the word he used, you’re making an ethanol bomb. That’s one thing people do, they probably don’t know what they’ll get out of it, whereas I know what I’m going to get. We can manipulate it to do different things a little bit with things like temperature. Some of the things we do with the same yeast, youwouldn’t know it was the same yeast. IF you’re familiar with what it’s characteristics are at different temperatures then you can change the beer without changing the yeast. Changing the yeast is fun and I do like using new yeast just to do something different, but it’s good to know your yeast. DCB: I mean, we homebrew and you can create vastly different flavors on the same yeast. GL: That’s one of the funnest things to do. A lot of times the homebrew club here will do a group brew, they’ll do 5 of the same brew using 5 different yeasts and that’s fun to do to see what it’ll do. But when you’re taking something you’re going to sell and get on you guys’ website it’s good to know what it’s going to do. DCB: So it’s interesting you’ve brought up the topic of beers that don’t fit into style. Especially with GABF coming up… a lot of people are saying, “You know, we have this beer that just doesn’t fit in there.” Is that kind of annoying, or is it not a big deal as a brewer?  Just a few of their 40-50 styles. DCB: For a flagship beer, there’s a lot going on in the Dortmunder. There’s a lot of flavor. A lot of places will say “It’s our flagship, we don’t really care…” GL: Most people’s flagships are like that. They think they have to cater to that, get the crowd and then step them up. And in hot weather, we’ll do the pilsner and all that. But I think, here at Great Lakes, part of their success has always been that Dortmunder, being aggressive. You want to talk about balance? It skipped over the stepping stone mentality that says you have to have the light beer. There’s some other breweries around town that think you have to have the macro under the bar or something. DCB: We saw a lot of that. “It’s not on the menu, but if you ask we have Miller…” GL: We have an N/A that we have in bottles here, and that’s it. You’d never see that [Miller, Budweiser, etc…]. One of our things is stick to your standards and people are coming around to it. The people that thingk you have to give them something light. Even when you give them something light on tap they’d still rather their Bud Light or whatever. You’re really wasting your time. If you’re going to go that route you might as well sneak under the bar. One brewpub served it in a brown paper bag. If you ordrred it you have to get it in a brown paper bag. Those macros do what they do well, but we should do what we do well too and not worry about it. We have a great wine list here at the pub and you can always order that. If you don’t like the beer… this may not be your place. There’s plenty of places around town. DCB: One time during this trip we were at another brewpub [New Holland], we saw a guy order a pitcher of Bud Light. The bartender told him, “We don’t have that, we just have this [referring to one of their lighter beers].” The guy responded, “OK, we’ll try that.” The bartender’s answer? “Are you sure, you probably won’t like it. They have Bud Light across the street. Maybe you should go there.” The guy answered, “No, no we’ll like it. That’s what we want.” Finally, the bartender, “OK, but you might not like it.” Well, the guy and his group did, indeed, like it.  Their 70bbl kettle. DCB: And, on top of that, some of are friends would completely defy the Bud Light assumption. They hate it. But, we’ve found through trial and error, that one likes sour beers and the other loves barrel aged stouts. Give either a pale ale or a pilsner, and they’ll shrink away. But give them one of these “high level” beers, and they’ll love it! You can ease those people in. GL: Yeah, my sister, more than anyone, made me realize that years ago. I was trying to get her to try good beer. She would drink Miller Lite. Tried to get her to drink some of our beer. Dortmunder? Something else light we had at the time, whatever it was? Sure enough, she liked the porter the best. Who’d have known? She knows it has to be sipped and enjoyed. I would’ve never thought that was the beer she’d pick out of our beers. It made me realize, you’re wasting your time ifyou’re trying to make your own light flavored beer. DCB: A lot of it is the saying “I never knew beer could taste like that!” A pilsner will taste a little better, but it doesn’t change the game. To talk more about the macros, on the success of Coors’ Blue Moon, they’re launching an “ultra premium” beer line. Budweiser has sort of dipped in and out of “craft” beers. What’s your take on how this affects the industry? GL: Those are the kind of questions that the answer is going to come and we’re going to see. They’ve [Coors] done a good job with Blue Moon. It’s hard to say what will happen. It’s like the reverse of the other mentality that people will only drink their’s. There’s still that element that craft brew mentality that they don’t even want to touch that stuff even if it might be good. I think Blue Moon, and the seasonals, it’s good. You can’t deny that. I think, if they’re going to make it, they’re doing it right. If you’re going to do it, do it right. And they’re very capable of that. I think A-B has gone about it the wrong way, trying to call it something that it’s not. It doesn’t make sense with some of the stuff that they’ve done. But, if Coors keeps having success with the Blue Moon lines and doing it well... It’s a hard question. You know they can do it and you almost hope they don’t do it. But, at the same time, there’s that mentality that some people just aren’t going to buy it because of who makes it. We still have that on our side. DCB: One of the exciting things, too, is that when the big guys take notice, it means there’s a real market there. It’s not a fad. For the longest time, the macros were all saying, “It’s a fad, they’re just doing crazy stuff out there!” GL: It’s a fine line. When you’re a brewpub it’s easy to just slam all those guys. But when you’re getting to the point wehre you have a distributor, you’re distributor is a Coors or Budweiser house, which is scary because you’ll be a secondary thought to them. That’s why a lot of those guys sign on for the Budweiser distributor deal. Then you’re just riding on their coat-tails distribution wise. We do a Belgian whit, and it’s very successful outside of the Cleveland market, it’s called Holy Moses. It does a great job in all our other markets other than Cleveland. And what happens is, we distribute through a Coors house and they sell Blue Moon. We can’t get them to sell that beer here. They won’t fight for that tap handle. They sell Blue Moon first then, if they want a second whit, they’ll sell ours. DCB: That’s an interesting point. Not everyone is distributed through a big house. But, if the big guys get into the craft business, it’s kind of a conflict of interest on the distribution side. If you’re paying them to get your beer out there, but they’re trying to get their beer out there first… It’s a tough race. GL: That’s the tough thing about what we’re going through locally right now. And a lot of these craft people won’t sign on for the distribution deal like Budweiser is doing. But, just distributing through that house is already like a partnership. If you go around town right now and you see a Dortmunder, you’re probably going to see a Coors and a Blue Moon right next to it because that’s how it works. It’s almost like you’re partnered with them anyways on some level. It’s a tough time. We’re at a time, especially if they’re going to start making more specialties, it’s going to be an interesting 5-10 years to see how it plays out. There’s probably going to be a lot of mid-range breweries that give in to at least the distribution deal that they can get. So it’s hard to say what’s going to happen. And they’re more than capable of making good beer. If you make it out to GABF and you take the Coors tour, there’s a couple little bars around there that what’s called the Barman. It’s a true pilsner that Coors makes, and it’s only there… and… yeah, it’s good [nodding]. It’s good. They have the bartender pouring it correctly, they call it the seven minute draw. You have to order one before you’re halfway done. So there’s no doubt, they can do it. DCB: That and Stone just hired Mitch Steele from A-B, and now he’s running the brewery at Stone. So they know what they’re doing. They’re not wehre they are because they can’t brew. GL: And you’re probably see more of that crossover from big to small and small to big.  A promo truck in their brewery. GL: We’ve done bourbon barrel aged Blackout Stout for the past 3 or 4 years. We take that in January, when it comes out, and we put it on tap and in bottles and we take some of it and fill up bourbon barrels with it. I tasted Old Dominion’s Bourbon Barrel Stout in an airport and that’s when I decided to do it… I like bourbon too, so that helps. One of the restaurant managers and myself drive down to Jim Beam in February, pick up the barrels. They’ve got to know us well enough to know when we’re coming. And we actually drive right up to the dump floor and they roll some of the barrels into our truck. So we’re getting good fresh barrels from them. We have a good relationship with them. They come up here for a tasting. They do a whole bourbon flight. We fill up 2 sessions of 80 people for this thing now. I do that beer, then I do a pub level beer called Rackhouse Ale, named after the rackhouses where the barrels age down there. So we do two beers and they do two flights of their specialty bourbons. It’s become a real good relationship between us and them. DCB: It’s interesting you use Jim Beam… GL: We started because that’s where we could get them… and we called them and they said, “Yeah, come and get them.” There’s smaller batch bourbons going on, and people say you should use this barrel or that barrel, but we’ve stayed on because we’ve developed that relationship. DCB: Harpoon had a Barleywine in Boston, and they aged it in 4 different barrels and they were all very different. And Jim Beam was my [Devon’s} favorite. It was smooth and didn’t overwhelm the taste of the beer. It was smooth. GL: That’s good to hear [laughs]. There’s a theory I have about that. That industry didn’t go through what the beer industry did. Jim Beam’s been around forever. And they’ve been doing it right forever. They are craft. There are smaller places now, but Jim Beam has always been doing it the right way. They never had that mass production, mass palate in that industry. So, it’s not like they’ve declined. To me, bourbon and distilled beverages have a unique position from the beer industry. How there’s micros and macros, if that’s how you want to say it. They’ve always been doing it the same way. That’s why I don’t think it’s bad to go with the big guys in this case. It’s just most mass-produced, it’s not flavorful… trust me! If they pull us over with the van full of those things, they won’t believe us that we haven’t been drinking [because of the smell]! DCB: Going on to your brewing, what inspires you when you’re looking to create a new beer? How do you go about testing this new recipe? Do you do it as a small batch at the pub? GL: Inspiration? It gets harder here because, like I said, we have a long list of brews that we’ve done here. We’re coming up on our 20th anniversary, a year from right now [ September 2008]. It gets harder to think of new things. But the good thing is there’s a group of guys. And the good thing is, wherever it comes from, whether it be a beer fest tasting someone else or what. Some of the production brewers and myself were up at the Great Taste in Madison, and we tasted a smoked IPA and we thought it was a really interesting combination. You don’t usually think of hops going with smoked malt. So, one of the the people with me was like, we should do something like this, but it’s a little over the top with the hops and the balance wasn’t there. So we started doing this beer called Engine 20 that is named after the fire house that a fire fighter who was a friend of one of us here worked at, and he passed on. It’s a little less of that extreme hop, it’s smoked pale ale. It came out really nice with the hop and smoke combination. So sometimes your inspiration comes from trying someone else’s beer. That’s how the Barrel Aged Blackout Stout came, from tasting the Old Dominion Barrel Aged Stout. It helps that we have, locally, a good group of guys that we talk all the time. That still seems to be the norm in our industry, and hopefully it stays that way. People share ideas a lot. You get ideas from customers. I had this beer here, you should do this here, you should use this spice from the chefs here. We do beer dinners so we’re trying to create beers that go with food as well as food that goes with beer here from time to time. We do a Whit Beer here that’s has ginger and lemongrass, instead of the usual spices. And that came from a former chef here, who I’m still friends with. That thing pairs really well with a ton of different flavors. It’s become one of those beers and we have to make it every year and it has a following. So you get the inspiration from all over, you never know where it’ll come from . When you think of something new, it has to be something good too. That’s the other question. The first time we do something new, we do it on the pub system. It’s a large system to make a mistake on, so you have to be a little bit careful not to go too crazy. If I wanted to do something really crazy, I guess I’d dust off the homebrew system and do it at home.  The new 70bbl brewery GL: I don’t think people always realize how hard that is. It’s not just quadruple all the ingredients. There’s a lot of variables in that. When we first opened up over there, the transition went fairly well on most of our beers. The hardest one was the Edmond Fitzgerald Porter. It took us about a year to get it back. That’s a world class porter with numerous medals. And, one of the proudest moments for me here was when that won a medal after the transition. It’s won two since then. It is hard sometimes to ramp up. When you’re ramping up a new beer, it’s not as hard because it doesn’t have to be exact. But, when we were ramping up the porter, which had been a longtime standard, it had to be dead on. It just goes to show  70bbl brewery again. DCB: One more thing we were wondering. A lot of places we’ve seen two barrels very far away from everything else. And it usually turns out that it’s a sour beer that nobody in the brewery really trusts. They trust the system they use for sanitation but, at the same time, don’t think it’s necessary to fully test. Are you guys doing anything like this? GL: We have a very small amount of beer aging in casks that we can pass by when we go across the street. You can see where they are and it’s funny that you say it that way. They’re out of reach and out of the way. It was a Tripel that didn’t attenuate where we wanted it to, so we took it and did a whole bunch of stuff with it. We recently tasted it and, lo and behold, it’s good now! Soon we’ll see something with that. You don’t want to tell everyone then say, “Oh, but it’s going to be a few years.” And, then, if it doesn’t come out right, you just have to deny it. DCB: Yeah, you kind of always have to draw it out. You doing anything special? “Yeah, a few things…” What kind of things? “Well, we have a few barrels…” What kind of barrels? Well, we’re doing some sour beer…” Nobody wants to talk about a beer they’re doing that may never be tasted if it goes badly. Well, we think that about wraps it up, so thanks for your time today! Time to see your new 75 bbl brewery. |
