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Great Lakes Brewing Company - Interview with Luke Purcell

Luke Purcell

As many of you may remember, Devon and Jeff went on a road trip to the Great Lakes Region back in September to check out the brewing scene in the middle of our country. You've heard about almost all of them, but what Great Lakes brewery road trip would be complete without a visit to Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland, Ohio? Luke Purcell, the Pub Brewer for Great Lakes Brewing Co., was kind enough to take some time out of his busy day to sit down with us and tell us the history of GLBC, his philosophy on beer, a secret GLBC project and more! And, with this interview, we officially wrap up Devon and Jeff Drink the Great Lakes! So, without further ado, on to Luke Purcell of Great Lakes Brewing Company.

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.

GL: We have the original system… it started as a brewpub. Then this was the first micro in Ohio. We still use our 7 bbl system for brewpub only beers. Every once in a while we’re do a 22 ounce bottle run… those things are kind of just to keep people coming to the pub. Our beers are getting more available, so that keeps people coming down. A few rotating handles aside from our regular stuff. Before our current 75 bbl system we had a 30 bbl system… that building is now condos, and that’s wehre I started. In ’99 we started on the 75bbl system and we’re still adding tanks to that. We’re still filling the building up with tanks.

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.

GL: For me it used to be frustrating. But for 6 or 7 years now I’ve been in charge of what we send to GABF and you just come to terms with it. You realize I’m not going to change that beer to suit their needs, and it has a huge following here. I’m not going to change it. We do 40-50 sytles per year. We have enough beers that fit. We send the ones that fit, and the ones that don’t, we don’t. Our Dortmunder, our biggest selling beer, is the best example. In 1990 it won the GABF Gold Medal. It’s called Dortmunder Gold, it was named after the fact that it won that medal. I haven’t sent that beer for years because it doesn’t fit into the Dortmunder category. One of our brewers mentioned, why don’t we try to make a more true to style Dortmunder. I said, we’re not going to even worry about it. We sell so much Dortmunder, why worry about the medals. Of course you want them, but we have enough beer to be able to send 5-8 beers out there every year. So we don’t worry about it.

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.

GL: That’s the thing, people will discover they like beer the hard way if they are willing to try it. Normally we find that people will like something on the menu if we can get them to try it. Then they’ll think, maybe I’ll try this…

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.

DCB: Getting back more on the Great Lakes Brewery topic. We’ve seen stacks of barrels or hidden barrels everywhere we’ve gone. Are you guys playing with any of that with your bigger beers?

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

DCB: Do you ever find it tough to scale up to the larger system?

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.

you, too, there’s the brewer then there’s the system as well. A lot of places will hire someone and won’t realize it’ll take him a little time to get used to it.

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.

Three Floyds - Interview With Nick Floyd

Everyone knows Three Floyds brewing for brewing big hoppy beers like Dreadnaught or huge stouts like Dark Lord, but we found out there's a lot more to Three Floyds. We sat down with Nick Floyd to discuss some of their new ideas, including some bourbon aging, krieks, berliner weisse and a whole lot of more surprises. These guys got their notoriety in the rest of the country for brewing some big beers, but that's just the beginning of what they are capable of. Read on for the full interview with Nick Floyd.

DCB: How did you get started in brewing and what led you to start Three Floyds?
Nick: I started home brewing when I was 18. I originally hated beer because all anyone drank in high school was warm Old Style or warm Budweiser. I’m like, “why are they drinking this shit?” Then I tried some good beer, then around 18-19 started home brewing stuff. I decided when I was 21 to go to brewing school and do it professionally. Then I brewed pro at a couple places, The Florida brewery, Falstaff, and Malta which is a horrible unfermented porter. But some people like it for breakfast so that’s cool. Then I worked for the wine cellar, which is like a German style brewpub out in the west suburbs of Chicago.Then in ’96 we opened Three Floyds, with the help of my brother and dad.

We opened in Hammond, which is north of here. We opened in Hammond because, and everyone asked, “Why’d you open in Indiana, and not Chicago?” In Hammond we had 5,000 sq ft., rent was $500. That’s why we opened in Hammond. If we opened the same size brewery in Cook County, IL, rent would have been $5,000. And we started with very little money! You can see our original brew house, it was just a small 5 barrel kind of ghetto system.

DCB: It must feel kind of good to move from little finance and a little place to here.
Nick: Yeah, and we’ve done it without really any debt, so that’s good! Some people are like, “Well why aren’t you at 20k barrels, like so and so…” Well, because we don’t want giant loans or giant debt load or have partners whose philosophy we clash with.

DCB: So you guys have been open about 11 years now. Certainly a lot has happened in that time, you guys have gotten a lot of acclaim in the beer industry. You’ve gotten some awards. Has there been a difference… is there a pressure now that people have an expectation about what comes out of Three Floyds, when you guys are developing new recipes.
Nick: Yeah, if we don’t make gigantic… I hate to call it “extreme” beers, but that’s what they’re calling them… Like we just made a Helles and people just shrugged their shoulders. But, a terribly good, clean german helles, people are like “eh, boring.” But, if anyone else made it, some other brewery or brewpub, then you know people would love it. Yeah, I guess there is some pressure to always make bigger more alcoholic more hoppy stuff. But we make the whole gamut now.

DCB: Yeah, it seems like things are already starting to diversify. Are you guys trying to make sure that you keep a wide variety of beers open to the public despite that pressure to create extreme beers.
Nick: Yeah, at our pub especially, there’s the very strange stuff and stuff we only make in a 6bbl tank to serve here. But every month now we come out with a new 22 oz seasonal which we’ve never done before. But we’re making more and more beer, 20% growth every year, but shrinking our reach to just Indiana and Illinois. We can’t even keep up with Chicago.

DCB: Yeah, you used to distribute out to Rhode Island, and we used to drive down there to try and get stuff from you guys.
Nick: If you can only deal with 3 distributors, instead of 15, that’s way less headaches and the beer doesn’t have to travel as far and be fresher. When we’re bigger, we’ll be back in those markets.

DCB: Do you have any plans for increased distribution? Or are you working on saturating the current markets right now.
Nick: Our immediate goal is 10k barrels. After that, if we go to 15k, then we can possibly rethink about that. But there are 8 million people in this area so I think that’ll keep us busy for the next couple years at least.

DCB: We also happened to notice that Chicago seems to be a pretty good beer city… With all the quality breweries right in the area and it’s all getting drank.
Nick: Yeah it is, but the distribution laws are terrible. Bell’s pulled out for that reason, New Glarus isn’t here for that reason. And a lot of national brands don’t want to get a bloody nose in Chicago because of the distribution laws. Which are a result of Al Capone and what Chicago is infamous for back in the early part of the 20th century.

DCB: It definitely sounds unfortunate. The more breweries you talk to out here, they all sort of subtly mention the distribution and the franchise laws that exist.
Nick: Well the distributor in Illinois owns you.

DCB: They own your brand and can sell you however they please.
Nick: And if you want to leave them, you have to, in some cases, pay them 3 years of profits of what they would have made. So to buy out a big brand is millions of dollars. If you want to switch distributors, most people can’t or can’t afford it.

DCB: That’d be a good way to get into debt right there. So, speaking of you say you introduce a new 22oz every month, what do you use as inspiration when creating a new beer. Do you test it first, or do you have a good idea of what it is and it gets brewed.
Nick: Both, now that we have a pub we can totally test things in out own weird way. Basically, we’ve always just made stuff that we want to drink. We’re small enough that it all sells. If we made 5,000 barrels of something that wasn’t popular, then that might be a problem. I guess, regardless, we make stuff we want to drink, regardless of what the public wants.

DCB: It seems to have worked so far.
Nick: Like Alpha Kong, I don’t know how that will sell, but I’m sure we’ll sell it all!

DCB: Everyone’s kind of looking out for the new Three Floyd’s beer. It always gets buzz when it comes out. They all seem to be well received too.
Nick: Well, you try your best and make it as clean as possible, with the best ingredients and we try to do the best we can

DCB: Switching gears a little bit, there’s been a decent buzz around Coors coming out with their new craft beer division. Do you have any thoughts on how that will affect the whole industry and how you feel about that?
Nick: I guess they’re already kind of deceiving people with Blue Moon and I guess they’re going to continue on with that. For us, it turns more people onto trying new beers. So I guess it’s not a bad thing. Will our $8 or $9 six-packs be competing with that? I don’t think so. People will always be looking for genuine hand crafted micro. So, overall, I guess it’s a good thing. The big breweries have been slipping in percentages, so I mean they’re just turning to what’s working.

DCB: It’s really a testament to you guys. It was ignored by the macros for so long, now when they start to enter the game it acknowledges a legitimacy that there’s something real there and it’s not a fad.
Nick: Well, we’ve grown consistently and, micro nationally is 5%... that came out of their percentages, so…

DCB: Along those lines, we thought it was kind of interesting when the CEO of SAB Miller came out and said craft beer is a fad and going away, yet their two biggest competitors are venturing in to make fake craft beer.
Nick: Miller tried in the 90’s with Amber Reserve. It wasn’t half bad. But I don’t know for their CEO to say that is kind of … stupid. You go to any big city and see a new pack of micros. Or to any part of the western United States, it’s everywhere.

DCB: So, going along, obviously you have a lot of small releases at the brewpub. Do you have any big upcoming releases that will go to production soon?
Nick: Well this summer we just started doing Gumbalhead in 6-packs. That’s kind of our biggest release in years. Other than that just the seasonals and, of course, we’re now known for Dark Lord Day, that’s our other big release. That’ll be in April 2008.

DCB: This is kind of a weird question, but it seems that you guys get pigeon-holed a lot, especially with the Dark Lord… if anyone knows one beer it’s Dark Lord. Everyone kind of comes out here for that. But you always notice there are a few beer geeks who are like “it was better last year… no it was better the year before.”
Nick: Yeah, they’ll always do that. As long as you annually date it with different color wax… people always say stuff like that. All those British barley wines: “’85 is better than ’88… ’89 is better than all of them.” There’s always going to be that. And that’s a good thing. Some years will be prized over others. I mean, it’s bound to happen.

DCB: We always notice that people say, “Last year’s was better, they’re ramping up and selling out…” There’s always that guy.
Nick: If we turned the whole brewery into a Dark Lord factory, maybe they could say that… but we only made 90 barrels of it. And it was heavier than ever this year, so you can’t say that no matter what.

[laughter]

DCB: One of the interesting things is the way you package your beer too. The wax dipping, the art work is certainly unique. Is that something you wanted to do right from the beginning to have a powerful image along with the beer?
Nick: Well, yeah. When we started, everyone had a tree or a mountain or was named after a town, so we used characters. Then, on top of that, buying the best ingredients and making the best beer possible, trying to make the best graphics that we could. The brewery’s motto is, “It’s Not Normal,” so make the graphics and art totally not normal, and use the best graphics we could find. Randy Mosher, he’s a famous home brewer and he’s written a couple of books, he does our graphics, he’s done a really good job.

DCB: When you do the wax dipping, does that present challenges as you try to scale up your production?
Nick: Yeah, that sucks! At Knob Creek, you can tell which lady dipped it by which way the wax drips. We actually got a better wax machine, so it’s 2 or 3 days of hand dipping. It makes the beer stand out, though… and it dates it… and it looks cool.

DCB: One of the things that’s interesting is this term: “extreme” beer. Right now there’s this interesting thing happening in craft beer as a whole where some people are starting to turn away from that term… or trying to.
Nick: Well, extreme you think of guys with barbed wire tattoos. I guess it’s a bad moniker. But, I guess, some of them are extreme in a way. But that’s what micro brews do. Not many are making corn or rice adjunct lagers.

DCB: Going back to the brewing, what’s inspiring you out there? When you’re looking for something knew, where are you looking to right now?
Nick: Everywhere you go… you go to brewpubs or beer bars and it could be any brewpub anywhere that’s made a one-off weird sour this or wine-barreled this. There’s no one source. It’s all diverse. It comes from I guess everywhere. For me at least. It’s not just Trappist breweries… it now comes from everywhere. And now Europe has some amazing micros, so that’s good. They’re making some inspiring stuff now.

DCB: Just looking around and seeing those barrels… [pointing at barrels nearby] we’ve seen a lot of people doing the sour thing lately… experimenting with it…
Nick: That’s the newest thing. Those are all just straight up bourbon, though. We will be doing some sour stuff. A real Berliner Weisse… some krieks… and framboise I think.

DCB: Wow! That’s quite an interesting departure from everything else.
Nick: Well it’s the one place we haven’t really ventured into. It’ll be cool. We’ll make some weird fruit flavored ones. It’ll only be available here. I don’t know if we’ll ever bottle them. We’d have to napalm the whole bottling line.

DCB: Everyone keeps talking about bringing sour barrels in. And they’re skeptical about bringing it into their brewery.
Nick: It should almost be another brewery if you’re going to do it. We’ll just keep those fermenters on the other side of the building. You don’t want to contaminate the whole facility just because you’re trying one new thing.

DCB: Well, 10,000 barrels is definitely exciting… especially with very little debt and without big investors. And we’re sure people will be psyched to hear about the sour beers you guys will experiment with. Good luck in the future and thanks for hanging out with us for a bit!

Mayflower Brewing Company Interview With Matt Steinberg

Ever since our first sip of Inkwell Stout, we here at DrinkCraftBeer.com have been big fans of Matthew Steinberg's work. When we heard that he was leaving Offshore Ale Company and their brewpub on Martha's Vineyard to start a new craft brewery in Plymouth, MA, we were psyched. No longer would we have to travel via ferry to drink his beer (Offshore was a brewpub that only had 2 bottled offerings. To get his specialty beers, you had to take a ferry for almost an hour to get to the island of Martha's Vineyard off of Cape Cod). On top of the geographic change, Mayflower Brewing Company is the first new production brewery to open in Massachusetts for a while now, so we wanted to make sure we were there to see the beginning. When news first broke, we called Matt and said we wanted to be there as soon as possible to document the opening and sit down to talk with him. Well, they finally laid the last drain, got the brewhouse set up and fired up their brand new kettle on January 4th. On the 16th, DrinkCraftBeer.com was at Mayflower to check out their beautiful new brewery and talk to Matt Steinberg about his newest project. Oh, we got to try a small sample of Pale Ale as well. Let's just say we're psyched for this new brewery! Now, on to the beer talk.

DCB: So how did Mayflower come about?
Matt: Drew (Owner) is a descendant of the Mayflower. His family member was John Alden who was the cooper (barrelmaker) on the Mayflower. He was hired to be on the Mayflower so he could make barrels to bring back because they needed to leave some barrels that had beer behind. When the boat came back there were cooperage laws that when you leave with cooperage you had to bring the cooperage back with you. You had to build the cooperage on the boat. So that's part of that story.

DCB: Haha, so even back then losing kegs was a big problem, I guess!
Matt: So that was part of the labels, using the barrels for the pale ale as the flagship, not that it's barrel aged beer but I don't think most people will expect it to be barrel aged. Then the farmhouse picture for the mellow golden ale and the hops for the IPA. But the porter we decided to go with the three threads story, which is strong ale, dark beer, and lager blended together to make a more drinkable beer for the porters and whoever else were working. So we were thinking, what can the icon look like? Drew found this rope image with three ropes for a boat and I was like, "That is awesome!" So we had our graphic designer draw our own version of that. The color is really cool; you can see on the six packs it sort of has a wood grain. The porter has this charcoal black gray look. I'm real happy with it. Looking at all these images on the computer was very difficult looking at it on the monitor. But then when they six packs came in I was like, "Yeah this is sweet."

DCB: Is brewing in the English style different for you?
Matt: I love the classic part of it. Being at Offshore with the two flagship beers it was one thing. A lot of people really don't understand, but I do love the classic styles. I kind of got over the need to brew a different beer every batch. I loved that for 4 1/2 years but, finally, I was like it's time to buckle down and brew some beer. We brewed the draft beer for the last year I was there and it was really a challenge on that system to brew consistently.

DCB: While you were at Offshore you could really do whatever you wanted to brew, can we still expect some special brews from you here?
Matt: Yeah, we're definitely going to do some. I did design all these beers, so I take any credit or criticism in that sense on these beers. Ryan and I are going to do our best to brew a couple of seasonals that come out every year. We're thinking about doing a Thanksgiving ale which I think makes perfect sense. The one problem I see with that is the release date. All the Oktoberfests are already on the shelf and, as those are coming off, winter beers are going in. Our Thanksgiving beer would be going in say October first and go until New Years. But does it seem like it's old on New Years if you're drinking Thanksgiving ale? So we need to figure that out. We don't want to brew an Oktoberfest because we're an English style brewery. The Thanksgiving ale is probably going to be something like and old ale. We briefly talked about doing a barley wine. I don't love barley wines for personal consumption; they are certainly a fun beer to make because you see how crazy people go. I love Cambridge Brewing company's spring [barley wine] Arquebus that Will [Meyers, CBC head brewer] makes. It's a spring barley wine and it's dry and strong. I don't know how Will makes it so dry but man it's amazing. So that is certainly an option for a spring beer. We've talked about doing some type of wheat beer for the summer. I'll be itching to do some kind of imperial stout. I've got a whole new idea for an imperial that I'll just have to be careful not to call Inkwell (Matt's IRS from Offshore) out of habit.

As proud as I was of that beer [Inkwell] every time I brewed it, it was never the same and it was improvisational stout in title. I am excited to do some new stuff. The IPA here is nothing like any of the IPAs I brewed before... it's 70 IBUS and 6.8-7.2% and it's going to be big and bitter, high aroma, dry hopped. But it will be drinking beer...for freaks. [laughs]

DCB: Will you be doing some cask ales?
Matt: Yeah we will be, I own two firkins personally.
Ryan: [laughs] Yeah probably tomorrow we'll have one filled.
Matt: Shoot yeah we could probably do it tomorrow. We don't have an engine yet, but the idea was to have an engine here (indicating a spot on the tasting room bar top). But this [tasting room] wasn't designed to be a bar here, but we'd need to get a breather and make sure we open it on a day we can get 20 people here, but that shouldn't be a problem.

DCB: [Speaking of places with casks,] if you can get into Deep Ellum that'd be great...since we can walk there.
Matt: Yeah we'll definitely be in there. Aaron does a great job there. Sunset already placed an order as well.

DCB: Were you guys worried about entering the Massachusetts market since there's so much beer here?
Matt: I have to say I don't necessarily think that the saturation is true. One of the issues with the market here in Massachusetts is that the distributors bring in so many beers so it is saturated but it's not saturated by breweries that are local. It's very easy to say, "I drink the local beer;" if you live in Boston it's Harpoon, if you live out west it's Berkshire, but there's nothing down here. And Drew, when he was planning this brewery he had several ideas. He had this dog oriented idea, but that's kind of been played out a little bit. And the Mayflower idea, but he would only do that if it was built in Plymouth. He had to build a facility where it belongs. He had a really hard time finding a location until he found this place which is a great location for a brewery. We're not going to get any walk by traffic. It's not super easy to find, but it's not that hard.

We already have so many locals, the construction guys already want beer, the electricians want beer and it's unbelievable how much business Colony Place is doing. So yes the market is saturated with great beer, but there's room for more. The Publick House has great Belgians and tons of stuff from California, but they have no beer from MA on tap beside a couple specialties and some one offs.

DCB: How big are you guys looking to do production wise?
Matt: Right now we plan on doing 1000 barrels. We have the hops to do up to 1200 this year.

DCB: Where are you looking to distribute?
We're looking to be a small regional brewery in the 10-15K barrel range eventually.

DCB: Will you be doing any bombers?
Matt: We'll be doing 6 packs for now but our bottling machine can be easily adjusted so we'll probably do some special releases in bombers. The IPA will be draft only at least to start, so that may be something that goes into a bomber at some point. We found this really interesting package for bombers that's a 4-pack that you can either do stickers or print on. That would probably be more like a mix pack of bombers, so I love that idea.

We've talked about doing 12 packs, like a mix pack, Christmas time mix packs do really well.

DCB: So the big questions: When does it hit stores and when can people taste it?
Matt: Well Ryan and I have been tasting it but we're lucky. Draft beer will probably be released late next week or early the following week (January 24/25 or the following week). The accounts that will see it first will be: British Beer Company, Stone Forge Tavern, T-Bones in Plymouth, The Colonial, Sam Diegos and a few others. Cambridge Commons pre-orderd, Union Brewhouse has pre-ordered a few kegs.

Bottles will be some time mid to late February. But I do foresee bottles coming out pretty quick. The tasting room will be open when we say it's open [laughs].

DCB Note: For anyone worried that Matt's beers won't offer up the same quality as his past work, let's just say you have little to worry about. While he may be brewing in the English style, our sample of the Pale Ale was distinctly American in flavor. Not to say there's anything wrong with English beers, but our sample of the pale had nice malt tones with a great up front hop flavor followed by a distinct bitterness. We're excited to try the whole line-up and you'll soon find us scouting out South Shore bars to try them all on tap.

Bell's Brewing Company Interview with John Mallett

The Bell's Eccentric Cafe Tap List... Mmmm...

When you're in Michigan on a beer tour, you really can't ignore the elder stateman, or giant Gorrilla depending on how you look at it, presiding over the room... Thus, we found ourselves at Bell's Brewing Company and the Eccentric Cafe. Making beers ranging from their seemingly ubiquitous summer wheat ale, Oberon, to the frighteningly dark and think Expedition Stout, we knew these guys were going to be an interesting crew. This isn't even mentioning the citrusy IPA we've only had via trips to Pennsylvania known as Two Hearted Ale, one of the best IPAs out there! There was never a doubt we'd stop at Bell's, even if it was just for a beer. We also wanted to talk about the whole Bell's and Chicago situation that was going on (and has developed quite a bit since) at the time. We made our way in, grabbed seats at the bar and ordered a beer while waiting. Soon, John Mallett, the Bell's production Manager, and Rick, who runs the 1st shift in the brew house and was just getting off work, joined us and this is where we come in.

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