Bell's Brewing Company Interview with John Mallett | Drink Craft Beer

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.

DCB: So, the way we always like to start this: a little history. How did you guys get into the industry?

Rick: I started off just going to school, studying hydrology, and a buddy of mine called and said “Hey, what are you doing?” I was like, well, I’m in my senior year and studying this [hydrology] and I don’t think I really want to this. The more I looked into it, it’s like, I don’t want to spend a lot of time on a boat or anything and I’d been home brewing for a while... He said, “Well, there’s an opening at Bell’s and are you interested?” Two weeks later I had the job, dropped out of school and never looked back. I thought it’d be a temporary thing, you know, you don’t go into a brewery of the size we were at that time, that was ’93, I don’t even know how many barrels we made that year, it wasn’t many. Well, you know, they produced my favorite stout in the world so I made it home, per se, and have been here ever since.

The bar at the Eccentric Cafe where we sat. Those are our beers.

John: I’ve been brewing for many years. I was living in Boston and cooking my way through engineering school and was not really that psyched about watching chemicals float through pipes the rest of my life so I said “Screw this.” At that point Commonwealth [Brewing Company, now defunct] had just opened up, Harpoon [Brewing Company] was in Boston, and Sam Adams was there, so it was the real start of the craft brew thing going on. I went down there and got a job at the brewery [Commonwealth] and within a month the head brewer had quit. Steve Slesar and I were hired at the same time. We were both there for a month and they were like “You guys are the head brewers.” Steve is one of the Slesar Brothers who owns Boston Beer Works [a brewpub chain in Massachusetts]. So he and I started brewing together and eventually I ran that brewery for a number of years and then went away to go to Siebel. I didn’t get that training [at Commonwealth] so I went to Siebel for the long course, got out of there and went to Washington, D.C., ran a brewery there for a few years, Old Dominion. Started a company called Saaz, and we built equipment and did engineered solutions for breweries. We did a lot of interesting projects; we did everything from the million barrel Yuengling plant on down to a pilot brewery for Cargill [a malting company that supplies barley and grain for brewing] that had to be fully automated but used 10 kg of malt. So that makes less than a keg of beer. It’s a nice homebrew set up! Then, around the same time that Larry [Bell] came to me and said “I want to build a new plant, a nice plant… I’ve got money together for that…” About that same time my 2 year old daughter didn’t recognize me coming off a road trip once because I’d gotten a haircut and shaved off my beard. I was like “I should really be in the same house every night for a while…” So, Larry was super happy to have me come here and it’s been great. It’s really one of the places to be here because we’ve got this really long term work force that’s been here… smart, committed brewers… just a great place to be.

DCB: So one of the interesting things you hear when you talk to people about Michigan beer is, “If it wasn’t for Bell’s, we wouldn’t be here.” A couple people have said, if you try to start a new brewery, especially out here, there’s one thing you need to do: your beer needs to be at least as good, if not better, than Bell’s in order to even get noticed. Do you guys feel that pressure at all? Does it change the way you operate?

Bell's Beer Garden with a performance stage. There are hops growing that you can't see to the right.

Rick: I think it’s been a benefit for us because, I think we’ve really had a good grasp on the strong ale... people were looking for something beefier in their glass and we got the calling from that. People started breaking out from that and went ahead and started going down different style guidelines… With Jolly Pumpkin doing their Artisan Ales, New Holland is doing similar stuff [to Bell's] but, you know, they got different things going on. Beer is just such a big variety of styles… we captured the English Ale and let other people go with it. So you get to share the wealth.

John: It’s interesting to me, being here, how Bell’s as a craft brewery is a really old craft brewery. Larry started this company back 23-24 years ago. I think we’re the oldest craft brewery east of Colorado, so by every measure Larry has been breaking rules for a long long time… You know, really strong beers and very interesting styles and the idea that, back then, you’d be producing this beer that was bottle conditioned, unfiltered, open fermented over the top in terms of alcohol… there’s a big push on “oh this is the extreme beers,” it’s like, yeah, the extreme beers that we make would be old enough to drink. They’re going on over 21 years, you know? This is not a fad; this is the ethos of the company for a long time. And, so, the company being as old as it is has seen growth through the state, we are the biggest brewery in the state and a lot of the ways people are going to say where you are in relation to that.

Rick: You get a really good feel for that when you enter your beers into a competition and the feedback is “your porter fits the stout category, your stout fits the imperial stout category and you imperial stout category we have not a category for that yet…” And you think you’re doing wrong… we’re not doing wrong, we’re doing right. They have to bend to us.

John: I’ve talked to some other brewers up north who say “there’s this unfiltered stronger beer, it’s Michigan style.” Well, that’s really kudos for Larry, because he developed it that way. It’s great to be able to make these very free beers, these beers that are really great huge interesting beers.

Rick: And away from breaking the barriers and the laws of beer, Larry is very vocal in changing laws in Michigan, just for our growth and, moreover, everybody else too. State for state, a lot of restrictions were happening [here] and we had to get away from that to do what we wanted to do. He went out on his own and lobbied against this and that and got everybody with him and changed a lot of laws to help the industry grow in Michigan.

DCB: How many barrels are you guys putting out a year, roughly?

Just to give you perspective of how big this place is. That's Jeff on the left.

John: This year we’ll do roughly high 80’s… 85,000 barrels plus. We’re not sure where that’s going to come in yet. We definitely ran that out… there was a week that we did something like 3,000 barrels in a week, which is like...

Rick: Our highest month was 12,700 and something barrels… last year we did 74k plus.

DCB: What’s interesting about you guys is, we come out here, and we have an idea how big you are, but we actually can’t get your beer in Boston. We got some of the Two Hearted Ale on a road trip to Pennsylvania and WOW… And, usually, whether it’s right or wrong to think this way, when you get a beer that's got that real "craft beer feeling," you don’t think it’s from a brewery this big. Has it been difficult to keep that craft beer feeling as you’ve scaled up to 80k barrels?

Rick: Well, you know, it’s interesting we have 400 barrel fermenters, but we also have 2 barrel fermenters and 15 barrel fermenters and 50 barrel fermenters, sort of every size, so there’s this incredible feeling of, "let’s play with this stuff." There are some brands that have graduated and moved up to the majors.

John: Up through the ATF and getting label approvals… stuff that you could only get on Eccentric day now we have a label for it and it comes out seasonally.

Rick: So, in terms of beer development… We’ve got this great pub and great clientele that are like “well I’m definitely going to have one of those.” So, we’re able to develop and massage these beers into shape. Then, we make a little. Then maybe they take off. There’s been some that I’ve thought we’re going to take this to market and people are just going to fall over themselves to get it and, maybe they do maybe they don’t. Others people are super psyched about then they just sort of organically grow. I think we really brew the styles of beers to our own tastes and quirkiness.

John: A lot of people say when they visit other Michigan breweries that the one standard they see among Michigan is that the Michigan brewers are brewing for home brewers or brewers. It’s not beer for the masses or the old man, it’s beer that my home brewer buddy would really like… From there, we just say, yeah that’s what we like to drink too.

John: Our overall plan and our chance to play with all these different beer styles and having a lot of freedom, as we’ve grown what we’ve found is that we get better and better tools. For instance, Rick is able to make a lot of liquid move through the brew house and become great beer and have a very fine control at that and it’s not just necessarily just dragging a hose… He’s got the time to watch the process and pull samples and is this in spec or not? And we can talk about what our specs should be. How far out of range does it venture before it’s not longer this beer?

Rick: Do we have to make an adjustment?

John: To bring it into this increasingly narrow… I’m really excited to make a full flavored beer and have that beer be reliable for our consuming public where they drink this beer and say, “yeah, that’s what’s I wanted.”

A mass spectrometer we believe? This is one of their tools to make sure their beer is consistently delicious.

Rick: Consistency is so important, too. And the smaller you get the less control you have over consistency. I feel that from where we were to where we are, our consistency has really tightened up… I think people were a little more lenient 10-15 years ago the amber they had last week was not the beer they’re drinking this week, but they let it go. It was the mystique of the craft brewers. Now that craft brewing is somewhat taking a foot hold people are actually looking more for consistency and I think that’s a big boost for the direction we’ve been going. Being in one place for almost 15 years I’d say the biggest dynamic for that is that we’ve been growing every year. In the last 5 years I haven’t brewed on the same brew system 2 years in a row. It’s always expanding.

DCB: One thing that we've also noticed is, at the consumer level, extreme loyalty to Michigan beer… something you don’t see in Massachusetts. At the bar you just go and get whatever you’re in the mood for. But out here, we’ll be talking to people and they have real loyalty to state brewed beer. Did you find that helped you grow and, the next piece of that, is as you expanded did you find it different as you expanded to other states? Was it a challenge… was it a different market and how’d you adjust to that?

John: For a brewer that’s originally from Massachusetts, and I drove 14 hours to the other side of the state here recently… Michigan is a real big state! There’s a real awareness here of buying local… it’s an old line manufacturing state. The state is just larger, you could say. Boston drinkers who drink locally could include Allagash, Magic Hat… some things from the surrounding states… Ommegang even, are as close as anything in Michigan. It’s a slightly different footprint in scale. Second thing is going into these other markets… one of the most interesting markets is Chicago… it’s 2 and a half hours away… it’s a big city in the Midwest… huge beer drinkers and huge Bell’s fans. That was a real different sell there than to be in Michigan. That’s mostly because Chicago is a dirtier beer market than New York City. It’s more corrupt. As we went further and further afield, Bell’s exists in this iconoclastic long term position of really being edgy and pushing a lot of style guidelines.

DCB: To talk about the whole Chicago thing again and, I know I’ve heard this story about pulling out of the Illinois market, it’d be great to hear it from you.

John: When distribution was first going on in Chicago with Bell's, distribution looked a lot like a van from the brewery going there and dropping kegs off and Larry saying, “Please try my beer.” From this tenuous little foothold to graduating up to having a distributor who’s going to deliver the beer. Eventually that distributor decided “I want to get out of here.” And, as beer distribution works in the country is that, because they helped build that business you are therefore their property and therefore they can sell your distribution to whomever. The company they decided they were going to sell to was a company that Larry didn’t feel like was going to represent our best interests. That might manifest itself in a lot of ways. It might be that “we’re this giant company that sells a lot of beer, but we don't really have time to go out there and talk to anyone about your cherry ale,” or “what’s the difference between the 3rd coast ale and… you know, it’d be a lot easier if we got you down to your 4 biggest sellers and we’re not going to do the others but you can’t sell them here.” I think Larry got a sense that they weren’t going to be the best fit for us. The options were number 1: go with the people who weren’t going to represent you well or number 2: go with a company who would represent you well, oh but have your pants sued off. The third option, that wasn’t even discussed, was you can’t pull out of your market. This market represents a little more than 10% of our gross sales and no company can do that. That’s not a skill that we really developed well, the sit down and shut up thing. So that transferred into, well we’ll just remove ourselves. “Well you can’t do that!?” Well, we can and we will and we did. Right now I know there’s a lot of Bell’s fan in Chicago that would love to have our beer.

Rick: Love it enough to drive to Michigan or Indiana or Wisconsin or Iowa…

John: You know, it’s unfortunate; I’d love to be in that market, I’d love to be in Chicago. That being the case, we’re now out of Chicago.

DCB: It sounds like eventually you’d like to be back there if things end up working out in some fashion?

John: It would be great but I don’t necessarily foresee it. There are things out of our control.

DCB: Speaking of new markets, do you have anything that’s in the near future and what’s kind of the broader long-term plan? Do you see yourselves as a national brewery at some point?

The underside of the fermenter. That's our awesome tour guide on the right who spent a great deal of time showing us the production brewery. They have an amazing set up!

John: I mean, you’re talking to production, the guys who make the beer… that would be a good question for what Larry’s got planned. When we left Chicago we did open up a couple markets, we went into Virginia and D.C. That was a place when I went down there Bell’s was there and we eventually pulled away because we just couldn’t make enough beer. North Carolina and Florida… Those markets were added to balance out the [loss of Chicago].

Rick: Surprisingly enough a lot of those new markets had a strong appreciation for stouts and porters ironically.

DCB: You don’t normally expect a hotter climate to like those…

Rick: Yeah, you know, normally the Oberon and the Amber, your normal flagships. But, you know, wow we’re making more stout because of this new market, that’s awesome! Because when you’re making more stout you are on the right path…to anything.

DCB: I have to agree with you… When we came out here we’d had the Two Hearted Ale and we hit the first beer store in Michigan and they had a huge line-up of Michigan beer. There was an aisle that just said “Michigan.” So we got the Expedition Stout… and that was the first beer we tried on this trip.

Rick: There’s 74? 86? How many breweries in Michigan now? It’s more than a deck of cards, I know that!

John: Between the brew pubs and the little micros, they’re calling Michigan the new Oregon for brewing.

DCB: We’re definitely seeing it. We were actually talking about, a little while ago, how the scene in Michigan is blowing up. But not everyone is doing the huge almost offensively hoppy thing. But there’s a lot going on here, a lot of scenes… there’s some brewers doing hoppy, some are doing stouts… A lot of stuff is meeting here and making for a great beer culture.

John: What I find really fun is a lot of regulars for our pub will go out west, and they’re really psyched to go out there because the west coast is the big craft mecca. And they’ll go out there and come back and say, “Well their beers weren’t quite like yours… we kind of missed that.” That extra we put into it, the common thing they say is “they’re kind of watered down… you kind of had to dig deeper and do a little field work to find the good ones.

Rick: I think one of the things that epitomizes Michigan breweries is that we do make stronger beers. The starting gravity of Oberon is jacked… it’s up there. It’s not super high, but for a beers we sell many 10’s of thousands of this beer it’s… well, it’s a starter introduction wheat beer, except, oh yeah, it’s 25% bigger beer than most craft breweries that are out there.

DCB: For a summer ale to be 6% is pretty big.

John: It’s 6 1/2%. [See! They're proud of their beer!]

DCB: So the question we have to ask… Is there anything new you’re putting out soon? Or anything you’re working on you might put out soon. Everyone always wants to know that.

Rick: We have Oktoberfest.

John: Huge hit, we put that in a bottle for the first time this year.

John: The biggest beer coming out soon is the HopSlam. People are like, “Where is it? When is it?”

Rick: I get an email a week… I got one last week from a guy who was like “when’s HopSlam coming out again?” His email address was HopSlammer****@***** [details removed for privacy].

John: So that was really interesting to see that that beer… well we did a bunch of it this year, and we’ll do a bunch of it this year, but people got super psyched about it.

Rick: We’d get a pallet into the general store [onsite at the brewery] and even employees would be like “is there any of that left?” And we’d answer, “Yeah, like, 2 cases” and we just got a pallet in 36 hours ago. And that’s just one little location in the back here. It just flies off the shelf.

John: So we’re doing that, and we’ve always got stuff going on down here. I think when you say, “what’s new?” in reality I don’t think you’d walk onto a major league baseball field and say, “So, who’s new?” “Well that guy was playing Triple A, and he was Double A…” We’ve kind of been watching that for a while and decided…

DCB: It’s always a little different when you have the brewpub side, because you can start things small, test it out, then tweak the recipe then it’s not new... it’s just bottled.

John: And you’re running it through the old pros too, they’ll let you know exactly how they feel about it.

DCB: They’re loyal, but it seems like they’d tell you, “This ain’t working guys…Go back to the drawing board.”

John: Perhaps, but there’s always someone who’s head over heels for it. On the same side of the coin.

John: Overall, it’s great being here and making these super interesting beers… great workforce, great small town.

DCB: One more question we’ve been asking people. Coors recently started a new division committed to brewing these “ultra premium” beers. We like to get opinions… How is that for craft beer and how do you view that when the big macros try to enter the market?

John: Well they’ve been in it for some time…

DCB: Well, yeah, Blue Moon…

John: Yeah, I remember having that beer before it was ever in glass [aka bottled] at the baseball brewery there and the Sandlot [Coors small Denver brewery/brewpub]. I think that’s sort of the lone shining star in Coors portfolio, that’s where they’re seeing the growth. They recognize the writing on the wall. Realistically I think there’s this seminal shift in the way that we Americans are approaching food and beverage. That’s started off with Ben and Jerry’s making ice cream and the place on the corner that says, “We could make something that tastes better than Wonder [bread],” and it moves on through wine…

Rick: and even BBQ sauce.

John: There’s just this much greater diversity. And for these larger companies to wake up and start to listen to the market and the fact that people have been asking for this. So is it a horrible thing? No, I don’t think it’s a horrible thing. It’s reality, it’s the world we live in. I am super excited when people become more interested in better stuff, because I want to work someplace and I want to be in a world where there is competition and it does force me to get up in the morning and say, “How am I going to do it better? How am I going to do it better tomorrow?” If it was just showing up to work and make it...

Rick: Just make whatever product… it’d be mindless, dull, boring.

John: I think the consumer wins, we’re pushed a bit we’re stretched. Do we think we’re better strong faster… prettier? Well we are prettier [laughs].

Rick: If it gets people more aware of different styles of beer, maybe it will get them to try other things. Beer is such a brand oriented product. People who drink Bud drink Bud! To get them to do that, you got to nail them down. If Bud comes out with something that they try and they’re visiting their son in a town that has a brewery and they’re like, well they have an Amber Bock, and there’s this amber ale… and maybe they like it. It just feeds the whole system.

John: I think beer is about stories… about the stories behind the brewery and how we make our beer and how that manifests its way through it. So I love the fact that there’s this diversity of approaches. You sit down and have a beer with Ron from JP and you get this real sense of “Hey, here’s this guy who has this real thing,” and you go and have a beer with Larry [Bell] and he has this other thing and Allen Newman from Magic Hat and hey, here’s all these different approaches.

Rick: Yeah, and none less interesting than the other. They’re all very intriguing.

DCB: When we had expedition, it had this real mollasesy thing… is there molasses in there? What’s in there? It’s not like any other stout.

Rick: Will your car run on it? For real? Is that a mythbuster’s challenge?

John: Well the malt bills are pretty developed. These pipes right here [gestures to Rick’s arms], there’s just a ton of specialty malts that go into these beers and I am very interested in the way that that whole thing comes together. [John actually got very technical here for a bit, and we didn’t quite follow…]

Rick: To put it in layman’s terms, it’s a big beer and big beers behave in funny ways. If you have two reactants, and you double the concentration, you don’t double the speed of the reaction. Everything is exponential. In some ways, the beer is a huge beer… we put some hops in there, right?

John: Jeez… we put a few boxes in there.

DCB: So what’s kind of inspiring you guys right now as you’re creating new beers. Where do you look for inspiration?

John: I think it’s… there’s a bunch of different people involved in the process… we come from a lot of different backgrounds. We’re also tied in pretty well to a lot of national and international brewers and we’re just talking to them about “what’s new, what you working on… what if you did kind of a half gainer with a double twist and…

Rick: …a superman seat grab.”

John: The people who are in the brewery are big fans of beer and they’re out they’re tasting other beers and talking about different beers and stuff. Larry is probably the biggest mastermind and he’ll scribble something out and say, “Hey, make this.” And you’ll say, “Is that a naked chick? What is this? Larry, tell me what's going on here...” and he’ll say, “Well I want it to be 11%...” “Ok…” And you’ll walk away and brainstorm with your teams and come up with something.

Rick: The great thing about this is that Larry is a busy executive and he’s got a successful company and he’d never dream of going to the home brewer’s conference and bringing rocky mountain oyster stout [sarcasm on this last part here... extreme sarcasm]… and what could be more disgusting than oyster beer? And, well, rocky mountain oyster beer… [Larry once brought some Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout to a homebrewers conference in Michigan... He didn't tell anybody what it was, just ensured that nobody was a vegetarian.]

John: When that’s the leadership, it’s going downhill from there.

Rick: He’s not short on imagination, that’s for sure! I think he introduced that one, “No one here is a vegan, right?”

John: Then again, Get Lucky… it looked like something you’d find in your refrigerator... or your grandmas refridge months after it went bad. I believe it was our St. Patrick’s Day beer.

Rick: We wanted to use some of the local terroir… which is a wine term for local wine character in the area. I thought there’s California brewers out there using wine grapes. But we don’t have that here.

John: We got Kellogg.

Rick: We made a beer with Lucky Charms… as the adjunct, it was 10%.

John: That one we’re not bottling this year.

[all laugh]

Rick: While that’s great to come in and try, but you look at it and it’s just like, “ugh…” and you got that prejudgment. Then this older guy walks in and tries a sample. And he orders a 20 ouncer.

Rick: Well, in addition to the Lucky Charms, we also threw in Spirulina (blue green algae). But it’s actually used for beer, I have a good friend over in Singapore who’s been talking to us and saying “I got this wacky beer over here…"

John: And it’s [the Spirulina] not the green you get down at CJ’s Pub where they put a few drops of food coloring in… This is the green you might find at a bio hazard. Then the other thing we had in there was Green Tea.

Rick: It was green and it was weird and it was what it was… And it sold! And then that just goes back to our fan base… “Hey, if you guys made it, it can’t be bad.” I might not like it as much as I liked something else. But, you know, in the same respect it can’t be bad.

John: So, obviously, there’s not this corporate structure of “you need to do this and not that.” It’s definitely energetic, fun and creative.

Rick: When you come out with 10 stouts in November, I think you know your feet are planted in the right place. [DCB Note: Rick seems to love stout, you pick up on that? So do we though! Yeah stout!]

DCB: It’s cool to see a brewery can grow to a certain size and not lose that mystique and fun of not knowing what’s going to come next. It’s interesting to see that some of these craft breweries are growing in size and they’re really biog and successful without having to change. And I think we’re starting to see more of that, which is excited. It used to be you could start out small and have a local following but, if you really wanted to be big, you had to change some things. It seems like that’s where a shift is happening now.

Rick: Well I think it’s interesting that, given the growth of the craft industry and this company being as old as it is, I’m sure that it could have grown more rapidly but that would have meant, “what’s up with the hazy beer?” “Oh we can fix that!” And “Hey, what’s up the strong…” and us, “hold on, we can adjust!” And that didn’t happen. Being here and knowing how long Larry’s been brewing and this company has been here… it’s like, “wow, it didn’t grow faster than that?” And that’s because that stuff was held really close. The beer didn’t follow the market; the market grew to appreciate the beer and said, “I actually do like my beer to taste like something…”

John: And with our huge advertising budget [all laugh], it’s good the beer sells itself. But I don’t see it doing any less!