Interview with Dave Higgins, Brewer at Wachusett Brewery | Drink Craft Beer | Interviews, Breweries, Interview with Dave Higgins, Brewer at Wachusett Brewery

Interview with Dave Higgins, Brewer at Wachusett Brewery

Above: Dave Higgins

When Dave Higgins, one of the brewers at Wachusett Brewing Company, invited us to check out their brewery we gladly accepted. As we've mentioned in the past, it's no secret that we're fans of local beer. To be honest, though it's almost in our backyards, we'd only tried a couple of their offerings. Everybody knows their blueberry beer, but we wanted to see what else was going on there. We met up with Dave on a very rainy Saturday morning and began with a full tour of their facility. Having been to a fair number of breweries, we're used to seeing the same old things as far as equipment goes. For the first time in a long time we had to ask questions about the equipment, and there's a good reason why. Wachusett was started by three Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) graduates; this place was built by engineers and you can tell. They built their own mash tun, converted milk tanks to brite tanks and the list goes on. To be honest we've never seen anything like it, and it really was impressive.

Our tour ended and we sat down to speak with Dave, it's here our interview begins:

DCB: How did you start brewing?
Dave: I did some brewing at home, like a lot of home brewers. Did a lot of home brewing, a lot of self education, everything I could get my hands on the internet and came with that knowledge. Totally came here just to get my foot in the door bottling wise. I worked as a cook at a restaurant before I came here. They told me my reputation preceded me as to how clean the restaurant was, how good the food was, temperatures. They basically said OK, we're going to teach you our system, you have the basic knowledge, and I basically flourished here. It's basically the perfect environment if you don't mind getting dirty and getting tired there's a lot to be taught and learned.

DCB: Now do you still home brew now?
Dave: No time to, but I do help out a few local guys, we just brewed a nut brown recipe that a friend wanted. And I taught him how to do that. So I helped him get it where he wanted. I showed him what I know as far as how to brew something like that.

Above: No space spared at the brewery

DCB: How was it coming into the industry without formal training?
Dave: This is the only system I've worked on, its great though, the craft beer brewers are the most helpful people in the industry. I will go to the meetings, the MBA meetings, or I'll just show up at breweries and they will just give you everything. You know like if you wanna look at my mash tun here this is how you operate it, this is how it works. Bill Dunn at Elm city, I look to him a lot and our head brewer Howie, but sometimes you need someone out of the loop and that's great. You keep a little bit to yourself, like our blueberry, its ours and you got Budweiser who's trying to replicate a blueberry, but that's something we'll hold close to us. As long as your making good beer then you're helping our industry. So we all just sit around at those MB meetings and they're so great. We'll just bounce ideas back and forth.

DCB: So everybody knows Wachusett Blueberry, did you expect it to be that type of flagship beer?
Dave: When it came out, I mean we hmmmd and hawed. Is this going to work? Is it going to taint the lines? There's a lot going into it, and once they honed that in it just sorta exploded. It's not blue, its not overwhelming blueberry flavor, its so well balanced, it just kinda took off, and now its a big part of our production. I think it's a great beer to get people into craft beer. It's the gateway beer I call it. You can get the girls to drink a blueberry and be like wow, and then hopefully they'll turn into a summer ale drinker, and then their palette will turn them into a Country Ale drinker. Hopefully they'll be drinking Dave's beer over at the brewpub (Dave at Gardner Ale House) just because of that. I really think it was just the concept that we tried to put out a fruit beer that was a little different, and it just took off.

DCB: So what's the next step for you guys, you're moving into NY and NJ now.
Dave: New York is a big part of the new market. We hired a guy and we're like, "OK, you're going to New York." You just totally try to pump that area. He knew that area and he knew beer. So he pushed the [Green] Monsta' on the Red Sox bars as a total Yankees defiance.

DCB:What are you guys looking to do beer wise next?
Dave: No new beers on the horizon right now, we're not trying to put out 22 different kinds of beer. We have 3 brewers and we brew 15K barrels a year and there's just not a lot of time for R&D. We don't have a pilot system; when we brewed the Monsta' we just worked on it and worked on it and we just sort of said, "All right, lets try it." We don't really do test batches, we just go balls out and go for it, but we have a really smart core with Howie and they know what they want. They have a concept, IBUs, color, sweetness and we just tweak things as we go. Each time we tweak our beers just a little bit. Its never going to be perfect but we get it where we want it to be. It can be tough to keep up with the extreme beers. We make balanced beers and it's something we're very proud of. We're just trying to make what we have better.

DCB: Speaking of extreme beer, where do you see that trend going?
Dave: My opinion is its not going to stick around, everything has a time line. Extreme beer is something they're pushing right now. You can thank Dogfish Head for that, but that's what made them and that's something to be proud of. You're starting to get brew pubs that are pushing that and they're winning gold medals for it. But everything reaches its peak and then it comes down a bit. I mean you can only pack so many IBUs in a beer before you can't taste it anymore. And then that beer is gonna become $9 and no one is going to buy it. And, actually, our Monsta' is close to the top selling growler fill, and that's our big beer, it's a big pale ale. We're a pale ale crew here. I think you guys are starting to see a lot of balanced beers, there could be a total new trend. Who ten years ago saw that we'd have a double super duper IPA? That 120 (DogFish Head 120 Minute IPA), nobody would have thought of that. It will carry a while but there's some very ingenious people out there and they're just going to come up with something new and take our market in a new direction. That's the best part of being in this industry, you never know where it's going. It only takes one guy and then a trend starts.

I don't like the term beer geek, those are my friends and none of them are geeks. They are trash men and mechanics and they don't know anything about beer but they know what they like and they don't want to drink Budweiser. Those are the guys I kinda look to. And they're starting get bored with the idea of extreme beer.

DCB: Craft Beer is growing, is it now becoming a threat to companies like Budweiser and how do you think that affects the market?
Dave: The deal with Redhook, the guy did what they needed to do to keep the company going and they still make a great product. I don't like the concept of the big guys coming in and buying companies just to keep up. But sometimes it could be a good thing for that particular company as long as they leave that company alone. They want that segment, though, they see there's profit there and they can undersell someone like us, so it could be a detrimental thing. The big guys have to to make something middle of the road that appeals to everyone and that's not good for craft beer. There's a lot of breweries popping up though.

It's guys like you two trying to educate people and get the word out. That's why it was so important for me to have you guys come out here. You're dedicated and you do what you can to make it happen. You guys keep the ball rolling, we make the beer, we try to make the beer and you guys help us market that whole segment. There's a lot of websites out there that have something negative to say and you guys just put out there as what it was. You guys seem like, this is what we saw of it, plain and simple.

DCB Note: At this time the president of the company, Ned LaFortune, stops by the brewery.

Above: Custom built mash tun

DCB: Its really interesting how you guys made your own brewing equipment we've never seen anything like that.
Ned: Yeah I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's been working for 13 years. We get 93% efficiency. We bought that tank that was gonna be the kettle, we didn't have a kettle and we're like, "Well this is gonna be an awesome kettle." We were going to upright it put some legs on it and cut the top. And for some reason, we were looking at it and we were thinking about it. We found another tank for a kettle, and we just designed it and thought about it. The false bottom is just a screen, a well screen, we went down to a well store and bought a screen. And its that efficient now and we never get a stuck sparge. We actually have two other screens that we're going to add to get a bigger surface area. We started the company with virtually nothing. The three of us got into this to make beer, not to make money.

DCB: As you scale up, your capacity is going to max out how are looking to expand?
Ned: It's going to happen in stages. We have another kettle that's almost ready to go, that's going to give us a much greater boiling capacity. We've been keeping an eye out for a 50 barrel mash tun, but I think we're gonna jump another step. We also have a 120 barrel system that's in storage... it's a huge copper Zieman system from Germany, 1951. And we're going to re-engineer that to operate in here. It has a 14 foot diameter mash vessel. We're looking to build a 25K square foot brewery right there(lot behind current facility). So the packing plant, warehouse and distribution will all move out there. And we'll run conduit under the ground and then the beer will be pumped over to be packaged. We're thinking about building a glass room and putting the Zieman out in front of the building.

We've had 10 years of consistent 15-20% growth. We do charge a premium price for our beer, and we could be more competitive if we discounted, but we've actually increased the price a little to slow the growth. We don't have the capacity yet so that's the reality.

It's great, I think it's great what you guys are doing, its what we used to do, just get to know the industry.

(At this point Ned went to get "supplies" for his camping trip for the weekend.)

For more information on Wachusett Brewing Co. visit their website here: http://www.wachusettbrew.com/