Within our first six or eight months, the tap room license became available and we've
been scrambling ever since to try to build a tap room.
What we're doing here really is very closely related to the work on the farm.
It was ever part of the business model to have an area here where we're open frequently.
We can bring people in, serve beer on site.
It didn't even occur to me not to have a tap room.
It was just obvious to me that we'd want to have the tourist traffic flowing through
here, but we are in a fairly remote location.
It's a little bit more challenging to get people to come out.
It's usually those who enjoy a crap beer and they're seeking us out and they'll come in.
This is a variety of different ways to grow craft breweries.
In the big picture, I think it's right that there are a number of different ways to go
back.
Oh yeah, it helps, doesn't it?
So here we are, sitting in the middle of the Longfellow neighborhood, you know, great
location next to the light rail, on bus lines, bikeable, a lot of really, really cool businesses
on Lake Street.
Oh yeah.
I'm confident that this little triangle that we got here is going to be one of the hippest
spots in the city.
It's good for the morale of the city too, I think.
It's contagious.
Having grown up and getting in Colorado, I've always considered Walker to be the bale of
Minnesota, all the things that you can do here.
The summer turns are very busy in Walker.
It's just a fun place to be right by the lake.
It's just a really, really fun place to be year-round, but in particular summertime.
I just like to do what we do well.
You know, I'm just striving to achieve a really, really good British-style ale.
I like British-style ales because they're more balanced.
We're striving to achieve balance across the board with all our beers.
Now what was your focus on the Belgian beers, why?
I was captivated by the complexity of those beers and everything that they had to offer,
so it became interesting to me to try to replicate them.
But the challenge I like better is, here's my raw material this year.
What can I make that's really good?
Part of my philosophy with brewing in general is to use as much of what you have available
to you in the way that it's available to you.
You should expect to have an estate beer from here, using herbs that we've grown, using
barley that we grew in our fields that was at least partly fertilized with waste from
the brewery.
I expect our beer to be consumed immediately, but there is one of our beers in particular.
It's quite exceptional for selling, and that would be our Three Sheets Imperial IPA.
We do several things to make sure that our beer sellers pretty well.
One of those is the bottle conditioning.
We worked up the Westside recipe in like two or three months.
It took us like a month and a half or two just to come up with a damn name.
Love Child.
Yeah, that's what it was going to be.
Harriet's Love Child.
Harriet's Love Child.
I was really pleased with the way Westside turned out because it was like nothing was
being left behind.
It does it well.
It does it well.
The two primary groups of flavors that I try to emphasize are the cereal and the fermentation.
I've had zero problems with the Nottingham dry ale yeast that I use across the board.
Very good for English styles.
I like to get the flavors from the grain and the hops, not so much from funky esters
in the yeast.
I want those esters and those spicy flavors that we get from the fermentation, from the
yeast management, to sustain in the beer.
The Westside is a Belgian IPA, which is a European beer.
The malts that we choose to use, the way we choose to brew it, the yeast that we put into
the beer.
But then all the hops, pungent, sticky icky, characteristic West Coast hops.
So Westside Belgian style, and it worked.
Yeah, it did.
It did.
It worked.
It did.
It did.
It did.
It did.
