Ladies and gentlemen, Black Hatter.
I like it.
I haven't even tasted it yet.
Welcome back to the Happy Hour, guys, and welcome back to a tradition that goes back
to 2008, looking back on all the places we've been in the past 12 months.
2013 was another bang-up year, and in support of that, with this year-end episode, we're
going to give you even more of what you want.
We started a documentary series this year called Beer Trapure Nours, in which we ask
questions of people out there that we feel are really movers and shakers in the craft
beer industry.
We ask the same questions to everyone, and we got a variety of really cool answers.
We'll begin this retrospective where we began the new year, in our home city of New York.
So let's get started.
Here's a look back at 2013 and Beer Heroes.
Welcome to our ongoing series, and I left that open because we have entitled it, but
I'd like to call it Beer Trapure Nours.
Mark, I'm going to hand the microphone over to you, and we'll ask the first of our many
questions.
Here we go.
All right, so let's talk about who your heroes are in the beer industry.
I think akin to music, they're all dead.
So Michael Jackson at the first and foremost, because his writing style was really just
so approachable for everybody, regardless of your actual interest in the product.
However, the depth of knowledge was always present, so every Michael Jackson book, be
it any of the beer books or the whiskey book or any other, you want to have every page
of it soak into your brain.
So the only way to do that, obviously, is to drink a ton of beer.
So there's that book.
He opened it up for everybody.
I mean, he really did.
He opened it up.
He kind of made the conversation start for so many people.
He started from a bar level and took it from there, and he wanted input.
He spoke to people.
He didn't speak to this generation of beer snobs.
Beer snobs aren't happy people.
They looked out on everybody.
Beer gigs is one thing.
Beer snobs are ignorant people.
They should not be in bars.
They should be put in a corner somewhere.
Beer is about sharing.
Sharing your experience.
I never, ever open a good bottle on my own, unless I'm surrounded by good people that
want to share this and talk about this beer.
Beer snobs to me piss me off.
I don't want to see them.
I want to share my beer.
I want to talk good about it.
I don't want to introduce other people that don't know about this beer to this beer.
It's the most important thing for craft beer in America right now, is to share that experience
and let people know about it.
And what Corey was saying, Michael Jackson, is the guy that started this up with just
culture and bar culture and appreciating good beer, and that's what's most important
to everybody.
And you know what?
It's beer.
It's way better than what it used to be.
It's amazing right now, and it's like, I love the passion of it.
It gets me excited, and I just want everybody to share this, and that's why I try to do
what I do in New York, to introduce new beer to new people, and get them to experience
full of experience, because it's exciting, and I love it.
There's definitely love and skill in equal measure in craft beer, and every brewer has
their heroes, as we found out at Single Cut in Astoria Queens.
This is one of my favorite parts of every brewery.
Every brewery has their own little stash of things that they love that aren't even, that
are not necessarily their beers, but- I'll have to highlight Hedy Topper, which I'll
go on record as saying is, in my opinion, the best American beer, and one of the best
worldwide beers.
I don't think it gets any better for Imperial IPA.
Present companies, Imperial IPA excluded, of course, but that's a phenomenal beer.
And this is another part of the brewing community that we love so much, is it's a community.
You're not shy or afraid to throw accolades and compliments to each other, you're all
in it together.
Yeah, absolutely, and hey, credit where credit's due.
These guys are amazing brewers, they're making fantastic beer, and I only aspire to be brewing
stuff on their level, so they've certainly influenced me to a great degree.
My hero, I guess, as I cut my teeth, as a brewer, has always been Sierra Nevada.
I think that Sierra Nevada is a great brewery, they've never misstepped, they do everything
to the nth degree of quality, regardless of the scale that they've taken on, the beer
has never sacrificed, they've never cut any corners, and I think torpedo is one of the
best IPAs out there, it's a great beer.
As far as who are my heroes today, that's easy again for me to answer, it's a couple
of the great breweries in Vermont.
I think they're making the best beer in the United States right now, Alchemist and Hill
Farmstead.
All the rules are going out the window, like everybody, oh no, you can't use dry yeast,
oh no, you can't fill it, yes you can, you can do whatever you want, and America's leading
the way in that, you're not beholden to the way styles have always been, and you can experiment,
you can innovate.
I've always said that the U.S. of A is the best beer producing country in the world,
you know we're not, you're absolutely right, we're not beholden to any, you know, 500 year
tradition of doing X, Y, and Z, we're doing whatever we want, as long as the results are
great then it's all good.
So in Astoria, heroes because of innovation, but at Idol Hands Bar, maybe just a little
closer to home.
Honestly, my beer icon would be my dad, really, my dad didn't know that much about beer,
like he didn't give me any education, he didn't like teach me about anything, but he had this
passion for it, that like, he liked being drunk, come on, that's fine, but like my dad
basically was stationed in Germany in the force, and this was in like the 50s and 60s,
and so craft beer kind of didn't exist then, but he went to Germany and was like, oh my
god, you know, I've been drinking Jenny Light, you know, since I was 16, Pennsylvania, this
is terrible, like here's all these great beers like marzins and vices, and like he came home
and he couldn't get that, so he's always on the search to like find cool beer, or better
beer, and so that had like a huge influence on me, other than that, when I went to college,
school in Michigan State, Lansing, Michigan, I started to get like going into bars, and
they would have like Red Dog, Ice House, Miller, LaBats, Coors, and I would drive them and
I'd literally be like, oh god, why do people like this, I don't understand, like what is
the attraction, and so I started home brewing, I was like, there's gotta be, wait, because
we weren't getting sold a lot of craft beer at that point, so I was like, I'm gonna go
find out how to make it, and so I had a friend who bought a beer making kit, and that was
our Saturday afternoon exploit, a bunch of us would go to his house and we would brew
beer every Saturday and like, oh, what do you want to make, I don't know, what's an
up brown ale, I don't know, we can't find it in Michigan, let's just make one, so it
would probably be my dad, and then Jason Jones, who bought the first beer kit, so.
Is there a particular brewery coming up, or a particular brewer, maybe in the last 10,
20 years, that was really like, wow, that person's changing the game?
Larry Bell, Bell's from Michigan, I mean that was like the first time that craft beer penetrated
the bars I was hanging out, but Bell's was the first craft brewery where they were like,
I was like, oh finally, a beer, this is good, this is good, like more of this, definitely
Larry Bell.
Does anybody know where Shorts Brewing is?
2013 also brought another first for us, the opportunity to headline a month-long craft
beer and burger tour, courtesy of our friends at Bagger Dave's legendary burger tavern.
Over the course of four weeks, we shot at 10 breweries and hosted 10 events at Bagger
Dave's stores in Michigan and Indiana, and it was awesome.
Here's a montage of some of the places we visited, and some of the events we threw.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Downtown Detroit, this is Rebecca Raver, the vice president
for marketing for a diversified restaurant holding, did I get that right?
You did?
Yeah.
Yay.
And we are journeying into the future.
This is something that hasn't even happened yet, and yet we're here, we're already there.
This is going to give you a great idea of what this location is going to be carrying in terms
of local craft beer.
Let's have a look.
Good luck Amina, there you go.
So cheers everyone, drink well, to dirty water beer, drink well, drink well, do good.
This year it was one of those where we had the hops to do exactly what we did, and the
public just ate it all.
They're sort of taking things you already know and putting them into the stratosphere,
and also introducing things you might never have heard of before, making it Le Bon, and
making it Le Bon.
I love that, making it Le Bon.
That's what we're doing.
If you could smell what we could smell, you'd be as happy as we are.
I've said it before, I'll say it again, it's like having a three-year-old, really big three-year-old.
It's all about, you know, kicking ass and taking names, you know, we want to make the
best beer on planet Earth and get it to the people, so.
What's the trivia about Berkeley in the Berkeley script?
Fred Goldstein invented the curveball in 1870.
Oh, right!
What was your revelation just now?
Even the lettuce tastes better after drinking the beer.
It's alive!
Beer is a living thing.
You need to know that.
Beer is a living, breathing, spitting thing.
We would be remiss without saying thank you, first of all, for Bagger Dave's hosting tonight.
So I'm just going to go ahead and drink this beer, because it's really pretty.
And sharing all of their amazing beers with everyone tonight, so.
And of course, thank you, Sun King!
Yes, Sun King Brew!
Another one of our favorite stops this year was hanging out with the good folks of Barrier
Brewing at Oceanside, New York.
We were there to talk about them getting back up from, basically, a knockout punch from
Hurricane Sandy, but we learned a whole lot about their heroes as well.
Who were the people that you looked up to in the brewing industry that were doing things
that you respected and maybe wanted to emulate or at least took inspiration from?
Well, I'd say that the very first craft beer that I ever had was Magic Hat, Fat Angel,
and I was actually, it was my first fish tour that I was participating in, in high school.
Why do I feel like there are a lot of brewers that have similar stories?
And if you've ever been a part of this scene, you go to the show several hours before to
kind of take it all in, to meet people, to mingle, and everyone's kind of selling their
goods.
There's a whole little market there of people selling crafts and food, including craft beers.
When this guy approached us, Sandy had this really cool micro brew from Vermont and wanted
to know if we were interested in a bottle.
He was selling it one for three bucks or two for five, so we jumped on the bargain.
We just cracked open a beer and I had never tasted, I thought I knew beer.
This thing was just like an explosion of bitterness and maltiness.
At the time, I didn't even really know how to articulate those flavors because I'd never
tasted them before, but that was kind of it.
That was, that's what sparked me into really kind of getting into the flavor profiles of
beer and what they had to offer.
If you fast forward probably about like six years or so, in college, I studied abroad in
London and I lived there for a year and I got into the real ales, the cask beers and going
to the pubs and just kind of part of that pub ritual of going there after work, drinking
these low ABV beers purely for the flavor and for the social aspect of talking and hanging
out not in any way to get drunk because you need to drink 20 of those things to do that.
You get a whiskey or something like that if that's what you're going for.
So again, that kind of reminded me about this whole concept of appreciating beers for the
craft, the flavor, the passion that goes into it.
So when I came back from there, that's when I jumped into home brewing.
Who was doing stuff that really, really just sort of got your imagination?
I think similar to Craig, like some of the first craft beers I had weren't necessarily
beers that were, well, when I went away to college, like 98, 99, started drinking some
Sarenac beers because I went up to school, up to college in Plattsburg so that was a local
micro brew up there and then it kind of just, I started getting some Lake Placid beers and
then started having some experience with stone brewing and probably the ruination, some of
the really hoppy beers, flavors I've never had before.
Those were the beers that then kind of propelled me to start home brewing.
I had a friend that went to Hawaii on his honeymoon.
He came back and I think it was like 2006, went to Kona Brewing, went on a tour, fell
in love with the whole, you know, fell in love with the brewery, came back and I guess
one of the tour guides was talking about home brew kits so he said, we got to order this
kit.
So we did, we started making beer and they came out relatively good.
You could drink them.
They weren't, you know, severely contaminated.
And the cool thing, you know, you get, and you go to buzz and it was, it was just really
a cool process that you could, you could make this, this liquid and then, you know, obviously
not the first ones to discover this, but just fell in love with it.
You know, so then we started developing my own, you know, own recipes, fine tuning them
and then it's actually where I met both of these guys at a six point brewery.
We all worked there together.
Everyone there was, it was a home brewer.
That was like part of the prerequisite for getting the job there.
And you know, we'd bring our home brews in, everyone wanted to taste them, you know, give
their advice input.
So kind of we all, we're just in addition to working on a commercial level, which is,
we all feel is invaluable to, you know, starting your own brewery.
You know, we would all just have, we were all home brewing as well and experimenting
and fine tuning recipes and so at the same time, formulating a business plan to get this
place up and going.
So what I want to ask is, do you, do you, what is the most underappreciated beer style
out there?
Now I'll give you a minute to think of your answer.
Maybe it's a beer style that you really want to brew, but the most underappreciated beer
style out there, I'm going to go one, two, three, and you all say it at the same time.
Let's see if it's the same style.
Be really interested.
Ready?
One, two, what?
Still thinking?
You got it?
All right.
Ready?
One, two, three.
All right, so that's actually, I think, a really, really good thing because that means
that everybody's got stuff they want to work on here, which means more recipes, more beers
coming.
See, and that's, that's, you can always tell when, when brewers are, are creators when
they, you know, when they're using their imagination and they're finding inspiration
other places because, and that's what we taste in your beer every time is that somebody
had an idea and it made it all the way into the glass, so the, the, that's the kind of
brewery that we find inspiring.
We could never do what you guys do.
We wish we could, but we can appreciate it.
And we appreciate it whenever we possibly can.
You know, people often ask us, why don't you guys brew?
And we feel that that's basically akin to saying, you appreciate guitar music.
Why don't you pick up a guitar and play it like a virtuoso?
The truth is brewing is an art form as much as it is science.
And another place where they are pushing the boundaries of that art form, Sun King Brewing
in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Here's one of their founders, Clay Robinson.
His hero story has to do with a chance meeting of a guy who happened to become his business
partner.
Right as I was getting out of college, I had fallen in love with craft beer and I used
to get kegs for parties from Circle B Brewing Company, which was on the north side of Indian
apolis.
Right.
And the guy who would help me load kegs into the car is now my partner, Dave Polk.
So I would get kegs, he would help me load them in, and a couple of years after college
I started brewing downtown at Rock Bottom Indianapolis.
About a year or so into that, the Ram downtown opened and I went to meet the brewers and
the assistant brewer was that same guy who used to load kegs in my car.
And we had this, like, aha, like, you look familiar, yeah, you.
So we went back and forth and we became fast friends and we'd drink beer at the end of
a work week together.
And from 2005 to 2008, we ran the Ram brewery together.
And during that time we started a conversation which was, what would you do if you could
open your own brewery?
And along in the short of the three plus years of planning and then the year that took me
to write the business plan, get investment, let's get open, along in the short answer
is this.
Here it is.
Ta-da!
For some brewers, it's about where they started brewing and how the region might have an influence
on their taste in beer.
Case in point, Chief O'Neill, peak skill brewing.
I started brewing in the Bay Area in the late 90s.
The first brewery I ever worked at was the 20 tank in San Francisco.
I worked in the kitchen there and they let us play around clean lines for the best brewery
and the better manual labor.
From there I worked at the Gordon Beers production brewery in San Jose.
And then I worked at Jupiter and Drake's East Bay, which were, Drake's was one of the first
breweries in the Bay Area, grass breweries, originally known as Lynne Brewing.
And then in 2002, my wife and I moved from the Bay Area to Ipica and I worked at Ipica
beer for nine years and then we moved down here, we moved here about a year ago.
Sometimes a region affects a brewery in a totally different way.
This is Brewery Vivante in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
It all begins with a trip, right?
So I always love the Belgium styles of beer.
It's a very like mysterious beer.
As much as you have beer knowledge, there's still something mysterious about how all that
comes together.
It's really, it's all about the yeast character of beer.
And a trip over to Europe, we visited all, my wife and I went there, we visited all these
little small countryside breweries in Belgium and France, none of them that anyone's ever
heard of before.
People drink the beer in this one village, you go two lodges over, they've never heard
of the brewery you just drank from because they all focus on those.
But they're all these wonderful, very characteristic, kind of rustic.
We call them farmhouse beers, you know a lot of times they're unfiltered, there's sometimes
sour characters to the beers.
But we fell in love with them and that's what we wanted to do when we came back here.
Another amazing facet of the craft beer industry is how it really crosses all barriers as we
found out at Union Craft Brewing in Baltimore, Maryland.
You know, the beer that brought me into craft beer was Pete's Wicked Winter Ale.
Whoa!
Yeah, so I love the Winter Ale, so that's a beer that's like, you know, near to my heart.
But pretty much I like drinking any kind of beer, you know, there's always a perfect time
for some sort of beer, you know, whether it be a colch after cutting the glass or a stout
in the middle of winter, or stout in the middle of summer, you know, so there's no real favorite
beer of mine.
I just really like whatever I can get my hands on and drink.
John and I are both doing a play at Center Stage right now that has to do with race.
And you know what?
There aren't a lot of black brewers out there.
What's that like for you?
Well, you know, what's funny, though, is that like the authoritative brewer in America
that most people turn to for stuff is Garrett Oliver, you know?
So there's Garrett Oliver, there's Mustafa, Michael Ferguson out in California for BJs.
So we're here, we're around, you know, but there aren't, but there'll be more I think
as craft beer becomes more diverse.
Craft beer is, for the most part, is very colorblind, and that's a good thing, and it's
also a bad thing.
So you know, nobody refers to Garrett Oliver as a black brewer, he's just Garrett Oliver,
you know?
But at the same point, there's not much advertising in craft beer, there's not much reach out,
so it's all kind of word of mouth.
And since the majority of the craft brewers and craft beer owners are white, there's
not much reach out to other groups.
I think that's in advance we have here.
You know, when I said right open my own brewery, we're going to reach out to different neighborhoods
and to different populations.
So that's something we've tried to do.
So I guess a perfect way to end this episode would be to talk about our heroes.
Truth is, anyone who works in the craft industry is a hero to us, because brewers make great
neighbors.
And all the folks that we've featured in this episode, we have incredible and deep respect
for, but none put it quite as succinctly as John Kimmick at the Alchemist Brewery in
Waterbury, Vermont.
So here's a little wisdom from John, and here's to 2014.
We'll see you guys next time.
Cheers.
And we've got to be a good human being to begin with, you know, there's a lot of degenerates
in the world and there's a lot of people that really, really think only of themselves, whether
they fool themselves into thinking otherwise.
And you know, I mean, that kind of, that's like deep shit, man, you know, you start thinking
about who you are as a human and what you want to leave behind, you know, do you want
to just be anonymous and squeak through and leave nothing behind or do you want to have
some sort of greater impact, you know, not going to change the world, but boy, if you
can make an amazing change in an employee's life that's been popping around job to job
and all of a sudden you have created a job that they take pride in and have fun at and
can see themselves doing till they retire, you know, I mean, what a better thing.
I mean, Jen and I have found our passion in life and have gone after it and have achieved
so much with it.
How can you spread that around, you know, how can you give that feeling to other people?
Because so many people are like, I don't know what I want to be, you try all different
things and a lot of people never find their niche, you know, so if we can help them find
a niche and make that niche more, I mean, that's a very satisfying thing for sure.
New Holland Brewing.
We're on campus.
We are.
Time to go back to beer school.
It is.
Oh, here comes the bus.
Cut.
Print.
Print.
We're not here.
We're not here.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Ha, ha, ha.
Ha, ha, ha.
