It's like Americans just woke up and said oh geez you know what we're
missing out a little bit because people like flavor we made a conscious
decision when we started we're gonna try stuff that may work it may not and
have fun with it I'm Jason Abel and I'm Jim Abel we're the co-founders of two
brothers brewing company craft beer is crafted beer there are so many varieties
of raw ingredients that we can use that the possibilities of a finished product
are just limitless we've always tried to make balanced beers I think that a lot
of a lot of brewers will be caught up in this thing where they want to brew a
beer that's 18% alcohol or they want to brew the world's happiest beer or
there's just all these extremes and we really try to back away from that make
sure that our products are very well balanced so there's a great creative
outlet there but it's also very technical there's a lot of precision that
has to go into it and a lot of science we believe in flavor forward products the
level of ingredients that somebody uses I think is super important in adding
flavor a brewer's ability to manipulate those ingredients towards brewing
things that are bigger bolder more exciting
you know that foam on there yeah that's the reaction that's searches in the
barley converting into sugar so that means it's happy it's doing what it's
supposed to do right there are guidelines put out by the brewers
association of what a paleo should be what an IPA should be what an amber ale
should be we never look at those we have an idea of what the styles about and we
always want to put our own signature on the style so it's a great marriage
between those two things and it's absolutely a craft it's absolutely an
art
It all really started when I was a kid, I was a kid, I was a kid, I was a kid, I was
in college, I studied abroad, and was able to travel a lot, and really fell in love
with the concept of what beer is in Europe, which is a lot different than it was in America
at the time. It was the mid-80s, there wasn't anything going on in the American craft
brew scene.
Every Sunday we'd have family dinner, and all we do is talk about beer and brewing,
and it was really our mother who said, finally, you guys either need to shut up or open a
brewery because you're driving me mad. So we did.
True story. Blame it on mom.
It's easy that way.
We've always managed to work it out and get along, I guess, I guess it's Jason's coolness,
his level-headedness.
You can actually see that he understands that now, it's taken him a long time, but he gets
it. So that's important.
So I heard you guys had a secret lab upstairs.
Sorta, we have a real lab upstairs that does all the quality control for our product. We
have two people in the lab that, you know, on a daily basis are checking out everything
that we do and checking shelf life of product and things like that. But there's a secret
division to that lab. Yeah, absolutely.
Can we see it?
No. But you can see the tank that the beer is in.
It goes back to the creativity and the art of the product. You know, it's rather than
trying to maybe duplicate or mimic something. I think it's more fun to make something up.
Sometimes it's after several pints of beer, and you know, you come up with some stupid
idea. Oh yeah, that'd be great. But it didn't quite work out the way you planned it. But
that's the fun part. That is the artisan aspect of what we do, and we do love that.
People have just become accustomed to different flavors, and they want to experiment. They
want to try different things.
I think there's also that aspect of going back to being local. Supporting your local
business, having a local association, and they take pride in that.
You know, that's one of the things that really allured me to beer in Europe. You know, the
fact that it was about community, and it was about families enjoying meals together, and
it wasn't the, you know, the yellow fizzy stuff that dad drank during a football game,
and otherwise you didn't see it. It was part of their culture and part of their community.
And I think bringing that back to the community is awesome.
We've got a long, long ride ahead of us, I think. Overall, craft beer accounts for
about 5% of total beer consumption, so when you think of it that way, you know, we're
still in our infancy. You know, I couldn't think of having a better partnership than
what we have right now.
Of all the drinkers that are out there right now, we've barely touched them. We have, like,
a generation of people that have grown up with craft beer. And that generation is still
very young, but we also have their kids and their grandkids to work on after that that
are going to grow up in that same environment where there's variety in what they're drinking
and eating like there's never has been in America before. So can we get, like, a parting
shot where we're duking it out and you can use that for, like, an action shot? You can
get a, we can break a glass and you can get a final shot of the broken glass on the floor.
It did not turn out well.
Thank you.
