Category Archives: Bars, Breweries, & Brewpubs

Write-ups and reviews of beer bars, breweries, and brewpubs.

2011 GABF Interview with Brett Porter of Goose Island Beer Co.

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Brett Porter, the Brewmaster at Goose Island Beer Co. has had a busy tenure. He came to the company from Deschutes in late 2009 as Head Brewer. Within a couple of months co-founder and former Brewmaster Greg Hall had announced his resignation to go into the cider business and Porter found himself at the helm of one of the Midwest’s largest craft breweries. Shortly thereafter Goose Island was sold to ABInbev, a move that drew heavy criticism from many in the beer world. It was a lot for the new guy to take on.

So far, the ABInbev merger hasn’t changed the beer coming out of Goose Island. It has allowed them to expand production of their Vintage series and invest in equipment to insure better and more consistent results in their Brettanomyces-fermented beers. Porter has instituted an intensive program of research into the workings of this “wild” yeast strain, which to me is fascinating stuff. Porter talks at length about that research in this interview, as well as about his efforts to include the entire staff of the brewery in the creative process. A warning, this one gets pretty geeky.

2011 GABF Interview with Brandon Wright of Hamburger Mary’s in Chicago

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Hamburger Mary’s Brew & Grill is located in the heart of the Andersonville neighborhood (a.k.a. boystown) on Chicago’s North Side. It’s a very diverse neighborhood full of unique shops, exotic restaurants, and fun bars. It happens also to be the home of the famous Hop Leaf Belgian beer bar, which is just a few steps down the street from Mary’s.

Owner and brewer Brandon Wright is crafting some unique beers (peanut butter porter anyone?) on what is basically a large scale homebrew system. The mash and boil are handled on a ten-burner commercial stove in the prep kitchen. Wort is hauled to the fermenting cellar in buckets. He calls his brews “Mary’s homebrew.” Are the beers great? Well no, but they’re not terrible either. And the ambience of the place more than makes up for any shortcomings. The main dining room is colorful and kitchy. One might even say “Fabulous.” Two other spaces in the Mary’s complex include a sports bar and a nightclub where they do what they call “Maryoke.”

As they say at Mary’s, “Eat, Drink, and be Mary.”

GABF 2011 Interivew with Pete Crowley of Haymarket Pub & Brewery

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The 2012 Great American Beer Fest (GABF) is only a few weeks away. I though I might celebrate that fact by finally posting some of the video interviews we shot at last year’s festival. I’ll kick it off with an interview with Pete Crowley, Brewmaster at the Haymarket Pub & Brewery in Chicago.

I first met Pete in 2009. I had passed the Certified Cicerone exam just a few months before and saw Cicerone Certification Program founder Ray Daniels chatting with someone across the bar at the Goose Island Clybourn Brewpub. That someone was Pete Crowley, who at the time was head brewer at the Chicago Rock Bottom. During our conversation I made the mistake of referencing “house beers” at the Rock Bottom Chain. At that time – unbeknownst to me – the Rock Bottom chain had no system-wide house beers. The brewer at each location had nearly total control of what they brewed. Having revealed my ignorance, Pete proceeded to roundly dress me down for at least 10 minutes.

Fast forward to 2011. I’m in Chicago doing a two-month theatre residency with men in a halfway house on Chicago’s West Side. I happened also to be doing brewery visits for my upcoming (at some point, I promise) Upper-Midwest Brewery Guide. Haymarket had just opened, and happened to be within walking distance of the halfway house. Needless to say, I was a frequent visitor. I had the opportunity to engage in many, more-civil conversations with Pete and to share a few beers along the way. Haymarket quickly became – along with Goose Island Clybourn – my second “Chicago office.”

Old Chicago Gold Medal Mini Tour

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Truth be told, I don’t go to Old Chicago all that often. But they send me notices of each new mini-tour and every once in a while one will catch my attention – pique my curiosity. And so it was that the current one found me sitting at the Roseville location sampling beers.

Until August 19th, Old Chicago is featuring the Olympic-season-appropriate Gold Medal Mini Tour. The 8-beer tour is made up entirely of beers that have recently gone for the Gold in major national or international competition. This theme makes for an interesting and varied lineup. Remember that all of these competitions have Light American Lagers categories in addition to those for the more flavorful and funky brews. The Old Chicago selection of award-winners reflects that variety. At Roseville (three beers in the list vary from store to store) the list encompasses Michelob Ultra as well as Stone Cali-Belgique.

I didn’t sample the whole flight, as for some of them there was really no need. But here is the full list with notes for those that I did try.

Blue Moon Belgian White Ale

Michelob Ultra – Believe it or not, I had never tasted Michelob Ultra. I don’t tend to spend much energy on light beers. So it was with a certain amount of excitement that I raised the sampler to my lips. How do they make it so sweet when all the carbs are removed? It’s a mystery – a marvel of modern brewing science. And of course there was the green apple note that is the signature of AB products. I could see this being okay on a hot summer day if it is really ice cold. People are always complaining that beers like this win medals. Remember, the big-boys invented the category. Whether  or not you like the styles – or the breweries – they make them better than anyone else.

Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen – It had been over a decade since I had a Widmer Wheat. This is another hot-weather quencher. Crisp and dry with wheaty sharpness, it differs from other American wheat beers in its inclusion of subtle banana and clove yeast character. This could make a tasty everyday fridge beer. Nothing taxing, but tasty all the same.

Leinenkugel’s Berry Weiss

Schneider Weisse Tap 7 Original – This beer has won a ton of awards, and for good reason. It’s a great beer. It’s not called a dunkelweizen, but has many of the characteristics of one, including a dark-amber coloring. The sharp wheatiness is there. The full, yet light-bodied mouthfeel is there. Yeasty banana and clove are present, but not dominant. It’s rounded out by delicious caramel and dark fruit flavors with a touch of chocolate in the finish. Delightful! I just had to finish the bottle. Couldn’t let good beer go to waste.

Summit Extra Pale Ale

Stone Cali-Belgique IPA – Sometimes beers evoke images in my mind. While drinking this beer I could see the elegantly sleek outlines of modern industrial design; horizontal stonework, hanging light fixtures, exposed ventilation in the ceiling, and occasional flashes of corrugated steel. It’s bitter, but not the tongue scraper that I would expect from Stone. Peppery phenolics from Belgian yeast offer a nice complement to the spicy hops. A slight citrus edge adds bright highlights. The finish is clean and super-dry. This is an elegant beer.

Red Hook ESB – Another beer that I haven’t tasted in over a decade, this one took me back to the 90s when I lived in Chicago and waited tables at a restaurant in Evanston. It was a go-to craft beer at the time. Its reputation has faded since. It starts sharply bitter and then evolves to a caramel/toffee center. Bitterness lingers after swallowing. There was an intense fruitiness here; oranges and tangerines. It surprised us all. I don’t remember that strong fruitiness, but after more than 10 years, how much can I really remember of the taste of this beer?

New Old Chicago Debuts in Eden Prairie – And It Is Good

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I recently got a press release from Old Chicago about doings at the Eden Prairie store. I frequently get press releases from Old Chicago. Some are more interesting to me than others. This one got my attention. While the release didn’t give the whole scope of what was happening, it suggested that the Eden Prairie location was the beta for a nationwide re-do of the chain; new food, new design, and most importantly to me a new beer list. There was also something about Cicerone Certified bartenders. My curiosity was piqued.

You’ve been to Old Chicago, right? It’s that pizza joint with the 1980s decor and the World Beer Tour. They have a big beer list – 30-some taps and a bunch of bottles – but fully a third of the list is standard American lagers. There’s little chance the staff will be able to tell you much about the beer they are pouring. Hopefully the draft lines are clean.  You go there because you know you’ll find a decent beer, but the experience is always somewhat underwhelming.

This press release suggested all of that was about to change. To get to the bottom of things I talked to Mark Newman, the person in charge of beer and spirits for the chain. “When Old Chicago opened in 1976,” he told me, “we had 110 beers. People thought we were crazy. It wasn’t easy to get 110 beers back then, so we brought in all of these imports. Old Chicago introduced the whole idea of the beer-centric restaurant.” Over the years helped launch some of today’s top craft brands. Old Chicago was one of the first to pour New Belgium. According to Newman Odell’s first account was at Old Chicago. But somewhere in the 1990s he says, the chain lost its way. Now they’re trying to get that old vibe back.

Photo from Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal

Newman gets audibly excited when talking about the changes. You can tell he’s genuinely passionate about what they’re doing, which is just short of a total re-do. The cluttered-casual 1980s design has been scrapped in favor of a sleek, modern look; minimalist almost. The menu was gone over from the bottom up. They worked with chefs from the Chicago-based Lettuce Entertain You group on the culinary redesign. Old items were dropped, new ones were added, and everything is made in-house, from scratch.

But it was the beer aspect that interested me. The changes on the beer side encompass both selection and service. In terms of selection, Newman says they considered a couple of options; the Flying Saucer model with hundreds of taps and bottles or a more-focused model with a smaller selection. They opted for the latter, choosing in his words “quality over quantity.” The new restaurant has 36 taps and maybe twice that number of bottles. Of those taps 24 are craft rotators and only three to four taps are given over to what they are calling “US Classics.” As Newman explained, “There is a market for those beers and we will always sell them, but we don’t need eight of them.” One of the most exciting changes to the beer selection is a focus on local. Newman says they want every Old Chicago store to reflect its location, and that means always having several beers available from local brewers.

Changes on the service side include both the way beer is served and the knowledge of the staff that serves it. As part of the Eden Prairie re-make they tore out the old draft equipment and replaced it with a brand new state-of-the-art system. With the exception of branded specialty glasses, they have replaced all the glassware so that beer is served in an appropriate style, non-frozen glass; no more icy shaker pints. Beer-clean glassware is especially important to Newman. Proper cleaning methods have been put in place and all glasses are rinsed before filling. As well, glassware is checked twice a day to make sure it is beer clean.

Server knowledge is important. It’s frustrating to go someplace and not be able to get information about the beers that are being poured. At the new Old Chicago everyone goes through some basic beer education. It is mandatory for bartenders to pass the Certified Beer Server level of the Cicerone Certification Program. It is encouraged for servers. Newman says the company will support any staff that wants to advance to higher levels of the program, paying for exams and education. Additionally, they have instituted a policy encouraging staff to offer samples to guests; kind of an “if you like that you might also like this” idea.

Photo from Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal

After talking to Newman I had to see for myself, so I trekked out to Eden Prairie for dinner. I was impressed. The food was good, the décor was a big improvement, but this being a beer blog I’m going to focus my review on the beer experience.

Selection: Of the 36 beers on tap I counted eleven from Minnesota. The local selection was even bigger in bottles. The rest of the beers were a high-quality mix of national crafts and imports. Of the three American lagers available on tap, one of them was Grain Belt Premium. In the printed menu each beer is accompanied by a set of icons that describe its basic flavor profile. The list seemed to me a little heavy on hops, but there was a range available from Victory Prima Pils to Brooklyn Brown and Stone Smoked Porter.

Service: My two beers came out in proper Nonic pint glasses with a perfect half-inch of foam on top. They left circles of lace all the way down the glass as I drank. Glancing around the bar it seemed like proper glassware was the norm, and I saw that beer-clean lacing everywhere I looked. I even witnessed the bartender explaining the concept of beer-clean glassware to some patrons sitting at the bar.

My server Jen was great. She is a Certified Beer Server and seemed to know her stuff. I asked about local beers and she pointed me directly to them, even telling me the thumbnail sketch of Fulton’s history. She was able to describe the flavors of beers reasonably well and guide me toward the profile I wanted. As I sat enjoying my Sweet Child of Vine, she brought me an unsolicited sample of Lucid Camo, another hoppy beer from a local brewery. I saw others being offered samples as well. When I asked Jen about a beer to accompany desert, she suggested Brau Brothers Moo Joos.

To head off any suspicion, I am not being paid to shill for Old Chicago. In the interest of full disclosure, they did buy my dinner.

What interested me about this story was the fact of a national chain committing itself to quality beer and beer service. When TGI Friday starts serving craft beer, it’s significant. When Old Chicago reasserts an emphasis on proper service, staff knowledge, and quality selection, including a number of locals, it says something about the state of craft beer. Are they just cashing in on the craft beer boom? Perhaps, but what’s wrong with that? The thing is, these places attract a broad clientele. It’s great to have dedicated beer bars like Happy Gnome or Muddy Pig, but they primarily preach to the converted. These national chain restaurants have the potential to introduce a huge swath of people to better beer. If they do it right, like I believe Old Chicago’s Eden Prairie rollout suggests they will, then that’s all the better.

Pour Decisions Brewing Company – An Update

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On April 1st last year Pour Decisions Brewing Company came out. The timing and tone of the announcement led many to believe it was some elaborate beer-geek hoax. There were no names given in the communiqué. Who were these guys? Where did they come from? These unanswered questions sent many off on sleuthing missions, checking addresses on Google Maps and looking up corporate registrations on the state website.

Turned out Pour Decisions wasn’t a hoax. It was a real brewery-to-be, spearheaded by homebrewers extraordinaire Kristen England and B.J. Haun. An article on Heavy Table followed soon after the announcement. Given the reputation of the brewers (both good and bad) the air was thick with anticipation. A couple more blog posts appeared on the Pour Decisions website and then………..silence.

In the intervening 11 months precious little has been heard from Pour Decisions, but they are still out there and moving toward finally opening the taps. I recently chatted with Kristen England at the brewery and got a status report.

On the afternoon of my visit the brewery was a construction zone as finishing touches were being put on the tap room, which should be finished by the time this posts. According to England, the plumbing and electric are all in place. The only thing remaining is to re-assemble the boiler. They are waiting on the proper contractor to complete that task. Once that is done, they should be ready to make beer. England refused, however, to be pinned down on a date. Things happen and that kind of speculation hasn’t worked out so well for them in the past.

So what has been the delay? England cited contractor delays and issues with city inspections. Problems with the contractors hired to install the plumbing and such has been a major source of frustration. Work was promised, partially paid for, and then never delivered. One contractor reportedly even went after Haun with a wrench (or was it a hammer?).

Part of the hold-up around inspections came from unforeseen code requirements. For instance, even though the taproom is only separated from the brewery by a four-foot half-wall, the space requires a separate HVAC system. And then there were the panels. The brewhouse is run from a plug-and-play control panel. In Minnesota all “panels” have to be inspected before they can be used. The keg washer/filler also had a panel that had to be inspected. Costs and delays.

Another problem was the lack of inspectors in Roseville where the brewery is located. If you open a brewery in Minneapolis or St. Paul, they have several inspectors who tend to the business of checking things out. In Roseville there is only one. Says England, “It takes a while. It’s not his fault; he’s got a lot to do.”

Once up and running they plan to launch with two beers. Patersbier is described as “a crisp, Monk’s Golden Ale.” It will come in around 6% and have a good amount of bitterness and hop character. Pubstitute is a dark Scottish session ale listed on the website at 2.8% ABV. England says they are going to bump that up just a bit to around 3.2%. By keeping it that low they not only stay true to style, but also create a beer that can be sold in the grocery store. Don’t fret the low ABV. English session ales have full-flavor and mouthfeel despite their diminutive strength; tastes great and less filling.

England has been involved in beer-historical research with British beer blogger Ronald Pattinson of the Shut Up About Barclay Perkins blog (a great blog if you’re into that sort of thing). Pattinson has been digging into the archives of Britain’s great breweries to discover what beers they were making and how they were making them. England has been translating that research into brewable recipes. Although he doesn’t want to be known as “the guy that makes historical beer,” this research will be a big influence in the beers that Pour Decisions makes. “Everything now has been done before.” says England. “People don’t think so, but everything has been done before. So when we come out with a double IPA it’s going to have English ingredients. It’s going to have all low-alpha hops. Our stouts will be historical stouts using brown malt and amber malt. We’ll use lots of invert sugar. When you taste it you’ll understand the concept. It’s going to be very similar to what you’ve had before, but not like anything you’ve had before. Our beers will be things that you can wrap your head around but different from what you know.”

Expect Pour Decisions to have beer on the street soon. What does soon mean exactly? I can’t say. If I were to wager a guess I’d say this time it’s a matter of weeks rather than months. But things do happen. Only time will tell.

The Whistle Stop Restaurant & Brewery in Woodman, Wisconsin

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The Southwestern Wisconsin town of Woodman has a population just over 100. At one time it was the terminus of the “Dinky”, a narrow-guage railroad that connected it to the towns of Boscobel and Fennimore. Of course at that time Woodman was a bit more bustling, with residents numbering in the thousands. The Dinky used to drop mail it passed the post office in Woodman, announcing its arrival with a toot of its whistle. The Dinky tracks are still in the ground behind the Whistle Stop Restaurant, and the kitchen still doubles as the town’s post office.

In almost every way the Whistle Stop is what you would expect from a restaurant/tavern in a tiny Wisconsin town. The décor is simple; it’s relatively unadorned save for the Bud and Miller Lite posters on the walls. The tables are covered with the requisite red and white checked tablecloths. There is taco night on Tuesday and an all-you-can-eat Friday night fish fry. A small number of locals sit around the bar talking and drinking beer. On a busy night they might be joined by bikers. The thing that makes the Whistle Stop unique is the beer that they are drinking. It’s brewed on sight.

After Dennis Erb and his mother Leslie bought the restaurant in 2008, Dennis started looking for a way to make the place a little more special. He started making beer there in 2010. With no prior brewing experience, he has leapt right in, constructing a home-made, half-barrel, electric brewery in the basement. During summer high-season he brews every other day. That’s essential given the six house-brewed taps and numerous bottle selections he keeps available. He also sells a limited amount of bottles in area stores.

Erb says that his brewery is like “Dogfish Head on a smaller scale.” The comparison is not entirely undeserved. Many of the beers in his lineup are one of a kind. There’s pistachio kölsch, hazelnut red stout, the minty-bitter Arctic IPA, and Rose Red, a red-ale brewed with rose hips and rose extract. He takes inspiration from all around him. Sometimes it’s something he sees in the grocery store. Or maybe he reads about an exotic location and sets his mind to translating it into beer.  As he talks about it, the joy he derives from the process is evident. The experiments don’t always work, but when they do they are surprisingly tasty. And you have to give him credit for going out on a limb in a place where Busch Light is king.

Ordering beer at the Whistle Stop is a bit of a crap shoot. About half of the beers I tried were sour; unintentional, but not always entirely bad. Those that hadn’t “gone Belgian” were actually pretty good. There was the deceptively drinkable Amber Bock, a dangerous seven-percenter that drank more like it was four or five percent.  I approached the mint-infused Arctic IPA with trepidation. It ended up being one of my favorites of the night. While the smell of spearmint was intense, the flavor was just enough to enhance the already minty Northern Brewer hops. And the floral rose-hip/rose extract ale was a downright, champagne-like delight.

The food at the Whistle Stop was good as well. My bacon double burger was prepared by postmaster Leslie Erb herself. It was delicious. The French fries were nice and crisp.

Oh, and there is supposedly a ghost.

If you tend to geek out on style guidelines or can’t control yourself when presented with a beer that’s gone over to the other side, then don’t go to the Whistle Stop. If you are looking to have fun tasting some very interesting beers and chatting up the super- friendly locals, then this place is for you. Check it out next time you find yourself in the southwest corner of Wisconsin.

Mankato Brewery – A First Look

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Within three days of launch, Mankato Brewery had already sold 30-barrels of beer. That’s 930 gallons, the entire capacity of one of the brewery’s three fermentation tanks. The rapid sales took them by surprise. When I visited on Thursday, January 12th they had only one sixth-barrel keg left in the cooler and had ramped up their brewing schedule as much as possible. After only a week in business, they are already shopping for more tanks. It’s a good problem for a new brewery to have.

I first talked to Mankato Brewery co-founder Tim Tupy for a June 2010 article on The Heavy Table food blog. At that time Tupy and his partner Tony Feuchtenberger were just getting started. Their website was mostly a space-filler. They had yet to nail down a space. And their search for a brewer was just beginning. They needed someone willing to build the brewery and the brand from the ground up, and willing to relocate to Mankato. As it happens, Mike Miziorko, then a brewer at Summit, was looking for just such an opportunity. He read the Heavy Table article and picked up the phone to call Tupy. In July of last year he celebrated his last day at Summit and headed south to join the team.

The three view themselves as the legs of a three-legged stool. Each one brings a different talent to the partnership. Tupy is an entrepreneur with marketing experience and deep connections in the civic life of Mankato. Feuchtenberger’s background is in production and operations management. Miziorko is the man who makes the beer. Of his switch from Summit’s 220-hectolieter, fully-automated system to the much-smaller and totally-manual 15-barrel brewery at Mankato Miziorko says, “This is brewing. This is what I went to school for. I’m much closer to the beer.” He’s enjoying the ability to put his stamp on the thing from build-out to beers.

Tupy began considering the idea of opening a brewery a few years ago. He’s active in several civic organizations, which makes him well connected to what’s happening in Mankato. He saw a demand. People still had a connection to the old Mankato Brewing Company that closed in the 1960s. Kato beer signs and t-shirts were a common sight. His entrepreneurial spirit – he’s already opened two other businesses – said “let’s go.” He approached his homebrewing buddy Feuchtenberger and the two began to plan. A public brew day at the Brau Brothers brewery in nearby Lucan, Minnesota sealed their resolve. Within three months they had the basics together and started their search for a brewer.

Mankato Brewery launched on January 5th with their flagship beer Mankato Original. Original is a classic Kölsch-style beer. The crisp, lager-like ale has bready malt flavor and subtle fruitiness in the nose. Spicy hops and moderate bitterness keep it balanced but leave it light and delicate. In talking about the beer, Miziorko, who’s college major was German, quotes and old German saying that the “first beer should ask for the third.” My first-hand experience says that the third goes down just as easily as the first.

Miziorko appreciates the subtle complexity of German beer styles. To him they are beers with both depth and drinkability. “I’m a beer drinker,” he says. “I want to be able to enjoy more than one.” He has spent a good deal of time in Germany and admires the sense of community and tradition that surrounds beer there. Beer is a staple of life; it’s food.  He says that beer drinking there is less about the beer and more about the time spent drinking it. “That’s Gem?tlichkeit.”

Mankato Brewery is only distributing in Mankato and St. Peter. If you want the beer, you’ll have to go there to get it. There are plans to introduce other year-round beers and a few seasonals, but those will have to wait until they can keep up with demand for Original.

Summit Brewing Company Interesting Rumblings

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At the Summit Silver Anniversary party on Saturday I had a most interesting conversation with one of the hard-working and talented Summit brewers. While exchanging pleasantries over compostable plastic cups of Silver Anniversary Ale, I said that I was glad to see EPA, the old comfy-blanket of many  a Minnesota beer nerd, brought in to the new millennium with this recipe. Many people have the impression that while Summit makes great beer, they have been making the same great beer since 1986. Things like the Unchained Series and Anniversary Ale are helping to polish up the brewery’s image. That’s when things got interesting.

This brewer revealed that Summit is taking delivery this week on a two-barrel pilot brewery specially designed to mirror their big system. This new toy will give the brewers a place to play. What interesting new Summit flavors will come from that?

One plan is for regular special/limited releases following on the tails of Silver Anniversary Ale. When I proposed the idea of small-batch, big-bottle beers this brewer said, “That is a possibility, hypothetically speaking of course.”

I look forward to seeing what the next few months and years will bring.

Surly Turns Five: An Interview with Omar Ansari and Todd Haug

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Surly Brewing Company opened the doors of its Brooklyn Center Brewery in 2006. At the time there wasn’t much of a craft beer scene in the Twin Cities. The big craft-beer boil-over of the last few years was just reaching a simmer. There certainly was nothing – or at least very little – in the market with the heavy lupulin load of Furious. But the desire for such beers must have been there. In its first year, Surly took off like a rocket.

It’s been a busy five years for Owner Omar Ansari and Head Brewer Todd Haug. Rapid growth in demand has spurred constant expansion of capacity in the brewery. This year they spearheaded a successful legislative effort that won Minnesota brewers the ability to sell pints at the brewery. The next five years promise to be even busier with the construction of a planned 100,000-barrel “destination brewery.”

I sat down with Omar and Todd at the brewery last week to talk about the past, the present and the future of Surly. And of course we talked about Five, a beer fermented with “wild” Brettanomyces yeast brewed to celebrate the anniversary. Five had its bottle release this week. It sold out in most stores in just a few hours. If you missed out getting a bottle, a draft release party is happening on Monday the 29th at the Republic in 7-corners from 6:30 to 10:30 PM.

Surly turned five. Five years is one of those milestones. If you think back to 2006, where did you think you would be right now?

Todd: You know, hindsight and experience always seems to change that idea of what you thought it would be, but certainly we didn’t expect things to grow as fast as they did, especially with beers like Furious in our market. We always knew that there were holes in the market in terms of beer styles, especially styles that weren’t represented by Minnesota breweries. Knowing that, we thought, “Well how big are these holes? A really hop-forward beer; how is that going to carry through all the state of Minnesota?” So that’s the kind of stuff we didn’t know. And at the time we didn’t really need to know. It was more like, “let’s just make these beers and make them the best we can and see what happens.” What we really didn’t see coming was the timing with the craft beer swell. We knew it was happening around the country, but it was a little slow getting to Minnesota. There was a lot of fortuitous timing.

Omar: I was really hoping that we would have a few employees and maybe be making six or seven thousand, eight thousand barrels. That was really what we hoped for, to make enough beer to pay the bills. Just get the beer out and hope that we’d find some people that want to drink it. The plan wasn’t to get the Coors drinkers to start drinking the beer. We always said that our beers don’t come with training wheels. They’re not starter beers. We’ll let Fat Tire be the gateway beer. We weren’t looking to bring people into the world of craft beer. We wanted to brew something a little bit bigger; some of the more aggressive beers that this market didn’t have. We were both a little surprised after the ball got rolling by how much people embraced it. It was pretty unbelievable the amount of progress in that first year. It’s still amazing some of the places where we have accounts. It’s shocking given the price point of the beer and the flavor profile of the beers. It’s just not the type of beer you expect to see all over the place.

I find that Furious has become a gateway beer.

Todd: Scary.

Omar: You mean a gateway from BMC? Yeah, a couple years ago when sales were kind of doing their normal spring ramp-up I called up “Fitty” (beer manager Joe Fitzpatrick) at Thomas Liquor and asked, “What the hell’s going on? Your sales are up like 30%.” He’s like, “Well, more people are drinking it. A good example, we’ve got a guy who was a Coors drinker, and he’s started drinking Furious.” That makes no sense on every level; economic-wise, flavor-wise, Just the whole brand. Who would think that someone would go from Coors to Furious?

I think it has something to do with Surly’s reputation. People hear about Surly and how good the beers are so they try it. You might think they wouldn’t like it, but they do.

Todd: I’ve done that before. I don’t necessarily like the word hype, but I understand it. Whether it’s a movie or a new TV show or whatever it is that people have heard about, they hear that it’s supposed to be good so they have this expectation. I think we still have some of that, but I think in general people are going to it with an open mind. Instead of saying, “Oh, it’s going to be similar to this beer.” They sort of have a completely clean slate as far as what they’re palate memory thinks it’s supposed to taste like. I think that’s good for us because people are a little bit more open to it.

Talk a little bit about Surly’s reputation. You’ve got this reputation for these big extreme beers. But in my view that’s not really what you do.

Todd: No. And that’s kind of been our argument for a number of years now. You know, at first we wanted to grab peoples’ tongues with the beers and grab their attention. But all we ever said was that we wanted to make the best beers we could in whatever style we wanted to make; the kind of beers we wanted to drink. That’s what every brewer says. Hopefully no brewers are out there making beers they hate.

Omar: Beers the marketing team comes up with.

Todd: But, with that in mind those first beers… I mean Furious maybe, but Bender? It’s not really an extreme beer. But for some reason, and I don’t know if it’s because of this market or because of the beers that people talk about on the internet, that’s the perception. But Hell, Bitter Brewer, Mild, we make a lot more sessionable beers than we do extreme beers.

Omar: I don’t think if we were in southern California, Oregon, Washington, or Colorado, I don’t think there are many of the beers that would be in any sort of extreme category. I mean even Darkness isn’t huge. We talk about this all the time. Everybody’s brewing these great beers, but how many 14% beers do you want to drink? I guess it again all kind of comes from what we want to drink. Neither Todd nor I are into these really massive beers because you can only have one. And I think we both like drinking more than that. We’ve gotten into more sessionable beers as time has gone on. I don’t know if it’s the marketing or the design or just that how we do it stuff kind of comes together, but folks think of it as this really crazy extreme thing. Furious is a big beer, but there are a lot of them out there like it. Go out west and they’re all over the place. Imperial Red Ale, it’s not a crazy style.

Todd: I was a big fan of Hop Rod Rye from Bear Republic.

That’s a great beer.

Todd: That’s kind of what inspired Furious. That hoppy amber that didn’t exist in this market. It wasn’t that we felt we needed to make something extreme. It was because there was already stuff out there that we were into; you just couldn’t get it here. That’s the biggest thing that people don’t understand is just how behind Minnesota craft beer was. It certainly caught up fast now that ever brewery in the country is available here almost. But five or six years ago, unless you wanted to road trip or were actively involved in traveling and visiting breweries, there was a lot of stuff going on in small little regions that nobody knew about here. Obviously Beer Advocate and Rate Beer have shrunk a lot of that. But we’ve quickly realized that as great as the BA community has been to us and really helped us get rolling, that’s a tiny percentage of the people that actually buy our beer. That’s another reason we don’t just make extreme beers.

That’s an even tinier percentage.

Todd: Exactly.

Omar: We also think of the fatigue of those beers. You can drink them for a while and then you’re just like “ugh.” I mean, I never thought we were going to brew a lager when we started. I remember people asking us, “You going to brew any lagers?” I was like, “Hell no we’re not going to brew any lagers. Schell is already doing a great job of that.” But three years into it…

Todd: Let’s brew a lager.

Omar: Why wouldn’t I want to brew a lager? To me that’s part of the Surly extreme thing. Maybe other people think that’s not what we should be doing, but that’s what we want to do. So that’s why we’re going to do it.

So let’s talk about Five. At Winterfest you took the Great Snowshoe award with Pentagram. That was a single barrel version of Five?

Omar: Yeah, Pentagram is what we called the single barrel version.

Todd: Yes, the blend is a little different. I think it’s better.

I’ve got to say, even given that Winterfest is a beer-nerd audience and that Pentagram was really good, I was frankly surprised that it won. I wouldn’t have expected a sour beer to win.

Todd: Me too. I was like, “really?” I thought one of the super hoppy beers like Abrasive Ale, or Furious, or somebody else’s. I thought Fitger’s bottle-conditioned beers or something. And that’s kind of what we were talking about too, about how accepting the market was for Furious five years ago. I didn’t think that they would ever embrace a beer that was that hop-forward in this market.

Omar: I don’t think they were that accepting five years ago. It kind of took a while.

Todd: Well, you know what I mean. It started pretty fast after that first eight months. But Five should be the most polarizing beer we’ve ever made. I think it’s fairly balanced for being as tart as it is. I don’t think it’s straight up vinegar.

What made you decide to make a sour beer?

Todd: Well we’ve been talking about it for a little while. It’s always one of those things that we wanted to do it but we weren’t sure how. Obviously there’s the risk of bringing that stuff (Brettanomyces) into the brewery, which I’m still worried about. But it made sense to do something extra different for a bigger number on the anniversary. So we pulled the trigger a little over a year ago with the blind faith of we’ll see what happens. I think we knew we would be able to make something that was really good, but we weren’t sure. Even all the research I do and talking to other brewers, they were like, “You’re kind of on your own on this one.” Okay, great. Thanks for the help. But it’s true. I can call Chris White from White Labs (a yeast bank). I can call other people I know that have worked with Brett. But they all do it differently than I wanted to do it. Most of the guys I know that are using Brett are using it just to finish the beer. We wanted to do 100% Brett-fermented and then condition in barrels. There are a handful of those out there. Not a lot of them, but I think that’s going to change. People are learning more about how Brett works fermentation-wise.

Omar: It’s definitely going into the unknown. The anniversary beers always are. Todd usually tells me after he’s put it together.  It’s always, “we’ll see how this works out if we use ten pounds of cranberries per barrel.” We’re going to go down that road and see where it takes us. With the other beers we know where it’s going. But this is like, we’ll find out.

With Brettanomyces and any of the bacterial fermentations it’s kind of a crap shoot what you end up with. How did you deal with that uncertainty?

Todd: By just trying to understand how Brett works as a yeast. Not flavor profile, not raw material, not anything but what does it do and how does it do it? Chris White at White Labs really helped me establish pitching rates, which allowed us to get primary fermentation into a normal window. Most people are under the impression that it takes months and months and months for Brett to actually ferment. I guess we proved that it doesn’t if you pitch right. The souring takes months, but the actually primary fermentation doesn’t, which is kind of cool. So with that in mind, we did primary fermentation in stainless. We had it contained. We really didn’t want it blowing all over the brewery. We had a couple old 15-barrel tanks that we used for that. Once we got the Brett established we were able to brew it every ten to fourteen days. As soon as it was done fermenting we’d rack it into the wine barrels. But I think the important things are how we handled it in terms of the flavor profile. I wanted a really rich malt. I didn’t want a pale sour beer. I wanted something with caramel flavors, which would with time turn into a cherry and tobacco, plum and raisin kind of thing. So there’s some Special B in there and some de-bittered black malt for color. At first it tasted kind of smoky and was kind of gross actually. But after two months it was like, “Whoa. This tastes totally different.” You could convince somebody that there are cherries in it.

What strain of Brettanomyces did you use?

Todd: We used Brett strains A and C, Anomalus and Claussenii. Bruxellensis is what a lot of people are using. That’s pretty standard. I wanted to try something a little different.

Did you have any inspirations for making a Brettanomyces fermented beer?

Todd: The first all-Brett beer I had was from my big hero Tomme Arthur of Lost Abbey. It was Cuvee de Tomme at the time. I thought it was amazing. That was probably the first and last all-Brett beer I’ve ever had. I think the sour character was nice, to where it was like, “wow.” It was pale. It was kind of more of a gueuze kind of profile from what I remember. I just remember thinking it was a lot like some of the Belgian sours that I had had. I was just amazed that it wasn’t Belgian.

How did you get the fermentation to happen so quickly? I made an all Brett beer a couple years ago and had trouble getting it to start.

Todd: When I talked to Chris White about it, that’s what my original concern was. He gave me some advice about pitching rates. I don’t remember what the cell count was, but it’s literally like ten times the normal amount. But once you get to that point you’ll see normal fermentation times. So the first generation was kind of slow and it attenuated high. The second one went a lot faster and attenuated lower. The third one took right off and went all the way down to 2-degrees Plato, which was what we wanted. Oxygenation is a huge thing too. The tricky thing is that when using Brett, leaving it in the tank is the safest thing to do. Rack your beer off it and then just put fresh wort in there. Every time you oxygenate it there’s more acetic acid, so it gets more sour every time. They don’t recommend trying to quicken the fermentation by oxygenation because you’re going to have a lot of weird stuff happen with a lot of acetic acid produced. We tried not to do that. So every time we’d run fresh wort in there we’d try to make sure it was well oxygenated. Once we had the right amount of cells per milliliter it would take off. Now that it’s been sitting again when we want to reuse it, it will probably be slow again. But I’m shocked at how durable it is. It’s indestructible and it’s sitting there ready to go when you need it. We’re going to mess around with it some more, just because we have it. We’ll see what happens with it as we continue to use it.

We can’t talk about the five-year anniversary without talking about the next five years. Given plans for the “destination brewery” obviously big things are coming.

Todd: Yeah, there are big things coming down the road. It’s going to be a couple of years. Meanwhile for me, my job is to make sure everything is running and we’re able to grow, stay staffed, and still make clean, solid beers while we’re working on the new project. As exciting as it is, the normal day-to-day stuff here isn’t going to go away. So I think for me the main challenge will be to not get distracted by the thing down the road and worry about what’s going on here and now.

You still have to run the brewery.

Todd: I just don’t want people to think that in two years everything is going to be great. It’s going to be different, but we still need to get there. I don’t want to forget what we’ve built and how we’ve built it. We’ve still got equipment to install and maintain and new staff to hire and train. When the new facility does open that will probably be immediately in charge of the flagship beers and probably all the canning operations. And the current brewery we’re hoping will become a bottling facility only. That’s kind of what we’re thinking now.

So more the small batch type of stuff?

Todd: Yes. I think it will be a great training ground for new guys or for a place for guys who want a break from the bigger brewery and want to get hands on. We could do a lot of sour stuff here. We could do a lot of different things, which is pretty exciting because we could go into it with the ball rolling. That will be a nice luxury. As this brewery fades out of the regular beer production and the new one takes over we’ll be able to immediately start making different cool beers here.

How far along is the new brewery?

Todd: We’re just now trying to finalize sight selection and stuff. It sounds like that could be done in September. So that’s a huge factor in how we’re going to build it out. How we’re going to size the equipment. When we get a site selection that’s when we need to order a brewhouse and start looking at the big pieces. There’s really nothing here that would scale up to the new facility. We’re limited by our ceiling height here. Our fermenters are the size and geometry they are as dictated by our brewhouse and the ceiling. But in the new place that won’t be an issue. There’s really nothing here we’d want to bring over there. Maybe a couple small tanks for a yeast bank or something like that, but generally everything here is sized for a 30-barrel brewhouse. The new brewhouse will hopefully be around 80 barrels.

That will make things easier.

Todd: It will. It’s going to be rough getting everything going. Everything is going to change. We just want to keep it simple. We don’t need a five-vessel brewhouse. We aren’t going to start decoction mashing. We aren’t going to change things just because we can. I’d like to keep things as similar as possible with the brewhouse. For the regular beers, that’s what established the flavor profile. We want it to be efficient. Actually that’s going to be a huge benefit of a bigger brewhouse is waste energy recovery. It’s going to be in the high 90s for efficiency which will be great. The canning line will be high speed. We’ll probably have to look at used machines just to see what we can get into. New machines aren’t cheap. But again, all that stuff has come so far in ten or fifteen years. If we buy a ten, fifteen, twenty year old machine, it’s going to need a lot more maintenance than a new machine that’s a little bit more high tech. A new machine might be a smaller footprint even. So there are some trade-offs. We’re not going to know. We might run into some problems. Rolling beer into new markets takes time too. We’re probably going to have to be patient and wait for some of those markets to develop before we can just go, go, go.

Although there is certainly going to be no shortage of demand in new markets.

Todd: No, true. But it still takes time. Stone is a good example of it. They’ve tried to roll out in some other states that aren’t as close to their home market where people don’t know as much about them. They went into Wisconsin and weren’t happy with the way beers were selling and weren’t happy with the distributor setup, so they left. Stuff like that. I’m not saying they can’t sell everything they make, but they had to kind of re-figure it. We could see that happening to any brewery.

Surly Five

What does Surly Five taste like? Here’s my notes:

Five
Surly Brewing Co., Brooklyn Center, Minnesota
Style: Brettanomyces Fermented Beer
Serving Style: 750 ml bottle

Aroma: Loads of cherries with complementary leathery aromas. Hints of wood and roast.

Appearance: Black. Moderate off-white head with fine bubbles that did not persist.

Flavor: A complex mélange that changes with each sip and evolves through to the bottom of the glass. Flavors come in stages. Starts with hit of sour cherry. That subsides mid-palate to let rich, mouth-filling caramel malts and balsamic vinegar take over. Cherries are still there, but darker. Leather. On the way out it’s husky, woody, and lightly astringent. Finishes very dry. Throughout there are ever revolving chocolate, roast, wood, and fruit flavors. Fruits range from unripe apricot to pineapple to berries and even some hints of dark, dried fruit. As it warms it takes on the character of cold-coffee. Complex but easy to drink. The sour wasn’t too intense. Should be good even to the uninitiated.

Mouthfeel: Light but mouth-filling. Well attenuated, but still thick in parts. Light and not unpleasant astringency. Medium-high carbonation.

Overall Impression: Good “wild” beers can be tricky. Brettanomyces yeast is a crapshoot. You never really know what you will get. Todd Haug has pulled off a nice one. Evolving layers of oak, malt, and yeast character. Not too sour, but sour enough. Pentagram was good at Winterfest. Five is better. This one should get even better with age.