227: Tom Jacobs of Antidoot Is Searching For Simplicity
Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast
What's the Goal?
Juster, to keep doing what we do. Just erto have fun. Er, i think our idea of expansion is not to make more bottles, but just to grow more stuff ourselves. That's it. Beautiful. So success is is a year we good fruitha ha, ha, ha. Yeh. E. Well, let's zoom out a little bit and talk about the big picture, you know, for for you and for antidote. What? What's the goal? And what does all t oses look like? It only finds its way into blends with anor sider.
Antidoot’s Tom Jacobs didn’t set out with the goal of launching a brewery. It was more a natural outgrowth of his and his brother’s homebrewing, which grew too large to remain just a hobby. Still, Jacobs pursues every one of the small batches they brew with the exploratory zeal that informed their homebrewing days.
The brewery and batches are small, intentionally, for two reasons. First, Jacobs is not willing to compromise their creative vision to achieve the scale necessary for a larger corporate entity. Second, they prefer to use the fruit and herbs from their own trees, grapevines, orchard, and gardens—something only viable at their minuscule size.
Despite their self-imposed guardrails, Antidoot forgoes other mainstream brewing conventions such as style categories because, as Jacobs says, “It’s hard for people to appreciate things without a concept, but if you give them a concept, they judge against the concept.” Moving beyond preconceived notions of what a beer should be, and encouraging drinkers to approach the beer on its own terms, with an open mind, is Antidoot’s raison d’être.
In this episode, Jacobs discusses:
- building a self-sufficient, agriculture-driven lifestyle with a seasonal approach to brewing and growing
- finding a brewing mode between ester-forward Belgian beers and too-acidic sour beers
- foregoing the one-dimensional term “sour”
- blending acidity with bitterness
- using diverse herbs for bittering, such as gentian and wormwood
- selecting for wild Saccharomyces over Brettanomyces to preserve terroir flavors and nuance
- brewing wild cider without losing apple character
And more.
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