Good Beer Hunting

Today we’re going to talk about origin beers.  There’s increasing discussion in niche beer circles about the accuracy of some of our beer vernacular. What constitutes farmhouse ales, for example? Most leading farmhouse beer producers don’t operate a farm at all. Rather, they hold close to some of the prevailing traditions of those styles largely lost to history. And increasingly, farmhouse producers are located in urban environments, pulling extremely far away from their inspiration, but perhaps staying connected to methodology or year profiles that give them a way to talk about a different approach to brewing regardless of the disassociation.  But today we talk to someone who’s working hard to take another part of beer making back to an extreme niche tradition, and that’s Mad Fritz Brewing in Napa Valley. Owned and operated by Nile Zacherele, a professional vintner at David Arthur Vineyards on Pritchard Hill, Mad Fritz is an attempt to take the ingredients of beer back to an origin status, not unlike winemaking where the location, the soil, and the cultivation of the ingredients is both present—and local—to the production of the beverage.  To that end, Nile has convinced some locals farmers to grow barley for him, which he intends to floor-malt himself. He even sources water from local wells and reservoirs. He also barrel-ages or barrel-ferments all his beers, many of them on the paler side, which means they pick up wood character quickly.  I first learned of Nile’s beers when he sent a care-package some months back and I tasted through them with some good friends and colleagues here at the studio. We were curious—and sometimes downright perplexed—by what was happening in the bottle. These were very unusual beers in both concept and execution. Not to mention the details where were we found ourselves becoming engaged—a shift in water profile, a lingering grain quality, wood character that skewed our expectations.  So when I had the chance to visit recently on a short trip around the North Bay, I wasted little time in asking Nile a hundred different questions. Then we went up the hill to the vineyard to taste the grapes, the fermenting juice, and the finished wines that have serviced as a sort of inspiration point for brewing origin beers. And I’m happy to say I’m still curious and perplexed.

This week’s episode features one of Chicagoland’s newest production breweries—Miskatonic in Darien, Illinois.  My first memory of these guys was sitting at Owen & Engine, an English-inspired bar on Western Avenue that routinely puts together a great list. Scanning down through it, I noticed a name I’d didn’t recognize, and next to it, a simple, refreshing style designator—“Mild.” Now, I fully admit that, as someone who drinks for a living, I’m in a bit of a bubble at times. But I was thrilled to see that word. You may recall from way back in episode 4, Mark Spence and I complained that there were no English Milds being made in Chicago. And making a beer like that close to home is critical—it’s not going to export across the Atlantic all that well.  So when I saw a start-up in Chicago brewing a Mild out of the gate, I was all over it. And it was great. Delicate, slightly toasty, a tad bitter, balanced by a malt character that finished dry. It’s a perfect beer. A perfect style, really.  But that Mild, as memorable as it was for me, was less about a style that Miskatonic was keen on, and more of an approach to every style they brew. Subtle, balance, delicacy—this is what I’ve come to know them as.   And this past year, GBH was lucky enough to work with them as well, helping them get their story straight and their message ready for market as they entered with cans for the first time, introducing themselves to thousands of new customers.  So here we are, two months into packaged product on the shelves. It’s a perfect time to ask them how it’s going—and how they got here.

A while back, when we were shooting Grit & Grain in the Goose Island barrel warehouse, there were a series of barrels set aside for a special project lead by Innovation Manager, Mike Siegel. All I knew at the time was that it was a Brett Pale Ale of sorts. Other details were kept close.  Today, I got to taste the final results of that experimental beer. But more importantly, I got the back story on the collaboration between Goose Island and beer historian Ron Pattinson—who, over the years, has worked with a number of breweries to re-create ancient recipes down to the tiniest of details.  Ron is a prolific writer. He's got a number of books and magazine articles under his belt, and a website that’s about as old as ours is going on 10 years now.  Mike Siegel, who you may recall from episode 28 of the GBH podcast, leads innovation at Goose Island’s Fulton Street brewery in Chicago.  Between them, I got a couple of words in. But mostly, I tried to clear the way for some of their deeper insight into the challenges—and the fun—of bringing a recipe like English Stock Yard Ale to life.

Longtime GBH readers may recall the article I wrote about Hill Farmstead back in January 2014. For GBH, and myself as a beer writer, it was a bit of a turning point. That article remains our most-read brewery profile ever. And now that it has two years running on it, I doubt that'll ever change. The reach it’s created for GBH opened a lot of doors for me and the team, and it was shortly after that that I first began bringing other writers into the fold. The entire reason many of those writers sought me out was because of that article. It changed something for them. It gave them a reason to think about beer writing very differently—and that was their words, not mine. But I can attest that even for me, it changed things. I’ve written about many many breweries over the years—almost a decade now. And most breweries have a sense of place and personality. But until that visit to Hill Farmstead, no brewery I’d visited had that sense of place. Or that kind of personality. Indeed, it took me almost a year to gather my feelings on the subject, and to share that story with my readers.  It’s a bit ironic for me that so much of my thesis was focused on the story beyond the hype for Hill Farmstead at the time. Don’t get me wrong, Shaun Hill's reputation was warranted, and the beautiful setting of the place certainly told an accurate story. But it was ironic because my experience actually made me value Hill Farmstead even more, but for very different reasons. I was attracted to Shaun's focus, the simple-but-expressive beers being made at a time when there was no real vocabulary for a mixed fermentation Saison in our typical craft parlance. The beers harkened back to my first and enduring loves, like Saison Dupont, for which I’d not found anything comparable in the states. And something about the place reminded me so much of the upbringing I had in rural Pennsylvania. The terrain, the isolation, the struggle to produce something valuable so far away from where those things are typically valued. After reading the article himself, Shaun admitted to not remembering my visit much that day. In fact, he reluctantly gave me about 10 minutes of his time and went back to work. And most of the piece came not from the things that Shaun said, but the things that he did. I witnessed not just the beauty and rare quality of it, but the work, frustration, and anxiety of it all—and it stuck with me. It was mostly a portrait built on observation, and a bit of self-reflection for my own life experience. That article tied Shaun and I together.  Years later, and we’ve become friends of a sort. I’ve gone back to visit a couple times a year, like many of you have. And I’ve been lucky enough to steal away some time on each of those trips to listen and learn from his experiences up on that hill in Greensboro, Vermont. Some of it has been trying and frustrating. And some of it has been revelatory and edifying. That’s just a way of living in that part of the world.  The weekend we recorded this episode, he was in town for our friend Ryan Burk’s wedding in Chicago. Ryan is the cider maker at Angry Orchard’s Walden project. You may have listened to his episode a few weeks back. You’ll find a lot of parallels here in my conversation with Shaun. The three of us learn a lot from each other these days, but of course, so much of it will be unique to his experience as the creator of Hill Farmstead—which, to my mind, is still one of the most singular things in the world.

Today’s guest is perhaps someone who could be described as the “hardest working person in London’s beer industry.” As well as heading up Marketing, Events & Comms for The Five Points Brewing Company in Hackney, East London, Doreen Joy Barber also co-runs the quarterly London Brewers Market, is an active member of all-female beer group, the Crafty Beer Girls and even finds the time to pull a few shifts behind the bar at The Chesham Arms, also in East London.  What’s surprising is that back when she lived in her native Florida, apart from a little bar work, Doreen wasn’t an active part of the beer scene, even though it feels like she’s been working in beer all of her life. After taking a chance on applying to study a master’s in anthropology here in London, Doreen moved overseas, even writing her dissertation on CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale. I asked Doreen to come on the podcast in part because of the way she kinda just “fell into beer” and became such an integral part of it. But also because of how some people describe the brewery she works for as, how Doreen puts it: “normcore” for concentrating on a tight core offering, instead of just throwing out an increasingly myriad selection of specials, like so many of their peers.  If you’re ever in London, it’s very difficult not to bump into Doreen if you visit one of her many favourite pubs, of which there are just too many to mention. And in her own words, if there’s a drink in her hand, then she’s working.

My guess is you didn’t see this one coming. Neither did I, honestly. Today we talk with Charles Adler, co-founder of Kickstarter and, most recently, the founder of Lost Arts in Chicago. I’m going to let him tell you all about that. But first, I wanted to explain the connective thread I see between Charles and the beer world. First, both are incredibly entrepreneurial. And in many ways, entrepreneurialism has come to define what craft beer is. The things that Charles has created, and what craft beer values, are things like transparency, innovation, and community connections. But in my conversation with him, I think you’ll also hear some other familiar things. A heads-down approach to building something. A desire to grow, but also remain steadfast in your values and goals. The need to be a generalist, but also value specialization. It’s the constant need to balance a hundred different things that are all in tension with each other, in order to get from point A to point B. There are also a lot of parallels between my personal background and Charles’ that make for some pretty quick and interesting learning—even insights into what GBH is at its core, and how it came to be. I’m thankful for that. I hope you take away as many insights as I did about how you can think about your own business differently. Charles has that affect on people. Oh, and we talk about how a brewery might just be relevant to his new project, too.

Today’s guest is someone I’ve been waiting to interview for a couple years now. Since I first started the podcast, he was high on my list, but for one reason after another, it always seemed like we should wait. We just didn’t know what we were waiting for, exactly. Ryan Burk is the cidermaker for Angry Orchard, specifically running their new innovation cider house in Walden, NY. He was the former cidermaker at Virtue Cider in Fennville, Michigan. And before that, he was a homebrewer in Chicago. I met him just as he was transitioning from brewer to cidermaker, pouring some of Virtue’s earliest batches.  You may have seen GBH, and me in particular, take a keen interest in cider over the past couple years. We’ve written about E.Z. Orchards in Salem, Oregon, Rack and Cloth in Mosier, Oregon, and Virtue, among others—and visited many more. Ryan is the reason for all that. He held the door open for me. And in many ways, he still does. Thanks to Ryan, I was able to translate the many things I love about the most exquisite beers in the word, like Saison Dupont and Hill Farmstead, into an equally beautiful and delicious world of cider making. From there, I’ve ventured into natural and low-interventionist wine making as well. And it all started with Ryan.  He’s become one of my best friends in the world. In fact, the day this podcast episode was published, I was officiating his wedding to Eva Deitch—another name you might be familiar with, as she’s one of the many photographers GBH has collaborated with over the years. I was honored to be asked. As part of Angry Orchard, Ryan also honored our business by asking us to design the labels for his personal collaborations with cidermakers all over the world that will start releasing in the coming months and years.  So it’s safe to say that my relationship with Ryan is one of the more profound I’ve had in my life. I’m forever thankful for the impact he’s had on me as a person, as a drinker, and the influence we’ve had on each other professionally. That’s what this whole business of GBH is about for me, and nowhere does it come true more than right here.

This week's guest is the stuff of legend—Tomme Arthur, the founder and brewmaster of Lost Abbey. He's a brewer associated with both San Diego’s hop-forward dominance in craft beer, but also the world of barrel-aged Saison and Belgian-inspired farmhouse beers that continue to carve out a niche amongst the geekiest of beer drinkers in the U.S. And Tomme continues to impress both of these highly critical audiences. But Tomme's also a big part of the future. His voice carries weight. His opinions matter to the next generation. And his expectations only seem to get higher for others, not to mention himself. I first met Tomme when we helped judge the Brewbound Start-up Brewery Challenge in San Diego. Later, we'd meet up again, this time in Belgium at Brasserie Dupont when GBH was there filming our mini-documentary about Saison Dupont. We also were lucky enough to document the historic collaboration between Tomme and Olivier Dedeycker, Dupont’s fourth-generation owner, that occurred that day. On the site, we described that collaboration as "punching a hole in time." As hyperbolic as that might seem, to the people involved that day, it barely served to capture the feeling.  So when Tomme came to town for the Windy City Expo, an annual showcase with his distributor parter here, we decided to get together at the Hopleaf, a place that’s supported Lost Abbey from its early days, and have a conversation with a small group of fans in the upstairs bar. We also had some bottles from the cellar that Michael Roper was kind enough to share —and drink—with us.  Here, we dig into Tomme’s origin story, San Diego then and now, brand, portfolio, and barrel-management, and at least a dozen other things. Plus, we had a great Q+A at the end with the folks in the room.

Drew Larson is one of those people that’s everyone’s favorite person. He’s funny, smart, affable, and, other than brewers themselves, I don’t think there’s a guy in Chicago that works harder behind the scenes to bring you great beer.  Drew has an interesting road to beer. He was in the military, went to culinary school, became a sommelier, then a cicerone, then studied draft technology while he was managing the beverage program at the Hopleaf. He’s also an incredible hobbyist, and we get to that right at the start here. Eventually, all that obsession and curiosity lead him to start a company called Leaders Beverage. He now handles the design, installation, and maintenance of draft systems in a growing number of bars, breweries, and restaurants in Chicago. And he does it all with a singular approach to quality and businesse sense that you won’t find in most people who just want to clean your lines. This guy cares about the health of the industry overall, and his clients’ businesses specifically. In fact, his company maintains the six lines we have here at GBH studio. He’s the reason I’m confident in having six stainless steel flow control taps pouring some of the best beer in the city on any given day. I know it’s going to taste right.  So let’s get into it with Drew and learn a lot more about draft maintenance, how it affects the beer you drink and the business that’s selling it. And of course, all the other fun stuff he does.

This is going to be another deep dive into the world of brewing malts. We previously chatted with a micro maltster, Troubadour, in Fort Collins. That gave us some insight into the niche world of specialty craft malts. But today's guest covers a much wider spread.  She’s Sara Hagerty of Malteurop's U.S. division. She has an incredible technical background in biology, chemistry, yeast, and now, malt sales. It’s an interesting role, working across so many different kinds of breweries in a large region of the U.S., trying to meet their needs with barley malt. And in her time with Malteurop, she’s seen the company adapt to fit the rapidly changing needs of craft brewers after so many years of providing for the largest brewers in the world. It’s quite a different beast.  I met Sara at the Hopleaf recently, and within minutes of talking about her job, I knew, or at least hoped, that we’d get her in to the studio for a podcast interview so that I could share her insight and experience with you all. Thankfully, her insane travel schedule lined up with my own, and we found an hour to dig in.