All About Beer Magazine » Pull Up A Stool

with Brett McCrea

Julie Johnson — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 22:47:55 +0000

Chad Campbell and Brett McCrea of 16 Mile Brewery

Brett McCrea and Chad Campbell founded 16 Mile Brewery in 2009 in Georgetown, DE, a town in the geographic center of the state said to be 16 miles from anywhere. The brewery is sited in a 120 year-old barn on land owned by McCrea’s family.

AAB: This has been a homecoming for both of you.

BMc: That’s correct. Basically, I grew up in a house that’s 300 yards from here. I went to undergraduate in Maryland, and graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. After that, I worked for the federal government for 10 years. I moved back to help my father. Chad also grew up in Georgetown, but I didn’t really know him: we went to the same high school and the same college, although he likes to remind me that I am precisely four years older than he is!

I assume you have to remind him, then, that he was the one looking up to you.

BMc: I’ve never said that, but now I will! We wanted to open up a business in our hometown, because, if you had to put a melting pot together, it’s unique. It’s very small, but arguably the third most powerful court in the United States is a mile up the street.

Really? What is it?

BMc: It’s the Court of Chancery. If you look them up, a lot of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware, so a lot of the business court decisions are made here. Michael Eisner got sued here, things like that. So there’s prominent judges there, chancellors and vice chancellors. Some of them come here to have a drink, sitting next to dirt farmers. It’s a unique mix of people who come through.

I noticed your connection to Georgetown plays out in the names of your beers.

BMc: To be honest, this company really sucks at naming things. It took an act of God to come up with the name of the brewery. The name 16 Mile is a localism, because Georgetown is said to be 16 miles from anywhere. The town was formed after farmers from the western part of the county petitioned the general assembly to move the county seat from Lewes to somewhere more central. There’s a circle in the middle of Georgetown, and they took an azimuth from there and drew a big circle, and so it would be roughly 16 miles—about a day’s horse ride—from anyplace in the county. That’s how we got the name of the brewery.

Our beers are mostly named for state or local icons. If you look on the label of Blues’ Golden Ale, you’ll see the Delaware Blues Revolutionary War Regiment. It’s a very proud history: they fought in every major battle. They were decimated, because they were known for close-in fighting. That statute on the label is in front of the Legislative Hall in Dover.

Another one is Amber Sun, an amber ale named after our sunsets. There’s really only one place you can see sunset over water in Delaware, and it’s at the Breakwater Lewes Lighthouse.

Old Court is named for the original courthouse in Georgetown. We’re real proud of it, because that’s the beer that made Roger Protz’ new book 300 More Beers to Try Before You Die.

We have nearly 2,400 breweries in this country. How will 16 Mile stand out?

BMc: It’s the reintroduction of the session-based beer. The craft industry by and large has been almost a reflexive movement away from the national brands, understandably so. The further away from them they could get, the better. What you saw was a lot of high-alcohol, highly hopped beers. I’m not knocking anybody, but if you look at the top 50 beers on BeerAdvocate, very few of them are below 7 percent alcohol. There’s this notion that to be the greatest, there has to be an extreme associated with it.

I’ve lived in England and Germany, and Czechoslovakia (when there was one), and Belgium—places where they make good beer. I’ve always had an affinity for English beers because they do so much with low alcohol. We do English-style beers with an American craft twist, so there’s a bit more alcohol than a traditional English beer.

I feel the pendulum is swinging back to session, with a lot of indications in the market. Pete Slosberg, one of the founders of the craft beer movement, opened up Mavericks [line of beers], and most of the beers in their portfolio are below 4 percent alcohol. You’re starting to see the industry titans shifting, and I think that’s where the future of beer is. We feel it’s the simplicity of what we do that makes it great.

I understand you have an unusual collaboration with an English brewery.

BMc: That’s right, our Heraldry series with Copper Dragon in Yorkshire. We came up with this notion of a collaboration with an English brewer, based on events in English history. We started building beers around the stories.

The first one we came up with was the Waterloo brew. We took elements of that battle, and combined it into a beer. To reflect Wellington, we made an 8 percent strong English golden, along the lines of Golden Pride from Fullers. We took hops from the area the Prussian soldiers came from. We took a yeast strain from Belgium to represent Waterloo. Then for the coup de grâce, if you will, we took toasted French oak and soaked it in a case of Napoleon brandy, and put it all together. It came out very well.

What’s the process of collaboration?

BMc: We largely Skype with them. There’s a renaissance in England in craft beer, and what we do is bring the American component to their beers. They wanted to do a beer for Saint George, the patron saint of England. You know on the British flag, the cross in the middle is red? They asked us “We know you do an amber beer. Would you mind giving us the recipe?” They made it and released it in England.

And for us, the real coup, they gave us a recipe for Russian imperial stout with a pedigree back to the time of Catherine the Great. It’s a powerful beer.

That beer will be the base of the next Heraldry beer, which will be the meeting at Yalta. FDR was a big fan of bourbon, so we’re going to soak humidor-quality wood in bourbon, to signify Churchill’s cigar. Then, we may end up using an English hop—although Russian imperial stout is already an English beer.

We just released Made in the Shade, after the Scottish Black Watch, a very famous military unit in Scotland. We made a black IPA, we called it Made in the Shade, because they largely served in the shadow of the British Army, and we added English oak soaked in a case of 12 year-old Scotch.

The beers have been very well received. We don’t pilot-brew them, but we have a beer infusion tube that we’re able to use to test the combination of ingredients before we commit to a large batch. We’ve been working with BeerTubes.com to make a small infusion unit. We can suspend a small mesh bag that infuses an ingredient we want to test.

So you can avoid elements that might be jarring.

BMc: Everybody thinks, hey, bacon’s fantastic. Try it in beer. And this other notion, hey, what about Old Bay in beer? Naw, it’s horrible. So the infusion can solve a lot of misconceptions over what should be in beer. It’s how we can prototype these things.

We bring the idea of American experimentation with flavors, which you’re seeing a little in Britain. It’s a way we can use our experiences to assist them as they adapt to their market. Similarly, they give us insights into the tradition they have.

So you’re never brewing together at the same site. Your collaboration is information.

BMc: Right. All Skype and email on what we do and how we do things. Europe isn’t built on the collaborative traditions of American craft beer. Bringing that part of our tradition is something I believe will benefit everyone.

I understand you do have a restaurant, too.

BMc: We have a tavern here, but we have a new partnership in a restaurant called the 16 Mile Taphouse in Newark, DE. This particular location was the old Stone Balloon, which, since it’s right near the University of Delaware, has a legendary status. It was very well known in the eighties. Major heavyweight acts like Bruce Springsteen would come to this place. It wasn’t a matter of who had played at the Stone Balloon, it was who had not.

In addition to the Heraldry series, do you have other limited edition beers?

BMc: We do Collaboration Brews for a Good Cause. Delaware’s blessed with a solid cadre of chefs, some of which are James Beard finalists. Some have formed associations, like the Rehoboth Inspired Chefs Initiative. Those guys come in and we make beer with them and donate to their charities.

It used to be that wine bars were kind of the beginning of the wine evolution in the United States, and now it’s mainstreamed itself into restaurants. Beer is very similar. Beer started with outstanding beer bars like Blind Tiger or Monk’s, and what’s beginning to happen is craft is evolving into the mainstream of restaurants. We see restaurants as a critical component to the acceptance of craft beer.

We come from this area, and we try to celebrate that. If we’re blessed enough to sell all the beer in this area, we’ll be happy and content to stay where we are.

with John and Chris Trogner

Julie Johnson — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 16:08:40 +0000

Chris and John Trogner of Tröegs Brewing Co.

Brothers John and Chris Trogner were born and raised in central Pennsylvania. After a stint in Boulder, CO, where John worked a brewery and Chris in a restaurant, they returned to their home state, and founded Tröegs Brewing Co. in Harrisburg in 1996. In 2011, Tröegs moved to a new brewery in Hershey, PA.

AAB: How did you decide to come back to Pennsylvania to open your own brewery?

CT: We’d been looking at Colorado as an option, but we recognized there were a lot of breweries there—Odell’s, Left Hand, New Belgium—that were growing very rapidly. Then we looked at Pennsylvania as being a little under-served. We had some older, very traditional regional breweries, but not a huge number of craft start-ups. With the exception of Stoudt’s, of course, and Victory and a few others, there weren’t that many. So we felt there was more opportunity to come home and start a brewery.

We also looked on the highway map at the proximity of large metropolitan areas. Colorado’s a beautiful state, but it can take five to eight hours to get to the next city, whereas the mid-Atlantic region, central Pennsylvania in particular, it really only takes two or three hours to get to five or six major cities on the East Coast.

Was it your plan to concentrate on the Pennsylvania market?

CT: We’ve always felt strongly about being a regional craft brewer. Obviously the East Coast was an enormous opportunity, but our initial focus was central PA. It took us three to four years even to send beer to Philadelphia, which is an hour and a half down the road.

There must have been a big leap in volume to prompt the move of the brewery from Harrisburg to Hershey.

CT: It wasn’t too different from early on, when John and I realized we couldn’t grow the brewery with just the two of us doing everything. We hit that same logic with the brewery in Harrisburg: we couldn’t sustain the growth. The brewery wasn’t designed as efficiently as it could be, it wasn’t the safest brewery, it was hard to take people through for tours, we were kind of land-locked, and we were in a flood zone. We could have made it work for another five years, but as we outgrew the brewhouse, we realized we’d have to rebuild the whole infrastructure anyway. If we were ever going to move, this was when we had to do it.

How many regular and specialty beers do you brew?

CT: Our core is five year-round beers, and we try to have a seasonal every three months. Then we have a lot of experimental beers, which we call the Scratch beers, and then our Splinter series.

Tell me about the two series.

JT: We built this brewery with flexibility in mind. We’re really curious brewers, so we like to experiment with new techniques and different ingredients. On one side we wanted a very efficient system for all our core beers, and we also wanted a platform to have fun. We put in two brewhouses, one for main production, and the other is what we call our Scratch brewhouse, a smaller version of the larger one.

The inspiration for Scratch beers depends on where our minds are at the time. It’s constantly changing, so we just give each beer a number. We don’t have to worry about names, we don’t have to worry about marketing: we called the first beer we did Scratch 1. The next beer is just the next number.

with Tyson Arp

Julie Johnson — Tue, 28 May 2013 22:01:32 +0000

Tyson Arp of Nebraska Brewing Co.

Tyson Arp has been with the brewpub since it first opened just over five years ago. Originally a carpenter, he studied brewing at the Siebel Institute. His lucky break came when he won Best in Show at his first homebrewing competition. One of the judges, Paul Kavulak, was poised to open Nebraska Brewing Co., and hired Arp as assistant brewer.

AAB: Nebraska Brewing Co. seems to have a two-pronged business model. There’s a fairly traditional brewpub with a casual American menu and beer in standard craft styles, and then you have this edgy experimental line.

TA: That’s a good way to look at it. From the production side, it is almost two separate streams of beer. That’s partly a reflection of the atmosphere here in Omaha when we started, and things we had to do to define markets, but also do the beers we wanted to do and find people who wanted to drink them.

Are you almost dealing with two different markets?

To some extent. The Reserve Series and the barrel-aged beers, we drive a lot of that to our out-of-state markets. Locally we do a lot more of our session beers. We have really great distributers who move our Reserve Series as well, but the Omaha market is still an emerging beer scene.

Would one of your brewpub regulars who comes in each week for dinner and a beer be startled if you poured them Melange a Trois?

Not any more. Our locals are all about that stuff, too. It’s been fun to see how the Omaha market has grown in the five years we’ve been around. When we opened, we had other people on the beer scene telling us “Oh, you can’t sell an IPA in this market.” We said, “Well, those are the beers we like, so we’re going to make them anyway.” Maybe we struggled a bit in the first two years, but it’s been interesting to see in the pub how the tastes of our regulars and our restaurant crowd have changed over time. We see the hoppier beers starting to outsell the maltier, lower IBU beers.

How long did that take?

It took three years before they embraced our pale ale, and now there’s kind of a cult following for it locally. People freak out when we don’t have it available.

with Chuck Silva

Julie Johnson — Wed, 01 May 2013 22:22:15 +0000

Chuck Silva of Green Flash Brewing Co.

All About Beer: What is it about the San Diego beer community? Ten years ago, even though a lot of the major players were in place, it wasn’t on fire the way it is now.

CS: I think the fun thing that makes San Diego unique, compared to other awesome metropolitan craft beer hot spots, is that San Diego offers more diversity of beer styles. There’s a lot more Belgian styles, innovative new styles, not just hoppy beers. We have great hoppy beers here, for sure, but we’re not so narrowly focused.

Compared with San Diego, in LA, people who want to get into the industry seem to face more of an uphill struggle, even though there are very good places there. It’s hard to see how the two places can be so different.

LA is a whole different scene. Everything’s so “what’s hot and what’s not.” Brewpubs are restaurants first, and so LA, being so fickle—what have you done lately?—a brewpub might be hot for a couple of weeks, but what’s next? It’s hard to build a loyal audience. That’s just how I feel about LA. It’s not personal; it’s just an observation.

It’s my impression that Green Flash was one of the earlier companies, not to brew Belgian styles, but to put a Belgian twist on American beers. Is that accurate?

To some degree, yes. The original focus at Green Flash was high-end craft session beers. That all changed once we made West Coast IPA. It redefined the benchmark West Coast IPA style. There were already a lot of great IPAs out there, so we had to make the beer extravagant.

Our introduction to Belgian beers was our third-anniversary beer. We did a Belgian tripel, which is still in our line-up. That was more a traditional abbey tripel. Then I saw Belgian breweries were inspired by the hops that we’d been using on the West Coast in particular, with beers like Houblon Chouffe. So I looked at that and thought if they can put a Belgian flavor and American hops together, I can do that my own way. I started playing around. We used our imperial IPA wort and fermented it with our house yeast and a Belgian Trappist yeast, dry hopped with several American hops. That’s how we got Le Freak.

with Will Kemper

Julie Johnson — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 23:15:49 +0000

Will Kemper of Chuckanut Brewery and Kitchen

All About Beer: You have been in on start-up brewing enterprises in many countries. How receptive were they to brewpubs and craft beer?

Will Kemper: The reception has generally been positive, for example, in Turkey—specifically Istanbul, because Turkey’s a big country, so you’re really talking Istanbul.

AAB: It’s secular, but Muslim.

It’s a secular country like the U.S. is a secular country. The cultural aspects have a lot to do with how things are done. For example, I’d worked in Istanbul for three or four years on a couple of breweries. People think as far as Islamic countries go, it’s kinda puzzling, the acceptance of brewing there.

After a couple of years, I was in a vehicle with the project manager, and we were discussing work permits. On work permits, you have to put down what religion you are, so I had put down Buddhist. I tell them this story in the car, and the manager said, “No, Will, actually, you’re not Buddhist. What happened was, when you gave us the application, we put you down as Muslim. It just makes things easier.”

I understand that. I’ve worked with all sorts of engineers and independent contractors there, and invariably they put us all down as Muslim.

So, you look at the situation in Turkey, where 95 percent of the people are Muslim [and shouldn’t drink alcohol]. When you see that type of project, there might be concerns, but I was included in that 95 percent! So dealing with the people there, it’s secular like the U.S. is secular, where most of us are just assumed to be Judeo-Christian. There’s more similarity, as far as people relate to each other, than difference.

How did you get your start?

I studied chemical engineering in Boulder, at CU; I actually started homebrewing there.

Did you have beer and brewing in mind when you took up chemical engineering?

No. After I graduated, my wife, Mari, made a comment one day: “Will, if you like beer so much, why don’t you learn to make it?” One thing led to another. Making beer is classical chemical engineering. There’s a lot of chemistry and biology to it, but manufacturing is engineering. So, when you talk about a background to get into brewing, I can’t think of a better one.

Where was your first proper brewing job?

With Thomas Kemper. We moved out to the Seattle area in the late ’70s, because we wanted to live on the coast. The big brewery in Seattle was Rainier. I made an appointment to see the brewmaster, to talk about the profession of brewing. I said, “I have a degree in chemical engineering, and I’ve been homebrewing for so long. I’d really like to make my way into the brewing industry as a professional if I could.” He said, “Well, I appreciate that, but to become a brewer these days, you have to be born into it.” What that meant was that it went from father to son. Without that linkage, it was virtually impossible. The fact was, breweries were consolidating, and jobs were actually declining. So unless you were born into it, good luck.

We decided to think about it, knowing that some small, new breweries had started up already. There was Bill Newman’s on the East Coast [Newman Brewing Co., Albany, NY] and I want to say Cartwright in Oregon, and a couple of others. The point is, it wasn’t a compete vacuum. I decided, let’s try to make our own brewery. My discussion with the brewer at Rainier taught me, if you want to do it, you’ve got to do it on your own.

I hadn’t realized that older breweries would have been closed to newcomers.

Here’s another story. I’ve been with the MBAA [Master Brewers Association of the Americas] for a long, long time. I was sitting in one of our meetings for the Philly region. At that time, I was the only craft brewer going to these regional conferences. I’m sitting with the brewer from Stroh’s—only about a dozen or so people would come to these meetings at the time—and he said. “Look around you. There are 12 master brewers around here and only two of us are practicing our craft.”

Craft brewers kept the brewing industry alive and thriving. The big guys helped us too, of course, but without craft brewers, there’s no way that organizations like MBAA—and their knowledge—would continue to exist.

with Jim Wagner

Julie Johnson — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 23:39:23 +0000

All About Beer: When was DuClaw founded?

Jim Wagner: DuClaw was founded in 1996 by Dave Benfield, who is still the owner.

Jim Wagner of DuClaw Brewing Company

You have four locations in Maryland. Do they all brew on site?

It’s good you mentioned that. Due to Maryland state law, they do not. Early on, we were in quite a conundrum when we decided to take the DuClaw concept further. Dave, our owner, had the vision of expanding to multiple brewpubs. It didn’t take a whole lot of time to find out that in Maryland that was against the law.

Really? What’s the problem?

Exactly how it’s written I do not know, but the meat and potatoes of it is that an owning entity—in this case, Dave—can own one [brewpub] location, but he cannot own more than one. The rhetoric says this law was put in place basically to prevent Bud or Miller or Coors from coming into the state and opening 10 or 12 breweries and dominating the scene. That sounds well and good, but in actuality it kind of handcuffs a lot of craft brewers.

We decided at that point it really wasn’t feasible to fight the law. Dave realized after talking to the state liquor board that we could brew at one of our locations and supply a second location. We opened a restaurant at Arundel Mills, not what we’d call a true brewpub, but a restaurant that served only our beer. Legally, we were then able to brew at our original location, send our beer to a distributor and buy it back to sell at our second location.

Isn’t that a classic example of how crazy these laws become?

Then, when we opened our third location, at that point, you could legally send the beer [made at an original site] to one location, but if you owned more than one, then that’s illegal.

with Ben Edmunds

Brian Yaeger — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:04:38 +0000

All About Beer: With no professional experience and brewing for a brand new brewery in a city renowned for its beer culture, were you intimidated when you first started?

Yeah, absolutely. For months I had a huge amount of anxiety. I was confident that I could make good beer, but I wanted to enter the market at a level of quality that I was happy with and would make a good mark for us in the beer world here.

We were shooting high and so I was pretty nervous about that. But still, when you’re brewing in this town—there’s a lot of good brewers and really devoted beer lovers—every time you release a new beer you want it to meet the expectations of what Portland beer is meant to be.

Ben Edmunds, Brewmaster at Breakside Brewery in Portland, Ore.

What is that community of brewers like and how are you fitting in?

I’m always astounded by how open and interested people are. The people that I feel like I’ve learned from the most are the ones that are the most open. The other day, I was down at Upright Brewing chatting with (owner/brewer) Alex Ganum. I told him I had an issue come up and say, “I wonder what you would’ve done in that situation?”

It’s a great industry where you can do that. It’s a huge affirmation when other brewers come and drink at Breakside and I make it a point to go and taste as many of the new beers that they’re releasing as often as I possibly can.

That can’t be a bad thing to brew at two celebrated breweries in Beervana and find your primary brewmaster demands on the rise.

Yeah, we’ve started looking at our expansion plans. We’ve accelerated our plans to have beer in other markets. At the same time, we’re mindful of not overreaching too much even though we have a very successful small brewpub. We need to scale up appropriately. We’re going to move to a much bigger system and brew under capacity, hopefully, for the first few years.

with Pat Conway

Julie Johnson — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 22:20:43 +0000

All About Beer: The words “environmentally and socially-conscious” appear first in a list of attributes that describe your company. Where did that commitment start?

Pat Conway: It’s been an evolution. My brother Dan and I almost immediately had a recycling effort at the brewery back 24 years ago. Now we have the three waves in our logo. The logo has barley crisscrossed at the top, centered with hop cones. Underneath the words “Great Lakes Brewing” we have three waves that represent our Triple Bottom Line: we felt it was important to emphasize, beyond the financial, the social and environmental. As it’s turned out over the years, the social and environmental aspects have gained in popularity with our consumer base.

Pat Conway of Great Lakes Brewing Co.

We’re part of the one-percent-to-the-planet strategy giving back to the community. We’ve got our Burning River Fest, which I think is going into its twelfth year, where we give money to groups that work primarily in the area of water quality. I think we’ve doled out over $350,000 to groups that work in that sphere. So it’s not “green-washing”: it’s a living, breathing part of the company.

Great Lakes is located in a historic part of Cleveland.

The buildings were actually built in the mid-nineteenth century. One was a livery stable, which is now our beer garden. Another building where our taproom and beer cellar are, was called Market Tavern. The other building was the Herman-McLean Feed and Seed, and now that’s our little brewery restaurant and dining room. The corner building was the Silver Dollar Saloon and upstairs was a burlesque house—now that’s our corporate offices on the upper floors and the first floor is retail. Our production brewery across the street was the stables of an old brewery called Schlather Brewing Co.

Cleveland had 30 breweries in the 1870s, and we’re in the center of where a lot of the brewing activity took place. The whole campus just reeks of charm. There’s nothing like old red brick buildings to conjure up the romance of brewing days past.

You once told me there are bullet holes in the brewpub wall.

That was Eliot Ness. Our mother was his stenographer. When he put Capone in jail in Chicago, he came to Cleveland to run the police and fire department, and my mom used to take dictation from him. One of his favorite watering holes was Market Tavern. There’s a stunningly beautiful tiger mahogany bar replete with bullet holes: somehow, they’re associated with Ness. My mom questioned the veracity of the story, because she said he never carried a gun, but I said, “Well, maybe somebody shot at him.”

with Brad Wynn

Julie Johnson — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 16:09:46 +0000

Big Boss has been through a lot of incarnations, hasn’t it?

It was Tom Cat, which became Pale Ale (it was really owned by the same people), then it became Rock Creek, and that’s when I became involved. Rock Creek became Chesapeake Bay for a very short time and nearly went under. We came back and started Edenton, and then, fortunately, Geoff Lamb bought it and we became Big Boss.

Brad Wynn of Big Boss Brewing Co. in Raleigh, N.C.

It’s grown big—new staff, new equipment, much larger output. What’s the rate-limiting step on scaling up operations?

Tanks—fermentation to lagering to finish. I just bought two new 100-barrel tanks, which will take the place of two 50-barrel fermentation tanks. But we will do 12,000 barrels this year, up from 6,500 last year, barring anything unforeseen. I mean, we’ve had a boiler go down, we’ve had all kinds of crap, but we’ve been on a good roll lately.

You can sell as much as you make right now?

Oh, yeah. We can’t make enough. And we can’t explore any more territory—I’m not even covering North Carolina yet. We’re not east of 95, there are a few more pockets of the state we’d like to cover. I just got off the phone with Pennsylvania and Virginia yesterday about why I can’t get them beer yet.

I know you trained as an economist. How did you get started in brewing?

I was the keg guy at Wild Goose. They had some crazy name for a keg washer, so it sounded like a really great job until I got there! I’d had two job offers: one with them, and it started right away. I wanted to be a brewer and I needed work, so I took that one.

What were you doing before that?

I was at University of Delaware, thinking of getting my MBA, until Lynn said we were having our first kid. I thought “What? I’ve got to get a job? What the hell! School’s so great!”

with John McDonald

Julie Johnson — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:43:27 +0000

What was your background before you turned to brewing?

I went to art school for college, then had to figure out a way to make a living. So I became a carpenter/cabinet maker and did that for about 15 years. I became a homebrewer in the mid-’80s and was enamored with the small breweries that were popping up around the country and thought that was something I’d like to do.

Does any of your art background transfer to brewing?

I’m very process-oriented. You look at all the things I’ve done, as an artist and a cabinetmaker, making something is what drives me and got me into brewing.

You’ve grown to be one of the larger craft breweries. How do you balance your growth with your ideals about beer being a local or regional activity?

We’ve always prided ourselves on being, first, a local brewery. Then we became a regional brewery. Four or five years ago, we began making our Smokestack line, which is our higher-end, bigger, more esoteric-type beers. The Smokestack line in general is higher alcohol, bigger beers; it makes sense for us to ship those farther.

Speaking of local tastes, I find it remarkable that your wheat beer is your most popular beer. Not many breweries lead with a wheat beer.

Right. That started for us back in the early ’90s, and it just fit the Midwestern palate. And ours is about as no-frills as they come. It’s a very simple recipe. It is very approachable, and that’s why we sell 100,000 barrels of it.