Meet the Brewers: Ron Jeffries, Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales

In anticipation of the Brewers Guild Summer Festival in Ypsilanti Friday and Saturday at Riverside Park, I have conducted interviews with local brewers Matt and Rene Greff, Arbor Brewing Company and Corner Brewery; Brad Sancho, Original Gravity; and Ron Jeffries, Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales.

This is the last in the series, an interview conducted with Ron Jeffries from Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales. Scroll down to read interviews with Rene and Matt Greff, Arbor Brewing Company and Corner Brewery; and Brad Sancho from Original Gravity. They are also posted here: http://www.heritage.com/life/ and video clips from each interview to come soon.

Excerpts from all of the interviews were published in Heritage Newspapers' July 22 edition. Enjoy and cheers!

Ron Jeffries
Owner of Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales, 3115 Broad St., in Dexter; and proprietor of the Jolly Pumpkin Café and Brewery, 311 S. Main St., Ann Arbor
Age: mid-40s
Lives in: Ann Arbor with wife Laurie, who is a partner and co-founder of Jolly Pumpkin, and son Daemon

How did you get started brewing?
Jeffries: Well, it’s a long and not very exciting story. I had always loved beer for as long I can remember in any case, at one point become interested in more flavorful beers and that was quite a while ago. And at that time there weren’t nearly the varieties of craft beer available that we have today except for Bells which was started in the early 1980s, and there were a few other craft brewers from around the country, but there still weren’t all that many. I was very interested in craft beer and at some point, I’m not exactly sure why but I was in graduate school, I woke up one day and decided that I wanted to be a brewer and to learn more about brewing. So I changed the focus of my major to do with breweries and brewpubs and issues of waste and efficiency.

A few years later, I got hired to work in a brewery. (What brewery?) The first brewery that I worked in was Grizzly Peak (in Ann Arbor). Greg Burke and myself were the two original brewers there back in 1995, I started studying brewing science in the early 1990s and a few years later started working for Grizzly Peak.

I really like the interplay that you get with craft brewing, you have the science of brewing, it’s very important to understand how beer is made and what it takes to make good beer…and also you have the craft. What we do from the outside probably looks the same every day and that’s what craft is whether you are making cabinets, baskets or beer.

It’s a lot of doing the same thing, but when you are in the minutia of what you’re doing, every day is actually very different; it’s that application of science. And we are also an agricultural product, so the raw materials are always different…you take that and that is really where a lot of the artistry comes in; designing beers and flavors.

There is no science that can tell you, predict to you what flavor you will get from a certain amount of a certain malt or a blend of different malts, or different hop varieties. You certainly have hop analysis that can analyze a number of different compounds and that can maybe give you an idea of what flavors you can expect…but that is really where the rubber meets the road of where that artistic expression and experience really comes into play when designing beers and designing recipes.

(What Jolly Pumpkin does seems to be a very artisinal process and different from what most other breweries are doing…)
What we do is a little different. A lot of breweries are starting to get into that now, when we started six years ago very few if any were doing oak aging and blending to the extent that we do. Selling sour beer six years ago was pretty difficult…a couple months out of the box opening we won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival (held annually in Denver, Co.) and it showed that we were making great beer from the beginning. But still oak-aged sour beer back then was a tough sell and it still is, but now it is getting easier.

(Do you think you started a trend as there seems to be more sour beers on the market?)
Jeffries: I wouldn’t have the hubris to say it was all us when we are such a tiny brewery, but other brewers do pay attention to what even the small breweries are doing, but we were certainly around at the beginning of this wave of people making sour beer if not the beginning.

Brewers have been making sour beers for hundreds and probably thousands of years. Beer was sour before people learned how to isolate the souring bacteria from their brewing yeast…on a resurgence level here in the U.S., we were definitely among the first if not the first. I think we remain to this day to be the only brewery to oak age 100 percent of their beer.

What is your opinion of the craft beer market?
Jeffries: I think it’s great. Obviously I love craft beer, it’s awesome to see more and more people enjoying it and drinking and knowing more about it.

It’s attracting some national media attention. And it’s always kind of great but at the same time you have to also kind of cover your eyes and ears when you hear reports because they are so far from the concept of craft beer and craft brewers. To you and I, it seems like it’s an everyday thing, but it’s kind of like, ‘Why don’t you know about this?’ And they make goofy jokes because it’s beer, they get the terminology wrong and that sort of thing.

But that just has to do with the national attention, certainly the growth is just great. You can go so many places now and get great beer, so many different restaurants, stores all around the country. It didn’t exist a few years ago and now it does and it’s growing. It seems to be picking up momentum as more and more people realize that quality of life is often times more important than quantity, sure you can go buy a 30-pack of mass market beer for the same price of a six-pack of craft beer, but when it comes to enjoyment and your life and what you would rather drink.

(The growth) is good for a lot of different reasons. One, craft beer is a great beverage, it’s very good compared to a lot of different beverages out there, it’s a great thing to be drinking.

It’s nutritious. In a lot of cases there is live yeast in unfiltered beer which is great for you, there’s a lot of other nutrients and anti-oxidants in craft beer, really it’s a great beverage and it has always been a beverage of moderation compared to spirits or other more alcoholic beverages.

It’s good for the economy, it’s good to have businesses that are growing; that are hiring people, especially the last few years that we are struggling through. And it’s great for the craft beer business owners, I know a lot of these people and they are all really phenomenal people, they are all very passionate about what they do and they all really care about there communities and the environment. These are great people to have succeed in any community because they really care and they’re passionate and they give back to the community. It’s great for everybody from the consumer to, of course, the business owners themselves.

(Even though there is a supportive network of brewers in Michigan, the market is still competitive, yes?)
It is. There is limited shelf space…certainly we are all trying to stay in business. In Michigan, craft beer is still only less than 2 percent of all beer sold, so we do have a lot of room to grow. If you look nationally, I think it’s still below 6 percent…some states are closer to 10 percent and some cities, I think Portland, Ore., it’s around 30 percent of all beer sold is craft beer.

We’ve got a tremendous opportunity for growth and I think most of the craft brewers if not all the craft brewers in Michigan realize that the best place for all us to succeed is if we all succeed and work together to help each other.

Certainly you’re first concern is that your business stays in business and that you feed your family and take care of your employees, but after that it really helps me sell beer if Matt Greff if selling a lot of beer, it helps me sell beer if Founders is selling a lot of beer. It gets people interested in the category…So it’s people, but it also buyers at stores. If they say, ‘Hey, this craft beer is doing great maybe they’ll bring in my beer,’ so that all really helps.

Are you always coming up with new ideas?
Jeffries: I like to joke that my life is controlled by scraps of paper. Because I write everything down on little scraps of paper and they kind of whirlwind around…I write a lot of the ideas on scraps of paper but usually only after I have had them floating around for a while, because at first I think, “Oh, I’ll remember that. That’s such a great idea,” but after a while other great ideas start crowding, and I say that I better write this down before I forget.

Again, another thing I like about craft brewing is that it can be very creative especially in the smaller breweries where you have the opportunity to brew more often…experiment with fun new recipes, new ideas. You’re not constrained in a lot of ways other than making something that will sell and is financially viable.

(At this point, is it the demand that is determining where you are taking the brewery or is it you and your scraps of paper?)
Well, it’s two-fold. We can’t stay in business without people buying our beer, I mean we need customers, we love our customers, they are very passionate about our beer. You feel really good when somebody really likes what you do. It’s a great feeling when somebody likes what you do.

Conversely…although a very nice guy, I’m kind of a cranky artist type too, I don’t really care, I’m making the beer I want to make and if you don’t like it, sorry, there is probably another beer out there for you. But I’m doing what I want to do.

And there is a certain economic reality that we all face, the beers have to be good but they have to be quality to sell…I mean we demonstrated that, we started with this tiny niche brewery that made really good beer but really strange beer compared to what everybody else was doing and most of what everybody still is doing, and we had some really, really tough years but we scrapped and we hung on, and we kept putting out great beers, we kept winning the wars and one-by-one people were getting excited about our beer and talking about it and started talking about it on the Internet and that sort of thing.

What is your favorite style of beer to drink (before I allowed Ron to answer I guessed that his favorite style was saison as most of Jolly Pumpkin’s flagship beers are saisons)
Jeffries: I love saison. I drink probably more than most people do simply because that is what we mostly have around here.

It’s a funny story that I tell…I was at the Great American Beer Festival in 2008…and the Great Divide micro-brewery (based in Denver, Co., where the GABF is held) they usually have an open house for brewery people during the GABF so (Ron and his wife, Laurie) we usually go over there and kick around and enjoy some beers at their bar and it has gotten really, really crowded over the years.

The year before last it was really crowded and we were kind of in this sea of people and I was trying to get up to the bar to order a beer…I finally get up to the bar and kind of had to push people on either side, I ordered the stout for Laurie and got myself a Denver Pale Ale, because it’s a phenomenal beer especially when it’s fresh and getting it direct from the brewery is about as fresh as it’s going to get.

So I ordered those two beers…and handed Laurie her stout and I kid you not, two people at either side of me looked at the beer and then looked at me (kind of funny) and I said ‘Cheers guys!’ and went back into the brewery and was enjoying my pale ale…but one of the guys was actually a beer journalist and comes up to me and he goes, ‘I can’t believe Ron Jeffries is drinking pale ale,” and I said I love pale!

It was the style that turned me on to craft beer years and years ago it was pale ale. It’s one of my favorite beers to drink, because it’s mild enough in alcohol you can enjoy more than just one or two…nice pale ales have a good hop aroma, or at least a decent enough hop aroma and I love hops, which is surprising to most people – I’m kind of hop-head actually.

So outside of saisons, pale ale or IPA is probably most likely what you would see me drinking.

How important is the Brewers Guild fest?
Jeffries: The most important thing about any beer festival is really finally getting to meet face-to-face, our people.

The people who buy our beer, who drink our beer and are really happy to see us and support our brewery.

That’s the best part. They’re not fans, they’re not customers, they’re like our people. They’re the people that love us and love our beer and we’re really excited to see them, and to be able to make a face-to-face connection, communicate with them, if they have questions about the brewery or let them know what’s going.

It’s just fun, and it’s great to meet people that way. We also do get new people, to talk about the beer to them and explain about sour beer and what we do and try to win people over to sour side a little bit and that’s always good too. But the main thing for me and most of the people here is to be able to really meet the people who have been enjoying our beer and get to talk with them and shake their hand, thank them for buying our beer.

What have you got planned for the Brewers Guild Fest?
Jeffries: We always try to do fun, special things for the Michigan Brewers Guild Festival, it’s our ‘home’ festival if you will, right in our backyard.

But we think and we hope that all of the fans and customers in this area are familiar with our year-round, our regular beers and even our seasonals…we always try to run all firkins (which is a container that holds unfiltered beer and dispensed without the use of additional pressurization), for the Jolly Pumpkin table, we like the traditional gravity dispensing firkin, there’s a little more conditioning in there, it’s just fun. It’s a fun thing to do, everybody is excited about it and it also allows the opportunity to create special beers, ‘one-off’ beers and that’s what we do.

So this year we have our Bam Noir with pomegranate in it…we’ve got our Roja De Kriek, which is a kriek version of our Roja, aged on cherries, we’ve done that for the past few years and it’s a real crowd pleaser.

We have one of those flashback beers that has been sold out for a while, we have a firkin of our Biere De Mars that’s a perennial favorite that is brewed in extremely limited amounts. We also have our Weizen Bam with lemon grass which is a great combination, and our Blanca with hibiscus, so some really fun beers.

Weekly Beer Thoughts, July 19-25: Beer Fest just two days away

As of this writing the wonderful, glorious, grand, exhilarating Summer Brewers Guild Fest is a little less than 48 hours away. For adults, the glory of Beer Fest is as close to Christmas morning as we will ever reclaim. I'm still waiting to come home and see gift wrapped jet skis in my driveway - in the meantime, this will suffice just fine.

Beer Fest is my moment. It literally is something I look forward to all year long because in a way myself, along with other news people in the area become a part of the festival by getting to know the people and places that go into this highly popular annual tradition. Personally I know that I gain more and more appreciation for how much hard work goes into the whole thing every year on behalf of the Brewers Guild and the brewers themselves. And the brewers take it very seriously. This is isn't some namby-pamby (try looking that term up in the Associated Press Style book) spur of the moment thing for these guys where they haul out a few kegs of their year-round brews and hopefully try to win over some customers.

Heck no!

Ron Jeffries from Jolly Pumpkin had a beautiful and succinct way of answering one of my questions when I recently sat down with him. I asked, "What is important about Beer Fest?" And he said without any hesitation and as matter-of-factly as can be mustered, "It's a chance to meet our 'people' face to face...and shake their hands."

Now when Ron says "people" I thought that was a pretty interesting way to put it. He explained that what he meant were those "people" are more than just customers, they are those who happily and enthusiastically support his brewery and are more or less dedicated to drinking Jolly Pumpkin beers. In short, there are those who would follow Jolly Pumpkin to hell and back...not that there would be any reason for that (just an expression).

And I think a lot brewers feel that way, for no matter how big one gets or how many New York Times articles are written about how your beer beats most Belgian-style beers (including the ones made in Belgium), it still feels good to be told you are doing a good job by the people who matter most - Jolly Pumpkin people, or Arbor Brewing Company people, or Bells people or Founders people...you get the picture.

Ron Jeffries is a very nice person. When he says that his favorite part of the festival is meeting these loyal and dedicated JP fans, the same fans who have helped bolster his once tiny brewery into a regional powerhouse and current market trend-setter - I believe him.

Anyway, I think I lost my original point of this, what was it? Oh yeah...See ya at Beer Fest! And don't forget to seek me out so you can get a video clip of yourself.

Beer list highlights

The brewery and tentative beer list has been released per the Michigan Brewers Guild blog, The Mash. See here: http://www.mbgmash.org/

There are several highlights that jump out right away, the first and foremost being that Bells Brewing Inc., will be making a triumphant return and bringing the heavy guns. In addition to favorites that have catapulted Bells on a national level - namely Oberon, Hopslam and Two Hearted Ale - they are also bringing a bourbon barrel-aged stout, a Berliner-weisse (a fastly disappearing German style of beer) and two Biere De Gardes...am I reading that right? One Biere De Garde made by Bells is pretty intriguing, but two!?!?!

Founders is always a festival favorite as I can always tell when the KBS is tapped as a mile-long line forms in under a minute. Well this year, Founders has decided to quit pussyfooting around and bring Kentucky Breakfast Stout and Canadian Breakfast Stout - awesome. And not to be tampered with is their Black Biscuit which is a strong ale, or old ale as some label it. The CBS and the Black Biscuit, I believe, is one of the rare appearances for Founders. Last year, they debuted Hand of Doom imperial lager which was very nice.

So, the wrap it up (as I am way past my bedtime), there is going to be some truly wonderful things going on at Beer Fest and I hope to see everybody there!

Meet the Brewers: Brad Sancho, Original Gravity

In anticipation of the Brewers Guild Summer Festival in Ypsilanti July 23 and 24 at Riverside Park, I have conducted interviews with local brewers Matt and Rene Greff, Arbor Brewing Company and Corner Brewery; Brad Sancho, Original Gravity; and Ron Jeffries, Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales.

This is the second in the series, an interview conducted with Brad Sancho from Original Gravity. The rest of the interviews will be posted here and at http://www.heritage.com/ in the coming week leading up to beer fest (video clips from each interview to come soon as well), and excerpts from all of the interviews will be published in Heritage Newspapers' July 22 edition on Page 2-B. Enjoy and cheers!

Check back here Thursday for my interview with Ron Jeffries


Brad Sancho
Owner, head brewer of Original Gravity Brewing Company, 440 County St., Milan
Age: 35
Lives in: Originally from Belleville, now lives in Ypsilanti Township

How did you get started brewing?
Sancho: I got started just by reading a lot of books and I started homebrewing in 2002. I spent a couple hundred bucks on the equipment and started making it on my stove, eventually I graduated from there to the garage.

Actually it was my brother-in-law who really got me started. He was homebrewing with some friends, just kind of messing around. None of them were really pros at it.
So I went over there (when they were brewing) and I really wasn’t even into drinking good beer at the time, I just thought I would go over there drink some beers and it was fun and it was interesting. We tried it a few weeks later and it was horrible.

But it was interesting to me, so I bought some books and started and thought, ‘Hey I want to try this.’ So I read through the books and saw that we didn’t do this and we didn’t do that…and that’s kind of what sparked it. After that I bought some limited stuff to make it on my stove and it kind of started from there.

(So, what led you to eventually opening Original Gravity?)
Sancho: It’s kind of weird. I said to myself, ‘Well I would like to do this some day,’ and after that I started working on a business plan…so I started dabbling around with my business plan and worked on that for several months. And then I just started getting a little more serious about it, I started doing a lot more research about it, started getting a little more excited, and eventually I said to myself, ‘Wow, I’m really going to do this, this was actually happening.’

And even after that, after I had the business plan and started meeting with banks, even after I got my loan and started building, it really didn’t sink in until we started doing construction and I was about to quit my job. Then it really started hitting me like, ‘Wow this isn’t a joke. I’m really going to do this.’

I went to school to be a mechanical engineer. I was doing diesel emission testing for companies for almost 10 years, and in the middle of all this my wife was pregnant. So I started questioning myself like, ‘Is this really the fatherly thing to do, to quit a secure job?’

But I think what really pushed it over the edge for me is that I was really, really enjoying the homebrewing hobby coupled that with the fact that I wasn’t enjoying my job anymore. This wasn’t what I wanted to do every day, I said I think I wanted to make beer every day or close to it. And most days (brewing) is fun…this really is a cool thing to be doing, I enjoy it.

What continues to get you out of bed in the morning?
Sancho: It’s kind of the whole thing. It’s really a combination of things.
I really enjoy making beer, but to be honest sometimes I don’t get all that excited about making another batch of IPA (India Pale Ale) like I did today because I have so many times before. But we have the rotating taps and we have the small-batch system, so I still have other avenues to have fun and I think the customers feel the same way. The like to try something new, just the creative aspect of coming in and doing those things that’s what gets me out of bed.

And the other aspect, which is not specific to owning a brewery, with owning your own business, you’ve got a little more freedom. I’ve got a wife who is pregnant again and a little boy that’s 3-years-old, so I can kind of move my schedule around to spend more time with the family more so than at a regular job.

What is your opinion of the craft beer market?
Sancho: I like it, it’s supporting my business. It’s kind of weird, I started homebrewing 2002 and really it’s been a short period of time that there has been a big surge of microbreweries. I think in the early to mid-1990s, there was a big surge and that was before I was even 21, and now there is a big surge of craft breweries.

I think a lot of that is because there has been a big movement to try to support local so that definitely helps. That’s what we’re all about here too (supporting local businesses)…before prohibition there were more breweries than there are today and that’s because they didn’t have the transportation like they do now, so people got their beer from the local watering hole. The whole thing is really cyclical.

(Do you feel like there has been a shift in craft beer where drinkers are seeking out more creative beers?)
You definitely have to have the beers that people want to drink. In my case there are lot of beers that people haven’t tried before, so maybe they don’t know what they want.
And I say in my case because we did open in Milan, it’s a rural neighborhood and there are lot of people who come in here just to see what we’re all about.

I’ve heard it a million times before, somebody will come in and say that they drink Budweiser, so you need to help them understand that there are definitely other styles of beer out there.
I think to help educate them and offer them something different is important.

(How long have you been distributing to local bars and restaurants?)
We’ve been distributing for about a year, a little over a year now and we just had a two-year anniversary last month. Right now there are between 10 to 12 places have our beer and we are growing into that.

I don’t have plans to bottle, we do the take-out, we do growlers here but as far as bottling I really don’t want to have to get into that if I don’t have to. So far we have been fortunate to have been able to pay the bills and run the business without having to do that. It’s a whole other investment…it’s a whole other transferring of the beer so it’s another opportunity for something to go wrong with the beer. I am sure you have had six-packs from some of your favorite breweries where you know it’s sometimes it doesn’t taste just right, but some places do it better than others. You know, it’s just really something I don’t want to get into.

If we do any bottling, it will be small batches that we would sell here. We just started doing some barrel-aged stuff so in the fall and the winter we will have that out. We have a scotch ale that’s aging in a Bourbon barrel and I have a imperial IPA that’s aging in a Bourbon barrel. I’ve got a hard ginger ale that’s aging in a bourbon barrel, there are no hops in the brewing process for that other than some dry hops that are placed in the server tank with it. I thought that would be really fun to have a Bourbon ginger-ale kind of thing,

What have you got planned for the Brewers’ Guild Fest?
Sancho: We’re going to be bringing some of our full-timers. I think it’s important to bring your full-time beers, some of those people identify your business with those beers and they always want that beer.

What is your favorite style of beer to drink?
Sancho: I definitely go for the hop-forward kind of beers. I really like hops, which is almost getting clichéd at this point because everybody loves the hoppy beers…the big citrusy, floral IPA’s. I really like those.

(What is your favorite style of beer to brew?)
Sancho: It doesn’t make that much difference to me. I don’t do anything too abstract. I do like beers that I dry-hop. I dry-hop a lot of my beers like my IPA, my amber, my bitter and even my ginger ale.

(Dry hopping is) adding hops after fermentation, either in the server tanks or in the conditioning tank. Like today, I transferred a new batch of the amber, when I did that, I basically have a big sack that I fill with hops and I tie it up in there.

How important is the Brewers Guild Festival?
Sancho: It’s got a purpose for me personally for my brewery especially since we’re kind of young, I don’t really advertise…it’s a way for me to advertise my business.
It’s also being part of the Brewer’s Guild, it’s a good event to bring us all together so we can get together and socialize and we have that networking and social aspect.
It also kind of has that ‘Wow’ factor, that "Ah" factor. Bringing all the breweries in Michigan together, not all of them are members of the Guild but most of them are, and a big majority actually attend the festival. So I think that helps all of us do better to see all of these great breweries come together for one big festival, and to be known as one of the better beer festivals in the country.

Meet the Brewers: Matt and Rene Greff, Arbor Brewing Company and Corner Brewery

In anticipation of the wonderful Brewers' Guild Summer Festival in Ypsilanti July 23 and 24 at Riverside Park, I have conducted interviews with local brewers Matt and Rene Greff, Arbor Brewing Company and Corner Brewery; Brad Sancho, Original Gravity; and Ron Jeffries, Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales. The following is the interview I conducted with Matt and Rene. The rest of the interviews will be posted here and at http://www.heritage.com/ in the coming week leading up to beer fest (video clips from each interview to come soon as well), and excerpts from all of the interviews will be published in Heritage Newspapers' July 22 edition. Enjoy and cheers!

Matt and Rene Greff
Owners Arbor Brewing Company, 114 E. Washington St., Ann Arbor; and Corner Brewery, 720 Norris St., Ypsilanti
Age: Matt is 43, and Renee is 44
Lives in: Have lived in Ypsilanti since 1991

How did you get started brewing?
Matt: I actually studied in Germany when I was in college. I fell in love with beer when I was over there, I had no idea what good beer was at the time…I was actually studying abroad, nothing beer related or so I thought.

When I got home it was pretty much before the whole microbrewery renaissance had started at least in this part of the country, and I was working a soul-crushing corporate job out of college. Renee called me one day and asked if I didn’t mind swinging by (a local) store to pick up some bread and cheese for a dinner party that night. So I did and I was kind of going through the store when I saw this book called “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing,” (by the founder of the American Homebrewers' Association Charlie Papazian).

The German beers I buy here tasted stale as opposed to what I was drinking in Germany, and (at the time) there weren’t many good craft brewers out there yet. So I wondered if I could make the beers that I fell in love with as opposed to trying to find the stale versions of them over here. So I went into my office, read the book from cover-to-cover, came home and proudly declared to Renee, “I’m going to be a brewer.”

What is your favorite German style?
Matt: I’m a rare breed in the fact that I’m a professional brewer and I’m also a homebrewer. My favorite would be northern German Pilseners, it’s kind of the first love story I had with beer. They tend to be very hoppy, right in the 40s in terms of (International Bittering Units), they are light and crisp, great in the fall and great in the summertime…a really good all-weather beer. I really enjoy that crisp, Noble Hops taste.

Rene: And technically they are very difficult to make.

What continues to get you out of bed in the morning?
Matt: In all honesty, what gets us out of bed in the morning is the fact that we have been doing this 15 years and it’s still all about the beer. If we owned two restaurants, we probably wouldn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. If we had a manufacturing staff of 16 employees, we wouldn’t want to get out of bed.

What really continues to make it thoroughly enjoyable is the fact that we are in the beer industry. It’s a great industry with great products not just by us but by everybody in the state of Michigan and across the country. It’s a great community, and we have great relationships with people from other breweries.

I would say it’s still really all about the beer and that keeps us going. There is never a shortage of good beers to make, there is never a shortage of new things to experiment with.

Are you always coming up with ideas for new beers?
Matt: Since German beers are my first love, I was a very rigid brewer for many years; very true to style beers. Since the both of us had studied abroad, we kind of have the travel bug, so every country we go to we really try to learn in-depth of their beer traditions by sampling different styles. And for the first, maybe the first 10 years, the styles we made tended to be very traditional. Really I would say with the new influx of brewers, we have hired several (brewers) in their early 20s and they have a much broader sense of adventure in terms of brewing. So they are really teaching this old dog new tricks.

Now that I have kind of had my horizons broadened, we’ll be out somewhere and I will see a certain spice and start thinking to myself, “Hmmm….I wonder how that would be in a beer? Maybe I should try that.”

Like I said there is never a shortage of areas to experiment, and that has kind of been the cornerstone of microbrewery renaissance. It was started by reviving what European beers used to be, and now it has gone to the next step where people are making beers that nobody ever dreamed of making before.

What is your opinion of the craft beer market right now?
Matt: I think nothing but high regard for the whole industry. I think that brewers are still brewing with integrity. We really haven’t seen any breweries get too big or sell out or any of those shenanigans, like with a lot of growth industries where your goal is to get to a certain point and have another company buy you out – you don’t really see that in the microbrewery movement.

What you do see is constant innovation, and we are a very collegial group of people that all get along who are all very supportive. But it’s an arms race to a certain extent. There’s a lot of “Oh yeah, you did that? Well, I’m going to do this.”

I think the tell-tale sign of that is that a lot of these European breweries are sending their brewers over here to see what the heck is going on with these American craft breweries.
(What about Bells Brewery, Inc., which will open a new $5.2 million facility at the end of this year?)

Rene: They’re still small in the grand scheme of things.

Matt: If you think about it, even if they double their production they will still only do about 2 to 3,000 barrels per year, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to a macro-brewery like Coors or Anheuser-Busch. It’s not really about keeping it small…look at Founders, they are growing like crazy and it’s still a small brewery. As far as breweries go, they are easily going to be the second biggest Michigan brewery in the next couple of years. But they are doing based on their spirit and their current portfolio, they haven’t found like a sell-out beer, like a light beer and just market the crap out of it.

What is happening is that we are growing the market (of craft beer drinkers). You have to keep growing to stay viable in business, they are not selling out. And I think what is happening is a slow conversion of beer drinkers to craft beer.

For example, Michigan is on the map as far as top craft beer states in the country, we’re I the top three, and I think it’s the top beer state. We have less than 1-and-half percent of all beer sold in Michigan comes from craft breweries. Compare that to Oregon and they are up over 15 percent…we have this huge growth potential, not only in Michigan but across the midwest and the country, and I think it just happens with time.

Now, our goal with the Michigan Brewers Guild is pretty low: We’re trying to get to 5 percent within the next five years. I think the fact that the Michigan brewers are growing like they are just proves there is a growing market, even in this economy there is still a market for high-end craft beer.

What have you got planned for the Brewers’ Guild Fest?
Matt: We’ve been doing barrel-aged sour beers over at Arbor for about eight years and we have just started doing that over at Corner for distribution. Next year, we are going to do quarterly roll outs of sour beers at Corner Brewery. Well, what we’re doing to kind of kick that off is on Friday and Saturday (during the beer fest), we are going to do the “Hour of Sour where we’re going to switch all of our beers over to four sour beers, so that’s going to be fun.

We’ll take a couple of our popular standards and round out between the two breweries with specialty beers just for the festival. We’re doing what is called Demetrius Aged Pale Ale, named after Demetrius Ypsilanti, in honor of the fair city of Ypsilanti. It’s a double IPA that has been put into inoculated oak barrels to sour and age and then dry hopped in the oak barrels. We’ll have the Flamboyant Wild Red, we have a two-year old sour beer that we made for our anniversary a couple of years ago and saved a couple of kegs so we’re going to break those out and we have a two-year-old saison.

How important is the Brewers Guild Festival?
Matt: It’s really important I think for the Guild and for the breweries as a collective. The turnout and the media exposure is just so good to draw attention to the fact that we have this incredible beer scene in our state so that’s really, really important.

On the individual brewery level, I think that focus of the festival has really changed from introducing people to your flagship beers, or your year-round beers, and it has really changed to you almost want to leave those at home and break out the big guns just for the festival. Which I think makes it just so much more fun and it keeps it fresh for people.

Weekly Beer Thoughts, July 5-11: It's Hot!

Damn it's hot outside!

But, here's the real question: Is it too hot to drink? Ohhhh...I don't think so. If weather predicates your beer consumption habits than this is the wrong blog for you. Here at the Corner Stool we conquer adversity like so many stomped ants, we plow through challenges whether it be hot weather, cold weather, rainy weather, hot weather (wait, I already said that), and to be perfectly honest I'm not sure why all of my theoretical hardships are weather-related. I'll talk about that with my therapist.

So anywho, what are some good seasonal brews for this time of the year in which the heat is so stifling that sitting waist deep in a kiddie pool on the front lawn doesn't seem like such a bad idea - not that I am speaking from personal experience nor have I done that several times this past week and I don't care what my neighbors tell you.

Lindemans Framboise, Pêche, Kriek or Pomme

Fruit lambics are very much under-appreciated beers which is ironic because they are by far and away the most refreshing next to a bubblegum-like, fresh banana wheat beer or the clean bite of a German pilsener. Lindemans is what you will find in abundance, which is good as they are fairly well reviewed but I don't know whether they use fruit extract or traditional whole fruits in order to blend the taste.

Above, I named the most prevalent brews from Lindemans fruit lambics you will see at your local beer-monger: Framboise is Raspberry, Pêche is Peach, Kriek is Cherry and Pomme is Apple, at that point it's really up to taste buds as each brew imparts a pretty heavy-handed flavor for each. I prefer the Pomme because I really enjoy that tart, Granny Smith apple kind of taste and nose, man this is making me thirsty!

Sierra Nevada's Kellerweis and Jolly Pumpkin's Calabaza Blanca

When thinking of wheat beers, what first comes to mind I'm sure are the pale to burnt orange, spritzy styles of southern Germany's "Weissbiers" or wheat beers, but wheat can be applied in several different fine examples such as German dunkel-weizen (dark wheat), American brewing also has come up with their own versions of dark wheat ales or Belgium's witbiers (white beer) of which the popular Hoegaarden is a good example.

Sierra Nevada's Kellerweis is a good representation of the German tradition of wheat beers. Released last year about this time, the beer is relatively new and features a yeasty drinkability of citrus and banana coupled with a full, pillowy head. Very refreshing indeed.

Calabaza Blanca is a witbier that strikes more tartness than say like Hoegaarden which is an easy drinking session beer for the most part. I honestly can't tell you much more about it as I have not had the beer in quite a while, but I can tell you that after every JP beer I try, I gain more and more respect for the hometown brewery done good.

So here's to all you beer consumers out there trying to stay cool, cheers! And don't be ashamed about that kiddie pool, just make sure you wear swimming trunks and not Speedos - which, again, is definitely not something I have learned through personal experience.

The 'Season' for Saison

I wanted to kick off this inaugural Corner Stool blog with reviews because that in essence is what beer tasting is all about. Over Memorial Day weekend, myself and a buddy of mine gathered a gaggle of prime examples of our favorite style of beer – Saisons. The Franco-Belgian tradition of saison brewing goes back thousands of years as the beer was made during the winter and stored for seasonal farm workers. In French, saison means “season,” and the beer was made for “saisonnières. There could be arguments made on whether American versions of the style should fall into a different category, much like American-made champagne should be labeled as sparkling white wine (has anybody else watched the Rob Lowe balcony scene in the first Wayne’s World lately), as it does not originate from Champagne, France. But that should be something left to more enlightened individuals than myself. There is recently a trend of American-made sour beers that use wild yeast strains and a new-ish category of American Wild Ale has been termed. These brews are influenced by Franco-Belgian sour brewing traditions emulating saisons and unblended lambics. Give Jolly Pumpkin's La Roja or Ommegang's Ommegeddon a taste, both are pretty easily available right now.

So, as you can tell from the accompanying photo my friend and I did not mess around when it came to this important mission. The best part about this review is that most of these beers are pretty available throughout Michigan and northern Ohio, but some of the brews, such as the Fantômes we were able to procure, are fairly difficult to locate throughout Washtenaw and Wayne counties anyway; but it’s out there. So, I decided not to review everything we drank but rather what I felt were the best examples of the style. So, without further delay, here we go:

Brassiere Fantôme – Brise BonBons and Fantôme Saison

Fantôme (French for Phantom) beers carry a bit of a Holy Grail air about them. While some areas of the country have easy access and good distribution, they are still regarded by saison lovers as probably the best traditional representation of the style, next to Brassiere Dupont which makes Saison Dupont and Foret among others. I like to say that the regular Fantôme Saison, Saison Dupont and Foret, make up a holy trinity of sorts for saison brewing. You simply can’t go wrong.

I chose to package my review of the Brise BonBons and Fantôme Saison because they are pretty similar in appearance, nose and drinkability. Both brews poured very flat but I have heard that has been a long running characteristic of Fantôme beers, during the tasting there was a comment made that Fantôme doesn’t fully ferment out their beers leaving behind soluble sugars thus lessening the carbonation and head. But I have also heard that Fantôme is famous for their inconsistency, I read a review not too long ago where a couple friend put together two different vintages of the Fantôme Printemps, opened them at the same time, and got completely different results. Either way, these kinds of things only lend credence to the brewery's rustic character and charm.

The appearance is a hazy, turbid copper with absolutely no head – it was a bit odd to see a beer our like that to be perfectly honest, I had seen it cask conditioned ales.

Both Brise BonBons and Fantôme Saison come at you with a very strong and spritzy nose, with notes of red wine, seltzer and aromatics. The taste for both (like I said, they’re pretty similar at least the two bottles we had) is a wonderful mélange of winey notes, lots of fruits and esters, and a strong complexity of mustiness or moss in the finish which lingers around. The consistency of the brew reminded me more of an unblended lambic (without massive tartness) rather than a smooth drinking saison like Saison Dupont or Foret.

Drinking these two beers was more of an experience than just a tasting. There simply is nothing like it in the American craft beer market, unfortunately.

Flying Dog – Wild Dog Colorado Saison

And just when I make a comment on the lacking nature of American style saisons, we come to probably the best state-side representation in the market. This beer, like the Fantômes, is very hard to find in our retail area, at least I have never seen it and if there is anybody who has let me know so I can corner the market.

This tasting marked probably the fourth or fifth time I have had this beer and each time I have found something new. This beer pours a more lemony, pale yellow appearance more likened to Saison Dupont and distributes a nice, foamy two-fingered head. The taste and mouthfeel of the beer features large citrus notes, candied fruit and there is some mustiness and hay/straw in the background. On a sidenote, much like Saison Dupont as the beer warms up, the tint slowly evolves from a pale yellow to a deep and turbid burnt amber. It's like a magic trick!


Brooklyn – Sorachi Ace Saison

Unlike the previous two, this is a brand new endeavor from famed Brooklyn Brewery (can you guess where it’s located?) and I believe it’s a one-time, seasonal production.

What makes this brew stand out and why I chose to review it out of the rest of the beers we had that weekend, was because of its pleasantly alternative take on saisons. The brew uses the Sorachi Ace hop, usually reserved for citrusy India Pale Ales, and which adds lemon, grapefruit, clove and juniper-type notes in the nose and taste. It pours with a large, pillowy white head over and although it is more subtle than traditional representations of saison, I feel it was an overall good beer and did a nice job balancing something new with something traditional.

Welcome to the Corner Stool

What do you like about beer?

Well, there is a lot to like about beer especially if you live in Michigan, aka the Great Beer State – like I do – and live in about as good as an area as one can hope for if you’re a beer lover – like I do – and if you have an unquenchable thirst to constantly seek out new releases, limited releases and just flat-out good brew – like I do – than there is a lot to like about beer and the growing beer community that has been cultivated throughout the state.

And that my friends is what has led me here – Welcome to The Corner Stool: An ongoing discussion about beer, food, sports life and love from the mind of somebody who never takes himself seriously

But let’s get one thing straight before you continue – this is not a blog for beer geeks. There are plenty of sites, forums and group discussions dedicated to those who choose to take their beer geekdom to a higher level (some might say snobbishness), this is simply a blog that will be regularly generated from someone who is heads over heels in love with craft beer and beer culture. I have learned over the years that one of the very few areas where I am halfway competent is storytelling and I thought to myself – why not apply that “talent” to beer?

And it’s funny really, because this whole undertaking dovetails into an altogether different but related story in the digital transformation of our company, Heritage Newspapers. With a new bent for online-first and social media, the company went on a search for those interested in blogging. So, half-jokingly I asked if I could write a blog about craft beer. When I got a response that beer blogs are some of the most popular not only throughout our parent company of Journal Register Corporation, but in the country, well that’s all the motivation I needed.

So what will you find here at the Corner Stool? Well for one, you’re going to find beer and lots of it. The top priority here at Corner Stool Enterprises will be to promote local, and not so local, Michigan beer and subsequently the brewmasters, ownership themselves. Here you will find reviews, news about events and special releases, area brewpub news and views, news about your local craft beer retail – in short, this is Beer 101 my fellow degenerates and class is in session. In addition, I wouldn’t mind once in a while going off topic and initiating a discussion on area news and views and what have you. At the very heart of this blog will be community journalism, it’s just that the subject of beer will be foremost in application.

Why did I want to do this? That’s a great question Austen, as I now have apparently taken to talking to myself. Well, like I mentioned above I am a beer fan, wait let me correct that – I am a HUGE beer fan. I grew up in a small suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio and started my love affair with craft beer when my best friend got a job at a place called Brewmasters. It was, at the time anyway, a unique and provocative business venture started by an area homebrewer where customers would come in and choose the ingredients to make their own beer. The patron would be able to follow through the brewing process and in two to four weeks, depending on what kind of beer they ordered, they would have a half-barrel of “John’s Hopped Up Monster,” or “Susie’s Nice Little Brown Ale,” you get the idea. So, not only were you able to make up your own beer but you would receive a bit of an education as well, it was truly a neat idea.

It flopped miserably of course after about a year, but my friend worked there the entire time and it eventually led him to the Seibel Master Brewing program in Chicago but that’s an altogether different blog. Brewing is expensive and southern Ohio is not the type of place that would support something like that – it was doomed from the start, unfortunately.

But, like most situations a silver lining was soon apparent as the entire experience started my friend and I on a long and enjoyable journey to explore the world of good beer, how is it made and who’s behind it. Let’s not be glib about this, craft beer has exploded over the past 10 years and created its own market that essentially didn’t exist until the 1970s. It is something that I have a great amount of respect for and those behind the scenes, but that’s enough about me – let’s get down to brass tax.