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.
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