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.
No comments:
Post a Comment