The Good Doctor

After a conversation with a brewer in OKC about potential space to brew in yesterday, I thought it would be a good idea to give you guys a little background about me and my company.

I've been enamored with brewing beer for quite some time now. When I was about sixteen I became aware home-brewing was a thing you could do when I started noticing a bunch of bubbling buckets my friend's older brother had stashed around the house. I thought that was about the coolest thing anyone could ever do.  That year I did a project for my business class in high school about how I was going to open a brew pub later in life. I still have that dream, and when I'm done being a gypsy I probably will settle down and open up a tiny pub somewhere.

The summer after my freshman year in college, right after I had turned 19, I was at my parents house in South Jersey on vacation and brewed my first batch of beer. It was an extract cream ale kit. I certainly didn't taste it being under-age and all, but a few of my older buddies did. They told me it was "definitely better then Miller". That was a pretty high compliment back when we were still so young and naive. I was hooked. I spent all my savings on brewing books, read about beer either in a book or online for several hours a day, and home brewed twice a week. It took me three batches to go all grain. I remember that beer too. It was a dark mild. That beer was really good (say my older friends who were of legal drinking age when I was under age). I figured if I could pull off such a solid beer brewing the "real" way on my kitchen stove, I probably had enough of what it takes to really hang with the big boys.

When I went back to school in Pittsburgh, I called every brewery in the city every day offering to work for free. It took some time, but by February the guys at the Church Brew Works were so fed up with hearing from me that they told me I could come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays to volunteer on the bottling line. I was working three part time jobs, attending college as a full time student, and was the president of my fraternity at the time, but i made it work.

Things went well. All I was doing was bottling and making variety cases (two things that I couldn't despise more by now) but I couldn't have been happier. The first time they let me scrub yeast out of a tank I nearly fainted I was so excited. I made the decision that this was the career path I was going to head down, and decided to take a year off of college and see what happened. The Church still didn't have any paid work for me, so that summer I worked as a short order cook for the snack shack at a country club, and did my best to keep up with my two day a week internship.

That August, one of the brewers hurt his back and they wanted me in full time. It was a significant pay cut, but I took it without a second thought. I got trained to filter and transfer beer, clean and sanitize tanks, and do everything else that didn't actually involve brewing. I wasn't allowed to brew because I was under age, and the owner at The Church felt that if I couldn't taste beer I certainly wouldn't be effective at brewing it. I was getting a little restless by that point.

By that next February, a year after I started my internship at the Church, I took a job at Hofbrauhaus branch in Pittsburgh. There was no creativity, and I had to trim my beard (those Germans are crazy, that's unheard of in the American beer scene), but I was brewing beer and learning from an old German dude who'd been brewing longer then I'd been alive. He told me I had to taste everything, but that I had to taste it in the corner of the cellar since I was under age. I hit the ground running and was brewing Hofbrauhaus beers a week after I started. My first solo commercial size batch was the Hofbrauhaus Helles Lager, a beer I'm still pretty fond of. I also got trained running a very complicated type of filtration system that usually only larger breweries could afford, and that's a skill I'm very proud to have.

I gained invaluable experience working at Hofbrauhaus, and was really proud of the beer we made, despite sometimes calling it "corporate swill", but I hated it there. The old German dude that I admired and had come to work for had been let go, and I was answering to a corporate style restaurant manager who's former gig was running a TGI Friday's in the airport. He didn't know a mash tun from his own ass, but he was in charge of us and was the one who told us what to do. Being managed by a guy who openly admitted he didn't know anything about my job was the most frustrating experience in my life. Plus he made me trim my beard even shorter and implemented a dress code. We had to wear t-shirts tucked into khaki pants. If I had wanted dress codes and tidy facial hair I would have gone to law school.

By now I was 21, and I had still kept one day a week part time working at the church brew works. Brewers work long hours, usually 9 or 10 hour days. 60 hours a week was really rough, especially without a car. From my neighborhood in Pittsburgh it was a mile and a half walk to the Hofbrauhaus every morning, and on Saturdays an hour bus ride to the Church. I was exhausted all the time, and miserable at the corporate brewery I was at.

But I was always taught hard work pays off, so I kept plugging along. I had developed a nack for a few things as my interests and skills became more specialized. I was offered full time hours again at The Church, and of course I jumped at the opportunity to come back. This time, along with cellar work I was able to brew. I got to make recipes for specialty beers (St. Agricola ale is mine, and it's on right now. keep a look out for a black saison and a beer we're calling "inside out stout" as well, those are my recipes) and was put in charge of and given creative control of the sour beers, the barrel aging program, and cask ales.

And so that's what I've been up to. Your math is right if you're following along, I'm only 22. But now it's time for a move, since my better half got placed in Tulsa with Teach for America. I've worked so hard to get to the level I'm at, and I feel I'm ready, so I'm deciding to take the big leap into opening my own brewing operation once I'm in Oklahoma. The sole reason this is a gypsy operation and not a brick and mortar one is so I have the option to move around with my lovely lady. We're both young and have a little wanderlust going on.

That's my story, and I'm sticking too it.