Latest / The Brewery Underground Podcast | Craft Beer Interviews, Reviews and Beer Travel / Complete Episode: Ska Brewing Co-Founder Dave Thibodeau: Craft Beer, Ska Music, Brewery Growth & Industry Trends

Transcript

Complete Episode: Ska Brewing Co-Founder Dave Thibodeau: Craft Beer, Ska Music, Brewery Growth & Industry Trends · The Brewery Underground Podcast | Craft Beer Interviews, Reviews and Beer Travel

• 0:04
  Stand by for the Brewery Underground
• 0:17
  A Steven Scott Daily The way Brewery Underground night and
• 0:26
  day. Hey, we are off and running here
• 0:39
  on the Brewery Underground podcast.
• 0:41
  Well, we're sitting, we're not exactly running, but Steven
• 0:45
  Scott and Scott, you know, there is something today that I, I
• 0:50
  right off the bat, I think, you know, we and I just said, you
• 0:53
  know, because that's a crutch word of mine that'll be edited.
• 0:57
  Right out of the gate. Right out of the gate.
• 0:59
  Maybe that'll be edited out, hey?
• 1:01
  You got it. You got it out of the way.
• 1:02
  Got it out of the way. We've been doing this podcast
• 1:06
  almost three years now, but nothing is in comparison to the
• 1:10
  brewery Ska Brewing in Colorado. They've been around since 1995,
• 1:20
  bringing the history Scott bring in who we have on today from
• 1:24
  SKA. We've got a guy and I feel like
• 1:27
  we've we've talked to him for the last 5 minutes.
• 1:28
  I feel like I know him for a while now and I feel like he's
• 1:30
  one of those guys who's got a great personality and you
• 1:32
  probably hadn't met a stranger, which is a great thing.
• 1:35
  We've got Dave Thibodeau who's Co founder president in
• 1:39
  operations of Sky Brewing out of Durango Co.
• 1:42
  Dave, welcome. Well, thanks for having me guys.
• 1:46
  I appreciate it. Happy to be here.
• 1:48
  Yeah, this is awesome. I want to give a little
• 1:51
  precursor how we got to connect with you.
• 1:53
  So we had on Emily Hutto, who you know like know pretty well
• 1:58
  and she kind of put us together. She goes, I know you who you
• 2:01
  guys have to talk to next and she put us in contact with you
• 2:04
  and and here we are in which is great.
• 2:07
  We've met this kind of a networking thing.
• 2:10
  We had Brent on from Riverbend and then we kind of met Emily
• 2:17
  through that and then they put us in touch with White Labs and
• 2:19
  also you. So we've got this network thing
• 2:21
  going on where we've connected to you and it's, it's been, this
• 2:24
  is awesome. Great.
• 2:27
  Yeah, Emily's got a, She's got a great network.
• 2:29
  She's a fantastic person. She now lives, as we were
• 2:32
  speaking before we hopped on, now kind of she's in our neck of
• 2:35
  the woods. So which, you know, is a pretty
• 2:38
  rural neck. Hey, girl.
• 2:42
  You describe that area, if you don't mind Durango, Co, Kind of
• 2:45
  tell us geographically where that is within the state.
• 2:48
  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's interesting.
• 2:50
  We're about a six hour drive from Denver.
• 2:53
  We're the far southwestern corner of the state.
• 2:56
  We're probably, we're about two hours from Telluride.
• 2:59
  We're really close to the four corners where you can actually
• 3:03
  stand in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado in one spot.
• 3:09
  And yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty rural.
• 3:11
  Our, our, our towns about, I think about 18 or 19,000 in the
• 3:16
  city limits and about 47,000 in the county.
• 3:22
  Purgatories are ski area, Wolf Creek ski area is really close
• 3:25
  and Telluride's the next closest.
• 3:27
  So we're, we're out there. You got to go over some big
• 3:30
  mountain passes if you're coming from the north or the east, so.
• 3:34
  Probably see a little wildlife out there too, I would imagine,
• 3:37
  yeah. Yeah, there's a it's not unusual
• 3:41
  for me to see on my ring camera at my house, and I live right in
• 3:45
  town. For me to see bears, Mountain
• 3:47
  Lion, deer, everyday raccoons, fox, it's crazy.
• 3:53
  That's awesome. That's awesome, I think Emily
• 3:55
  said. Like if you had to go like
• 3:56
  towards Denver or that area, like you have to cross like 2
• 3:58
  mountain ranges or something and something crazy.
• 4:01
  Dude. Not an easy, not an easy way to
• 4:04
  get there. No pros and cons to that.
• 4:09
  Without that, well, we do we. We do have to mention that Scott
• 4:13
  and I recently aired a beer that Emily had sent from Sky and that
• 4:18
  was your West Coast IPA that we both enjoy.
• 4:21
  We don't have any ska on this episode tonight, however, I know
• 4:27
  I got something else. I have one of your stickers
• 4:30
  right here. How's that?
• 4:32
  Well, I apologize for that. I I know some was sent and it
• 4:36
  just hasn't got there I guess. Just hasn't.
• 4:38
  Got here yet? It's all good.
• 4:39
  Yeah, it's all. Good.
• 4:40
  OK, look, I can pretend. Look, I've got the ska koozie.
• 4:44
  I can pretend what's in here is ska look.
• 4:47
  Yeah, I've got some ska, so I'll go ahead.
• 4:50
  And I just had a West Coast. I had to kind of like prime
• 4:54
  myself mid afternoon. I'm low energy, you know, and
• 4:58
  it's 330 here. And so like a beer at 3:30 pops
• 5:02
  me back into action. So yeah.
• 5:05
  Let's go round two, baby. Let's go.
• 5:07
  Well, we we had the sky in Scott's garage.
• 5:09
  He was actually brewing some beer recently and I brought the
• 5:13
  sky over. So we made sure we did a a beer
• 5:16
  share on it at West Coast, the IPA and it was really good.
• 5:20
  But today on this podcast episode, I have something that
• 5:24
  was given to us by another podcast friend, Rich from the
• 5:27
  foamy heads. This is creature comforts.
• 5:29
  It is the piano keys, the Al Sharpton, and yeah, I've been
• 5:35
  drinking this for a little bit now, let's say an imperial
• 5:38
  stout, and it's pretty good. Nice.
• 5:41
  Yeah, Steve started with like a 9.6.
• 5:46
  Starting big on this podcast episode.
• 5:50
  I've got the, we've talked about this many times, Stokehouse, the
• 5:55
  original. And Dave, what's what's
• 5:59
  significant about this beer? It's it's made in Tennessee.
• 6:00
  It's right here in Nashville. They use Riverbend malt in this
• 6:03
  beer. So just kind of a connecting all
• 6:06
  the dots, you know, kind of awesome.
• 6:08
  Yeah, I was actually going to ask you guys.
• 6:09
  I, I, I thought I knew that the podcast was from Nashville, but
• 6:14
  it, you guys had a central time zone thing on the meeting and I
• 6:18
  was just curious if everybody was in the same spot or if you
• 6:21
  guys are in different parts of the country.
• 6:24
  Yeah, he and I are just 30 minutes apart.
• 6:27
  So we're central and I think when when we put a Riverside, I
• 6:29
  think it puts our time. I assume it when you see the
• 6:33
  invite, does it just say central time or does it give your time?
• 6:35
  Yes. It's Chicago, so.
• 6:38
  I think we had confusion on when I think we were an hour off one
• 6:41
  time with our guest was an hour off, but we made it work and it
• 6:43
  was fine. Yeah, that's fine.
• 6:45
  That's a funny thing with with podcasts and interviews.
• 6:48
  It's you're trusting the computer to do the right thing.
• 6:51
  You know when you accept anybody's invitation and it
• 6:55
  doesn't always do the right thing.
• 6:56
  I always worry about it because I look at it, you never, you
• 6:58
  know, when you book a plane ticket, you're getting ready to
• 7:00
  book a plane ticket, You make sure the dates right and the
• 7:02
  time of the dates right, right. It's, and you look at it 100
• 7:05
  times before you hit send or whatever.
• 7:07
  I do that with this thing. I look at the, the, the
• 7:09
  invitation 100 times to make sure the dates right.
• 7:11
  It's it's AM or PM, you know, just making sure you got every
• 7:14
  detail just right. And I'll I I've still gotten it
• 7:18
  wrong. I've even shown up at the
• 7:19
  airport on the wrong day. Well, the other, the other thing
• 7:25
  is at the time we're recording this, it kind of dawned on me
• 7:28
  today that you're from Colorado and I'm originally from
• 7:32
  Cincinnati. You might see some of my
• 7:33
  obnoxious red stuff back there. The Reds are actually playing
• 7:37
  the Rockies right now in a series, so you know, the game
• 7:39
  will be on later. So who knows, maybe, hopefully
• 7:42
  it'll be a good game. Where is the game?
• 7:45
  Where is it in Cincinnati? It's in Cincinnati, OK.
• 7:47
  Yeah, Yep. I'm saying for the Colorado,
• 7:49
  they hit those 500 foot home runs out there, don't they?
• 7:52
  Yeah. Right.
• 7:53
  Are you guys both Predators fans?
• 7:55
  Yeah. Awesome.
• 7:57
  Yeah. You guys got a pretty good team
• 7:59
  out there. You guys got a pretty.
• 8:00
  Good team. I'm fired up about it.
• 8:02
  We have a we have a team that's, I don't know, I'm not going to
• 8:06
  say much more, but I'm really looking forward to this next
• 8:08
  series so. And you won the Presidents Cup
• 8:11
  too, didn't you? I think so.
• 8:13
  Yep, Yep. Yeah, and and there's been a
• 8:15
  curse on the Presidents Cups teams that win it, but you guys
• 8:17
  don't seem to be hindered by that at all.
• 8:19
  You're rolling. Yeah, it doesn't.
• 8:21
  I you know, I don't know, that's never really been a Colorado
• 8:23
  sports thing. You know, the random different
• 8:26
  curses. I mean, really, if you think
• 8:27
  about it, the the the Avalanche isn't that old of a franchise.
• 8:30
  I mean, it is that was what, an early 90s ninety or something.
• 8:36
  But Broncos, you know, it's there just haven't been curses.
• 8:40
  I mean, we just kind of suck most of the time.
• 8:45
  But the Avalanche, they're just something else.
• 8:49
  And our, our Nuggets are having an OK season.
• 8:51
  There's some issues there, but they're they're squeaking along.
• 8:54
  They're still in the playoffs. But the, The Avalanches and I, I
• 8:58
  don't know, hockey's just the funnest game.
• 9:01
  It's fun to watch, fun to play. I love hockey.
• 9:04
  And when you get to the playoffs, it is a complete
• 9:06
  different. I want to, but the the, the
• 9:08
  energy is so much more. It's so much different.
• 9:11
  It is. It goes a whole nother knot,
• 9:14
  yes. It's so amazing to me that
• 9:16
  hockey like, you know, the, the difference between the very best
• 9:21
  team and the second best team is and it's, it's always going to
• 9:25
  be one goal game. And it's like, how can that how
• 9:29
  can the best team still win all the time?
• 9:32
  And then, you know, a lot of that can go out of the out the
• 9:34
  window in the playoffs. It's just because the energy is
• 9:37
  so different. You know that's.
• 9:39
  Right. You know, and teams are
• 9:40
  different, you know, if you have a success in the regular season,
• 9:43
  I think that's why the President's Cup winner is kind
• 9:47
  of cursed sometimes. It's because you're you're
• 9:49
  different playoff team maybe than you are in the in the
• 9:52
  regular season. You know, we we have a great
• 9:53
  regular season team and then maybe not built for the playoffs
• 9:56
  sometimes, but everybody, you guys don't seem to be having any
• 9:59
  issues. I hope not.
• 10:02
  I hope not. I don't the issues.
• 10:05
  We like playing you guys because you whip up on us quite a bit,
• 10:07
  so every time you come here so it's like, are we going to lose
• 10:10
  8 to nothing again? You know, Dave, we have so much
• 10:13
  to talk to you about, but we don't want to miss out on a
• 10:16
  headline that just happened to you recently and that was you
• 10:20
  all just won the gold at the World Beer Cup for True Blonde
• 10:24
  in the English style pale ale category.
• 10:27
  And man, can you talk about that because that had to be such a
• 10:32
  tremendous victory and achievement for you guys.
• 10:35
  Yeah, it was, you know, we were on a little bit of a drought.
• 10:39
  I think we the last time we won was 2021 and it was True Blonde.
• 10:46
  I don't know if it was Great American Beer Fest or World Beer
• 10:49
  Cup, but but yeah, so going, you know, 5-4 or five years without
• 10:54
  winning one of those major medals, that's like it's it's
• 10:58
  kind of hard. You know, you wonder if you'll
• 11:00
  ever win one again. And it's so hard to win right
• 11:03
  now. So like, there's breweries, you
• 11:04
  know, like our good friends up in Golden Co at Cannonball Creek
• 11:08
  who win every Great American Beer Fest.
• 11:10
  They'll win at least one, if not two or three.
• 11:13
  They won small Brewer of the year this past year.
• 11:16
  Those guys keep winning, but I think they're an anomaly for the
• 11:19
  rest of us, especially a lot of the legacy Brewers.
• 11:22
  It's, it's just so hard to win with 10,000 breweries out there,
• 11:27
  you know, but this one was really kind of validating
• 11:31
  because it was the very first beer we ever made here in 1995.
• 11:35
  The very first batch of beer was True Blonde.
• 11:37
  And we've won, I think 5 Great American beer fests and, and
• 11:41
  this was our third world beer cup with that beer.
• 11:44
  So it's it's just a, you know, I think it's a testament to to
• 11:48
  your flagships when there's a lot of noise going on and a lot
• 11:52
  of craziness and diversity, which I love.
• 11:54
  But I think, you know, you got to be you don't ever want to
• 11:58
  give up on your flagships and get caught chasing too many
• 12:01
  trends because they're they're there, they're solid and true
• 12:04
  wants stays. You know, it's we're not growing
• 12:08
  as far as territory goes. You know, certain beers are
• 12:12
  growing new release is growing for us, but that beer just
• 12:15
  maintains a rate of sale for us. That is something we can depend
• 12:20
  on and it's it's just been consistent and the same thing
• 12:24
  year after year after year. And yeah, I don't know from it
• 12:28
  was really special to win again and, and especially with that
• 12:32
  beer. And it's like, like I said, we
• 12:34
  were all in our tasting room watching it live.
• 12:36
  And, you know, when you get through half of the competition,
• 12:40
  when you're sitting there watching it with a bunch of
• 12:42
  customers and stuff in the tasting room and you haven't won
• 12:45
  and you've gone through like two or three categories that you
• 12:48
  were entered in. And you're just like, what?
• 12:50
  There's no fucking chance we're going to win anything, you know,
• 12:53
  And then all of a sudden happens and like the whole place just
• 12:56
  erupts. And I don't know, it's, it's a
• 12:58
  great feeling. So I, I really appreciate you
• 13:00
  bringing that up 'cause I'm still on a high from it.
• 13:03
  How many breweries were you competing with in that
• 13:05
  particular style to win? I'm going to say it was 73, but
• 13:11
  I might have just pulled that out of my butt.
• 13:13
  Well, I. Don't know why that.
• 13:15
  We'll just say a lot. It was a lot.
• 13:16
  Yeah, in that category. So the categories are all so big
• 13:20
  now, you know, it's just crazy. Well, that that's got to give
• 13:24
  you such validation after 31 years.
• 13:27
  It's this consistent beer that you keep coming out, that you
• 13:29
  that you put out every year for 31 years.
• 13:32
  And not that beer gets dated, but you've seen breweries come
• 13:34
  and go and you've seen beers come and go in these categories.
• 13:37
  And you're still doing it after 31 years with one of your
• 13:40
  flagships. It's amazing.
• 13:41
  And and like you said, you get that validation like, shit,
• 13:44
  yeah, we're still doing it. Yeah, it's crazy.
• 13:46
  And it you know, it's and you see it with, with, I mean, it's
• 13:51
  cool with certain, like, like I said, legacy breweries or
• 13:54
  whatever breweries have been around for a while and you know,
• 13:57
  some of their flagships just go away over time.
• 14:01
  And just knowing that this was it.
• 14:03
  Like it's whenever losing sales with it, it's always maintaining
• 14:08
  and it's always, it's a, a really popular beer in our
• 14:12
  tasting room, does exactly what we expect it to do out in the
• 14:15
  market. Maybe, maybe 2.
• 14:18
  It's in our own detriment. We don't put a lot of effort
• 14:21
  into marketing it. And it's, you know, but it's
• 14:25
  just, it just does what it does. It's a workhorse.
• 14:27
  And so it is, it's kind of a, you know, it's an approachable
• 14:31
  beer. It's a, it's in the English
• 14:34
  style pale category and it's definitely an English, more of
• 14:38
  an English style beer. I think our yeast strain is
• 14:41
  still the original Ringwood strain 1187 that we used in it
• 14:46
  on day one. And the recipes, I don't know
• 14:50
  that it's changed at all, if not maybe a little slightly, like
• 14:54
  just there's some local honey in there that changes a little bit,
• 14:57
  you know, So we got to do we got to do little tweaks, but not
• 14:59
  really a change. So it's cool, you know, just it
• 15:03
  is what it is and it was. I couldn't there's not a better,
• 15:05
  there's not a beer I would rather win with is probably a
• 15:08
  better way to sum it all up. Do you remember going back to
• 15:12
  like 1995 or maybe even a little bit before then when you started
• 15:16
  brewing this beard? Did you know instantly, man,
• 15:19
  this thing is going to take off, This is going to take us to new
• 15:22
  levels. And.
• 15:24
  No, no. I mean where, what, what was it
• 15:26
  then? I mean, was it just like, did
• 15:28
  you know, or did it take a while to figure that out?
• 15:31
  No, when we opened our brewery, it was myself and my good friend
• 15:35
  Bill that started it with me and my buddy Kyle, who at the time
• 15:39
  was the head Brewer at the Wink Coop Brewing Company in Denver.
• 15:44
  We gave him like 10%, which we bought out long ago, but just to
• 15:49
  help us make the jump from home Brewer to pro Brewer, I guess.
• 15:53
  But we didn't really. We had no idea what we were
• 15:56
  doing. We came up, we came up with
• 15:58
  names before beers. Just whatever funny name popped
• 16:03
  into our mind was the reason to brew any specific style.
• 16:07
  So we were coming up with basically the back of a napkin
• 16:11
  business plan in the local bar called the El Rancho Tavern down
• 16:16
  on Main Street in Durango. And we just wrote, Oh, true,
• 16:19
  Blonde's a good name. Let's let's come up with it.
• 16:21
  Let's do a blonde beer. So, and that was our first year.
• 16:24
  And then actually that that same day we went to brew our second
• 16:27
  batch that was supposed to be true blonde, but this is how
• 16:31
  unorganized we were. I still remember this day
• 16:33
  vividly. We, we finished the first true
• 16:36
  blonde and went to mash in the 2nd and halfway through mash and
• 16:39
  in we didn't have the ingredients.
• 16:42
  So we were like, we were young punks and we were just like, we
• 16:45
  were excited and we just didn't. There wasn't a lot of planning
• 16:49
  in certain areas. And so the second batch actually
• 16:53
  became what was known as pinstripe, which was our second
• 16:58
  longest brewing beer. It's still kind of one of our
• 17:00
  flagships. It's a lot more popular right in
• 17:03
  our backyard than in our other markets.
• 17:05
  But yeah, it was like we had no, no idea at all.
• 17:09
  And we actually served those first two kegs at the Telluride
• 17:11
  Blues and Brews Festival of True Blonde.
• 17:14
  And at that time it was called the Telluride Brewers Festival.
• 17:17
  And it was it I, I remember because we met some cool Brewers
• 17:22
  from Telluride Old Brewery that's long gone now, that
• 17:26
  became dear friends of ours. And they were just like,
• 17:30
  something's not right with this. Yeah, there were issues with it.
• 17:35
  You know, there were yeast issues.
• 17:37
  The yeast was not healthy. And I think it was a little bit
• 17:41
  oxidized and it had some diastole issues and it but, you
• 17:46
  know, 1995 young kids, basically nobody.
• 17:50
  And it was still novel. You know, there wasn't, nobody
• 17:53
  knew anything, like nobody knew any better.
• 17:55
  So as the response was that it was fantastic.
• 17:59
  We knew something wasn't quite right with it.
• 18:01
  But we dialed it in with a little help from those guys in
• 18:04
  Telluride and buy our second batch.
• 18:06
  You know, we were brewing a much cleaner, better beer.
• 18:09
  But yeah, those first two kegs, I don't know.
• 18:12
  It was, we had no idea that it would.
• 18:15
  We had no idea we'd be around 31 years later, let alone that very
• 18:19
  first beer. I mean, you can honestly say
• 18:21
  that is a backbone, or at least one of the backbones of Scott
• 18:24
  Brewing is that beer. Absolutely, 100%, yeah.
• 18:29
  I'm I'm excited. Built the brew right?
• 18:32
  Yeah, I'm excited for you. Just from that effort that you
• 18:36
  made way back when to now that that you've won.
• 18:39
  The other question that I have is, you know, starting way back
• 18:43
  when, you know, 1995, I mean, craft beer started to become a
• 18:46
  thing. What got you?
• 18:48
  Do you remember really what got you into?
• 18:52
  I want to get into this craft beer thing and and try to make a
• 18:56
  go of it. Totally.
• 18:58
  It's, I've, I've told the story a lot, but, but Bill and I in
• 19:03
  high, we were, we were good students, but we partied in high
• 19:07
  school and, and so we were really into drinking beer when
• 19:11
  we were in high school. And we were actually in my dad's
• 19:14
  living room, my parents living room, and we ran across a book
• 19:18
  and then on the spine it just said beer book.
• 19:21
  And it was like a three ring binder.
• 19:22
  And we were like beer book awesome.
• 19:25
  When we pulled it off just 'cause it was alcohol, you know,
• 19:27
  we pulled it off the shelves and we opened it up and we started
• 19:32
  flipping through it and we're like, what is this?
• 19:33
  It's like page note pages of notebook paper.
• 19:36
  And we realized that it was homebrewed log sheets, and my
• 19:42
  dad had been home brewing and this was in about 1985, and his
• 19:48
  first batch in that notebook was in 1969, and his last batch was
• 19:53
  1980. So probably, he probably quit
• 19:56
  right about when I might have started to notice what he was up
• 20:00
  to, you know, 'cause I would have been in like 7th grade
• 20:03
  around then. Duh.
• 20:06
  And we started flipping through that book and we're like, Oh my
• 20:08
  God, He was actually making his own beer.
• 20:10
  My dad was making his own beer. And, you know, 69.
• 20:16
  Eight years before it was even legalized and well, we're
• 20:20
  flipping through it and we're thinking like, where's he add
• 20:22
  the alcohol at? And that's when we realized he
• 20:25
  was actually creating the alcohol.
• 20:27
  And that was just a light bulb moment.
• 20:29
  And so we jumped right into it and my dad got excited about it.
• 20:33
  He jumped into it with us. And so when we were in high
• 20:37
  school, we started, there wasn't even a home brewery shop in
• 20:40
  Colorado yet. And so we started brewing with
• 20:43
  my dad. We bought all of our equipment
• 20:45
  and ingredients from a friend of his up in Wyoming, made a road
• 20:48
  trip up there and you could buy malt extract in the baking
• 20:51
  section of the grocery store. At the time.
• 20:54
  It was kind of, it was very exciting, very cool.
• 20:58
  And that's what got us into it. And then so, and it became, it
• 21:02
  became our complete passion. And even through college, I was
• 21:06
  a communications major and every project I did, whether it was a
• 21:09
  a speech, a video, a technical writing paper, it was all on
• 21:13
  brewing beer. And so our dream was obviously
• 21:17
  to open a brewery at some point. And, you know, we did it very
• 21:21
  little money when we were still really young and we had no
• 21:25
  business sense other than a couple classes in college and
• 21:29
  had no idea that it would actually persevere.
• 21:32
  So I, yeah, it was to think back about like we got in it at the
• 21:37
  right time, but it was weird, you know, you couldn't just
• 21:40
  Google how to start a brewery, you know, so.
• 21:44
  Like you said, you're getting stuff out of the grocery store,
• 21:46
  but ingredients still just had to be hard to come by.
• 21:48
  You know, there weren't, you know, stores you could go to or
• 21:51
  stuff to order off the Internet. Like you probably had to
• 21:53
  scramble to find stuff. Yeah, In fact, hold on one SEC.
• 21:58
  See if I got this here. I just stumbled across this
• 22:03
  yesterday. I've got it here.
• 22:07
  Maybe I got rid of it. Well, it was a typewritten.
• 22:10
  It was actually typed out on a typewriter and it was a price
• 22:14
  book from my dad's buddy who sold the ingredients out of his
• 22:17
  basement in Wyoming. And that we have this price list
• 22:21
  that was just that was typed out on a typewriter.
• 22:24
  And he would send that to us in the mail, and then we would
• 22:27
  either drive to Wyoming to buy ingredients or we would write
• 22:31
  him a letter and send him a check and he'd ship us
• 22:34
  ingredients. So crazy, Yeah.
• 22:38
  Can I ask what your dad what? What was your dad brewing?
• 22:41
  Was he creating his recipes? I mean, I guess he had to
• 22:43
  because there's. Really no clones of everything I
• 22:45
  have. I have that beer book to this
• 22:47
  day and the first the very first blog sheet in 1969 batch one it
• 22:53
  it all it was was yeast sugar water and it was like and there
• 23:00
  was one note blew up all over the place upon open was the
• 23:06
  entire recipe and the entire. Learning the hard way.
• 23:12
  Was making prison juice. Yeah, that also could have went
• 23:15
  the way of a still too. That could have been whiskey
• 23:17
  too, with the still he had just. So he, you know, he got, I don't
• 23:21
  know if he ever even got a hold of the joy of complete joy of
• 23:26
  home brewing, you know, the Bayesian book back then.
• 23:29
  But that was what we started with.
• 23:31
  And but yeah, his the recipes were very, very simple.
• 23:36
  They got a little more complex. He didn't even have hops in that
• 23:39
  first one. Yeah, no.
• 23:41
  Said there's no, it's just trying to when he got back into
• 23:45
  it, when he got back into it with you guys, did he was he I,
• 23:48
  I can just imagine like his home brews stories like because he
• 23:51
  probably was doing it from by himself or maybe he was a couple
• 23:53
  of buddies. Just I bet he had some really
• 23:55
  great stories from those days. Oh yeah.
• 23:59
  And I don't, I don't really remember like, because he, he
• 24:01
  was, I mean, they weren't, they had a lot of fun with it and
• 24:05
  they, but they just never knew what they were doing.
• 24:08
  So they never really brewed good beer.
• 24:10
  So I don't think they got excited because it was
• 24:13
  delicious, you know. But when he first started
• 24:16
  brewing with us and we later that same first year was when
• 24:19
  the first home brew shop in Colorado would open up.
• 24:22
  And so we started talking to those guys and going to that and
• 24:25
  just hanging out there and our beers got so much better, so
• 24:29
  much more quickly. And I remember Boulder, Boulder
• 24:32
  Brewing Boulder beer was one of those early breweries that you
• 24:36
  could get, I remember buying 6 packs of it in a wooden crate
• 24:41
  and they had a little neck tag on each bottle that explained
• 24:44
  why there was sediment in the bottom of the bottle.
• 24:47
  And my, I remember my dad and I just thinking those were the
• 24:50
  most delicious things that ever in the world.
• 24:54
  And that was, he got re hooked on it and then started brewing
• 24:58
  much better beer. And it was, I think it was
• 25:00
  exciting for all of us. He helped me with all my college
• 25:02
  projects and it was cool. That's dude, that what a great,
• 25:06
  what a great thing to do with your dad, right?
• 25:08
  And to know that he had done it before and you just kind of
• 25:10
  rediscovered this thing, that is so cool.
• 25:13
  Hey, I have a two-part question. So the the the brewery equipment
• 25:17
  that your dad used then and the brewery equipment that you were
• 25:20
  using when you first started, is it still around?
• 25:25
  I think there's a good chance it could be there.
• 25:27
  We had, we kept everything in the basement of my parents
• 25:30
  house. They still live up in Denver.
• 25:32
  I'm actually headed up there tomorrow, so I'm going to look.
• 25:35
  But yeah. And there was like a it was an
• 25:38
  unfinished basement and actually had a drain in it.
• 25:41
  And so we used to do everything there.
• 25:43
  But I remember like, I remember like starting a batch of beer
• 25:46
  and then going off to college or moving and never finished, like
• 25:51
  leaving it in the plastic fermenter, you know, in the
• 25:54
  bucket. And so like I wouldn't be
• 25:57
  surprised if there's a bucket full of moldy work down there
• 26:01
  Can. You imagine nobody discovers
• 26:05
  that one day. There's a good chance that that
• 26:08
  some of that stuff could still be down there, like just under
• 26:11
  our stairway where we just kind of pushed everything away over
• 26:15
  the years because they've never finished the basement.
• 26:17
  So I'm going to check. I'm going to check this.
• 26:19
  Be a while just to see because I'm sure like even into to to
• 26:22
  today's, you know, compared to today's.
• 26:23
  So it probably looks very primitive.
• 26:24
  You know, stuff they were using or you were using.
• 26:26
  Totally, totally. You have to let us know.
• 26:30
  I'm really curious. I'd love.
• 26:31
  Love to know what that is. That's a great.
• 26:32
  Question if you got the pictures and if you could send it to us,
• 26:35
  we would post it. We would that would.
• 26:36
  Be awesome. Cool, that is.
• 26:38
  That. Is cool.
• 26:40
  That's cool. Hey, before we go any further,
• 26:42
  what what does that say on your shirt?
• 26:44
  It says property of Utica Club. Yeah, are.
• 26:48
  You talking about the Saranac? Oh shit, you guys in new?
• 26:52
  York, we had FX map on. We did.
• 26:55
  Yeah, I kept seeing the top of that.
• 26:57
  Does that say Utica Club and is it the same Utica Club?
• 27:00
  That is rad. That is.
• 27:02
  That was not intentional. It was just the hoodie I threw
• 27:05
  on. I went out there and it's been
• 27:07
  quite a few years, but we were just on a road trip out there
• 27:10
  and, and I had through another friend of mine, actually my
• 27:16
  brother-in-law who works at Left Hand Brewing, he had met FX Matt
• 27:23
  and somehow gave me his phone number and a brewer's phone
• 27:27
  number. And we were passing through
• 27:29
  Utica and I just shot him a quick text or something and man,
• 27:34
  they met us there and gave us like a 2 1/2 hour tour.
• 27:38
  And yeah, it was they. What a man, what a cool story.
• 27:43
  What an old killer brewery. If he, I mean, have you guys
• 27:47
  been to the brewery before? Not bad.
• 27:49
  Nope, it's. Amazing.
• 27:50
  Yeah. I've never seen like it.
• 27:52
  Like they've got horizontal glass line tags buried in the
• 27:56
  ground. You know that it's like there's
• 27:58
  there's it is cool. I mean, it's, it's late 1800s,
• 28:02
  you know? And I was going to say that I'm
• 28:05
  not Even so sure that Scott and I have had the opportunity on a
• 28:09
  podcast episode to talk about, I mean, he brought up the history
• 28:14
  when we had him on. But the, the one of the biggest
• 28:17
  things that that amazed me was you think of prohibition and
• 28:23
  they were able to get through prohibition back in those days
• 28:27
  and reinvent themselves. And now it's 4th generation.
• 28:31
  I mean, come on, it's amazing. It's amazing.
• 28:35
  Utica Club was the first legal beer after prohibition.
• 28:38
  Was it was license number one, the actual Utica Club?
• 28:41
  Yes, 1%, Yep. When we were there, it was like
• 28:46
  I said, it was quite a few years ago now, but they had they had
• 28:51
  they had just kind of re started making it again.
• 28:54
  I don't know if it if it was ever out of production, but they
• 28:59
  were putting a lot of attention into it and so it was exciting.
• 29:02
  So we drank a bunch of it while I was there and it was, it was
• 29:05
  exciting for them and I was, I don't know, nostalgia is a thing
• 29:10
  that I, I love. I love old stories, I love
• 29:12
  history and I special year, you know?
• 29:15
  Yeah, I was up upstate New York back in October and I, I knew of
• 29:19
  Utica Club but never really had remember the old Dolts and Shuli
• 29:22
  commercials. And we talked a lot about that
• 29:23
  in the episode. But they were selling the Utica
• 29:26
  Club pretty kind of everywhere They could kind of get it.
• 29:29
  You go into a bar and they would have it.
• 29:30
  So I'd had several of them over the weekend and then I even
• 29:33
  brought Steve one back too. It's like you got to have this.
• 29:35
  It is that it is that nostalgia, but it's like this is
• 29:38
  Prohibition beer, man. This is how they made this shit
• 29:40
  that long ago. They had a it was cool.
• 29:43
  We went to a couple little bars in town and and they still had
• 29:47
  old Utica Club signs, you know, from, I don't know, it's cool,
• 29:52
  cool town too. I'm glad you got to see that is
• 29:55
  that is on my bucket list now, especially after talking to
• 29:57
  Fred. We were like, Oh my God, that is
• 29:59
  so just the history there is just.
• 30:01
  It's amazing. Yeah, I saw that.
• 30:03
  I was like. Yeah, yeah.
• 30:04
  I was going to say it's one of the things we, it's really been
• 30:07
  a joy when we do this podcast of hearing about some of the
• 30:11
  stories like that, you know, and we know you, we know you have a
• 30:15
  lot of them as well. I don't think you're repping
• 30:18
  another brewery. I think that this is cool.
• 30:20
  That is that camaraderie between breweries, right?
• 30:22
  And you, you appreciate it. You guys have a quite a pretty
• 30:24
  good history too. I mean, 31 years is nothing to
• 30:27
  sneeze at. No, it seems crazy to me.
• 30:30
  You know, it's like trying to measure.
• 30:33
  It's been well over half my life, you know, and it just
• 30:36
  seems like I don't granted, the brewery's a different place and
• 30:40
  then it then, then it was far different place than it ever
• 30:45
  was. You know, it's a much different,
• 30:46
  bigger, newer building. And, but it's really weird, you
• 30:50
  know, to me, like when I walk in here, I still feel the same And,
• 30:54
  and I, I, I feel, I still feel like I'm that same age, you
• 30:58
  know, I feel like a kid and it's still beer still that exciting
• 31:02
  to me. And so I don't know, I love
• 31:05
  coming in here and it's, it's, it is funny thinking about it.
• 31:10
  It's, it's interesting. And I don't know if Emily told
• 31:12
  you this, but, but my two partners and I, my other
• 31:15
  partner, Matt Vincent, he joined us after our first year, all
• 31:18
  good friends. And we're the same 3 owners all
• 31:22
  this time. But we sold the brewery this
• 31:23
  past year. And so I've been going through
• 31:27
  all the old, all our old corporate documents.
• 31:30
  I just found our original stock certificates that we bought at
• 31:34
  the office supply store and issued to each other just
• 31:36
  yesterday when I saw that type typed out homebrew.
• 31:40
  I've been going through all that stuff in the last couple days.
• 31:42
  It just cuz it's all in boxes in my office and I don't need all
• 31:46
  that old corporate crap anymore. You know, it's corporate crap,
• 31:49
  whatever, but you know, I don't need the stuff from our original
• 31:53
  operating agreement or whatever it was, you know, so I'm just
• 31:57
  cleaning out my office, but it's like it's hard.
• 32:00
  I can only do it for about 15 minutes before I start tearing
• 32:03
  up. Yeah.
• 32:04
  'Cause it's so like, I don't know, it just means so much to
• 32:08
  me. Yeah, yeah.
• 32:10
  It's something you built. I mean, you built.
• 32:11
  It's your baby. You built it.
• 32:12
  Yeah. Is it?
• 32:14
  Is it hard to pin down like of some of the stuff that you found
• 32:18
  so far? Is it kind of hard to pin down
• 32:20
  like two or three things in particular that you've come
• 32:23
  across where you're like? Wow, yeah, I mean, there's like
• 32:29
  I was just trying to find that that that typewritten homebrew
• 32:33
  sheet. But I do have some of our
• 32:34
  homebrew recipes. This is our W 3rd Ave.
• 32:40
  Coriander wheat recipes. And you've kept them.
• 32:44
  What's that? And you and you've kept them.
• 32:47
  Yeah, I can't. I can't get rid of this stuff,
• 32:50
  you know. Like can you read?
• 32:51
  Like can you read the first, the page you just showed, the page
• 32:55
  you just showed, Can you read a little bit or can you tell us a
• 32:57
  little bit like what the recipe was for that?
• 33:00
  Yeah. So this was a coriander wheat
• 33:02
  beer and this had to be, it was before we started the brewery.
• 33:07
  So it's probably 1990. Four 5 lbs Pale Turo, 5 lbs of
• 33:17
  wheat. I wonder if we actually we were
• 33:20
  doing full grain at this time. So yeah, half pound crystal,
• 33:25
  half pound Munich. Let's see.
• 33:29
  Gosh, it's hard to we added some chips on at some point.
• 33:34
  You love this added water at a certain at 200°.
• 33:40
  I don't 5 quarts of water at 200° held at 1:55 for 15
• 33:44
  minutes. I can't remember what our
• 33:45
  equipment might have looked like on any particular batch 'cause
• 33:49
  we were my third partner that joined us, Matt, He ended up, I
• 33:53
  don't know if you guys know this company, but he ended up started
• 33:56
  starting a company making D palletizers for canning lines
• 34:00
  called Scoff Fabricating or Scoff AB, which he sold in 2021.
• 34:05
  But he just had an engineering mind.
• 34:08
  So every day we were like, every time we brewed, we thought of
• 34:11
  something cooler we could do and we'd run to the hardware store
• 34:14
  and, and make up create a piece of equipment.
• 34:17
  And he actually turned it into a multi $1,000,000 business, you
• 34:22
  know, over the years and he sold it and did really well.
• 34:24
  But it was like that was all just because it wasn't available
• 34:28
  to us. So we would engineer it and
• 34:32
  create it. So our equipment was changing
• 34:34
  all the time. I remember making heat
• 34:36
  exchangers out of copper and garden hoses like in the in the
• 34:41
  hardware store. So yeah, it's I see we got some
• 34:45
  Irish Moss in here. The hops looks like all
• 34:48
  Willamette hops. Oh, Mount Hood and then
• 34:52
  coriander. Did that particular beer make it
• 34:55
  onto your tap list? It's got.
• 34:57
  Well, it never did. And you know, I, I think I know
• 34:59
  why at my partner, him and his roommate that he lived with,
• 35:04
  this is when we first met him. We met this guy because in, in
• 35:07
  Durango, Bill and I, we didn't know him yet, but we were the
• 35:11
  only home Brewers that we knew were just, it was just the two
• 35:14
  of us. And we were doing all grain.
• 35:17
  And we heard about this kid doing all grain home brew.
• 35:22
  And we, and he was a punk kid and he was with a bunch of
• 35:25
  skaters, skateboarder kids. And they all lived in one house
• 35:29
  on the other side of town. And we heard he was having a
• 35:31
  homebrew party and he was gonna have 3 kegs of his homebrew on
• 35:35
  tap on his keggerator that held 5 gallon kegs.
• 35:39
  And we just had one for an alt beer that we had just made.
• 35:42
  I even remember the beer. And we were like, let's just
• 35:45
  show up at this party with our own 5 gallon keg, a homebrew,
• 35:48
  see what happens. And so we just showed up at the
• 35:51
  party and Matt freaked out and he was like, no way.
• 35:55
  And he threw it on tap And then we all partied all night.
• 35:58
  And we had that kegerator as a green kegerator that we had for
• 36:01
  years in our first tasting room. It was actually what we were
• 36:04
  pouring beers out of. And but his roommate really
• 36:09
  loved coriander and Matt didn't. And so he just, he didn't like
• 36:15
  the beer because his roommate would put way too much coriander
• 36:18
  in it. And you know, Coriander's got
• 36:21
  that effect still to this day. Cilantro as well.
• 36:24
  You know, it's you don't need either love it or you hate it.
• 36:28
  And they had that. And so it was a no go, even
• 36:31
  though he was forced to brew it every now and again.
• 36:36
  If you got to keep those sheets, you know when The Beatles were
• 36:38
  writing songs and they're writing lyrics down and they
• 36:40
  were leaving them all over the place.
• 36:42
  And people were just they. Didn't know what they were
• 36:43
  doing. People would come by and just
• 36:46
  scoop them up. That you need to hang on to
• 36:48
  those. I mean, I keep, I keep thinking
• 36:51
  about, you know, like there's there's the shows and then
• 36:54
  there's one that comes to mind where people walk into a house
• 36:58
  and they go to somebody's attic and they're like, wait a minute,
• 37:01
  there's Abraham Lincoln's like signature on on this document.
• 37:07
  And it's like, this is going to be you one day, you know?
• 37:09
  Yeah, I like this. Lincoln and The Beatles.
• 37:12
  Yes, hang on to it man, you never know.
• 37:15
  Hang on to it. There's a there's a thread
• 37:17
  there, though I don't want to be assassinated.
• 37:20
  No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not.
• 37:24
  Absolutely not. For anyone listening, Dave will
• 37:27
  probably just give it to you if you ask him for it.
• 37:29
  You don't have to shoot him over.
• 37:31
  That's right. That's right.
• 37:33
  No, we, we, we want things to be celebrated with you from a
• 37:37
  historical Bush. Back there today.
• 37:39
  I'll just give it to you, man. You can have it.
• 37:43
  Hey, we've not talked yet. No, no, Scott Brewing the name
• 37:47
  isn't just a random name and actually meet.
• 37:49
  There's something behind it and I didn't know this until kind of
• 37:53
  Emily started talking about you guys and it's a whole music
• 37:56
  style of music, right? So talk to us about how you
• 38:00
  incorporated ska brewing ska music.
• 38:03
  You guys are obviously fans of that style of music.
• 38:05
  You kind of tell us how that all came to be.
• 38:08
  Yeah, you bet. It's I mean, that's, that's the,
• 38:12
  that's the core of the whole thing, obviously.
• 38:14
  And it's when we were, I mean, ska music, for those who don't
• 38:17
  know, it's, it originated in the, in Jamaica in the late 50s.
• 38:23
  And it's, without getting too complicated, it, it eventually
• 38:29
  evolved into what became known as rocksteady and then reggae.
• 38:33
  So the roots of reggae is, is traditional Jamaican ska.
• 38:38
  But the trajectory of the ska itself was after that
• 38:42
  traditional kind of wave, which they called the first wave.
• 38:45
  It moved in, it skipped the pond and caught on with working class
• 38:50
  black and white kids over in the UK London area.
• 38:54
  And so they started forming these bands that, and it's, I
• 39:00
  hate to describe it this way 'cause it's not true.
• 39:02
  And any purists listening would get really pissed off.
• 39:04
  But if you don't know what you're listening to, it sounds
• 39:07
  like fast reggae. And so it's got horns and, and
• 39:12
  it's really about, it's about where the the beat falls.
• 39:17
  But these black and white kids, these working class kids in
• 39:20
  London and the UK, throughout the UK really.
• 39:22
  But London was kind of epicenter, they started forming
• 39:25
  these bands and that became known as the 2 Tone era with
• 39:28
  bands like the English Beat and the Specials, the second wave of
• 39:33
  ska. And then it kind of skipped the
• 39:34
  pawn back to the United States and became, that was the third
• 39:39
  wave. And that's where it kind of
• 39:40
  started to merge with some punk rocks.
• 39:42
  It was like punk rock with horns and you'd have this ska beat.
• 39:46
  But anyways, back to what it meant to us in high school, we
• 39:50
  were really into punk rock and ska.
• 39:53
  Our brewing regimen, you know, it's like sports fans, like
• 39:57
  we're very superstitious about brewing.
• 39:59
  You guys might have some superstitions like throughout
• 40:02
  your procedure, however you go about making a batch of beer,
• 40:06
  there's probably certain things you're pretty particular about
• 40:08
  that are hokey. You know, you don't really want
• 40:12
  to say it out loud. Yeah, our.
• 40:14
  Two, our two criteria, every batch was we have to listen to
• 40:18
  ska music while we brew and we have to drink our previous, the
• 40:22
  beers we're drinking have to be from the previous batch or the
• 40:26
  newest one that was ready to drink.
• 40:28
  And so those two things are what we always did.
• 40:30
  And then, you know, back then it was nobody really, you know, it
• 40:35
  was novel to have a bottle of beer with a label on it.
• 40:38
  Those were the early Apple Macintosh computers.
• 40:41
  And we were making labels and cutting them out with Exacto
• 40:43
  knives. But we could print text in green
• 40:47
  or it wasn't. We just had kind of, we made
• 40:50
  funny, silly labels and gave him out his Christmas presents.
• 40:53
  And we would always put, you know, whether it was My Kitchen
• 40:56
  or Bill's Kitchen, Scaw Brewing Brewing, bottled by Scaw Brewing
• 41:00
  Company, Dave's Kitchen, Denver, Co or Bill's Kitchen, Boulder,
• 41:04
  Co. And and then when we actually
• 41:07
  got to the point, you know, where 10 years later where we're
• 41:11
  gonna actually start a brewery, I was like, well, what are we,
• 41:15
  you know, all the breweries at the time were named after
• 41:17
  mountains, rivers or dogs. And I was like, well, what are
• 41:22
  we going to what mountain? You know, what are we going to
• 41:24
  call it? And Bill's like, oh, we're
• 41:25
  calling it Scott. We're not changing that.
• 41:28
  I'm like, nobody even knows what that means.
• 41:30
  You know, some of the college kids for sure.
• 41:33
  But Bill insisted, and I'm glad he did.
• 41:35
  And so, yeah, we, we moved forward and called it Scott
• 41:39
  Brewing. Some of the, you know, our first
• 41:41
  account was one of our first accounts was off in the
• 41:44
  mountains by this reservoir in town and right outside of town.
• 41:50
  And it was a steakhouse and it was a bunch of Cowboys, you
• 41:53
  know, that lived out there. And they were like guides and
• 41:57
  hunting guides. And we just, those guys made-up
• 42:01
  an acronym for it and just they told all their customers it
• 42:04
  stood for Shit Kicking Nails. And it was just an acronym for
• 42:09
  Shit Kicking Nails. So, you know, we're in a rural
• 42:12
  area, a lot of Cowboys here. So it was like half the town was
• 42:14
  college kids. They knew what ska music was.
• 42:17
  Half the town was Cowboys. They thought it was Shit.
• 42:19
  Kicking nails. Hey I do want.
• 42:26
  To say, you know, it was like all we knew at the time what we
• 42:28
  were really into was beer, comic books and ska music.
• 42:32
  And so we we wrote a comic book. All our characters were people
• 42:37
  from within the sky scene and all our characters became like
• 42:40
  names of beers and labels that we still use to this day.
• 42:43
  True Blonde was actually the heroine character of the comic
• 42:47
  book, So pretty. And you know, it was all
• 42:51
  ridiculous, but God, here we are somehow.
• 42:55
  Yeah, and service. But so you, you kind of hit it
• 42:57
  on this. You've incorporated that into
• 42:59
  the brand. You've got labeling, you've got
• 43:03
  it. We're going to talk to you about
• 43:04
  your website in a few minutes because that, that's a whole
• 43:06
  conversation because it's awesome.
• 43:08
  You've got, but you've got that in their suit.
• 43:10
  It's totally incorporated into the beer and the brand and the
• 43:13
  labeling and stuff. And I think that's cool.
• 43:15
  You you're able to maintain that and have maintained that the
• 43:17
  whole time. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, I
• 43:21
  think that's one of the cool things.
• 43:23
  I mean, we talk about it all the time because you never want to
• 43:26
  lose, you know, when you've been around this song, you don't want
• 43:28
  to, you don't want to lose any kind of culture you've created
• 43:30
  or authenticity. And it was like, man, it's kind
• 43:34
  of like, well, we have to just, you know, stick to the comic
• 43:37
  book. It's like, and, and we actually,
• 43:41
  I mean, no joke, we go back to the comic book sometimes looking
• 43:45
  for direction. You know, it's like, no man,
• 43:48
  it's this is what it's about. This is what we're about.
• 43:51
  And I think, you know, if there's one thing like
• 43:53
  millennials and Gen. Z can sniff out, it's it's
• 43:56
  inauthenticity. Yeah.
• 43:59
  When you're genuinely doing what you've always done and you're
• 44:03
  truly yourself, that goes a long way.
• 44:05
  And I think that, you know, that's good advice, I think for
• 44:08
  any brewery business person at all right now.
• 44:11
  And so for us, I feel really fortunate.
• 44:13
  You know, at the time I, I, I thought we were kind of really
• 44:17
  narrowing our market down to about as niche as it could get.
• 44:22
  Thought it was kind of a bad idea.
• 44:23
  And I'm glad Bill insisted. Because even though it's, you
• 44:26
  know, it's, it's not ska music isn't that well known.
• 44:30
  But I think if you get to know any of it and you get to know us
• 44:33
  as people and, and the character of the brewery, you can tell
• 44:37
  that it's we, we've done what we felt like doing all 31 years.
• 44:42
  You know, there's no other influence out there.
• 44:45
  You know, it's like we're just doing what we want to do, having
• 44:48
  fun doing it. Wikipedia is not only, not not
• 44:52
  always the most greatest source for the different things, but if
• 44:57
  you type in Ska, Wikipedia has a whole page about it.
• 45:02
  You gave it a, you gave it a whole much better presentation
• 45:06
  than Wikipedia would do. But you know.
• 45:10
  It's fun, danceable music and it's actually there is a dance
• 45:14
  called The Ska. We had actually there was an old
• 45:17
  classic album called Dance the Ska.
• 45:22
  We actually put out our own album called Drink the Ska.
• 45:25
  I'm going to say that looks very familiar.
• 45:27
  Some of that got. These classic spa dance moves on
• 45:31
  the back, and those are actually employees of ours.
• 45:35
  Where can someone find one of those records?
• 45:38
  There's the, the record company that we did this with is called
• 45:41
  Jump Up Records, and they're out of Chicago.
• 45:45
  The curated half, the album I curated the other half.
• 45:48
  It's cool. I always been so into music, but
• 45:51
  I I can't play anything. So now I've actually put out a
• 45:54
  record, but it's yeah. And so it's kind of a, it's the,
• 46:03
  the music itself is traditionally it was kind of a
• 46:07
  blend of R&B and like traditional Caribbean rhythms.
• 46:11
  And it's so kind of, and, but it's very danceable and, and
• 46:15
  fun. You know, it's it was that 2
• 46:18
  tone era or that second wave was pretty political.
• 46:22
  Well, a lot of it has been very political, but also very fun and
• 46:26
  danceable at the same time. And that's where all the black
• 46:29
  and white checkers come from too.
• 46:31
  That was the second wave. And that's the a unity thing
• 46:34
  between black and white kids that were in part of this
• 46:36
  movement. And for us, for us, it worked
• 46:40
  great back in 1995 because there wasn't digital printing.
• 46:44
  And if you wanted to print stationary or business cards or
• 46:47
  labels, you know, printing just black on white was the cheapest
• 46:51
  way to go. So, you know, bonus points right
• 46:56
  there for the motif. You mentioned early on that you
• 47:01
  like coming to work and when you, you come into work and
• 47:03
  it's, you know, you kind of feel like you're that, that Asian
• 47:06
  dude, you, you, you go to work, you're, you're making beer and
• 47:09
  you've got this music thing around you too.
• 47:11
  Like it's got to be the greatest job on earth.
• 47:13
  You've got all these things around you that you just love,
• 47:15
  right? It's the music.
• 47:16
  You're playing the music and you how many people could say they
• 47:20
  like going to work that that? Well, I'm guessing probably not
• 47:24
  many. I'm pretty grateful, I've got to
• 47:27
  admit I, you know, like selling the place, still getting to be
• 47:31
  here. I'm really glad that they they
• 47:33
  just don't want anything to change.
• 47:34
  It's 2 local guys that bought it and they're retired and they've,
• 47:38
  we've known him for a long time and it's, it's, it's cool
• 47:41
  because they don't, they want me here and they don't want
• 47:44
  anything to change. And I feel really fortunate
• 47:47
  because of that. But yeah, I mean, I couldn't
• 47:50
  imagine. I just couldn't imagine anything
• 47:53
  else Now, you know, for, for having one job for 30 plus years
• 47:58
  is not ordinary. And it's mostly because people
• 48:04
  get tired of it and they want to move on.
• 48:06
  And whether it's a brewery or not, I mean, maybe, maybe not
• 48:10
  everybody that jumped into the brewing industry in the last 15
• 48:14
  or 20 years should have, you know, but but for me, it, it
• 48:19
  wasn't ever a question. And, you know, I still believe
• 48:23
  very solidly in beer and I know it's it's facing headwinds and
• 48:27
  but it's been very cyclical. I've seen it just in the time
• 48:31
  that we've had our own brewery, but over history for thousands
• 48:34
  of years, you know, it's gone up and down and a lot of other
• 48:37
  trendy stuff is come and gone. And so I really believe in beer
• 48:42
  and the magic of beer and the feel of a pub and all of it.
• 48:46
  And the I mean the diversity of flavors and the things you can
• 48:49
  do with beers. To me, it's just so, it's just
• 48:53
  so great that it, I mean, how could you not love it, You know,
• 48:57
  it's like, and listen, just listen to us talking, you know?
• 49:00
  I, I think it there, there was a point that I, I thought about in
• 49:05
  the beginning when we talked about your true blonde.
• 49:08
  Scott and I have talked about this with other Brewers, certain
• 49:12
  styles of beer that are coming back now, loggers, your true
• 49:15
  blonde in 1995 and all of a sudden here we are in 2026 and
• 49:21
  it's kind of, it's still, it's still relevant to the to the to
• 49:24
  this day. Maybe, maybe 10-15 years ago
• 49:27
  people weren't buying as much, I don't know.
• 49:29
  But here they are today, and it's winning awards.
• 49:32
  Yeah, I think it'll be cool to check.
• 49:35
  Like, let's see what happens over the course of this month.
• 49:38
  Since the World Beer Company does.
• 49:40
  Does consumption of it go up? I mean, it seems like there's
• 49:43
  been a fair amount of attention around it.
• 49:45
  I, I feel like, I feel like between the GABF and the World
• 49:50
  Beer Cup, we had a bit of a lull.
• 49:52
  You know, like maybe, I want to say maybe I don't know, 7-8
• 49:55
  years ago till 5-6 years ago. And then since then I, I feel
• 50:01
  like I get really excited again about not just US winning
• 50:04
  awards, but any, any friends winning awards And it's starting
• 50:07
  to get attention again. And so I wonder, you know, if
• 50:10
  we're going to get any legs out of that, particularly in our
• 50:13
  tasting room, you know, our sales going to go up in the
• 50:16
  chasing room. So in the next few weeks we'll
• 50:18
  be watching that to see, you know, if it if it makes it a
• 50:23
  measurable difference. But yeah, I mean, it's you're
• 50:28
  right. And those those styles mean as
• 50:31
  excited as I am about something like our West Coast IPA, you
• 50:35
  know, our our older real flagship Modus Hopper and I
• 50:39
  another IPA, like an original old school West Coast IPA, it's
• 50:43
  still hanging in there. It's our second strongest
• 50:46
  selling beer. And it's kind of a those I
• 50:51
  think. Yeah.
• 50:51
  And like you said, the lighter loggers coming back.
• 50:54
  And it's, I love that because it's, it kind of, you know, it
• 51:00
  just shows you what really can stand the test of time.
• 51:04
  And, and, and, and maybe I mean, for us, there's certain beers
• 51:10
  and trends that that that we've jumped on board with.
• 51:15
  There's also other things that we haven't.
• 51:18
  Hazy was one where we were kind of divided when hazy Ipas first
• 51:22
  started, but some of us insisted on it, really liked them.
• 51:26
  Some of us swore we'd never like them.
• 51:28
  And that's one of our best selling beers, just our main
• 51:31
  Arizona IPA. But we never got into like
• 51:34
  milkshake Ipas, you know, juicy Ipas that tasted like juice.
• 51:41
  Just it was never a thing we wanted to do.
• 51:44
  And so, yeah, I mean, once again, it's another validating
• 51:47
  part of this conversation and, and what has happened.
• 51:51
  Like, I love seeing classic styles come back and they always
• 51:57
  do, you know, see you. Guys, you guys have been around
• 52:00
  long enough. You you've got that that history
• 52:03
  we're talking to Fred Matt was the same way.
• 52:05
  It's like you've been around long.
• 52:06
  You you know, you're starting to see those cycles start coming
• 52:08
  back right? And then you like, hey, if you
• 52:10
  can weather the storm or hey, this is this thing's a trend
• 52:13
  that it's going to come back to whatever you've been around long
• 52:16
  enough to see those things. Yeah, it's crazy.
• 52:19
  I mean, we can we can track it in our own numbers.
• 52:22
  You know, we've seen it just within our own brewery come and
• 52:27
  go and, and those styles, they come back and they always do.
• 52:33
  And it's. Yeah.
• 52:34
  And it's, I don't know. I mean, I love that.
• 52:36
  I love it because there's still I think I mean, I'm drinking
• 52:40
  mostly our West Coast like day-to-day right now.
• 52:42
  That's what I've been drinking at the end of the day in our
• 52:44
  tasting room. But our older IPA and blonde are
• 52:49
  beers that I just they're go tubes for me, you know, at at
• 52:53
  home on the weekend, whatever it is, That's what I've always got
• 52:56
  a nice stash of and it's I don't I don't know, it's great.
• 53:00
  It's like I said, it's cool to see that it's that it does.
• 53:04
  It does come back. You know, maybe it's, we'll see.
• 53:08
  There's a lot of, you know, there's, I mean, a lot of stuff
• 53:11
  like that. I guess in life where it's the
• 53:14
  the old stuff was cool for some reason at some point.
• 53:17
  Now everyone's starting to realize why again.
• 53:20
  Well, and, and I think it's good to touch on this because last
• 53:24
  year for your 30th anniversary, you had brought back some of
• 53:27
  your flagship beers. You did it each month.
• 53:31
  Are there certain beers and certain ones kind of going a
• 53:34
  little bit what we were saying before that really had some
• 53:37
  special meaning to you that you were able to bring back last
• 53:40
  year? Yeah, there was 2, you know,
• 53:42
  when we first started, it was, I'm kind of glad you asked that
• 53:48
  because it's, it's, it's fun to think about.
• 53:50
  But when we first started and I remember like some of the some
• 53:55
  of the brew pubs that kind of created a chain like Rock Rock
• 53:58
  Bottom, for example, Yeah. And trans working.
• 54:01
  In Nashville. And you know, their, their MO
• 54:06
  when they would open a new brewery and this is mid 90s, I
• 54:08
  don't know after that really, but they just they would give
• 54:13
  some freedom to the Brewer. But they were like, you got to
• 54:14
  hit this color spectrum. You know, you got to have a
• 54:17
  light looking beer, you got to have a, a, an amber beer, you
• 54:20
  got to have a brown beer, you got to have a dark beer.
• 54:23
  And so that was kind of our mentality when we started
• 54:26
  because that's what we got from other people that are already
• 54:28
  out there doing it. And that is how we came up with
• 54:31
  Blonde. And then Pinstripe was our red
• 54:33
  beer and then we had two other beers, Buster Nut Brown and 10
• 54:38
  Pin Porter. And both of those beers we
• 54:41
  brought back last year during our 30th anniversary.
• 54:45
  We were bringing a a new one back every every month.
• 54:48
  And it was that was those two in particular, just because they
• 54:53
  were part of that original lineup, really fun to bring
• 54:57
  back. And you know, what's cool about
• 54:58
  it was a lot of people that have long since left Durango, you
• 55:02
  know, saw that we were doing it on social media and started
• 55:04
  chiming in about how that was their favorite beer 25 years
• 55:08
  ago, you know, or whatever. And we even had a funeral when
• 55:14
  we retired those beers at that time, it was kind of a big deal
• 55:19
  to retire a flagship. So we actually had a funeral for
• 55:22
  10 Pin Porter and we all were wearing dark suits and we had a
• 55:27
  little casket. We buried, we buried it in our
• 55:31
  beer garden. It's still buried out there.
• 55:35
  It's all, you can see it on YouTube, the 1010 Porter
• 55:38
  funeral. And it was like, I mean, those
• 55:42
  beers meant so much to us and it was the first half of our
• 55:45
  existence. They were our bread and butter
• 55:47
  and some bringing them back last year and then having all those
• 55:50
  other people once again tied into the nostalgia that we're
• 55:52
  had fond memories of drinking those beers or I really love.
• 55:56
  That's the beer that got me into craft beer.
• 55:58
  Yeah. All that so.
• 56:01
  What made you retire, like permanently?
• 56:04
  Some of those beers where you're like the this isn't going to be
• 56:06
  our core beer because you've had some on on your tablet for a
• 56:10
  long time. I think if Scott's going like
• 56:12
  money. That's it.
• 56:14
  You know, do they really sell that much?
• 56:16
  And, and, you know, like the styles come and go.
• 56:18
  Like I feel like I feel like we could do pretty well with
• 56:22
  because some of our darker beers, porters and stouts over
• 56:26
  the years have been delicious. And I think, you know, they just
• 56:29
  didn't sell enough for, to work into our production schedule the
• 56:33
  right way. I have a feeling some of those
• 56:36
  darker beers might be able to make a, a triumphant return and
• 56:41
  then, you know, in the coming days.
• 56:45
  And I think because I, that's what I'm drinking now.
• 56:47
  Like when I go to a new brewery, a brewery I haven't been to yet,
• 56:51
  I'm trying to find a Porter or a stout.
• 56:54
  And it's kind of just because I, for so long, I've, I'm
• 56:57
  definitely a hops guy and I love Ipas for so long.
• 57:01
  I, I just go Ipas just to go to and now I'm like, man, I'm
• 57:06
  really enjoying something with a little malt and some darker
• 57:09
  malts and little less hops. And I'd, I'd love to bring back
• 57:14
  some of those beers again, or at least A twist on those beers.
• 57:20
  Do you do you pull out the notebook for those?
• 57:23
  For those for those you literally pull the notebook off
• 57:26
  the shelf and start shuffling through recipes.
• 57:29
  They do. And it's, it's funny because I
• 57:32
  have my own notebooks that actually have notes about why,
• 57:36
  you know, but then our Brewers have like they have the old
• 57:40
  recipes, you know, and it's funny because I looked through
• 57:45
  my stuff and it's like, well, this is, this is what we were
• 57:47
  doing. This is why we were doing it.
• 57:49
  This is why we, I'm on the kind of more on the marketing side.
• 57:52
  And so I was always into like the labels and the comic book
• 57:55
  side of everything. And so I, I look back through
• 57:59
  that stuff and like, why? What made us think about this?
• 58:02
  And God, how can I get that creative again?
• 58:05
  You know what? I got to spin off this somehow.
• 58:08
  You. Know, you know, as the brewery
• 58:10
  grows over 31 years, you know, you start out as kids and we're
• 58:13
  just going to make some stuff and we start this brewery.
• 58:15
  But then after a while, you know, you got bills to pay,
• 58:19
  right? And you got beer.
• 58:20
  You got to sell things to say. It's like, OK, we can't, we have
• 58:22
  to shift mentality at least a little bit, right?
• 58:25
  We got to sell, but we can still make the fun stuff.
• 58:27
  But we have to, we want to stay in business.
• 58:29
  We have to do this business thing too, right?
• 58:32
  Yeah, it was, it was really apparent like when that day kind
• 58:37
  of hit because, you know, like I said, we had blonde, red, brown,
• 58:42
  dark, and then those all worked because it was just, it was all
• 58:46
  new to everybody. Craft beer was, you know, and
• 58:49
  there's all these you're learning these styles and then
• 58:52
  certain styles definitely started to grab hold.
• 58:55
  And then when craft really started taking off in the early
• 58:59
  aughts, you know, mid aughts and and diversity started going
• 59:05
  crazy, then it was kind of like you couldn't you couldn't just
• 59:09
  survive on porters anymore. You know, there's definitely
• 59:13
  exceptions. Black Butte from Deschutes, for
• 59:15
  example, you know, still their flagship to this day.
• 59:18
  And, and it was kind of, but I remember, I don't know if I
• 59:23
  don't even know if Duck Duck Rabbit brewing.
• 59:26
  Do you guys remember those guys? Are they still I?
• 59:28
  Do I think I see them from time to time?
• 59:30
  Yeah. They were all stout, you know,
• 59:34
  it was, we just never had them out in Colorado.
• 59:37
  So now it's just, it's hard for me to know, you know, what
• 59:40
  breweries are still around because you just unless they're
• 59:43
  distributing, there's so many, unless you're distributing
• 59:46
  nationally, it's hard to tell. But you know, some of that and
• 59:50
  then there's been, I've seen other breweries that
• 59:52
  concentrated on one style of beer and that's hard.
• 59:56
  You know, I think we have a good example beer stat lager house in
• 1:00:00
  Denver that focuses just on German style lagers.
• 1:00:03
  That's really purist and specific about it.
• 1:00:06
  And they do a great job. They were definitely for a while
• 1:00:08
  a Brewers brewery, you know, like Brewers wanted to go there
• 1:00:12
  and drink, but they focus, they don't stray, you know, and and
• 1:00:17
  that's, that's an example of of. Where I think it's really worked
• 1:00:23
  overtime, but there's been a lot of breweries that have had a
• 1:00:25
  concept from opening that I'm only going to make this style of
• 1:00:29
  beer or that style of beer and it that doesn't stick.
• 1:00:35
  Could you give a ballpark estimate from when you start in
• 1:00:39
  95 to now? How many different beers have
• 1:00:42
  you brewed? Oh God.
• 1:00:43
  I mean I'm not asking like the the exact number, but just like
• 1:00:46
  a ballpark. We have like right now we have
• 1:00:48
  20 taps in our tasting room and they're always full and we have
• 1:00:54
  a new beer in our tasting room, not necessarily a a distributed
• 1:00:59
  beer every Friday. So, but you know, for for those
• 1:01:05
  first ten years, it was really only four beers.
• 1:01:08
  I mean, we have occasional one off batches and we do special
• 1:01:11
  beers for certain events, but God, in the last 1520 years, I
• 1:01:16
  can't Even so many different kinds of beer.
• 1:01:20
  And, and we have a, we have a, we have a 3 1/2 barrel system as
• 1:01:25
  a, as AR and D or a pilot system.
• 1:01:28
  And then we have our big system. And so we're always messing
• 1:01:31
  around on that thing. And a lot of those beers are
• 1:01:34
  just in our tasting room. But man, I mean, my guess is
• 1:01:42
  maybe not into the thousands, but hundreds and hundreds for
• 1:01:47
  sure. It's a lot.
• 1:01:49
  It's a lot, yeah. A lot of history, my friend.
• 1:01:51
  That's a lot of history. There's there's a beer on your
• 1:01:56
  tap list right now. And the reason it stood out to
• 1:01:58
  me is because of the ABV and it's called a W Easy Light
• 1:02:02
  Logger and it's 3.8%. Obviously it's in the
• 1:02:06
  description, it's a light logger.
• 1:02:08
  Why are those like low ABV and maybe even mid strength?
• 1:02:13
  Maybe it's in that range too. Why are those important?
• 1:02:15
  I know we talked about loggers in general, but why are those
• 1:02:17
  low AB VS important to people and why you know why have one on
• 1:02:21
  on on draft? Yeah, ours is.
• 1:02:23
  This is definitely an experiment for us.
• 1:02:27
  I, I've always thought we were really good at brewing clean
• 1:02:33
  light loggers. Like one of our, we started
• 1:02:35
  brewing a Mexican style lager in 1999 and it's our best selling
• 1:02:40
  beer and, and it's been, it's won a bunch of awards and it's,
• 1:02:45
  it's something I'm super proud of.
• 1:02:47
  And we've always been, you know, I think the, the, our lab and
• 1:02:51
  our quality control is a big part of that because obviously
• 1:02:54
  it's hard to make a beer like that.
• 1:02:57
  I mean, you can't mask anything and it's got it's got to be and
• 1:03:01
  then once you once you take it to a level where you've got a
• 1:03:04
  really low ABV, you don't have anything helping you out on the
• 1:03:08
  shelf at all. Ability guys.
• 1:03:11
  But anyways, it's AI think. I think a lot of it is ours is
• 1:03:19
  interesting 'cause we're we're branding it a bit different than
• 1:03:23
  the rest of our lineup. It doesn't look anything like
• 1:03:25
  our regular scab ears. The price point's also quite a
• 1:03:29
  bit lower. It doesn't cost nearly as much
• 1:03:32
  to make. And so it's it's we're almost
• 1:03:36
  looking at it like it might not even really sure it's made by a
• 1:03:40
  craft brewery, but I don't know if it even really depending on
• 1:03:43
  how you're defining it, if it if that's where it fits.
• 1:03:46
  So we're positioning it to sit on the shelves with Coors, Bud
• 1:03:52
  Miller, but we'll see how that goes.
• 1:03:55
  That's an experiment. But back to just low ABV and mid
• 1:03:58
  strength beers, you know, I, I love to see the, the, the mid
• 1:04:03
  strength beers that are still a particular style, not just a
• 1:04:07
  light lager, but like Ipas or whatever.
• 1:04:09
  You know, we kind of went through a phase of session, you
• 1:04:12
  know, it's, it's a little bit different now, maybe it's a
• 1:04:15
  little bit more accepted. But it's interesting because I
• 1:04:18
  think what we're seeing is a reaction to Gen.
• 1:04:24
  Z not drinking as much People our age, a lot of my friends
• 1:04:28
  that probably kept us in business all these years don't
• 1:04:32
  drink half the amount of beer they used to.
• 1:04:35
  And then there's trends like zebra striping.
• 1:04:38
  Are you guys familiar with zebra striping where you where you
• 1:04:40
  drink an alcoholic beer and then you drink a non alcoholic beer
• 1:04:43
  and then you drink an Al? Will you alternate?
• 1:04:46
  Where, where? Where is that becoming a trend
• 1:04:48
  then? I think it's just a thing.
• 1:04:50
  I mean, I, I don't know, but it's kind of people trying not
• 1:04:55
  to get hungover but still want to go out or still want to have
• 1:04:58
  some beers. And so older people and then I
• 1:05:01
  think younger people, millennials I think are pretty
• 1:05:05
  solid consumers, but they're very, you know, they have a lot
• 1:05:08
  of information coming at them digitally about health.
• 1:05:11
  And so it's, it's easy to, it's easy to spin somebody's out,
• 1:05:16
  take on, on beer, whatever. And I think, I think lower
• 1:05:21
  calories, you know, less gluten, less alcohol, all of those
• 1:05:27
  things, less carbs, those things are all there's definitely
• 1:05:32
  segments among beer drinkers and craft beer drinkers that are
• 1:05:37
  appreciating beers that take that into account more so than
• 1:05:40
  they ever have. And you're seeing, that's where
• 1:05:43
  you're seeing a lot of the growth right now.
• 1:05:46
  I just was reading an article that the BA put out today that
• 1:05:50
  mentions founders and Harpoon and their lower ABV lighter
• 1:05:59
  beers that they're coming out with.
• 1:06:00
  It's a good article. It's worth looking into just at
• 1:06:04
  the Brewers Association. But for us, I I, it's
• 1:06:08
  interesting. We've brewed, we had a beer, a
• 1:06:11
  lighter lower ABV beer called Ska Lager that we had out for a
• 1:06:15
  couple years. We discontinued it last year.
• 1:06:17
  And our employees that drink a lot of beer, especially the
• 1:06:21
  Brewers, you know, they'll, they'll taste and drink all of
• 1:06:25
  our higher ABV beers. But when they're just sitting
• 1:06:27
  there in the tasting room putting one down after another,
• 1:06:30
  that's what they were drinking. And, and it's just because
• 1:06:34
  they're going to get up and come to work at 4:30 in the morning
• 1:06:36
  or whatever it is. And it's like, you know, and
• 1:06:39
  they're younger, you know, and it's like they could put away if
• 1:06:42
  quite a few more beers and still function the next day.
• 1:06:45
  And then, then I can. So for me, it's difficult
• 1:06:49
  because it's not my, it's not my kind of beer.
• 1:06:53
  I still like copier, little bigger beers and darker beers.
• 1:06:57
  I don't like light beers that are that are don't taste like a
• 1:07:04
  lot, even though I appreciate the difficulty in brewing them.
• 1:07:08
  But it's something that's impossible to ignore when you're
• 1:07:11
  a brewery. I think our size it's, it's,
• 1:07:14
  it's, it's happening kind of branding the the West's easy
• 1:07:21
  light different than all the ska stuff is it's a little bit of an
• 1:07:24
  experiment as sort of a sub or off brand that I don't know how
• 1:07:30
  it's going to go, you know, and we're not releasing it market
• 1:07:33
  wide. We're just releasing it in the
• 1:07:35
  southern part of Colorado out of the gates to kind of just see
• 1:07:39
  what happens. But already our, our crew, our
• 1:07:44
  actual employees are drinking a ton of it.
• 1:07:47
  Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:07:49
  It was going to be a question of mine.
• 1:07:50
  Could you have even predicted like 5 or 10 years ago that you
• 1:07:54
  know, on, on at your place non alcoholic and what you're doing
• 1:07:58
  Also like some of the CBD sparkling seltzers?
• 1:08:02
  Could you, could you have predicted 5 or 10 years ago that
• 1:08:05
  hey, this is what's going to be a trend in 2026?
• 1:08:10
  You know, it's interesting because one thing we do have is
• 1:08:12
  we have a non alcoholic, just flavored sparkling water called
• 1:08:17
  Skagua. We've been making that for years
• 1:08:21
  and years. And it that actually stemmed
• 1:08:23
  from one of my partners getting a DUI when we were much younger.
• 1:08:28
  And we drank a lot of beer while we were working when we were
• 1:08:30
  younger. Probably not the best idea, but
• 1:08:33
  we didn't know any better nor did we care.
• 1:08:36
  And, and so he got a DUI and he, he couldn't drink anymore, but
• 1:08:42
  he wanted a bubbly beverage in his hand.
• 1:08:44
  This is before Lacroix, you know, like we didn't even know
• 1:08:47
  about that. And so we started like just
• 1:08:50
  carbonating water and then adding a little cranberry or a
• 1:08:53
  little lime and, and we always had it on tap in the back so we
• 1:08:57
  could have something to drink other than beer for years.
• 1:09:00
  And then people started coming and we had it for free in our
• 1:09:03
  tasting room. Like you could just go fill your
• 1:09:05
  own glass up with a tap just on the wall in the tasting room.
• 1:09:09
  Any, any customer and people started coming in and filling up
• 1:09:12
  jugs full of it and jugs and jugs and jugs full of it.
• 1:09:16
  And then we, we should start canning and selling that stuff.
• 1:09:21
  And so that's how that happened. But then we also got into CBD
• 1:09:26
  and we've recently gotten into the THC game, very low, low dose
• 1:09:31
  THC sparkling beverages. And it's just for an
• 1:09:35
  alternative, you know, and not none of us are into non
• 1:09:38
  alcoholic beer here. We appreciate it.
• 1:09:42
  We do sell. We do sell it here, but we
• 1:09:44
  don't. It's not our beer.
• 1:09:46
  It's not for you, right? It's for me.
• 1:09:48
  Yeah, it's so it's kind of the stuff that we can sort of
• 1:09:51
  appreciate like these THC drinks that we make, it's only 1 1/2
• 1:09:56
  milligrams of THC in a 12 ounce can.
• 1:09:59
  It's called SKA low dose. And those I'm having a good time
• 1:10:03
  with. That's it's fun to have one of
• 1:10:04
  those instead of a beer. Nothing higher than that as far
• 1:10:08
  as milligrams of THC, but that's really been pretty enjoyable for
• 1:10:13
  me. Once again, non alcoholic beer.
• 1:10:17
  I can't see a day when that's something we do.
• 1:10:19
  But back to your original point, no, five years ago, my it was a
• 1:10:26
  conversation we probably had 10 years ago, definitely not, but
• 1:10:31
  it's now. And actually we were just
• 1:10:33
  looking at the numbers today, You know, our, our beer numbers
• 1:10:38
  in our own tasting room aren't up, but our numbers on all of
• 1:10:44
  our non alcoholic beverages are up in the tasting room.
• 1:10:49
  So it's interesting, you know, and I said it again, I said it
• 1:10:53
  to our whole team today. I I believe in beer.
• 1:10:55
  You know, this, there's more people coming.
• 1:10:58
  We have a lot of tourists that come here.
• 1:11:00
  It's, it's Durango's a big tourism area and it's, it's very
• 1:11:03
  seasonal. So we kind of have to have a lot
• 1:11:06
  of offerings at least 'cause we're a full restaurant now at,
• 1:11:10
  at our world headquarters or that's what we always refer to
• 1:11:14
  it as. But we have it not necessarily
• 1:11:18
  for distribution or or a real, real true revenue generator
• 1:11:23
  outside of Durango, but just for to offer some diversity for
• 1:11:29
  those types of customers here at at our brewery.
• 1:11:34
  What that tells me, at least in my mind, is you're going to get
• 1:11:37
  the people that are going to go to the brewery anyway.
• 1:11:39
  Like you've got a group of people, right?
• 1:11:41
  And then somebody in there doesn't want to drink or is the
• 1:11:44
  designated driver or doesn't want beer, but you've got an
• 1:11:48
  option for them too. So you get your beer drinkers in
• 1:11:52
  there and then you get the other people that are going to come
• 1:11:53
  that might not have come in otherwise because you didn't
• 1:11:56
  have something for them, whether, you know, non alcoholic
• 1:11:58
  or THC or something. So the spike in that kind of
• 1:12:01
  tells me you're getting those people too obviously, right,
• 1:12:04
  with those groups that are coming in.
• 1:12:06
  Yeah, and that's, that's our intent, you know, for sure here.
• 1:12:10
  And it's like, you know, whether it's, I think we try to stay
• 1:12:15
  pretty true to where our soul is as far as to what we actually
• 1:12:18
  make and brew, you know, but like non alcoholic beards, I,
• 1:12:23
  I'm not throwing anybody under the bus here, but I still
• 1:12:26
  haven't tasted one that tastes as good as the version of it
• 1:12:30
  with alcohol in it. It would grade well.
• 1:12:35
  And so I don't get the point, but it's kind of like a lot of
• 1:12:39
  people do because it's close enough, I guess.
• 1:12:42
  And I don't like. It but I understand.
• 1:12:44
  Yeah, and I appreciate it. And and so you're right though,
• 1:12:48
  I think, you know, there's, we want to offer something to
• 1:12:51
  everybody if they've got a friend.
• 1:12:52
  I think, I think I always look at it like probably, hopefully
• 1:12:56
  the driving, the driving decision maker in the group is
• 1:13:01
  probably the person that wanted to have some of our beers, you
• 1:13:04
  know, but then can we accommodate all their friends?
• 1:13:06
  That's what I hope we can do. Yeah, you'd, you'd mentioned
• 1:13:11
  earlier that Mexican lagers was one of your first ones that you
• 1:13:15
  start brewing. And it's something that Scott
• 1:13:17
  and I, when we go out, we hit breweries.
• 1:13:19
  We've noticed probably over like the last two years or so that
• 1:13:22
  every brewery now, especially this time of the year, they have
• 1:13:27
  they have a Mexican lager. Do you feel like you were a
• 1:13:29
  little bit ahead of the curve on that one way back in the day?
• 1:13:33
  I feel like I didn't see another one from a craft brewery for at
• 1:13:36
  least a decade after we started brewing this.
• 1:13:40
  Yeah. I mean, we, like I said, we
• 1:13:41
  started brewing it in 1999. And it was, to be honest with
• 1:13:45
  you, it was we were closet Pacifico drinkers.
• 1:13:49
  We used to. We used to.
• 1:13:51
  I mean, we would go to festivals and we wouldn't sit there and
• 1:13:55
  drink all the craft beers. We'd go back to the truck or the
• 1:13:57
  car and drink a Pacifico and then go back out or pour it into
• 1:14:01
  our glass and and then finally we're and then that's what we
• 1:14:05
  would drink in the summer in Durango.
• 1:14:06
  It gets pretty hot here, you know, and craft beers were not
• 1:14:10
  really light at the time. Lot, you know, lot of flavor,
• 1:14:14
  not the cleanest, lightest beers coming out of craft breweries in
• 1:14:17
  the mid to late 90s. Finally, we were just like, why
• 1:14:21
  don't we just try to brew one of these ourselves?
• 1:14:25
  And so we got a yeast strain from Mexico City and we put a
• 1:14:31
  little, little dextrose in there and made a lighter beer and it,
• 1:14:39
  it stuck for us. I mean, I remember going through
• 1:14:41
  the labeling issues that the TTB didn't know what to do because
• 1:14:44
  we just called it Mexican lager, but it wasn't made in Mexico.
• 1:14:48
  And at that time you had to, you could, you weren't, you weren't
• 1:14:52
  getting your labels approved online.
• 1:14:54
  You had to do it through snail mail.
• 1:14:56
  So we'd get a letter back saying you didn't make this in Mexico.
• 1:14:59
  It's not a Mexican lager. So then it ended up being a
• 1:15:03
  hyphenated Mexican style lager and it was a all this rigmarole
• 1:15:07
  did finally get it to where we could put it in a bottle.
• 1:15:11
  And at the time we were all bottles.
• 1:15:13
  We weren't cans yet. But it, yeah.
• 1:15:16
  And then I, I, I really feel like it wasn't till, I mean, a
• 1:15:20
  decade later would have been 2009.
• 1:15:22
  So, I mean, still, that's 17 years ago, Yeah.
• 1:15:28
  Yeah. Yeah, Well, it's funny because
• 1:15:31
  Scott and I will go out. He could talk about this, but we
• 1:15:33
  go out now, especially this time of the year, we're like, OK,
• 1:15:38
  they got the Mexican lager. We got to try it, right?
• 1:15:41
  I mean we. We.
• 1:15:41
  We went on, we went on a trip last year and we went to 88
• 1:15:44
  breweries in a row, had a Mexican lager and we got one
• 1:15:47
  from each one of them. It was like, yes, this was
• 1:15:49
  awesome. But it wasn't that way years
• 1:15:52
  ago. Now everybody has a Mexican
• 1:15:54
  lager. And it's the same thing that
• 1:15:56
  everybody keeps saying. You can't hide behind them.
• 1:15:58
  I mean, you know, there's a reason why they're there.
• 1:16:01
  And if they're not going to be good, man, it's not going to
• 1:16:03
  reflect well on you, no. Yeah, we, I remember like we
• 1:16:07
  when we first made it it, I remember bringing it to a couple
• 1:16:11
  of specific festivals and we just embraced throwing a Lyme
• 1:16:14
  into it. Like we, we were always just
• 1:16:16
  trying to be irreverent all the time, you know, like just do
• 1:16:20
  whatever the fuck we want and, and regardless of what anybody
• 1:16:24
  else is doing. So we would show up at
• 1:16:26
  festivals, you know, in 1999, two thousand and that was when
• 1:16:30
  everybody was anti fruit in beer.
• 1:16:33
  And and we'd show up with this light beer and a big ol bowl of
• 1:16:39
  cut up limes and and Brewers would come like to taste it and
• 1:16:44
  no way would they put a lime in it.
• 1:16:46
  And we were just doing it just to kind of spite everybody and,
• 1:16:50
  and every year we sold more and more and more.
• 1:16:54
  And then it became, and we only had it, we were only brewing it
• 1:16:57
  in the summer. It was seasonal for us until
• 1:16:59
  just a couple years ago. And it started to almost eclipse
• 1:17:04
  Modus Hopper and I when it was only available for four months
• 1:17:08
  of the year. So it was in four months, we
• 1:17:11
  were selling as much of it as we were selling our main flagship
• 1:17:14
  throughout the whole entire year.
• 1:17:17
  And so we switched and we started selling it year round.
• 1:17:20
  It's, it's definitely our best selling beer that we have out
• 1:17:23
  there. And you know, and it's, it's for
• 1:17:26
  us, it's great. It's got, you know, it's got
• 1:17:28
  good placements in like the, the grocery stores and, and in
• 1:17:32
  Durango where we live, it's, it's just means summer here for
• 1:17:35
  everybody. That's what I miss about doing.
• 1:17:38
  We used to have a kickoff party when we would release it every
• 1:17:40
  summer and it was kind of like the unofficial start to summer.
• 1:17:44
  And now that we have it year round, we, we still have a
• 1:17:46
  party, but it's not, it's not really the Mexican lager party
• 1:17:50
  anymore. It's just the summer kickoff
• 1:17:52
  party. But right.
• 1:17:53
  Because. Because you could buy it
• 1:17:54
  yesterday at the same time. Exactly.
• 1:17:57
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:17:59
  And I, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's, it was, it's
• 1:18:02
  always been a fun beer for us. And I, I kind of love telling
• 1:18:05
  the story and it's, it's, I'm glad to see more.
• 1:18:08
  And it's, it's interesting because they don't all taste
• 1:18:12
  like ours. You know, we would, we should
• 1:18:15
  just always put this in the international pilsner category
• 1:18:18
  because there wasn't anything any better for it.
• 1:18:20
  We didn't brew it for a category, but we'd like to enter
• 1:18:23
  it. And it's, it's done well.
• 1:18:26
  And now it's like when you are really tasting some of those
• 1:18:30
  old, some of those older Mexican lagers that are truly derived
• 1:18:36
  from like German Vienna's and whatever.
• 1:18:39
  And that are, you know, I don't know that ours is the closest
• 1:18:44
  representation of some of those beers that I've tasted because
• 1:18:49
  I've tasted some that are really, really close and really,
• 1:18:52
  really delicious. I think ours is a little bit
• 1:18:54
  different. I love what it is, but it's
• 1:18:58
  really weird when you have a beer that light, you know, how
• 1:19:00
  much variance is there from brewery to brewery And, and it
• 1:19:05
  turns out there's actually quite a bit, you know, and I
• 1:19:09
  appreciate it. It's a hard beer to make.
• 1:19:10
  And so I like to drink them when I go to other breweries as well.
• 1:19:14
  But boy, when you get one that's not clean, it's it's, it's Pam.
• 1:19:19
  And you're right that that 8 breweries in a row was talking
• 1:19:21
  about they were different from from brewery to brewery and none
• 1:19:25
  of them were bad they but they did vary.
• 1:19:27
  And it was like how could it be different that much difference
• 1:19:30
  between them? But they're all fantastic and
• 1:19:32
  maybe some had some more corn notes or whatever it was, but
• 1:19:36
  they were all good. But they were all different.
• 1:19:38
  Yeah, Yeah, it's pretty. Variable.
• 1:19:41
  We never, we didn't have any kind of clone recipe.
• 1:19:44
  We just made it up when we started.
• 1:19:45
  We just had the yeast strain and so and what that's what we've
• 1:19:49
  stuck with all these years. So if you're really trying to
• 1:19:52
  replicate Pacifica or whatever it might be, ours probably isn't
• 1:19:58
  the closest representation out there.
• 1:20:01
  In fact, I know that's not, you know, so.
• 1:20:05
  Hey, Speaking of loggers, you do a German style logger
• 1:20:10
  Oktoberfest and we're not going to be that far off from
• 1:20:13
  Oktoberfest season. Can you talk about that?
• 1:20:17
  Yeah, that was another one that we, another one I'm really proud
• 1:20:21
  of. It's I think it's because it's
• 1:20:24
  so seasonal, you know, it's so limited.
• 1:20:27
  That's probably my favorite beer that we make.
• 1:20:31
  And it's we, I think we originally came out with one.
• 1:20:36
  We brewed one years and years ago and it did OK.
• 1:20:39
  And, and then, and there were a lot of breweries making an
• 1:20:42
  Oktoberfest long, long time ago. And then there was this big lull
• 1:20:47
  where it just kind of stopped happening.
• 1:20:50
  And I didn't see as many available on the shelves here in
• 1:20:53
  Colorado as I used to, but always loved the style.
• 1:20:59
  And so we just decided let's just go all in, get all of our
• 1:21:04
  distributors on board, get all pre-orders for this beer.
• 1:21:08
  This was 2017 or 1818, I think. And and just make an
• 1:21:14
  Oktoberfest, get the can. It's always, this is kind of an
• 1:21:17
  interesting thing, but there's a minimum quantity order if you
• 1:21:21
  get a true digitally printed can from, you know, the big can
• 1:21:25
  manufacturers like Ball. And if you're not going to sell
• 1:21:31
  that minimum quantity, then you pretty much are labeling your
• 1:21:34
  cans. And we decided to go for it with
• 1:21:38
  a with a cool matte finish, use this old label from the first
• 1:21:42
  time we made one years and years earlier, probably 2 decades
• 1:21:46
  earlier and reinvent the beer, totally new recipe.
• 1:21:51
  And man, we won multiple gold medals.
• 1:21:54
  We won Brussels won a gold, we won a gold at GABF that year and
• 1:22:01
  we were so proud of it. And it, it's, I don't know,
• 1:22:06
  it's, it's a beer that our whole team 'cause we're, I mean, we're
• 1:22:10
  already getting, we're already talking about brewing it, even
• 1:22:13
  though, you know, it's only April.
• 1:22:16
  We only brew a a couple batches, if even that, and it's limited,
• 1:22:22
  you know, it's just get it out and it's done and you got to
• 1:22:25
  time it right. But the longer it can logger for
• 1:22:29
  the most part, the better. And so it's yeah, we're already
• 1:22:34
  talking about fitting it into the production schedule.
• 1:22:36
  And but man, it's like when we come out with that beer, it's
• 1:22:40
  not unlike it's a similar beer to we've also done a Mexican
• 1:22:44
  lager Dark that we kind of discontinued, but we might do
• 1:22:48
  again this fall. They're very similar recipes
• 1:22:52
  actually, you know, trait. It's all German roots and it's
• 1:22:57
  but it's those beers that are kind of clean loggers, but with
• 1:23:03
  a little color and a little bit of a malt backbone.
• 1:23:06
  You know, I think I think Brewers in general eat it up.
• 1:23:12
  You know, not just us, but those styles, Yeah, I think they're,
• 1:23:19
  you know, for I think those are the types of beers that Brewers
• 1:23:22
  really, really appreciate a well made.
• 1:23:24
  When it's really well made it it's a beer I'm really proud of.
• 1:23:27
  And and I I once again, that's a big part of when fall rolls
• 1:23:33
  around, everyone can't wait to be drinking that again here at
• 1:23:35
  the brewery. Fun beer.
• 1:23:39
  When do you try to drop yours and, and, and do you, do you
• 1:23:42
  take into consideration, you know, a lot of breweries drop in
• 1:23:45
  stuff early or do you, do you kind of hold back a little bit
• 1:23:48
  and or when just when do you drop yours?
• 1:23:50
  By the way, can I, can I interrupt for a second?
• 1:23:52
  This has become a this has become a big thing with Scott
• 1:23:55
  and I had the conversation about Oktoberfest because because
• 1:24:00
  every year we text group of friends going do you see
• 1:24:04
  Oktoberfest yet? Do you see it?
• 1:24:05
  It gets earlier and earlier every year.
• 1:24:07
  What's the stuff at the grocery store?
• 1:24:10
  Yeah, it's, I'll tell you, it's, I mean, I don't think a lot of
• 1:24:14
  people really realize this, but it's a difficult puzzle.
• 1:24:18
  You don't want to come in later than a lot of other breweries
• 1:24:21
  because people just go for it when they first see it.
• 1:24:24
  And it's only going to be a one time purchase for a lot of
• 1:24:27
  people. So you kind of got to be at the
• 1:24:29
  forefront. You know, at the same time,
• 1:24:32
  Oktoberfest as we know actually it takes place in September.
• 1:24:35
  So it you don't want to come out with it so early that you don't
• 1:24:39
  have any around when it's truly Oktoberfest season.
• 1:24:44
  And then you got to take into account how long it takes to get
• 1:24:46
  to your distributors and how long it takes for your
• 1:24:49
  distributors to get it to the retailers.
• 1:24:51
  So it's a puzzle. And then if you, you know, if
• 1:24:56
  you have any still left at the end of September, when you hit
• 1:25:00
  October, you'll have some trickling sales.
• 1:25:03
  Come the end of October though, you can't sell it anymore.
• 1:25:06
  So you got to run out before that.
• 1:25:10
  So we usually try to get it out every year.
• 1:25:15
  It seems like it's a couple days earlier, you know, I think
• 1:25:21
  towards the end of July, sometime in July is when it'll
• 1:25:26
  probably get out there. And that gives it, you know, the
• 1:25:30
  whatever's left of July and then all of August before it's truly
• 1:25:34
  Oktoberfest season. So it depends on how much we
• 1:25:36
  make. And you know, I mean, that's
• 1:25:38
  that was always a complaint of mine too.
• 1:25:40
  Like I'm not drinking that stuff in July, July.
• 1:25:45
  There's a reason it's flat out in July, right?
• 1:25:50
  And I always blame with good or bad and I always joke when I say
• 1:25:53
  blame, but it's, it's Sam Adams's fault, right?
• 1:25:56
  Sam Adams did this thing. They, they, they, they did good
• 1:26:00
  or bad, they did it. They, you know, this stuff
• 1:26:03
  starts throwing up in mid June. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:26:07
  And then you're fucked. You kind of got to do that.
• 1:26:15
  Yeah. And are are there any
• 1:26:17
  Oktoberfest events that either the brewery or around Colorado
• 1:26:21
  that you were all involved in around Oktoberfest season?
• 1:26:24
  Yeah, there's some, there's some small stuff around around the
• 1:26:28
  Durango area. I don't think we do.
• 1:26:30
  We do different things like with certain retailers, but we're not
• 1:26:35
  in any big like Oktoberfest festivals.
• 1:26:37
  I, I, I really want to throw one ourselves in Durango.
• 1:26:40
  Where? Where we have different versions
• 1:26:43
  of German beers and like people have big tents and we get the
• 1:26:47
  mayor to come, you know, tap a barrel.
• 1:26:51
  And I, it's always been kind of a dream of mine to create a
• 1:26:56
  create something a little more authentic.
• 1:26:57
  But but Durango style, you know, and invite all our friends that
• 1:27:01
  make well made German style lagers and particularly
• 1:27:06
  Oktoberfest. But it's there's nothing huge,
• 1:27:11
  just some small things. But it there's room for it, it
• 1:27:14
  would be great. I think it'd be a lot of fun.
• 1:27:16
  We do we do try to get a polka band so and play it.
• 1:27:21
  They're very. Awesome.
• 1:27:23
  It is a it's, it's Steve. We love that time of year.
• 1:27:26
  Just the beer, the transitioning.
• 1:27:28
  It's just maybe the weather's changing a little bit.
• 1:27:30
  It's just that whole whole feeling of fall is great.
• 1:27:34
  And those beers come out and you get a polka band coming on.
• 1:27:37
  You're just in the mood. I always say for beer drinkers,
• 1:27:41
  it's like Christmas, right? It's the most wonderful time of
• 1:27:43
  the year. And it's kind of like between
• 1:27:45
  Thanksgiving and Christmas. And that's sort of the
• 1:27:49
  traditional Oktoberfest season lasts about that long too, you
• 1:27:52
  know? And then boom, it's here.
• 1:27:54
  And then all right, bye, bye. And as you said, I mean if
• 1:27:58
  you're going. To it.
• 1:28:00
  Maybe it's just because it's still fleeting that it's so
• 1:28:02
  great. I mean, as much as I would love
• 1:28:05
  to sit there and drink a lot of Oktoberfest, and I do, if I'm,
• 1:28:09
  if I'm going into a brew, unless it's a brewery that's serving
• 1:28:12
  Oktoberfest all year long, if I'm going into a brewery and
• 1:28:16
  it's, you know, mid November, I'm going.
• 1:28:18
  I don't know. Yeah, maybe not.
• 1:28:21
  Yeah, it's interesting. And it's, I mean, we, we usually
• 1:28:26
  'cause we get, we fill our pipeline with it, you know, and
• 1:28:28
  then we usually have another batch going and then that's
• 1:28:31
  what's going to possibly go on through October.
• 1:28:35
  And so the beer is still plenty fresh into the next year.
• 1:28:40
  But regardless of what the Best Buy dated on the can is, the
• 1:28:45
  consumer is just seeing Oktoberfest.
• 1:28:49
  Yeah. And that just means, and it,
• 1:28:51
  it's funny because, you know, we take it for granted 'cause we
• 1:28:54
  live it. But most people think
• 1:28:57
  Oktoberfest means October and, you know, just the general
• 1:29:00
  person out there. So, you know, for it's still
• 1:29:04
  good, like October still works. Obviously if you're a beer
• 1:29:08
  person, you're thinking of September, but.
• 1:29:10
  But the beer still tastes great in February, you know?
• 1:29:14
  But you can't sell it after October at all.
• 1:29:18
  Well, Steven, like Steven, I live in a part of the country
• 1:29:20
  where it stays hot for a late into the season.
• 1:29:24
  So when I drink Oktoberfest through October or even some in
• 1:29:26
  November, we don't care because it's still not cold yet.
• 1:29:29
  You know, it's been hot for seven months.
• 1:29:34
  That's funny. Yeah.
• 1:29:36
  I don't even think about that. That's funny.
• 1:29:38
  No, we're not ready for stout season yet when November rolls
• 1:29:42
  around. Yeah, this is almost the end of
• 1:29:44
  my stout season. That's definitely a thing in
• 1:29:48
  Colorado, like the seasonality of the beer styles and and what
• 1:29:52
  consumer preferences, including my own.
• 1:29:55
  You know, I definitely the fall turns browner beers, the the
• 1:29:59
  winter turns blacker beers. You know, there's no doubt about
• 1:30:04
  it. And and we see it in the tasting
• 1:30:06
  room. It's, you know, it's, it's real.
• 1:30:08
  When we had Emily on, we asked her, we said.
• 1:30:11
  We asked her, we said if a brewery did three marketing
• 1:30:15
  things well, what would they be? And one of the things she said
• 1:30:18
  was, and I'm quoting affect your website and accept that it's
• 1:30:23
  never really finished. Your website is perfected.
• 1:30:27
  It's. Fun.
• 1:30:28
  It's. Fun.
• 1:30:29
  It is fun and I, I guarantee it's continually updated because
• 1:30:32
  it's, it's, it's so cool. It's comic book style, comic
• 1:30:38
  book theme kind of thing. Can you describe it?
• 1:30:40
  It's very interactive. It's I was on it today and I
• 1:30:43
  kept jumping around like this is a lot of fun.
• 1:30:47
  I appreciate that IA lot of a lot of the thanks for that goes
• 1:30:53
  out to some friends from a marketing agency that they're
• 1:30:56
  they were dear friends before I knew there was a marketing
• 1:30:59
  agency involved, but out in Philadelphia called Red Tetamer.
• 1:31:04
  And they helped us create that website in the style of it back
• 1:31:07
  when we first built our world headquarters here in 2008.
• 1:31:12
  And then in house our our graphics person, Kara, she's
• 1:31:18
  she's maintained it ever since. So it's not easy to keep a
• 1:31:22
  website that's that's foundation is that old.
• 1:31:26
  It's very difficult to keep updated, but I have a hard time
• 1:31:31
  letting go of the style of our website.
• 1:31:33
  I don't want it to change, you know, it's.
• 1:31:37
  Got a lot of that black and white that you were talking
• 1:31:39
  about and you showed on that record earlier.
• 1:31:40
  It's got a lot of that around the border and stuff.
• 1:31:42
  I love it. It's funny, it's a lot of like
• 1:31:45
  the the, the verbiage and the text you know that we wrote
• 1:31:49
  whenever, however long ago. It's kind of.
• 1:31:51
  Fun like the. Story stuff is all pretty fun.
• 1:31:54
  The story is great. There's something on there.
• 1:31:57
  It's called Bear with Me, I got it here, The Legion of Ska.
• 1:32:05
  It is got a total comic book vibe.
• 1:32:07
  It's like you've got heroes and you've got villains and the
• 1:32:11
  heroes are you guys in the villains.
• 1:32:14
  I guess it's kind of like corporate America kind of thing.
• 1:32:18
  Yeah, so here's the actual comic book.
• 1:32:22
  Oh, look at that. Oh.
• 1:32:25
  That's the true blonde character.
• 1:32:26
  There's true Blonde, yes. Yeah.
• 1:32:28
  And pinstripe, Pinstripe, he's the skeleton that's in the
• 1:32:32
  pinstripe suit and he is the CEO of the Rock Gutson International
• 1:32:38
  Beverage Corporation, which which at the time was Bud
• 1:32:45
  Lightner. OK.
• 1:32:48
  Yeah. And so the whole everybody, the
• 1:32:51
  whole thing takes place and the showdown at the end of the comic
• 1:32:55
  book is in the 10 pin bowling alley and all of our friends
• 1:33:00
  that help us defeat Pinstripe and his thugs, that is the
• 1:33:07
  Legion of Ska. And it's it's pretty funny.
• 1:33:10
  Like, you could kind of see here's like the whole fight
• 1:33:14
  scene in the bowling alley, in fact.
• 1:33:19
  Right here. Full page motherfucking fight
• 1:33:23
  scene. Like an old Batman comic book.
• 1:33:29
  It's just like pow crunch, you know?
• 1:33:32
  Kabam and Kabam. So.
• 1:33:36
  So yeah, I mean that it all kind of it all.
• 1:33:39
  There's a lot of inside jokes in this place.
• 1:33:42
  There's inside jokes on our labels within our comic book
• 1:33:46
  and. And I mean, even even like our
• 1:33:49
  employee handbook has inside jokes and stuff, we try to
• 1:33:55
  that's, we kind of touched on it earlier, but we try to keep that
• 1:33:59
  flowing through a lot of the stuff we do.
• 1:34:01
  And so the websites like it's just the perfect medium for
• 1:34:07
  that, you know, to kind of tie it all together and give people
• 1:34:09
  a taste of it. And you can kind of tell, you
• 1:34:11
  know, there's, there's some fun going on and there's, I mean,
• 1:34:14
  there's a lot of story here and there and, you know, it's all
• 1:34:18
  pretty much completely embellished, but just little
• 1:34:21
  bits and pieces of truth here and there.
• 1:34:24
  Sure, there's a point to some of it, right?
• 1:34:26
  There's really a point here, like like if you click on each
• 1:34:29
  individual character, like if you click on true blonde, like
• 1:34:34
  it jumps to that person, then she says something, right?
• 1:34:36
  Is there's a statement or something and each of you have
• 1:34:38
  that. Even the villains have something
• 1:34:40
  if you click on them. You know, I eat the little guy
• 1:34:43
  for breakfast kind of thing. I think it's amazing.
• 1:34:50
  Awesome. I appreciate that.
• 1:34:51
  That's that's good to hear. David swear, man, what what's
• 1:34:56
  really what's really great about you is that you were you were
• 1:34:59
  like what your late teens when you when you're going to the
• 1:35:03
  brewing process and starting Scott's on now and I don't even
• 1:35:06
  I could see you now to then and you haven't really changed.
• 1:35:10
  You still have that you. Know I was trying to make her I
• 1:35:13
  don't feel like I have. Yeah, I can tell that.
• 1:35:16
  I mean, we have felt you through this entire podcast episode.
• 1:35:19
  I mean, from the the evolution of everything that's happened to
• 1:35:24
  you, you haven't changed at all. It's great.
• 1:35:27
  Amazing, that's funny to hear. What what what?
• 1:35:31
  PJO, Thugly and knuckles I've those are stuff.
• 1:35:37
  Two key thugs of the in strengths.
• 1:35:40
  You got to see these, you got to go to the page, you got to see
• 1:35:43
  it's, it's hilarious, it's great.
• 1:35:45
  I just, you can't even describe it.
• 1:35:46
  You got to look at it and see it's.
• 1:35:48
  Scottbrewing.com is the website. And and not all that, there's a
• 1:35:52
  whole lot of good stuff on the story so far is great.
• 1:35:55
  You've been touched on. You said something about Dave
• 1:36:00
  and Bill learned that while they loved gulping down good beer,
• 1:36:03
  they weren't yet old enough to buy it.
• 1:36:07
  You touched on that earlier in the episode.
• 1:36:09
  Yeah, it's absolutely. I love this.
• 1:36:13
  There's a lot of good information on here, like real
• 1:36:14
  information. There's a lot of fun stuff on
• 1:36:16
  here to go check out the website.
• 1:36:17
  It's great. Something else I want to touch
• 1:36:19
  on before we we don't want to keep you forever.
• 1:36:21
  And we got, we got a million things, but sustainability.
• 1:36:24
  You guys are really into sustainability.
• 1:36:25
  You've got a really nice page on your website about it.
• 1:36:29
  You guys, There's there's something really cool about it.
• 1:36:32
  You you can collars. You went from plastic to paper
• 1:36:35
  board was cool. You're composting, you're
• 1:36:38
  reducing waste. But one of my favorite things
• 1:36:40
  I've never seen this before is you use recycled jeans in the
• 1:36:44
  walls for insulation. Talk about that.
• 1:36:47
  They literally just wind up jeans up there.
• 1:36:49
  They ground down. How does that work?
• 1:36:51
  Yeah, when we, when we built the brewery that we're currently in
• 1:36:55
  in 2008, there were no LEED certified buildings in Durango
• 1:37:00
  at the time. And we wanted to be the first
• 1:37:03
  LEED certified building. And so one of the, you know, we,
• 1:37:08
  we did a lot of the stuff. But unfortunate part, when
• 1:37:11
  you're a small business owner trying to grow, to become LEED
• 1:37:16
  certified, you have to pay a commissioning agent to basically
• 1:37:20
  just stand there that doesn't live here, you know.
• 1:37:23
  So you're paying for his hotel and his food and and he's just
• 1:37:26
  signing off saying, yeah, you did the things you said you were
• 1:37:29
  going to do very expensive. And we were like, I'm not, we're
• 1:37:33
  not doing that, you know, so we didn't keep that guy.
• 1:37:38
  We'd still went forward with most of the things we wanted to
• 1:37:42
  do to become LEED certified. We didn't get the certification
• 1:37:46
  though. But one of the things we did
• 1:37:48
  amongst quite a few different things was and this was just
• 1:37:51
  cool because I hadn't even heard of this before, but the R
• 1:37:55
  factor. How how, how insulating
• 1:37:59
  insulation can be in a wall. And I don't know a lot about
• 1:38:03
  that, but recycled denim blue jeans is has a great R factor,
• 1:38:12
  like as good as fiberglass, if not better, I think.
• 1:38:15
  And so all of our walls are insulated with recycled denim,
• 1:38:22
  which was interesting because when we actually got it and it
• 1:38:26
  it clear as day was just recycled denim, you know, and I
• 1:38:32
  think it was a mix of of scraps from jeans being made and also
• 1:38:38
  jeans that were recycled. So yeah, that's what all of our
• 1:38:43
  walls are insulated with if. They're not on my bingo on my
• 1:38:46
  bingo card tonight. I would have not have ever have
• 1:38:49
  guessed that denim would be good insulation, yeah.
• 1:38:54
  And I don't, you know, that's I'm glad you guys just brought
• 1:38:56
  that up because it's one of those things I've probably taken
• 1:38:58
  for granted and haven't thought about a little while.
• 1:39:01
  But I wonder like how, how far, because that was in 2008.
• 1:39:05
  So how far advanced that has come and what other materials
• 1:39:09
  they might be using now. And and if denim is still is
• 1:39:13
  still a good, you know, has that insulating factor and that R
• 1:39:18
  factor that it, that it. And if there's better products
• 1:39:22
  now if we were ever to build something else?
• 1:39:25
  Yeah. So I don't know, but it was it's
• 1:39:28
  cool. Like if you cut right into my
• 1:39:30
  office wall right here, jeans would fall out.
• 1:39:32
  So you should just. Fall them out.
• 1:39:35
  And there's some Levi's. Maybe a few coins might come up.
• 1:39:39
  With who knows what else would fall out, but I guarantee some
• 1:39:42
  jeans. But there's some brewery recipes
• 1:39:44
  in the back pocket. A couple of grocery lists.
• 1:39:48
  Yeah. Oh my gosh, I got a couple fun
• 1:39:51
  things I want to end on if if if you if you got a couple extra
• 1:39:54
  minutes. Yeah, yeah, sure.
• 1:39:56
  OK, all right. What's the most punk rock thing
• 1:39:59
  that's ever happened in the brewery?
• 1:40:01
  Oh God, He's combing through the stories right now.
• 1:40:08
  Yeah, there's, you know, 'cause that can be, you know, that's
• 1:40:13
  pretty subjective. I can think of a, I mean, I, I
• 1:40:19
  can think about a time when we had a band that showed up kind
• 1:40:24
  of unannounced. They were a ska band called
• 1:40:26
  Warsaw. This is in our old brewery, our
• 1:40:29
  original brewery. The tasting room was very small.
• 1:40:31
  It was actually an old lab that coincidentally worked out great
• 1:40:35
  for us. But those guys kind of showed up
• 1:40:37
  one day unannounced. They were an Arizona ska band
• 1:40:41
  and they toured a lot in the Southwest and they ended up
• 1:40:47
  playing, they ended up playing in the tasting room, which
• 1:40:51
  wasn't, I mean, it's the size of my office, our old tasting room.
• 1:40:55
  And they had a lot of people and they weren't playing their
• 1:40:59
  regular instruments. They were playing brewery stuff.
• 1:41:03
  They were all really good. They can all play a lot of
• 1:41:06
  different instruments. They're all multi talented.
• 1:41:08
  And I was singing and it was this is it like 2:00 in the
• 1:41:12
  morning? A couple good stories like that,
• 1:41:15
  but this one's a good one. And it was like, yeah.
• 1:41:17
  And I, I, there's a picture that sometimes I see on the Internet
• 1:41:20
  when, when they're talking about this band that's in our tasting
• 1:41:24
  room that same night. It's like, particularly when
• 1:41:27
  it's this one guy's birthday. I see it pop up on some ska
• 1:41:30
  websites. But there was probably 10 people
• 1:41:34
  playing instruments really well. And well, way past when we were
• 1:41:40
  legally allowed to be doing that.
• 1:41:43
  And there was, and it was packed and, and everyone was, but
• 1:41:47
  people were playing pots and pans and I mean, some
• 1:41:51
  instruments. And I remember a recorder and it
• 1:41:54
  was like, and I remember like handprints the next day on the
• 1:41:57
  walls and people like, or climb and everyone was on top of the
• 1:42:00
  bar. And it was, I mean, it was, it
• 1:42:04
  was one of the funnest nights of my life.
• 1:42:06
  Took some time to get over in the next few days, but it was,
• 1:42:10
  it was, it wasn't legal. It was nobody got hurt.
• 1:42:14
  So I think that's a big thing in punk rock.
• 1:42:17
  You know, you're always trying to punk rock everybody sure as
• 1:42:19
  crazy as you get. And it was wild.
• 1:42:22
  It was completely wild. But nobody got hurt.
• 1:42:25
  We had a great time and everybody lived to at least do
• 1:42:28
  it to some extent. Another day.
• 1:42:32
  That was good because that was that was another thing.
• 1:42:34
  I was thinking about some of the old pictures, but we had a few
• 1:42:38
  questionable things as far as the legality of what we were
• 1:42:42
  doing in not only at our own place, but around town way back
• 1:42:46
  in the day. And then.
• 1:42:47
  So I think there's some things like that, you know, where
• 1:42:50
  you're still, you're just pushing the limits of everything
• 1:42:54
  and well. The good news is the statue of
• 1:42:55
  limitations have run out on that.
• 1:42:57
  Yeah, you hope. I'm not too.
• 1:42:59
  Afraid you? Don't.
• 1:43:00
  You won't tell anybody. Well, that's definitely punk
• 1:43:04
  rock. That is definitely punk.
• 1:43:05
  Guard that. That certainly fit the bill.
• 1:43:08
  If you had a walk up song or Ska Brewing had a walk up song, what
• 1:43:12
  would it be? Not Jamie's on a vacation far
• 1:43:16
  away and I'm just thinking, thinking the rock.
• 1:43:21
  But no, I I don't know. I'm that's a great question.
• 1:43:25
  God, I've never thought about that.
• 1:43:26
  Which is amazing that nobody's ever asked me that before.
• 1:43:30
  You know, you know what that means.
• 1:43:31
  Then, Dave, we're going to have to bring you back on again and
• 1:43:35
  you have a lot of time to think about it.
• 1:43:37
  Well, if he throws one out here, we're going to use as one of the
• 1:43:40
  posts. I know I'm trying to think like
• 1:43:44
  of all the like, OK, I think the Toasters, we actually used to
• 1:43:51
  use this on that website. I don't think it's on there
• 1:43:54
  anymore. But the toasters and this is a
• 1:43:56
  fun story too. They're they're celebrating.
• 1:43:59
  I think they're 45th year as they were, they were original
• 1:44:05
  New York ska, so part of that third wave of ska.
• 1:44:07
  I was talking about well known ska band and they've invited me
• 1:44:11
  to go on tour with them this fall in Poland and Germany,
• 1:44:15
  neither of which country I've ever been to.
• 1:44:18
  But they have a a song called Don't Let the Bastards Grind You
• 1:44:22
  Down. And I think that there's no
• 1:44:26
  doubt about it. That's that's the walk up song.
• 1:44:28
  Don't let the bastards grind you down.
• 1:44:30
  That's awesome. Yeah, you look down on that
• 1:44:32
  great song. I'm gonna end on this.
• 1:44:38
  What's one thing people have to experience to truly understand
• 1:44:42
  Sky Brewing? I think, I think actually being
• 1:44:49
  at our anniversary party in the fall, it's a good you get a
• 1:44:55
  taste, all the beers, you get a feel, the vibe of the brewery
• 1:44:59
  and all the people that work here and the people that really
• 1:45:01
  enjoy the beer and the music. It's it's kind of a scene.
• 1:45:05
  It's usually mostly ska. It's a little faster and harder
• 1:45:08
  and some more punk rock. This year with the bands that
• 1:45:11
  we've got lined up, it's September 12th.
• 1:45:13
  It's not quite sold out yet, but it always does sell out.
• 1:45:17
  But that party is really indicative of the whole
• 1:45:22
  character and the vibe of who we are and the beers we make and
• 1:45:27
  and the people we are and the people that work here.
• 1:45:30
  And it's a really good way to get a taste of what this place
• 1:45:35
  has been all about for 31 years. Awesome, Awesome.
• 1:45:39
  That's awesome. Steve, you got anything else for
• 1:45:41
  Dave? I can't get anything better than
• 1:45:43
  that. I know what it I mean.
• 1:45:45
  I don't have anything. I have so many other questions.
• 1:45:48
  But you know what? We like to save questions for
• 1:45:51
  another episode. And you know what?
• 1:45:53
  Now we're going to twist your arm and say, will you come back
• 1:45:55
  again? I'd love to come back.
• 1:45:57
  Oh yeah, you guys are a lot of fun.
• 1:45:59
  You were great man. You were great too, because you.
• 1:46:02
  You, you did a good amount of research for being in a place
• 1:46:06
  that can't get our beer on a regular basis.
• 1:46:08
  You know, I appreciate that. So I, I appreciate you guys for,
• 1:46:11
  for really digging into things before we ever even got started.
• 1:46:14
  Absolutely. We we try, we do a.
• 1:46:16
  Little digging. I've loved every minute of this
• 1:46:19
  episode. Man, this has been fantastic.
• 1:46:21
  That's awesome. Is there anything you want to
• 1:46:23
  end on? Anything we didn't touch on, you
• 1:46:24
  want to you want to put out there.
• 1:46:26
  No, I mean go avalanche there's we talked about that.
• 1:46:31
  No, it would be great to see you guys.
• 1:46:33
  You should maybe see if you can make your way out here for one
• 1:46:35
  of our anniversary parties even even.
• 1:46:37
  We're going to have to do that. I, I was telling every like I go
• 1:46:40
  to GABF a lot, but I know it's, it's it's almost another world
• 1:46:44
  getting to where you guys are. So we have to plan a little
• 1:46:46
  something maybe one of these days and kind of do both.
• 1:46:49
  Maybe next time I'm the one time I was in Nashville, I went down
• 1:46:53
  early. I ran in Rock'n'roll Marathon
• 1:46:56
  like it was like the day before the the the Craft Brewers
• 1:46:59
  Conference started and I swore I would be back to Nashville.
• 1:47:04
  So if I'm getting back there to do whether it's to run or for
• 1:47:09
  some other reason, I I'll look you guys up and definitely see
• 1:47:13
  if we can go out and have a couple of beers.
• 1:47:14
  We will show you a good time, promise.
• 1:47:16
  Awesome, I need a low time. Moving around.
• 1:47:19
  Yeah, we'll find time. For you, we'll find a location
• 1:47:22
  of record too. That would be an absolute blast.
• 1:47:24
  Yeah, that'd be great. Cool.
• 1:47:27
  Well, Dave, thanks for joining us.
• 1:47:29
  This was a freaking blast. It was awesome.
• 1:47:32
  I had a lot of fun. Thank you guys.
• 1:47:35
  Scott Brewing, West Coast IPA. Cheers.
• 1:47:41
  Jersey. Cheers.
• 1:47:42
  Thank you, Brewery Underground. Podcast.