Latest / The Brewery Underground Podcast | Craft Beer Interviews, Reviews and Beer Travel / Mashville Podcast: Chris Chamberlain & Braden Gall on Nashville Craft Beer | The Foamy Heads Collab | Episode 117

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Mashville Podcast: Chris Chamberlain & Braden Gall on Nashville Craft Beer | The Foamy Heads Collab | Episode 117 · The Brewery Underground Podcast | Craft Beer Interviews, Reviews and Beer Travel

• 0:05
  Stand by for the Brewery Underground podcast.
• 0:42
  Hey, well, look at this. We are we're back the foamy
• 0:46
  underground. That's right, Steven, Scott,
• 0:47
  Mitch and Rich. And we got a cast of characters
• 0:52
  on this podcast episode today. And Scott, you are the one that
• 0:58
  kind of were the ringleader on this.
• 1:00
  So let's talk about who we who we got on the podcast today.
• 1:04
  OK. And they've got so many titles.
• 1:06
  Let's just go right into it because I got a bunch.
• 1:08
  Written down here. We've got Chris Chamberlain,
• 1:11
  we've got Braden Gall. Both are voices and writers of
• 1:15
  the podcast Nashville. Among other things.
• 1:18
  Chris, you are a food, drink and travel writer for the Nashville
• 1:22
  Scene, probably among other things.
• 1:24
  Braden, you are the owner of 440 Sports Media host ESPN Sports.
• 1:29
  Again, probably other things as well.
• 1:31
  Welcome. Good to be here.
• 1:34
  Thanks guys. Be here.
• 1:35
  Yeah, Thanks guys. Yeah, we're, we very much
• 1:38
  appreciate it. And it's like 3 podcasts a day,
• 1:42
  you know? Yeah, 1.
• 1:44
  I was just looking at the windows and this looks like if
• 1:46
  the Brady bunch was like a pre. Ozempic Commercial.
• 1:51
  Yes. Speak for yourself.
• 1:54
  You're. Close to you.
• 1:55
  Speak for yourself, Chris. I'm midway through Ozempic.
• 1:58
  OK, that's. Right.
• 2:00
  Should we just need two more We? Can invite two more while we're
• 2:03
  at this. Yeah, we need like Alice the
• 2:05
  housekeeper, you. Know we'll let Rich be Alice.
• 2:10
  I've been called worse. That's OK.
• 2:14
  Guys that I get most of your titles right?
• 2:16
  Yeah, absolutely. That totally works for me.
• 2:18
  I literally have a have a business card that's covered on
• 2:23
  the back of it with places I write for, used to write for
• 2:27
  places that I've outlived, editors that I've outlived.
• 2:31
  So I've been doing this for about 17 years.
• 2:32
  And you know, to be a freelancer, you really got to
• 2:34
  scrape together a scrape together a living.
• 2:37
  I know Brayden can talk about that hustle too.
• 2:40
  I mean, I, I have a notebook in my pocket that says get shit
• 2:44
  done on the cover. So I mean, that's, that's what
• 2:48
  you got to do. That's it.
• 2:50
  Whatever works. First off, how do you guys know
• 2:53
  each other? Chris, you want to go first?
• 2:57
  Well, I've been a long time listener, loyal fan, first time
• 3:00
  podcaster with Braden, but I knew Braden from, you know, back
• 3:06
  to what he did on on one O 2/5 when he used to have the morning
• 3:09
  show there. And I heard it contribute to a
• 3:11
  lot of things. And when I heard that he was
• 3:14
  going, what are we calling a digital terrestrial podcaster
• 3:18
  radio? That Internet radio.
• 3:22
  Yeah, I started subscribing to his podcast one at a time, and
• 3:27
  now he's in my ear like 85% of my free time because I'm
• 3:31
  listening to one of his podcasts.
• 3:32
  I've always really admired that he's more than just a sports guy
• 3:35
  that, you know, he really cares about the culture of Nashville,
• 3:39
  the politics of Nashville's, the, the, you know, the
• 3:42
  sociology of Nashville. So I've always just enjoyed
• 3:45
  hearing his opinions and and he likes to eat and drink like I
• 3:49
  do, so that's good. So I probably I probably knew
• 3:55
  Chris two different ways, but didn't know that I knew Chris
• 3:58
  sort of like I, I had been reading his stuff, obviously for
• 4:02
  I don't know who I literally have no idea how long and then
• 4:06
  was interacting with him on Twitter.
• 4:08
  But Chris is one of those lurkers on social media where he
• 4:11
  doesn't really have the name, doesn't exactly match exactly
• 4:14
  what you think, You don't notice.
• 4:16
  And so we were going back and forth about stuff about the
• 4:18
  Preds and a variety of things. And then I think it was, yeah,
• 4:22
  during the pandemic maybe, or when the company launched
• 4:24
  something like that, where we started chatting a little bit
• 4:27
  more. And I kind of realized I was
• 4:28
  like, wait a second, This guy over here is the one that I've
• 4:30
  been talking with over here on the radio about this stuff,
• 4:33
  reading his stuff over here. And that was a few years ago and
• 4:37
  have kind of just been friends ever since.
• 4:39
  And he was the only guy for the job when I kind of pitched this
• 4:42
  idea to somebody and there was nobody else I wanted to do it
• 4:45
  with, so. Nice.
• 4:47
  And, and my handle goes back to, you know, literally it was my
• 4:50
  AOL handle, so. So that stands for America
• 4:54
  Online, everybody under the AOL. How's the AOL going these days
• 4:58
  for you, Chris? You know, I got a cabin up in
• 5:01
  Swanee and I wrote my first two books using CDs that came
• 5:04
  monthly from AOL and Net Zero so.
• 5:07
  Dial up to 0. Dial up's been a big part of my
• 5:09
  life for a long time. There you go.
• 5:12
  Hence why the editors have died. Yeah, I've outlived them.
• 5:16
  I don't think you're going to find anybody on this call that
• 5:18
  doesn't know what AOL is. I think we probably all had it
• 5:21
  back in the day. We're all of that age.
• 5:23
  Back in the day. Hey, before we continue on, you
• 5:26
  know what are we all drinking tonight?
• 5:28
  Since it is a beer podcast. Yeah, let's our guest start
• 5:31
  first. Chris, what have you got?
• 5:33
  I am drinking a Yazoo Daddio out of a defunct Mayday mug or pint
• 5:38
  glass. So here's Todd.
• 5:41
  Ozzy, ironically enough, we just, we talked with Ozzy last
• 5:45
  week in Murfur a couple weeks ago in Murfreesboro about his
• 5:48
  current happenings, what's going on right now, like his
• 5:51
  caricature drawings and things like that.
• 5:53
  So always having always a good time hanging out with Ozzy.
• 5:56
  Even more fun when you get him down on the microphones to talk
• 5:59
  for a little bit because you get the real Aussie.
• 6:01
  I never realized that he never quit his day job.
• 6:05
  Nope. Always been.
• 6:07
  Always. Had his full time gig, yeah.
• 6:09
  Well, he was talking about that that night in middle ground with
• 6:11
  us and I was like, wow, you know, all the years he owned
• 6:14
  Mayday, he was still working, you know, in healthcare and a
• 6:17
  day job. And it's like the, the, the
• 6:19
  amount of hours that that guy put in.
• 6:22
  And you could tell now he's just sort of like, you know, sitting
• 6:25
  back and and seeing how it all is with everybody else.
• 6:28
  And it it kind of indicates something about AC as drug
• 6:31
  testing policy. No May days on that I'm sure.
• 6:38
  Yeah, maybe, maybe he got grandfathered in somewhere along
• 6:41
  the way. Love that guy.
• 6:43
  He was great. We've actually not even released
• 6:45
  those episodes yet. It's it's that new.
• 6:47
  So maybe look forward to those soon.
• 6:49
  Right when you got. I've got I believe this is a
• 6:52
  Italian pills from Barik. I believe in my MO Rose pint
• 6:56
  glass, of course, so always on brand.
• 6:58
  I'm really into Barik right now. Them and fail of force as well.
• 7:01
  Those are like the two that I'm kind of drinking a lot of, even
• 7:05
  in a January, relatively speaking.
• 7:08
  So I'm just, I'm really into what they're doing right now and
• 7:10
  hopefully they'll still exist in a little while.
• 7:13
  Yeah. Yeah, I'll be interested.
• 7:15
  I know they've got beer, but for how long?
• 7:17
  We'll see. Yeah, they got land that's very
• 7:19
  valuable. That's the yeah.
• 7:22
  It's for sure. Yeah, well.
• 7:24
  There's a, there's a an MO Rose just to me, you mentioned it.
• 7:27
  MO Rose just opened up in Murfreesboro where I am too.
• 7:29
  So I remember going back to, I mean, even 789 years ago, my
• 7:35
  buddy and I when he was just getting into craft beer, we
• 7:37
  would go meet up at Craft Brewed, you know, downtown in
• 7:40
  Nashville. We would have a couple of
• 7:42
  flights there. And then the only other option
• 7:44
  that we thought of, or the only thing we knew, go down the
• 7:47
  street to ML Rose, have a good burger, have a couple of beers,
• 7:49
  and then continue like the craft beer tour around Nashville.
• 7:53
  And then at that point, hadn't been able to get back there
• 7:55
  since. And then three months ago, two
• 7:58
  months ago, ML Rose opened up in Murfreesboro.
• 8:00
  So it's become a regular hangout spot here too.
• 8:04
  I was so so depressed when. Checks in the mail.
• 8:07
  Rich checks in the mail. I was so depressed when craft
• 8:09
  Brew closed because Chip had promised me, oh don't worry,
• 8:12
  it's going to be a lot like the same.
• 8:14
  And I went in the next day. The whole this is a vape shop
• 8:17
  OK? Neon white.
• 8:21
  Yeah, yeah. When I drove by right afterwards
• 8:23
  I was like, Nope, not going in there ever again.
• 8:26
  Turned into the the blinding sun of LEDs.
• 8:29
  At the front is bad. Is anybody watching Pluribus?
• 8:33
  Yeah, I just finished I've. So is it good, Mitch?
• 8:36
  Is it good? Yeah, it's, I think it's great.
• 8:39
  I'm just saying I've. Heard good things?
• 8:41
  The premise of Pluribus is that everybody catches a virus that
• 8:44
  makes them all very happy because it spreads so fast.
• 8:47
  That's how I feel about ML Rose. Yeah.
• 8:49
  Yeah, Yeah, that's a good. Great analogy.
• 8:53
  Doesn't know how to take that. Well, yeah.
• 8:55
  So like I it's let's let's turn this from a beer show into a,
• 8:59
  into an AI show. I, I thought it's an entire like
• 9:03
  I'm, I'm 3 episodes in. So we're not my wife and I just
• 9:05
  started it. So we're like really excited to
• 9:07
  like, you know, go watch another episode tonight actually.
• 9:09
  But like it's, I feel like it's exclusively about AI, unless I'm
• 9:14
  wrong about that. And that's how it feels to me is
• 9:16
  it's like all these folks just all have the same brain.
• 9:18
  So I recommend it. Go, go watch.
• 9:19
  It's great. Yeah, sounds good.
• 9:21
  It's a slow burn, just don't expect it to be aggressive takes
• 9:26
  at all of them. It's it stacks upon itself.
• 9:29
  It's good. It's.
• 9:29
  Good I I really like it so all. Right, So what are the pros
• 9:32
  drinking? Mate, what you got?
• 9:35
  Well, I'm going to disappoint everyone here tonight.
• 9:39
  I'm kind of out of craft beer and I've got this.
• 9:43
  Several month. Old Matty Light matter day with
• 9:47
  this great yellow color. It's it's less amber than my
• 9:52
  glasses. Hopefully it's still fresh.
• 9:57
  I I don't know if that matters. I don't think it matters, but
• 10:01
  yeah. At some point he won't notice
• 10:04
  it's. Going to look like that in eight
• 10:06
  hours too, yeah? That's the goal.
• 10:10
  I am in the morning, right? I just created more natty light.
• 10:17
  He's getting his water intake in for the day.
• 10:20
  It's a renewable resource. This is my punishment for not
• 10:24
  stocking back on local craft beer.
• 10:27
  We've got to, we've got to. I've got to go back and find it,
• 10:30
  Mitch. But I know we both have one.
• 10:31
  We've got 1 of 3D printed bottle opener.
• 10:34
  I can't remember who we got it from, but it's the natter days.
• 10:37
  It's bright pink and yellow and it's got the teeth on the other
• 10:40
  side to help with the wax bottles.
• 10:42
  You know the wax tops. But it is a kill.
• 10:45
  It just says it says natter days on on one side.
• 10:48
  It's like bright pink and bright yellow.
• 10:49
  It's obnoxious looking and I love.
• 10:51
  It it's a wax cutter and bottle opener.
• 10:54
  Yeah, nice. I got to find it somewhere.
• 10:57
  I'm I'm drinking, so I've got AI got a couple.
• 11:00
  I'm actually Scott. I'm on my my full porn now all.
• 11:03
  Right. Good for 10 or 15 minutes.
• 11:07
  That's right, maybe 15 minutes. I've got a couple of Goose
• 11:10
  Islands in the back. I might bust out here in a few
• 11:12
  if if things go well. But I've got so tonight I just
• 11:16
  finished up when we started recording.
• 11:19
  I just got back from Chicago last week.
• 11:21
  So I decided to drive it instead of flying because I mean, it's 8
• 11:24
  hours, but it's a fun ride like 65.
• 11:25
  There's breweries along the way. And hit Indianapolis on the way
• 11:30
  back, hit this really cool place called Metazoa Brewing.
• 11:33
  Very, very dog friendly, like pet forward, like a lot of their
• 11:36
  brews are named after dogs. And I'm a big dog guy. 2 ladies
• 11:41
  run the shop. Super cool place.
• 11:43
  They have 15 or 20 different beers on the board and and
• 11:46
  they'll let you order all 15 of them at once if you want on a
• 11:49
  flight. And so it was just a fun time.
• 11:51
  So supported them there. I was drinking a hoppy wheat
• 11:54
  from them when we first started here and I've moved on to sad to
• 11:59
  say, it's it's not Nashville. I'm not drinking anything
• 12:01
  Nashville right now. Atrium Brewing, so probably
• 12:05
  another one of my my favorite breweries along a little bit
• 12:08
  north of Tennessee here going out to Chicago, but I'm drinking
• 12:11
  the karaoke vendors, their newest New England IPA.
• 12:15
  So. Super good, really juicy kind of
• 12:17
  got a little bit of like a milkshake taste to it, which is
• 12:20
  not normally what I go for, but in this case it just kind of
• 12:23
  smooths things out and it's not too creamy, but it's very smooth
• 12:27
  so I'm. Really enjoying it.
• 12:30
  Nice, looks good too. Well, I've got which is my
• 12:39
  currently my favorite brewery in Nashville and my favorite beer
• 12:43
  in Nashville right now is the original from Stoke House, which
• 12:46
  is breed is right over there by you in East Nashville, the old
• 12:48
  crazy gnome location. And this is my favorite, but not
• 12:51
  just Nashville. It's my favorite beer right now.
• 12:53
  It is unbelievably good clean, Chris.
• 12:56
  It's as good as you get as a logger.
• 12:57
  I mean, my God, if you guys haven't been to Stokehouse yet,
• 13:00
  make sure you get over there food and.
• 13:02
  Yeah, no, no, I mean, they're, they're legit.
• 13:05
  And that smoked burger he does is just.
• 13:07
  Oh, crazy. Yeah.
• 13:09
  Yes, I really wish I could have got the baloney.
• 13:12
  Yeah. And he released the sausage
• 13:14
  today, too. I saw their Instagram post that
• 13:18
  looked killer. Yeah.
• 13:20
  Everything from them has been so far.
• 13:23
  Yeah, Scott, I know you love that logger because every time
• 13:25
  where every time you're there, you're checking in three or four
• 13:28
  of them. Boom boom boom boom boom.
• 13:29
  And I don't do that with beers. I'm jumping from one to another
• 13:32
  almost every single time. But I'm just like everything
• 13:35
  they've got on the board is fantastic.
• 13:36
  Just give me another. Just give me another.
• 13:37
  Just give me that like I can't beat.
• 13:39
  You can't beat. It in that coat closet in the
• 13:41
  tap room, that's their dry storage, you know?
• 13:44
  Yeah. It's amazing what they do out of
• 13:47
  that small space, so. Goodness.
• 13:50
  Very efficient and they are doing wonderful things and we'll
• 13:53
  get back to this later, but on the Nashville scene, I'm just
• 13:56
  saying the ribs in the BBQ better be on that readers pole
• 14:00
  next year from. Stonehouse.
• 14:02
  Just telling. Just saying.
• 14:03
  Well, East, East. Nashville wins the scene most of
• 14:06
  the time because that's where all our readers are, yeah.
• 14:09
  That's true. You're mandering.
• 14:11
  Yeah, well. Because it's free, yeah.
• 14:17
  Steve, what have you got? Man, I am also drinking some
• 14:21
  Barique tonight. This is their English bitter
• 14:24
  Notting Hill Gate, so got to support Barique, you know,
• 14:30
  Hopefully we can support them for a long time.
• 14:33
  I'm hoping for, yeah. I love that ESB of theirs, very
• 14:37
  good. Cheers everybody.
• 14:39
  Cheers everyone. Thank you guys for being here
• 14:41
  and making the time. So the reason you guys kind of
• 14:44
  jumped on our radar and and then Steve, I know you know who
• 14:47
  Braden is prior to this, but you guys did a podcast and it was a
• 14:51
  seven part podcast ultimately called Nashville an Improbable
• 14:56
  History of Nashville Craft Beer, which I think we all thought was
• 14:59
  pretty amazing. I loved it.
• 15:02
  You guys were both the narrators and the writers on that.
• 15:04
  I will say that Braden really likes that name when I pitched
• 15:07
  it to him and now I hear that the poor guy has to say
• 15:11
  Nashville with an M Nashville. If you try and Google Nashville,
• 15:17
  you're not going to find. I think what's cool is you guys
• 15:22
  really listening to it, went through the history and you
• 15:25
  interviewed so many different people.
• 15:27
  But let's talk a little bit about what inspired you both to
• 15:30
  come together to really put together this podcast, what what
• 15:34
  was behind the idea and the concept of it.
• 15:37
  So I've worked with ML Rose for a number of years as a client on
• 15:41
  a bunch of shows. Just kind of believe in their
• 15:43
  vision and they believe in small business.
• 15:45
  We believe in small business. And so it was kind of a really
• 15:47
  good fit. And then they came to me.
• 15:50
  I would say, I mean, this had to be two years ago.
• 15:53
  They were just, they, they just kind of, we were having a
• 15:55
  regular kind of marketing kind of meeting and they were just
• 15:58
  saying, hey, what? Like we'd love to do something
• 16:00
  around beer. Like maybe we can do an episode
• 16:02
  of one of your shows around beer.
• 16:04
  And I like, I didn't, I didn't even have to like wait till the
• 16:07
  next meeting. I was like, I, I know what I
• 16:10
  want to do on this. I'd like to tell the story of
• 16:12
  Nashville, but like through the lens of craft beer and, you
• 16:16
  know, it never really was supposed to be about, you know,
• 16:18
  barley and hops and ingredients and flavors and stuff like that.
• 16:22
  It was always supposed to be about the city and like its
• 16:25
  relationship with beer and the relationship with people in the
• 16:27
  neighborhoods and everything. And they bought it like 100%
• 16:31
  right out of the gate. I was like, I don't know how
• 16:33
  long this is going to take. I'll put a budget together for
• 16:34
  you. I know who I want to talk to, to
• 16:37
  be the Co writer and the voice on it and had to build the team
• 16:41
  from, you know, had to get an editor and an audio engineer and
• 16:44
  put graphic design to it and everything.
• 16:46
  So once I got the budget together, they were like, they
• 16:47
  didn't, they didn't even hesitate.
• 16:49
  They just were like, yeah, let's do it.
• 16:51
  And I think they probably expected a product much sooner
• 16:54
  then then we put it out, took us way longer.
• 16:57
  A lot of that's on me, but that was kind of the impetus for it
• 17:01
  was like I kind of knew I wanted to tell the story and I didn't
• 17:05
  really know how to do it or, or you know, what's the right
• 17:08
  delivery mechanism. When they asked for that, I
• 17:11
  said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like instead of, instead of a 45
• 17:14
  minute conversation about, you know, a, a brewery or a couple
• 17:18
  beers or whatever, like let's do, let's do the whole thing and
• 17:23
  30 hours of plus of hours of interview and a year of work.
• 17:26
  And God, I don't know how many times we sat down to edit and
• 17:29
  finally we got it out. It probably was 1618 months
• 17:32
  maybe total from time of that meeting to the time it actually,
• 17:35
  you know, got got published. Yeah, We thought it was going to
• 17:38
  be, you know, like a like a tailgate beer long.
• 17:42
  But it turned out to be like a Barique process, you know, to
• 17:45
  get it done, you know, took a little bit longer to get ripe so
• 17:50
  well. But you guys set up though,
• 17:53
  because you interviewed a lot of brewery owners and a lot of
• 17:56
  Brewers, but you also went into, I mean, I heard former Mayor
• 18:00
  Bill Parcell on there. You've, you already had, you had
• 18:04
  Butch Spirit in who, who was the executive director of the
• 18:07
  Chamber of Commerce in Nashville for a long time.
• 18:10
  I mean, was it easy when you, I mean, you probably had those
• 18:13
  relationships. Was it easy to get a lot of
• 18:15
  these guys to talk about this or how, how did, how did that all
• 18:19
  pan out for you? Well, you, you, you know this
• 18:22
  and when you are like I started in, in radio and in sports as a
• 18:25
  producer and if you are going to be a great producer, you I don't
• 18:31
  know what our level of, of cussing is on the show.
• 18:33
  But as much as you. Want like, to be a great
• 18:36
  producer, like you cannot give a shit about what other people
• 18:39
  think of you. You just have to be willing to
• 18:41
  bother people. And so I think that's probably
• 18:43
  deep in my brain somewhere as a reporter all the time.
• 18:46
  I'm sure Chris doesn't care about this either.
• 18:48
  Like, it's just part of the job to to to cold call people.
• 18:51
  Hey, this is so and so. You've never heard of me, but
• 18:54
  I'm doing this project. Would you be willing to chat and
• 18:57
  I can introduce myself and like that, you know, that's how I
• 18:59
  used to like try to get Bobby Bowden on the show in like 2005
• 19:03
  when I first started working or whatever.
• 19:04
  Like you, just like, I remember, I think I called Bobby Bowden's
• 19:07
  house one time because I was so naive to like what I was doing.
• 19:11
  I was like, no, I'll just call his house.
• 19:12
  Oh, hey, misses Bowden. Like what's going on?
• 19:14
  And I, I, so I don't, I think that's the background is just as
• 19:17
  long as you're willing to like kind of beat the pavement and
• 19:19
  really go after people and not take no, like there's a few
• 19:24
  Brewers and a few breweries that didn't get featured, some of
• 19:26
  which just never got back to me. And that's OK.
• 19:29
  Can't, can't use your tape if you're not going to get back to
• 19:31
  us. And one or two of them, you
• 19:35
  know, it was multiple voicemails, multiple text
• 19:37
  messages, multiple emails. I probably sent the DMI, you
• 19:40
  know, any possible way, a Raven, a smoke signal.
• 19:43
  I tried to get in touch with people and if they, you know,
• 19:45
  you get to 6 or 7 Nos like, well, you're ignored, you got to
• 19:49
  move on and you got to still do the story.
• 19:51
  So a lot of it's just a you just kind of grind it out when it
• 19:55
  and, and, and mostly everybody was really great about wanting
• 19:57
  to tell their story for sure. When I had the advantage that
• 20:00
  I'd I'd written that beer book back in 2014, this beer book
• 20:06
  back in 2014 available at your Kroger check out.
• 20:10
  But that was back when all these breweries were just starting out
• 20:13
  and they were very anxious to tell their stories.
• 20:16
  And when I wrote that book, all right, first of all, I screwed
• 20:20
  up. I thought that the deadline for
• 20:23
  the first draft was in June. So I started working on it in
• 20:26
  May. That was when the book was due.
• 20:29
  So I had to do the whole book in a month and I took all my own.
• 20:32
  I had to take my own pictures too.
• 20:34
  So, but these guys, you know, it was, it was right at the peak of
• 20:40
  like round, like round two of expansion, the Black Abbeys, the
• 20:44
  Jackalopes, the Tennessee Brew Works, the Calf Killers.
• 20:48
  So they were very just new in the business.
• 20:51
  Great folks, fun to talk to because I knew that, you know,
• 20:56
  this was going to be a book that was about the history of beer.
• 20:59
  You don't want to write about the individual beers because
• 21:01
  they're not going to be there by the time the book comes out or
• 21:04
  in five years. So I wanted to tell the stories
• 21:07
  of the people and the founding mythology of each brewery.
• 21:11
  So they were more than happy to talk about that because they
• 21:14
  were all so new, you know, it was what they were going through
• 21:17
  at that moment. So I've had long time
• 21:19
  relationships and known these stories.
• 21:21
  So I knew what to tell Braden to ask them.
• 21:25
  And that helped a lot because I don't think people do that
• 21:28
  anymore. I think they just want to know,
• 21:30
  you know, what's new, what's shiny, where are you moving to?
• 21:34
  Did you buy a new tank? And I wanted to know, you know,
• 21:37
  where the hell does Martin Luther King or Martin Luther
• 21:40
  thing come from, Carl, You know, yeah, that's the interesting
• 21:45
  story to me, you know? Yeah, Carl's a great character
• 21:48
  too. And Chris, Chris, you brought up
• 21:51
  a good point. I know and, and, and Scott and
• 21:55
  Steve kind of follow the same format, you know, that that we
• 21:58
  all do. We all kind of have the same
• 22:00
  love of, of beer and, and local community and getting what's
• 22:03
  inside the heads of like the people in the industry out.
• 22:06
  But it wasn't always like that. Originally, back when like Mitch
• 22:09
  and I first started recording with the foamy heads, we were
• 22:11
  simply just, you know, we, we gathered around an old Microsoft
• 22:15
  like Surface tablet and put on the camera and the, and the
• 22:17
  microphone and sat on the couch and we talked about what beers
• 22:21
  we were drinking and we rated the beers and, and all that.
• 22:24
  But, you know, and if I go back, I did this the other day, I go
• 22:26
  back and look at and try to listen to some of those old
• 22:29
  episodes. Those beers aren't around him.
• 22:32
  Like it's not, you know, it's, it's it's point in time, right?
• 22:35
  The craft beer industry, as we have found over time, is
• 22:38
  evolving constantly. And there's always new beers
• 22:41
  coming out and people aren't interested in, you know, what
• 22:44
  was last week. They're interested in what's
• 22:46
  coming up now. So you brought up a good point
• 22:48
  about, you know, people are interested in the history and
• 22:52
  what's inside the people's minds of the industry, right?
• 22:57
  And that's what that's what I can say that as a customer of
• 22:59
  you guys that I that's what I'm interested in.
• 23:02
  That's what makes me interested in in Nashville is the the
• 23:05
  history and going through and the bite sized pieces, right?
• 23:09
  I mean, they're 20 minute episodes.
• 23:10
  No, I don't have to sit down and dedicate an hour long to
• 23:13
  something I can throw it on when I'm heading to the store.
• 23:16
  You know, when I'm taking, I've got my hands full with kids.
• 23:18
  So it's, it's easily digestible format.
• 23:21
  So cheers to you guys and I, I really appreciate the not only
• 23:24
  the historical look on things in Nashville, you know, but also
• 23:28
  the, the bite sized format that you guys present.
• 23:30
  That's that's I. I intentionally wrote this.
• 23:33
  I intentionally wrote this book to be each chapter to be like 3
• 23:38
  trips to the bathroom long so you can just leave it on the
• 23:41
  toilet tank and learn about a brewery you know every couple
• 23:44
  days. You're a fast.
• 23:46
  Place to do it. You're either a fast reader or a
• 23:49
  long something else. Both are true well.
• 23:53
  Like the, the thing that strikes me from both of y'all's
• 23:57
  comments, Chris included, is like one of the things I
• 24:00
  probably didn't expect, I probably wanted to do this but
• 24:03
  didn't know what to expect about it was sort of the personalities
• 24:06
  of like the original group. I think there's lots of great
• 24:10
  personalities currently new breweries, like I know a lot of
• 24:12
  them. They're great people, They're
• 24:13
  interesting. But I thought the ones that were
• 24:17
  really that really built the whole thing are the ones that
• 24:19
  are in that are in Chris's book. And so getting to know the
• 24:22
  personalities. One of the things that I, I
• 24:25
  maybe I'm the only one who finds interesting, but I thought
• 24:27
  though, and I think we did this on purpose.
• 24:30
  I, I wanted the story of the names of the breweries to be in
• 24:33
  there for each of those original ones.
• 24:35
  You know, Yazoo Bait, you know, Jackalope, Tennessee Brew Works,
• 24:39
  Black Abby, let's use those. And then Blackstone to some
• 24:41
  degree. But again, didn't get to
• 24:43
  Blackstone. They didn't.
• 24:44
  They didn't I, I think. Kent's a tough gift, but a great
• 24:48
  guy. He is, he is.
• 24:49
  But but like, I thought each one's story about how they came
• 24:53
  up with the name, like really gave me an insight into like who
• 24:58
  they were, how they thought, how they viewed things.
• 25:01
  Like if you hear Linus tell the story about how Yazoo came up
• 25:04
  with its name, it's like the most Linus Hall thing of all
• 25:07
  time. Like it's just like, like even
• 25:10
  how the logo came about, like, oh, we were just sleeping one
• 25:12
  night. My wife just drew it and went
• 25:13
  back to bed and then we found our logo.
• 25:15
  It's like the most Linus Hall thing I've ever heard.
• 25:18
  You know, Bailey, her story around Jackalope and her kind of
• 25:20
  affinity for like these mythical creatures.
• 25:22
  Like it's just a a real insight into kind of her playful,
• 25:25
  mischievous kind of side. That's really interesting.
• 25:27
  I just thought that was like one of those random, weird, silly
• 25:30
  things that, you know, you're never going to.
• 25:32
  I don't know. I hope that we're like one of
• 25:34
  the only places where you'd find that kind of stuff.
• 25:36
  And that was, I thought that those are the kind of things
• 25:39
  that that happened that I was just like, man, this is way
• 25:42
  cooler than I expected. Because those personalities all
• 25:44
  coming together when they did is really like the core of the
• 25:47
  story. We had.
• 25:49
  And I know Mitch and Rich had had, I think you guys probably
• 25:53
  even long before we had him on. One of our first guests was Carl
• 25:57
  Meyer and you know, I had crappier for years, but you
• 26:01
  know, it wasn't like I went around before I started doing a
• 26:03
  podcast and really knew a lot of the brewery owners.
• 26:06
  And we had, we got Carl on and within like the first 5 minutes,
• 26:09
  my mouth is just dropping because of just how dynamic of a
• 26:14
  guy he is and the personality and the, and the one of the
• 26:18
  first things he started talking about what you guys talked about
• 26:21
  on your, on your first podcast episode about this was what got
• 26:26
  him started was going to like Bosco's.
• 26:29
  And I moved here in 1998 in Nashville.
• 26:33
  And I remember Bosco's because I worked down, you know, down
• 26:36
  downtown off of Music Row. And it's like, I didn't Braden,
• 26:40
  I think you kind of said that it's like there were only a few
• 26:42
  places that you could go. And it's like, you know, shout
• 26:46
  out the Bosco's. I mean, Bosco's and Blackstone
• 26:49
  always has a, a, you know, a soft spot in my heart.
• 26:53
  We were just there a couple days ago because I'm pretty sure they
• 26:55
  were probably the first brewery that I ever went to.
• 26:58
  So, you know, and that it's, it's so it's so cool to hear
• 27:02
  about that kind of history back now.
• 27:04
  Yeah. Bosco's was a well, I just, I
• 27:07
  mean, Bosco's was a huge part of like my young adulthood in
• 27:10
  Nashville for family and kids. And you know, Sam's next door,
• 27:15
  like before it burnt down. RIP was like our Saturday hang.
• 27:18
  Like it was such an important part of like an important part
• 27:21
  of my life. And I, you know, to hear them
• 27:23
  all like validate that like felt really like interesting.
• 27:25
  Like this is as important to you guys as it was to all of us too.
• 27:29
  That that means it, that that must mean something.
• 27:31
  And that's sort of how it ended up as the the opening scene of
• 27:34
  the whole series. Well, like, you know what,
• 27:37
  Anchor Steam and Henry Weinhardt and Sierra Nevada, that was like
• 27:41
  the gateway craft beer for a lot of it.
• 27:43
  I went to college on the West Coast, even though I grew up
• 27:45
  here in Nashville. But in Nashville, the gateway
• 27:49
  to, Oh my gosh, there could be a beer that's not not a vanilla
• 27:54
  cream ale from Bohan. And you know that there's a real
• 27:57
  craft beer out of Nashville. That all happened to Blackstone
• 28:00
  for me. I mean, that was where you learn
• 28:02
  that, oh, in these tiny tanks, you can make something really
• 28:06
  beautiful and you can win awards for Saint Charles Porter.
• 28:09
  Yeah. Saint Charles Porter was my, my
• 28:12
  very first, believe it or not, my very first dark beer.
• 28:16
  Like at the time I was, I was drinking Saint Charles Porter
• 28:19
  and I was like, this thing is heavy.
• 28:21
  There is no way that you look at.
• 28:23
  I'm trying to remember the ABV on the Saint Charles port.
• 28:25
  It's easy drinking, but when you're coming from, you know,
• 28:29
  you're coming from over to the craft beer industry and like
• 28:31
  your definition of craft beer is like blue Moon Shock top and all
• 28:35
  that kind of stuff. And then you go, well, let's try
• 28:38
  something local and you try something like Blackstone and
• 28:41
  it's like, oh, I'll have that, that Blackstone Porter, you
• 28:43
  know, Saint Charles Porter. And I took one sip of it.
• 28:45
  I loved it. It was my I drank that thing
• 28:47
  religiously forever. It was it was such a good beer.
• 28:52
  And Scott, like I said, Scott and I went there.
• 28:54
  Yeah. And Scott and I went there on
• 28:55
  Sunday with some friends and it was kind of cool.
• 28:58
  It's like 3:00 in the afternoon and that place is just pat jam
• 29:01
  packed. And it's like, after all these
• 29:03
  years, you know, not always easy to jam pack a brewery, you know,
• 29:07
  But sometimes it's it's hard to get people in.
• 29:09
  But after they've always done it.
• 29:12
  Well, does Newcastle, does Newcastle count as a dark beer?
• 29:15
  I'm honestly curious. Like is that it's.
• 29:17
  It's a brown, right? It's a brown ale.
• 29:20
  It's I, I don't feel like it's. True to what you're saying?
• 29:22
  Through it though, can't you? I wouldn't say it's dark, but it
• 29:26
  is like Amber. I'm just like, that's the beer
• 29:29
  that I think of when I think of like the first time I ever tried
• 29:31
  something like in that direction.
• 29:34
  You know, it's probably at a college bar in Knoxville in like
• 29:36
  2003, drinking in Newcastle. And I'm, I'm holding a Newcastle
• 29:40
  thinking I know something that none of these other people know.
• 29:43
  Like nobody around me understands what we're doing
• 29:46
  here. The big Bomber Newcastle was a
• 29:49
  go to for me for so many casual things like a concert.
• 29:54
  They'd just sell the Bomber Newcastle Bomber.
• 29:56
  It was a go to here. That and Ro GAIL.
• 30:00
  Oh, yeah. All right.
• 30:02
  Little little Carl Meyer tribute or trivia for you guys.
• 30:05
  Have you ever seen him DJ? Yes.
• 30:08
  Yes, I have. Because to your listening
• 30:11
  audience, if you get a chance to go see him and Maddie Hargrove
• 30:15
  and their alter egos, DJ Dad's been drinking.
• 30:21
  It is. It's a very entertaining
• 30:23
  evening. Yeah, yes, they have a good
• 30:25
  time. Everybody else has a good time
• 30:27
  too. Yeah, the four of us did a
• 30:29
  collab podcast at at the Common John last Beer Fest on Earth and
• 30:35
  he was doing it. He was there then.
• 30:37
  So yeah, you mentioned, you mentioned how dynamic A talker
• 30:40
  he is. I, I got an hour and 21 minutes
• 30:43
  with Carl Meyer for this project and the story about where he got
• 30:48
  the name to Chris's point about like the whole, you know, black.
• 30:52
  Oh, now I'm going to butcher the old, what was the original name
• 30:54
  supposed to be? He changed it because it's in
• 30:58
  the, it's in this thinking that now I'm drawing a blank.
• 31:00
  It's all too many beer, too many beers that that was like an A 9
• 31:05
  minute story, like a nine or a 10 minute story.
• 31:07
  And John Lawrence said try and say that after you've had a
• 31:10
  beer. Yeah, that was.
• 31:11
  Yeah, like not even, not even a break.
• 31:14
  Like I didn't ask a follow up. It was like a 9 minute story
• 31:17
  about how the name came about and I think we got it.
• 31:21
  I think we got it down to like like 36 seconds or something.
• 31:27
  Good job. Hard.
• 31:29
  To be hard to do though. He probably gave you a lot of
• 31:31
  gold in there. It's so it's so hard to edit
• 31:34
  Carl Meyer. Yeah.
• 31:36
  Because there's so much good stuff, but none of it connects.
• 31:42
  Braden, before we hit record, you were telling us that Chris
• 31:45
  was your third choice in narrating the thing.
• 31:47
  We were the first two. They both thought of that.
• 31:52
  Why'd you go that direction? They they both recommended me
• 31:54
  though so that's good. Yeah.
• 31:56
  Yeah, it was. He didn't say that.
• 31:59
  Vern Lundquist and Dolly Parton were the first two, and they
• 32:01
  both came out. It's fair.
• 32:04
  That's fair. No, he wrote that.
• 32:05
  How do you not do the the the food and drink writer who wrote
• 32:08
  the book on beer, whose voice sounds so actually natural,
• 32:12
  unlike my voice, which sounds like I'm been working for 20
• 32:15
  years as a broadcaster. Everybody likes his voice way
• 32:17
  better. And so we got to had somebody to
• 32:18
  soften me up a little bit. Yeah, well, I I will admit the
• 32:21
  truth that it took us so long to do this podcast that you can
• 32:24
  hear me go through four different seasonal allergies.
• 32:29
  Well, now just go back and. Listen, yeah, that's the ragweed
• 32:33
  episode. Yeah, OK.
• 32:35
  It's just called texture. Yeah, there you go.
• 32:39
  But that's a that's a good question.
• 32:41
  So, Chris, I mean, I know you've done a lot of writings.
• 32:44
  I mean, like your, your history of Music City Brewing, like the
• 32:47
  book. I mean, you can even get it on
• 32:49
  the Amazon. It's on Kindle right now.
• 32:51
  You know, I know you're, you're also part of the the Nashville
• 32:53
  podcast as well, but you've done some, some not only just like
• 32:57
  Rezi and things like that, but have you done TV before too?
• 33:01
  Yeah, I've been, I mean, yeah, I've been on Food Network couple
• 33:06
  times. I've been judge and Best in
• 33:08
  Chow, which was a Canadian Food Network company that came down
• 33:13
  to choose the best barbecue in Nashville, Best in Chow.
• 33:17
  Wow. I still got the T-shirt.
• 33:20
  I'm judged at the Jack Daniels World Championships for 14 years
• 33:24
  in a row now, so that's a lot of good BBQ.
• 33:28
  Yeah. I think my question around that
• 33:30
  is, is there a difference? I'm going to, I'm going to leave
• 33:34
  it broad because I, I, I'm kind of anticipating what direction
• 33:38
  you're going to go in. But like, is there a difference
• 33:40
  between how you're supposed to not necessarily judge food, but
• 33:45
  like enjoy the food when you're doing something on television
• 33:48
  versus like if you're doing something, a write up in like an
• 33:50
  article or if you're doing something for like a book that
• 33:53
  you know that you're going to be publishing later and you're not
• 33:56
  directly on the spot right now? Like is there a mentality
• 33:59
  difference between the two? Well, there's yeah.
• 34:02
  I mean, you just described 3 very different things in that,
• 34:05
  you know, if you're judging, say at a BBQ contest, you've got six
• 34:10
  of the greatest chicken thighs you've ever tasted in front of
• 34:12
  you at the same time and you have 6 minutes to judge them
• 34:16
  all. So that it's got to be, you
• 34:18
  know, you don't judge one against the other, you judge
• 34:20
  each one against the platonic ideal of what you think it
• 34:23
  should be. But you can't go back and go,
• 34:26
  well, I like that one better than that one.
• 34:28
  You literally have to judge things one at a time against
• 34:31
  themselves and only themselves. But if I'm writing something for
• 34:34
  a book, you know I've got all the time in the world to compare
• 34:37
  it and think about it and rank it.
• 34:38
  If people really need ranks, think ranking food and
• 34:42
  restaurants against each other is kind of a bad thing to try.
• 34:46
  Anybody that's still in business in the restaurant business right
• 34:49
  now deserves a Best of award to me.
• 34:52
  I mean, just because it's such a hard business to get into, but
• 34:56
  people ask for that too. TV, you know, they give you a
• 35:00
  little time to think about it, but they don't really care as
• 35:03
  much about your opinion as the outcome.
• 35:06
  I mean, I knew going into Best and Chow that that Kerry Bringle
• 35:09
  was going to win because you know, he's like porker, he's
• 35:12
  awesome and he's, you know, he's going to be great on TV.
• 35:15
  And the other two were what was the one that hog Heaven, which
• 35:19
  was great, but they didn't have a personality behind it.
• 35:23
  There was no one that came out and charmed the judges.
• 35:26
  And then it was the wild horse, which was like judging inside a
• 35:28
  mammoth mammoth cave. So you know, I I could see the
• 35:33
  big industrial smoker out there. So you know, there's going to be
• 35:38
  elements of of theater and elements of truth and all of it.
• 35:41
  But you know, I just try and do the best job I can and and hog.
• 35:45
  Heaven was like a hog. Heaven was a perfect place to
• 35:48
  eat when I was also going to like original Yazoo.
• 35:52
  Like those were like, those were like, that was a Friday
• 35:54
  afternoon. Like walk across the park, go to
• 35:55
  hog Heaven and then head over to the happy hour at Yazoo.
• 35:59
  Yeah. I mean any place that just has a
• 36:01
  screen door, I mean. Yeah, great.
• 36:05
  And funny story. The, the my one of my buddies
• 36:08
  used to work at worked at a location and we used to work
• 36:12
  across the street from this guy who used to homebrew.
• 36:15
  And every, every week he would get, you know, some of an empty
• 36:18
  cake. He'd go right across the street,
• 36:20
  knock on the back door, Guy named Linus would open up the
• 36:23
  door. They would talk for a little bit
• 36:24
  and he would exchange his empty cake for a full cake before
• 36:27
  Yazoo was even Yazoo. He had it on tap at his
• 36:30
  marketing company and they would just drink Yazoo beer all the
• 36:33
  time. So.
• 36:33
  This is America. That relationship, yeah.
• 36:36
  Absolutely. I knew a couple guys that had
• 36:38
  like ad agencies and marketing in there that would literally
• 36:41
  get Yazoo on tap. They were wondering if they
• 36:43
  could run it through the walls. There's probably holes actually
• 36:48
  in the walls already, like. I'd be alright with it.
• 36:51
  Yeah. The rats should eat the beer
• 36:52
  lines though. It's funny you mentioned it
• 36:56
  because Steve and I were just over at Corsair this weekend,
• 36:59
  which was the previous original Yazoo location.
• 37:02
  It looks much different now, obviously, but it's that same.
• 37:05
  Spot yeah, I mean, that's where Karen did some amazing beers
• 37:09
  back in the day, but, you know, they were never going to be
• 37:12
  commercially super popular, but God, to have like somebody doing
• 37:16
  an old was it a how do you pronounce it a Groot or, you
• 37:18
  know, she would do these Egyptian beers and and Nordic
• 37:22
  beers and, you know, these weird ferments.
• 37:25
  And luckily the guys at Corsair were just weird enough on their
• 37:27
  own with what they were distilling.
• 37:29
  They're like, go for it. Make us this beer that's, you
• 37:31
  know, out of barley. Corn.
• 37:33
  Yeah. I do like that.
• 37:36
  Because a small beer project kind of thing they had when
• 37:38
  you'd go in there. I think Yazoo at that time at
• 37:42
  that place with Linus and how he came to brewing beer, I really
• 37:47
  do think that's like sort of the embodiment of like old
• 37:49
  Nashville. If people ask like, hey, what is
• 37:51
  old Nashville? What does that mean to you?
• 37:52
  What does that look like? How do you define it?
• 37:54
  It's pretty hard. You kind of just go, oh, you had
• 37:56
  to be there, right? Well, but like, I think you
• 37:59
  know, and Chris and I talk about this in the in the show, like
• 38:01
  parking your car on on a road that doesn't have a parking
• 38:03
  spot. Hopefully the windows are there
• 38:05
  when you come back, you're walking into a courtyard with a
• 38:08
  hole in the roof and a tree growing out of the middle of it.
• 38:11
  And you know, the beers were $3 or $4.00 and you had a local
• 38:15
  Nashville band playing in the courtyard that night.
• 38:18
  And like, it just was like that was it was rough around the
• 38:21
  edges. It wasn't like polished.
• 38:23
  It wasn't supposed to be there was it was gritty, but it was
• 38:26
  like creative and, and kind of passionate and like, there was a
• 38:30
  kindness to it too. Like everyone was just like
• 38:32
  there to enjoy beer and have a good time and listen to some
• 38:35
  music. I just feel like that's like
• 38:37
  kind of the embodiment of somebody's like what's old
• 38:39
  Nashville? I'm like that.
• 38:40
  That's kind of what I think of now.
• 38:42
  And I think doing the project is actually what kind of like
• 38:45
  restarted all my thinking about all the places I used to go and
• 38:48
  the things I used to do. And I really think that's that's
• 38:50
  what old Nashville really is, was this gritty entrepreneur,
• 38:53
  creative community that just supported each other, made
• 38:56
  really killer beer and was just trying to have fun doing it.
• 38:59
  And like this is some guy that just like learned how to do it
• 39:02
  off the back of a magazine. Like it's, it's a great story.
• 39:05
  And there was a lot of bootstrapping back then, too.
• 39:07
  I mean, literally, you could go in and volunteer to help Linus
• 39:10
  bottle on a Sunday and you'd go home with two cases.
• 39:14
  You know, that's how he bottled his beers because he didn't have
• 39:16
  a staff until his insurance found out about it.
• 39:19
  And they're like, no, you cannot have rando's coming in and using
• 39:23
  your bottling machine. But.
• 39:26
  You know insurance companies way to way to screw up a good thing.
• 39:29
  Well, that was one thing that I really loved working with Braden
• 39:31
  on this because, you know, I knew the the nerdy historical
• 39:33
  side of it and I knew the personality.
• 39:35
  I write profiles, you know, that's but to contextualize it
• 39:39
  and put it into the sociological timeline of Nashville.
• 39:43
  That's what Braden brought to this that I just was fascinated
• 39:46
  the whole way through and and on every, every step.
• 39:50
  I'm like, Oh, now I get where you're going and trying to find
• 39:52
  a way to make it a personal story, but also a Nashville
• 39:55
  story and we've in the personalities of all these great
• 39:59
  Brewers. I thought it ended up as a
• 40:01
  really fascinating timeline of what made us for good or for
• 40:05
  worse. It's city and what you know has
• 40:08
  turned into shit city since then.
• 40:09
  But you know, it was hot there right up until after the flood,
• 40:13
  so. And I got a she's not here, but
• 40:15
  I got a shout out our our editor and audio engineer, Ambrelle
• 40:19
  Crutchfield is like when we started it, we had were two
• 40:21
  episodes in and it was real dense.
• 40:25
  It probably listened like a like a weird old non fiction like
• 40:29
  book or something. Like it was just, it just wasn't
• 40:32
  what it needed to be. And I think she, she kind of
• 40:36
  heard all that stuff. She heard some of the personal
• 40:38
  side of it. She heard, you know, some of the
• 40:41
  things that we're talking about. Like she was great to pull out
• 40:43
  of us and, and, and out of me. So I want to give her a lot of
• 40:46
  credit. She's a brilliant storyboarder
• 40:48
  and audio engineer and was the editor and producer on the whole
• 40:51
  thing. So Ambrelle Crutchfield shout
• 40:53
  out. And she wasn't a beer nerd.
• 40:56
  She wanted to listen to it. She want to listen to it from
• 40:58
  the perspective of someone going into it, like, why should I be
• 41:01
  interested about this? And that really changed how we
• 41:05
  had to think about it because we were already interested in it
• 41:07
  going in so. That's a good perspective
• 41:11
  though. I mean, like you want to talk
• 41:12
  about getting, trying to target a different audience that that
• 41:15
  may not be somebody that generally listens to your type
• 41:18
  of stuff. You know, what is it?
• 41:20
  What would it take to get somebody that's not in that
• 41:23
  industry to enjoy and and listen and enjoy your show?
• 41:27
  So yeah. Thank God it's not on video.
• 41:29
  Yeah, you lose them all, Yeah. It's great.
• 41:33
  I really. Like I really like the the
• 41:35
  aspect of what you guys talked about and you probably had to
• 41:40
  edit it down. But talk about up until like the
• 41:43
  mid 90s or early 90s, the the laws in Tennessee that were so
• 41:47
  different that impacted anyone that wanted to be a Brewer and
• 41:51
  really wanted to to own a brewery in Nashville.
• 41:54
  Yeah, that's, you know, in this fractured political climate that
• 41:58
  we're in now, even then there were there were definitely
• 42:01
  issues and where one side wouldn't work with the other
• 42:04
  side in legislation. And the fact that our ex
• 42:07
  governor used to be a beer distributor and owned a trucking
• 42:11
  company that shipped beer from West Tennessee.
• 42:15
  He wasn't looking for small craft beer to become big.
• 42:20
  You know, he owned the biggest Budweiser distributor West of
• 42:23
  the Tennessee River, did a lot of good things for the state,
• 42:25
  but we were going to be regressive at that point.
• 42:27
  So the fact that because it was a good idea for business, a good
• 42:32
  idea for consumers, that the legislature was willing to undo
• 42:37
  100 years of bad legislation to create competition and create
• 42:42
  artisans. I can't think of many times
• 42:45
  where I could have said, wow, the state legislature really
• 42:48
  came up with something creative and good for the little people.
• 42:50
  And it's like, I think there's also a couple different like
• 42:53
  benchmarks really, right? Like there's the 90s benchmark
• 42:57
  where brew pubs were allowed, I think it was early 1992, I
• 43:00
  think, which is Bosco's. And then there's the home
• 43:02
  brewing ban that was lifted one of the later, you know, one of
• 43:06
  the later states in the country, but one of the early states in
• 43:09
  the South to do it. But really it's like you think
• 43:12
  of a Republican super majority, which is kind of taking over at
• 43:15
  that time, like right around the mid 2000 tens.
• 43:18
  That's kind of when the transition starts.
• 43:20
  You think of them as very pro small business.
• 43:21
  And that was not the case at all in in the state.
• 43:24
  They were long, long track record.
• 43:25
  And we probably could have put, I don't know, Chris, we probably
• 43:28
  could have done a whole other section in the first episode
• 43:31
  about a lot of that, a lot of those laws that kind of put us
• 43:35
  in this situation, We kind of tree topped them a little bit in
• 43:37
  the first episode. We wanted people to think about
• 43:39
  beer and like enjoy it come out of the gate a little bit more
• 43:43
  easy drinking, as it were. And the dense 1 is much, much
• 43:45
  later in episode 5 when it's very heavy into kind of the
• 43:48
  modern regulations that a lot of folks had to go and like really
• 43:51
  work against to try to solve again, line us all.
• 43:54
  But we probably could have done a whole another like 4 or 5
• 43:57
  minutes chunk in the first episode that was all about why
• 44:00
  that was the beard is the big beer distributor keeping
• 44:04
  everybody out of the state on purpose like that.
• 44:06
  That was a another big chunk. We could have done it just, you
• 44:09
  know, got to ease into the first episode and.
• 44:12
  You know, Nashville had been such a strong Bud Miller Coors
• 44:15
  town. Well, not even Coors.
• 44:17
  Hell, what do you get Coors? Until I've been, you know, out
• 44:19
  of college. I guess we could have went
• 44:21
  across the Mississippi by then. Yet.
• 44:22
  So we were a Bud Miller town and every bartender, every bar
• 44:26
  manager, every restaurant owner, every bar owner with the
• 44:30
  Talladega and Bama games and Tennessee games on Budweiser
• 44:34
  tickets. So you know, to having to
• 44:37
  overcome that. Think about the guys at Calf
• 44:41
  Killer, the Sergio brothers. The only places they had to sell
• 44:44
  their beer were at like, boat docks and Honky Tonks that had a
• 44:49
  Bud tap, a Miller tap and a Coors tap.
• 44:52
  And then these two hippies go in and go, I've got something, I'm
• 44:55
  calling it Black Widow Badass Hail.
• 45:02
  And it's the craziest thing you've ever tasted.
• 45:04
  We made it with, you know, beef jerky and smoked rutabagas, you
• 45:07
  know, or something. But all we wanted just give us
• 45:11
  one of your taps and at this boat dock.
• 45:15
  Right. In Sparta.
• 45:19
  And they, they succeeded. I love those guys.
• 45:21
  And they said, I'm going to bring you something different
• 45:23
  next time. So just give us that tap and who
• 45:26
  knows what it'll be next time I bring it.
• 45:28
  And that's, you know, that's at the, at the very micro scale how
• 45:32
  you change a climate. Yeah, hearing Bailey talk about
• 45:36
  the the when they finally got Bear Walker on and kicked off
• 45:40
  Miller Lite, like to hear her tell the story.
• 45:43
  I mean, she's like, that was one of the best nights of my life.
• 45:45
  We couldn't believe it. And when you're, you know, when
• 45:47
  you're 27 years old, going to these places, like just drinking
• 45:50
  a beer, like you don't think through the economics of how
• 45:52
  that beer got on that tap or who made it or how did it get here
• 45:55
  and who had to, who convinced who of this being a thing.
• 45:58
  And it really does take this crazy group of people.
• 46:01
  You need Austin and MO Rose to be willing to take risks to
• 46:04
  cater to a different audience that wants a different product.
• 46:07
  You got to have the person who's got the talent to make the
• 46:09
  product and then the wherewithal and the sheer determination to
• 46:12
  get it to places. And you're just like, I just I'm
• 46:15
  28 years old. I'm just going to go have a good
• 46:16
  beer. OK, Like this is awesome.
• 46:18
  Cool. And you never, I never
• 46:19
  considered like how it how it how much work and effort and
• 46:23
  adversity it took to just get that, that that pint glass in
• 46:26
  front of me. Let me turn a question back to
• 46:28
  you guys. So before homestyle, can you
• 46:34
  think of a regional breakout beer that came out of Nashville?
• 46:38
  And why don't you think it happened?
• 46:39
  Because I've I still wrestle with that question.
• 46:44
  Not a breakout beer. One that I had locally was Dos
• 46:48
  Paris. You guys mentioned that.
• 46:50
  Not a breakout beer, but I do know what you're talking about
• 46:53
  because homestyle. Like if I had to define a beer
• 46:55
  that represented Nashville for a long time, it would be
• 46:58
  homestyle. I was out of town before and
• 47:01
  being a liquor store. I mean guys I can hear people
• 47:04
  asking for homestyle like in a whole nother state like asking
• 47:07
  for years ago so but dos perros probably for me was 1 not break
• 47:11
  up but locally for me. What was anything bigger between
• 47:15
  O seven, O 5 and 2012 than Dos Perros?
• 47:19
  Well. Burst.
• 47:20
  Gerst was pretty big, but. Gersh was up in my Anna too.
• 47:25
  Gotcha. Yeah, my brother moved to
• 47:27
  Atlanta and he was just always wanting Dos Perros.
• 47:30
  So it's like he spread the word with a few friends there.
• 47:33
  So to me it'd be Dos Paros as well.
• 47:36
  People just kind of knew Yasu. But I don't think that was ever
• 47:39
  even a top three volume for Linus.
• 47:42
  I mean, compared to pale ale and and girls.
• 47:45
  So yeah, I mean, but I I've always been curious about that
• 47:48
  because, you know, you've got a bunch of Goose Island in your in
• 47:51
  your fridge behind you. That's nowhere near here.
• 47:54
  How did that make it here? And nothing from Nashville ever
• 47:56
  made it to Michigan. Yeah, well, I mean, like I I
• 48:00
  probably one of the most religious followed beer events
• 48:04
  and festivals that I try to get to every year is dark Lord day
• 48:07
  at 3 Floyds in Munster, IN And I remember my first year I was
• 48:12
  there, people were asking for now this was, you know, years
• 48:15
  ago, people were asking for homestyle like I buy I literally
• 48:19
  traded. I literally traded a Goose
• 48:21
  Island Bourbon County branch style proprietary bled for a 16
• 48:25
  ounce can of homestyle and like they were elated for it.
• 48:29
  So you know to be able it. Wasn't even on their original
• 48:31
  menu. Like wasn't even, you know.
• 48:33
  No and no. And and, you know, and we can go
• 48:36
  back and forth about, you know, the taste of homestyle today
• 48:38
  versus, you know, the ingredients of now versus later.
• 48:41
  But like, yeah, for sure, for me it would have been home.
• 48:45
  Can I ask a follow up, which is maybe not the biggest breakout,
• 48:49
  but is there one like that? Like Dos Peros is the the beer
• 48:53
  that I think of when I think of my transition from because I
• 48:57
  started with like big cheap beer in college.
• 48:59
  And then you kind of work your way into like, I don't know what
• 49:01
  you call like Red Stripe or Newcastle or, you know,
• 49:05
  Sweetwater 420 is probably more of an actual craft beer, but
• 49:07
  like those are like that was like.
• 49:09
  Training wheel beers. Yeah, but but like not regular
• 49:12
  light mass produced stuff, but also, you know, fairly large
• 49:15
  stuff. Like again, Red Stripe and
• 49:16
  Newcastle are the two that I remember.
• 49:17
  Thinking. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 49:19
  And but when I trans, Dos Peros is what I transition, you know,
• 49:23
  I transitioned into like, Oh my God, there's people here doing
• 49:27
  something really interesting. Dos peros defines like obviously
• 49:31
  it would have been why am I Fat Tire would have been a big one
• 49:35
  that's similar to it's a craft beer like Sweetwater 420, but
• 49:38
  it's not local. All right, That I want to be
• 49:40
  here. What?
• 49:41
  What was the thing that made you go, oh, I've got AI want
• 49:44
  Nashville beer? Without saying homestyle, it's
• 49:48
  tough. Without, Yeah.
• 49:51
  I, you know, I probably probably was gerst for a long time.
• 49:54
  Yeah, I think. Gerst what we our advantage is
• 49:58
  we have fresh and and variety. That's the beauty of having a
• 50:02
  lot of small breweries. You know nobody is going to
• 50:06
  you're not You don't have to worry too much about old beer in
• 50:08
  the beer coolers and you can always go find something new.
• 50:12
  You can, you know you can. You can do flights if you want
• 50:15
  to and discover something like that was what was cool about
• 50:18
  Southern Grist. You never expected anything to
• 50:20
  be there in a month. You better like it now because
• 50:24
  it's not. It may not be there when you go
• 50:25
  back next time. Like my my hazy revolution
• 50:29
  personally is tied directly to Southern grist.
• 50:31
  Like that's I began transitioning into that area
• 50:34
  because of Southern grist for sure.
• 50:36
  And it's a 3 barrels, it was a three barrel.
• 50:38
  System, I mean, they couldn't barely bigger than a home brew
• 50:41
  system, so. Well, I'm going to go back to, I
• 50:45
  go back to Blackstone, you know, it's such a regular lineup.
• 50:48
  And for me, those are the ones I've always remembered and gone
• 50:52
  and go back to and, you know, just go back there over the
• 50:54
  weekend. I'm like, there's a coach.
• 50:56
  I'm going to have that coach, you know, So brings back a lot
• 50:59
  of memories, you know? I think Bosco's was a big part
• 51:01
  of that too, because they had, they had a brand line, you know,
• 51:04
  a line of beers that was in Memphis too.
• 51:06
  So they had a steady brand, but they always made room for
• 51:10
  experimentation and they always had a real, you know, they had
• 51:12
  to relay L, you know, something that they had to use the beer
• 51:14
  machine on. And so you could be the old fool
• 51:18
  and knock the bung out of the out of the half cast.
• 51:22
  I think that developed a lot of people.
• 51:23
  And Brayden tell the story about all the people that were at
• 51:26
  Bosco's at the same time. I mean basically all of them.
• 51:32
  I mean, Carl, I think, and he tells the story in the opening
• 51:35
  scene of the very first episode about how he's rattling off all
• 51:39
  these different founders, whether it's Zanz or Yazoo or
• 51:42
  Jackalope or like you name it, they were all there.
• 51:46
  Kent is there. They're all there working
• 51:47
  together. And like, what's crazy is I'm
• 51:49
  like, yeah, I I don't maybe not in 2001 was I going to Bosco's?
• 51:54
  But like 05 O six O 7, I was going to Bosco's.
• 51:57
  So maybe I was a little later, but it just, I know what when he
• 52:00
  describes like walking into that place and they're, this is what
• 52:03
  it felt like and this is what it smelled like.
• 52:04
  And this is what it sounded like.
• 52:06
  Like I could I remember it and I can go back there.
• 52:08
  So it was, it was really crazy to hear that, that number, I
• 52:12
  mean, 8/10/12 people. And then of course, Carl breaks
• 52:15
  off and creates his own his own group and and Antioch Chris can
• 52:19
  tell you the the name of the name of the brewery.
• 52:22
  Let's just say it was, you can figure out the acronym, but it
• 52:25
  was the Antioch Sud Suckers. Yeah, so.
• 52:29
  Antioch Sud suckers. And he was doing it Carl in in
• 52:32
  perfect Carl fashion. He was doing it because he
• 52:34
  didn't like, he knew he didn't want to offend anybody that was
• 52:37
  still at the other home brewing club.
• 52:39
  Like he was like, oh, I don't we got to make fun of ourselves if
• 52:41
  we're going to break away and do our own thing and like.
• 52:43
  And the other reason he didn't want to be at Bosco's is because
• 52:45
  they allowed smoking. Right.
• 52:47
  Pallet. Oh yeah.
• 52:48
  This is why we call this, that's why we call this an improbable
• 52:52
  history, because I mean, the fact that all those people were
• 52:54
  in the room at the same time, the fact that, you know, Bailey
• 52:58
  and Christian and Carl all came from like high end professional
• 53:04
  jobs and moved to town and decided there's not enough good
• 53:07
  beer here. I'm going to quit my high end
• 53:09
  professional job and make beer for a living.
• 53:11
  You know, it's just we wouldn't have the scene we have if you,
• 53:16
  if you were trying to bet on how it would have happened, it
• 53:18
  wouldn't have happened this way. Well, so Christian, one of my
• 53:21
  favorite things about Christian and Tennessee Brew works,
• 53:22
  Christian Spears is I don't know if you guys like Michael Lewis.
• 53:26
  I'm a big fan. I like his work.
• 53:28
  I read all of his books, but his very first book, because he
• 53:31
  worked on Wall Street, his very first book is, is called Liar's
• 53:34
  Poker. And it's a total kind of like
• 53:36
  inside the, the walls of the bond trade as it was invented in
• 53:41
  the 80s at like Lehman Brothers and Salomon Brothers and all
• 53:44
  these places. There's all kinds of crazy
• 53:46
  characters in this book, right? And I'm sitting there
• 53:49
  interviewing Christian and he tells me the story about he goes
• 53:51
  to North Carolina. He, he graduates, he goes to
• 53:54
  Wall Street and goes and works because he's this genius math
• 53:56
  guy and he's working on a desk in Wall Street.
• 53:59
  And he's like, yeah, I was working with, have you heard of
• 54:02
  this character who's nicknamed this in Michael Lewis's book?
• 54:04
  And I'm like, yeah, I just finished it like a month ago.
• 54:06
  He's like, yeah, that was my boss.
• 54:08
  And I'm like, and then I'm thinking about Lewis's book,
• 54:11
  which is like, these guys were making an insane amount of money
• 54:15
  in, in like, in, in like 3 years.
• 54:18
  Like the, the, the skyrocketing profits for these companies and
• 54:21
  for these traders is just insane to understand.
• 54:24
  And he just was like, yeah, at 35, I'm going to leave it all
• 54:26
  behind. And then he he goes all around
• 54:29
  the world. He's like in Costa Rica and he's
• 54:31
  in Mexico and he's in South America.
• 54:32
  And he's eventually he's like, yeah, I'm in.
• 54:34
  I'm in a leprosy camp in India, working at a nonprofit when I
• 54:38
  decided I needed to brew beer for a living in Tennessee.
• 54:40
  And I was like, what? What are you talking about?
• 54:44
  And it's just, it's, I don't know.
• 54:46
  You talk about improbable. That story is wild to me.
• 54:50
  I wish Thunder or lightning would hit me like that and give.
• 54:52
  Me the inspiration. I need nothing.
• 54:55
  But I mean, he, he clearly had a lot of, I mean, again, you work
• 54:57
  on Wall Street in the 80s and 90s, you probably have to, to
• 55:00
  Chris's point, like he left a lot behind to just leave, just
• 55:03
  to walk away and to do all this stuff and then go find his own
• 55:07
  path and could have stayed on Wall Street and been a, you
• 55:09
  know, who knows how much money you can make.
• 55:11
  Yeah, and owning a brewery and and brewing beer is not an easy
• 55:15
  job. Nobody gives.
• 55:16
  Margins are not fat, no. No, yeah.
• 55:20
  But you know, we, we all know that the beer community, all
• 55:23
  these guys, I mean, most of them get along really well.
• 55:26
  And Chris, can you talk about that from your perspective of
• 55:29
  like you, you know, you've written in the food industry for
• 55:32
  years. Do you see that in the
• 55:33
  restaurant industry as much as as much as you've seen in the
• 55:37
  the crab beer industry of like the competitiveness, but yet
• 55:40
  these guys, they're all getting along.
• 55:42
  Does that happen in that industry too?
• 55:44
  Definitely pre pandemic. I will say that, you know,
• 55:48
  there's a lot of cities where people consider it a 0 sum game
• 55:52
  where, you know, for one restaurant to succeed, another
• 55:54
  one has to fail. And it's never been that way
• 55:57
  here. But we were a city that was
• 55:58
  experiencing unprecedented growth from 2000 to 2020.
• 56:03
  So there was room for new folks. But luckily in most cases it was
• 56:07
  independence. It was people that had all
• 56:09
  worked at The Capital Grille, You know, it was people that had
• 56:11
  all worked in each other's restaurants and even the people
• 56:14
  that came from out of town. I I love hearing him say, yeah,
• 56:18
  it's kind of similar to the story that that they talk about
• 56:21
  at Tennessee Brew Works where they showed up, where Bailey and
• 56:26
  Steve showed up with beer form and growlers when they were all
• 56:29
  hot and working. When somebody hears at a
• 56:31
  restaurant is in the last week before they open, that is go
• 56:34
  time. That is training time.
• 56:36
  That's when your friends and family, you're trying to get
• 56:39
  staff in and suddenly they'll be a knock on the door and it'll be
• 56:42
  Pat Martin and he'll have big trays of BBQ like, here you go.
• 56:47
  Or it'll be somebody knocking on the door from Adley's.
• 56:50
  Like how many people you got opening today?
• 56:51
  All right, we're going to deliver 100 of tacos to you, You
• 56:55
  know, and they want each other to do well.
• 56:57
  Now, we ran into a problem come pandemic time where if you were
• 57:01
  an independent restaurant looking to open, you decided not
• 57:04
  to open, which is a smart decision.
• 57:09
  But if you were building a big hotel, you kept building that
• 57:12
  hotel because there's no stopping that.
• 57:13
  And you know that those rooms need to be filled at the end of
• 57:16
  the pandemic. Well, there's going to have to
• 57:18
  be a big restaurant on the ground floor of that hotel.
• 57:21
  So that hotel opened, that restaurant opened, and then one
• 57:26
  did next door and downtown becomes bigger and more of the
• 57:29
  money goes into those and less into the independence.
• 57:32
  So now I would say there are plenty of local independent
• 57:36
  restaurants that would not mind seeing a few other restaurants
• 57:40
  die in a fire. But, you know, they're still
• 57:43
  rooting for each other. But yeah, that's the kind of
• 57:46
  competition. The competition is it.
• 57:48
  It's US versus them. And that's kind of a shame.
• 57:51
  It shouldn't be that way. Them used to be.
• 57:54
  Used to be like, you know, the guys at Farmhouse opening up
• 57:57
  downtown. Trey grew up in town, you know,
• 58:00
  and worked at the Capital Grill, and he opened a restaurant.
• 58:04
  Deb Paquette opens at downtown. You know, that's all right now.
• 58:07
  We're now we're making it. We're expanding into a new
• 58:09
  neighborhood with locals. Everybody I talked to, I just
• 58:12
  try and encourage that, you know, any restaurant that you
• 58:14
  love, if you're thinking about it and you haven't been there in
• 58:18
  a while, go because nothing, nothing's promised.
• 58:22
  They're they're competitive in 26, like beer and restaurants
• 58:24
  together now. Margins are going to be smaller,
• 58:27
  costs are way up. People aren't going out as much.
• 58:29
  People aren't drinking as much. Like it's a really important
• 58:31
  thing that if you like these places and you care about them,
• 58:35
  that in 26 and all these breweries now serve food,
• 58:40
  they're they're they're all competing for your casual kind
• 58:42
  of hangout time. 26 is going to be a tough year.
• 58:46
  Episode 7 talks a lot about the challenges that the industry is
• 58:49
  facing. And I think the restaurant
• 58:50
  industry is right alongside it. And so couldn't echo Chris's
• 58:53
  sentiments, more like if you're, if you really like a place and
• 58:56
  you go there, go there as much as you can afford to in 26 for
• 58:59
  sure. And we had, you know, between
• 59:03
  like when Yazoo opened until 2018.
• 59:07
  I can't think of a brewery that closed involuntarily.
• 59:11
  I mean, it was unbelievable to run.
• 59:13
  We were on that. Everybody that wanted to stay in
• 59:16
  the business stayed in the business.
• 59:18
  You know, some of them sold out, like, you know, Little Harp is
• 59:21
  sold out and those kind of things.
• 59:22
  But you don't see that in the restaurant industry.
• 59:25
  I mean, restaurant industry's got a 50% fail rate over five
• 59:28
  years. And it looked like we were, we
• 59:31
  were invulnerable in the, in the brewery industry.
• 59:33
  And now you're seeing that kind of consolidation over the last
• 59:35
  couple years. And you know, it started out
• 59:38
  when you, you could see that Mill Creek or not Mill Creek,
• 59:41
  the bearded iris and scofflaw were trying to get ahead of it.
• 59:44
  You know, we're going to have to get bigger if we're going to
• 59:46
  survive this. And they didn't, you know?
• 59:50
  Yeah, I often wonder about that because, you know, it's we've,
• 59:54
  we've been, we've all been drinking, all of us on the show
• 59:57
  here. I've been drinking beer for
• 59:58
  years, even before the pandemic. But the pandemic changed a lot
• 1:00:02
  of minds. You know, I mean, like when,
• 1:00:04
  when COVID came in and shut everybody down and it pushed
• 1:00:07
  everybody indoors, it forced a lot of the breweries that were
• 1:00:10
  out there to get very unique and very smart with how they were
• 1:00:15
  delivering beer. I mean like for me, I.
• 1:00:18
  It's it's going to sound really weird, but for me, some of the
• 1:00:21
  best times and like the new brew industry was when everybody was
• 1:00:25
  in lockdown because breweries were coming out with stuff every
• 1:00:29
  other week and there you're driving up, they were running it
• 1:00:31
  out to your car. Like it almost felt kind of old
• 1:00:33
  school the way things are being done.
• 1:00:35
  It was like couldn't go inside the doors and sit down, have a
• 1:00:38
  beer with somebody, but they would bring something out to
• 1:00:40
  you, you know, and, and Bearded Iris and Southern Grist, it was
• 1:00:44
  something new every other weekend.
• 1:00:45
  And that was Bearded Iris's mindset, you know, kind of from
• 1:00:48
  the beginning, it was a new IPA every other week and not a lot
• 1:00:51
  of breweries doing that if any time in Nashville, you know, and
• 1:00:55
  then all of a sudden, you know, money became cheap.
• 1:00:57
  So all of a sudden you saw all these new breweries open up post
• 1:00:59
  pandemic and all of a sudden people were borrowing money at
• 1:01:01
  0% interest and all that kind of stuff in PPP loans.
• 1:01:05
  And now in 2526 and probably in 25, like you're seeing this
• 1:01:10
  consolidation of breweries. Like, and sometimes you're
• 1:01:13
  looking at some of these breweries and you're scratching
• 1:01:15
  your head like how in the world are they still expanding?
• 1:01:18
  You know, it's just like, you know, there's, I'm sure there's
• 1:01:20
  a couple of breweries in everybody's mind.
• 1:01:22
  You just look at it and be like, they got 8 locations in
• 1:01:25
  Nashville and other cities around.
• 1:01:27
  Like, how are they still doing this, you know, And these other
• 1:01:30
  small breweries are dying. Yeah.
• 1:01:32
  Yeah. I sell pizza.
• 1:01:33
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:01:34
  But it's a it's. My, my mind often goes to those
• 1:01:37
  places. Like how does, how, how when,
• 1:01:43
  when people's backs were up against the wall, you know, when
• 1:01:46
  people were shut down, they were trying to figure out like, what
• 1:01:48
  are we going to do during the pandemic?
• 1:01:50
  What are we going to do to get beer into people's hands?
• 1:01:56
  Everybody had their own business model.
• 1:01:57
  It was it was almost like the Wild West.
• 1:01:59
  So I, for one, appreciated the the mentality of like Beard,
• 1:02:04
  Iris, Southern grist. Or I can order online.
• 1:02:06
  Go pick it up in the gravel parking lot.
• 1:02:08
  They would bring it out to you. Restaurants got creative.
• 1:02:12
  I felt like Nuketown and Call of Duty, like in my neighborhood,
• 1:02:14
  we had food trucks going up to the park in my neighborhood,
• 1:02:16
  you'd walk up and get food and people would be standing outside
• 1:02:19
  saying hi to each other. But the pandemic was just a
• 1:02:21
  unique time for the craft beer industry in general.
• 1:02:24
  There was no question here. It was just kind of like my
• 1:02:27
  thoughts on it since you were bringing up like pre pandemic.
• 1:02:30
  It's just kind of a weird time. I I wanted to tell the story of
• 1:02:34
  the pandemic's influence on craft beer, but you can't really
• 1:02:37
  do that without sort of talking about the entire picture of
• 1:02:42
  young people and drinking habits and non alcoholic beer and all
• 1:02:47
  these other things. Like consolidation had already
• 1:02:49
  begun. Nashville was already starting
• 1:02:50
  to contract slightly. It was going to be over over
• 1:02:53
  over saturated at in 2019 when it hits peak with 40 breweries.
• 1:02:58
  And I think all these things would have happened over time,
• 1:03:02
  but I think every issue that was facing craft beer, like the
• 1:03:05
  pandemic just poured rocket fuel on all of them.
• 1:03:08
  And so like, I think we were going to see a slow decline of
• 1:03:11
  young people drinking and then but the pandemic like shot it
• 1:03:14
  up, right? Or you're going to see people at
• 1:03:16
  more isolated at home. But new technology in the
• 1:03:19
  pandemic shot it up. I think, you know, people moving
• 1:03:22
  to Nashville, the cost of living, the cost of opening a
• 1:03:24
  brewery, all that stuff was going to slowly increase no
• 1:03:27
  matter what. Well, it, the pandemic shot it
• 1:03:30
  up. So it's almost like we took all
• 1:03:32
  the hits at one time. And hopefully the ones that have
• 1:03:36
  survived are, are the ones that kind of know how to do this now
• 1:03:39
  and, and will survive in the future.
• 1:03:42
  But I don't think anybody knows. That was something that every
• 1:03:44
  one of them echoed. I, I asked every person what,
• 1:03:47
  what are the challenges? How do you approach them?
• 1:03:49
  And they all kind of had a different answer, but all of
• 1:03:51
  them were about sort of evolution, evolving, changing
• 1:03:54
  your offerings, creating an experience for people to come to
• 1:03:57
  the brewery, whether it's food. It's kind of similar to what you
• 1:03:59
  had to do in the pandemic. You have to, you have to think
• 1:04:02
  of it now as like, how do I, how do I differentiate myself?
• 1:04:05
  And they're all coming up with cool ideas.
• 1:04:07
  They're all doing it kind of differently, which is hopefully
• 1:04:09
  fun to to watch play out. The difference is that when when
• 1:04:12
  everybody's hunkering down, like when everybody is literally
• 1:04:16
  being forced to anchor down in the pandemic, you feel like you
• 1:04:19
  can do that. You know, all right, we're going
• 1:04:20
  to go small and we're going to be we're going to be smart.
• 1:04:23
  We're going to come up with ideas, but when just your
• 1:04:26
  business contracts and you realize you have to hunker down,
• 1:04:29
  but you see other people running, you know, it's really
• 1:04:32
  hard to like, OK, well, they just got huge.
• 1:04:34
  They just got bought, You know, they just bought someone else.
• 1:04:37
  So they brought in new tanks. If Stokehouse were to lay off
• 1:04:41
  one, one person, that would be 25% of their sales for their
• 1:04:45
  whole workforce. You know, when you're already
• 1:04:46
  hunkered, You know, then you're talking about people.
• 1:04:50
  You're talking about friend, you're talking.
• 1:04:52
  It's not. It's not head count like it is
• 1:04:54
  for a large brewery. Do you think that it's you
• 1:04:56
  really think 2019 that was when things were contracting?
• 1:05:00
  No, I so we peaked in 2019 with breweries at at about 40.
• 1:05:04
  I asked so many different people to try to give me like when was
• 1:05:07
  the exact number and exact year And like I talked to people in
• 1:05:11
  metro government, I talked to people on the beer board, I
• 1:05:13
  talked to people on the craft beer association.
• 1:05:16
  Like I could not get an answer and I, I got like two different
• 1:05:20
  people to say like, I think we got just over 40 in 2019.
• 1:05:23
  And when I, the pandemic, like was the originator of the, of
• 1:05:29
  the contraction, but it was not going to sustain growth at
• 1:05:32
  20/19/15 to 19 pace because the city just is eventually that was
• 1:05:38
  going to be too over saturated. You see when people's eyes glaze
• 1:05:41
  over when they go to the Beer Store and they see 400 different
• 1:05:44
  options and they're like, I don't even know where these are
• 1:05:46
  from. And it was just too, it was
• 1:05:49
  there was too much like it grew too fast and it was going to it
• 1:05:52
  was going to happen naturally no matter what.
• 1:05:54
  Again, when you have not enough demand and over saturation of
• 1:05:57
  product eventually going to have contraction and consolidation.
• 1:06:00
  The the pandemic just made it like took it from back burner
• 1:06:04
  and put it on the front burner and said, all right, let's go.
• 1:06:07
  And so I think, I think you know, and every, and this is
• 1:06:10
  again, Linus did it something different.
• 1:06:11
  He went to Madison to get out of the rush of all of this.
• 1:06:14
  Bailey sold in a different way with Jackalope.
• 1:06:16
  She sold and stayed on as the the CEO.
• 1:06:18
  Bearded Iris sold basically all of its production after
• 1:06:22
  outsourcing it to, you know, a different place.
• 1:06:24
  First trying that, then they sell it to Wiseacre, but they're
• 1:06:26
  going to stay on and kind of run the brand in the city.
• 1:06:29
  Southern Grist sells completely. They're just out all together.
• 1:06:32
  Those guys. You look at Anthony at East
• 1:06:34
  Nashville Beer Works and he's like there's beer deserts
• 1:06:36
  everywhere around Nashville. Let's instead of building
• 1:06:39
  another East Nashville Beer Works, let's build like
• 1:06:41
  something crazy and he goes out there and builds like one of the
• 1:06:45
  coolest buildings in Middle Tennessee.
• 1:06:46
  That's luckily like 1 exit down from where my parents live so
• 1:06:50
  it's a very easy excuse to not go to my parents house and he.
• 1:06:53
  Builds a mobile. He builds a mobile truck so he
• 1:06:55
  can go to those beer deserts. Too right, Right.
• 1:06:58
  Yeah, and then he and then he comes up with all kinds of, you
• 1:07:01
  know, he does all the charity stuff with, with Fridays by the
• 1:07:03
  River and, you know, constantly being creative in his tap room.
• 1:07:06
  The point point is like Christian is tied exclusively to
• 1:07:09
  like really high end food. Everyone's kind of tried to do
• 1:07:12
  something different, but they all are facing the same things.
• 1:07:16
  And all those problems were coming.
• 1:07:17
  The pandemic just put them in front of our face like right
• 1:07:20
  away, like like that. And now we're down to like 25.
• 1:07:23
  So we we're talking 40% of the breweries have closed since 2019
• 1:07:27
  in Nashville and that's not a small number.
• 1:07:28
  That's a big percent. Dang, yeah.
• 1:07:32
  And then you and you and you got and you got others that are
• 1:07:34
  expanding like you said. I mean, East Nashville beer was
• 1:07:37
  just doubling down like, hey, we're going all in.
• 1:07:40
  It's and I think it's going to pay off for them.
• 1:07:41
  Like you said, that area out there, they've taken over that
• 1:07:43
  area in one O 9 like that's going to be they're they're the
• 1:07:46
  cornerstone of that area and are going to be for a long time.
• 1:07:50
  Yeah, a lot of apartments there too, which is yeah.
• 1:07:52
  They're. Building more stuff around him.
• 1:07:54
  So he's like, yeah, we're sitting pretty right here.
• 1:07:56
  I've always said that a brewery is a great job for like 4 or
• 1:08:00
  five people. You know, where you could sell
• 1:08:02
  everything you can make in your own tap room and you're not
• 1:08:06
  beholding to anybody. I mean, maybe you want a
• 1:08:08
  distributor so you can get into a couple of but Yazoo, you know,
• 1:08:11
  Linus didn't even want to sell in in grocery stores because he
• 1:08:14
  didn't want to be competition. He didn't want to have his own
• 1:08:17
  taproom. He wanted just to sell to other
• 1:08:19
  bars and, you know, just sell the customers that liked him.
• 1:08:23
  But as soon as you decide like, well, maybe we'll go to
• 1:08:26
  Chattanooga. Well, you will be, you will be
• 1:08:30
  the Chattanooga distributor's best friend for a month while
• 1:08:33
  they introduce you into the market.
• 1:08:35
  And then you're going to have to hire somebody in Chattanooga to
• 1:08:37
  sell your beer. So you're now paying another
• 1:08:40
  dollar a pint for every beer that you sell.
• 1:08:43
  And you're not going to get an extra dollar just because you're
• 1:08:45
  Nashville beer in Chattanooga. And guess what?
• 1:08:48
  Somebody in Chattanooga is going to come to Nashville now because
• 1:08:51
  of that. So the ones that are the most
• 1:08:53
  focused, you know, once you become, once you get beyond your
• 1:08:58
  tap room and beyond your market, you are working for the
• 1:09:01
  distributor at that point. And you're going to be depending
• 1:09:06
  on somebody that's riding around in their car to sell your beer,
• 1:09:09
  not the person you're talking to across the tap room bar.
• 1:09:13
  And that's how you make a lifelong fan.
• 1:09:14
  And you 4, those are the kind of people that that's how you learn
• 1:09:17
  about the beers. You learn about them by going to
• 1:09:20
  the places and finding favorites and then bringing them home.
• 1:09:24
  And so I think you're going to have to get small to hang, hang
• 1:09:28
  in there unless you're going to consolidate.
• 1:09:31
  Can can I ask you guys? I'll do.
• 1:09:32
  Yeah. You ask trivia, Chris, I'm going
• 1:09:34
  to ask trivia here. So I have the I have the book of
• 1:09:37
  lists here from the book of lists from the National Business
• 1:09:41
  Journal, which has which has the book of list, the top brew, the
• 1:09:46
  top breweries in Nashville ranked but by total barrels.
• 1:09:50
  Now I don't think every single brewery reports on this.
• 1:09:54
  So I want to put in some. Have you out here because I
• 1:09:56
  don't see Smith and Lintz on here.
• 1:09:57
  I don't see a few others, but isn't Nano Brewery 3000 barrels
• 1:10:01
  and below Chris, is that correct ballpark?
• 1:10:04
  There's 2020 and there's micro because because Harding House
• 1:10:08
  was different from a nano brewery, right?
• 1:10:10
  Because that was the, the, the main piece of legislation that
• 1:10:13
  put breweries into our neighborhoods was Anthony Davis
• 1:10:16
  when he was on the council removing the industrial zoning
• 1:10:19
  mandate mandate for breweries. And that allowed you to put
• 1:10:23
  breweries in commercial areas, which then turns into like sort
• 1:10:25
  of these residential areas. And I don't think I even like
• 1:10:28
  this hit me. I maybe it's not 3000, but let's
• 1:10:31
  go with 3000 for the sake of the conversation.
• 1:10:33
  You're saying get small, Chris, how many breweries in Nashville
• 1:10:36
  brewed more than 2500 barrels last year?
• 1:10:40
  2500 barrels. That's not very many.
• 1:10:42
  I don't feel like. I'm going to say 2.
• 1:10:45
  That's my guess. OK, few more.
• 1:10:49
  I must say 5 or 6. I feel like it's I.
• 1:10:51
  Must say 36 is the answer. Yazoo.
• 1:10:55
  Bearded Iris, the nation's Brewing Company, Which is, you
• 1:10:58
  know, the combo. Lipman.
• 1:11:00
  Yup. Tennessee Brew Works, Jackalope,
• 1:11:02
  Black Abbey, and that's it. All the ones that kind of.
• 1:11:04
  Work tailgate Jeans Tailgate doesn't report.
• 1:11:06
  You know they're in there, so there's seven.
• 1:11:08
  And tailgate doesn't report so, but again, like we're definitely
• 1:11:12
  talking about 5 or 6 places that actually are doing any kind of
• 1:11:15
  volume at all and are not small. So maybe that's a good thing, I
• 1:11:18
  don't know. I thought Mitches answer was
• 1:11:20
  going to be 6-7. Been fun talking to you all, all
• 1:11:26
  right. Where's the outlet?
• 1:11:28
  Where's the? Leave.
• 1:11:30
  I didn't bring it up this time. It drives Rich crazy.
• 1:11:37
  Rich got it. Is he a 5 year old?
• 1:11:39
  Yeah, he's, yeah, He just turned 6 recently and he's all up in
• 1:11:42
  that craze right now. Well, here's the good news for
• 1:11:45
  you. The 9 year old, I ran it into
• 1:11:47
  the ground. I said it so much that the 9
• 1:11:48
  year old like 3 months ago was like, dad, it's so stupid, stop
• 1:11:51
  doing that. And so she stopped.
• 1:11:53
  So 2025 Dad. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:11:56
  The seven-year old still kind of chuckles at it, but I've been
• 1:11:59
  working hard for about 5 to 8 months.
• 1:12:02
  I'll say yeah to get to get rid of this thing that's in the
• 1:12:06
  orange. The oldest one already hates it
• 1:12:07
  so. I bet there's a lot of like, NFL
• 1:12:10
  offensive guards whose jerseys are selling now.
• 1:12:15
  Just for that. Yeah, they moved on to 41.
• 1:12:18
  She walks around going 41. I'm like what?
• 1:12:20
  Safeties one of the one of the cool.
• 1:12:24
  Things I liked about the podcast you did is that the timeline you
• 1:12:28
  told was was parallel for the most part to my craft beer
• 1:12:32
  journey. Like literally the time wise,
• 1:12:34
  like I came to Nashville 2004. What I was talking for that was
• 1:12:38
  like Miller genuine draft. And somewhere along the way I
• 1:12:41
  found, you know, Blue Moon and but everything you were talking
• 1:12:44
  about and that because it was growing here, it grew my craft
• 1:12:48
  beer experience and journey at the same exact time.
• 1:12:51
  It was completely perilous to everything you were talking
• 1:12:53
  about. I was like, I was kind of
• 1:12:55
  reliving it again. I thought that was really cool.
• 1:12:57
  I don't know if you guys if it was the same for you guys or you
• 1:13:00
  started. I feel the same way, Scott.
• 1:13:02
  I mean, you and I have talked about this.
• 1:13:03
  I mean, you know, moved here in 98 and Brayden, I heard you on
• 1:13:07
  your podcast talking about, you know, you were always trying to
• 1:13:11
  find different places for craft beer.
• 1:13:13
  And at the time, you know, when I worked downtown and was like,
• 1:13:15
  OK, you have Bosco's, you have Blackstone.
• 1:13:19
  You could go down to the flying saucer and get and gets a, you
• 1:13:24
  know, different beers on tab and they may not been crap beer and
• 1:13:28
  maybe like, I think it was called the beer, the beer seller
• 1:13:31
  or something. Beer seller, yeah.
• 1:13:33
  Beer seller, yeah. Beer seller, Yeah.
• 1:13:36
  So they got blown up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:39
  And those, I mean, those are the places that I, that I
• 1:13:42
  remembered, you know, when I first, when I first moved here.
• 1:13:45
  Now we'll see. The beer seller did introduce a
• 1:13:47
  lot of people to a lot of beers, but they were not the freshest
• 1:13:50
  kegs when the keg got here from Munich to, you know, be a
• 1:13:55
  Memphis to Nashville, you know? Well, it, it was it, it did you
• 1:14:00
  know they called beer seller for a reason, right, Chris?
• 1:14:04
  You felt like you went in there and you were like, you were
• 1:14:06
  almost in a dungeon. And I don't, I don't want to get
• 1:14:10
  too deep into like why alcohol is important to civilization.
• 1:14:14
  I will recommend the book the Doctor, the evolutionary
• 1:14:17
  scientist that was featured in episode 7, Edward Slingerlin
• 1:14:20
  wrote the book titled Drunk. I think it's about four years
• 1:14:24
  old or something like that. And I, I read it and it's just
• 1:14:26
  like, it's just brain wormed into my head.
• 1:14:29
  And I, when we were putting this together, like to your point of
• 1:14:32
  your journey and then you guys, even just hearing you guys talk
• 1:14:34
  about talking about the old, like I can picture what a
• 1:14:38
  conversation would be like with one of my friends that was at
• 1:14:40
  Yazoo with me. I remember that.
• 1:14:42
  You remember that Delta St. show in like 07 and they played this
• 1:14:46
  album. It just come out like that.
• 1:14:48
  Those memories are so critical to people like living life and
• 1:14:53
  like building a community and alcohol is at the centre.
• 1:14:56
  There is no actual redeeming quality to your body for
• 1:14:59
  alcohol. There's just, there's just none.
• 1:15:00
  The medical community is correct about that.
• 1:15:03
  But the side effects of of alcohol, the social effects of
• 1:15:06
  alcohol, there is a reason we as a species picked beer and wine
• 1:15:10
  10,000 years ago to be our narcotic of choice.
• 1:15:14
  Because beer can't really kill you.
• 1:15:17
  Your body's going to naturally not have any room left.
• 1:15:19
  Wine's the same. Liquor is a different science
• 1:15:22
  all together. I'm not talking about liquor,
• 1:15:23
  but beer and wine in particular. Beer, Like it is how we form
• 1:15:27
  civilization. And I think it's something that
• 1:15:29
  we're missing. Going back to Richie talking
• 1:15:31
  about the pandemic and people being isolated, like young
• 1:15:34
  people not drinking. Like I know this sounds like I'm
• 1:15:37
  on a soapbox, like preaching here, but people need to go have
• 1:15:39
  moderate amount of beer with each other, put their phones
• 1:15:43
  down and stare at each other's faces for a little while.
• 1:15:45
  Like it's not. And you'll have those memories
• 1:15:47
  that you guys are talking about, which is like, man, you remember
• 1:15:49
  that time we were at this place and remember we were doing this
• 1:15:52
  or we went to this concert, the music fest we went to here or
• 1:15:55
  the beer fest we went to there. And like, that's the stuff that,
• 1:15:57
  like makes us who we are. And I, I really believe that,
• 1:16:01
  believe in it at my core. So I don't, I know that sounds
• 1:16:04
  naive or cliche. That's how I feel.
• 1:16:07
  I think you're right on the money, man.
• 1:16:08
  I think you're right on the money on it, yeah.
• 1:16:10
  If I'm not planning on going to to a city for whatever reason,
• 1:16:14
  the first thing I do is what breweries are there.
• 1:16:16
  I don't care if I've been or not.
• 1:16:17
  It's it's all around the breweries.
• 1:16:19
  If I take a vacation where, where we're going to drink,
• 1:16:22
  where are the breweries around how close are they?
• 1:16:24
  It's 100 times out of 100 for me.
• 1:16:27
  I'll tell you the one guy not to be and and this this is another
• 1:16:30
  Carl Meyer story. Don't be the guy that goes in
• 1:16:33
  and just orders a flight of everything they make.
• 1:16:36
  He talked about the 15, the 15 year flight just so you can
• 1:16:41
  check them off on on tapped. And Carl was was sitting there
• 1:16:47
  on his iPad watching his numbers.
• 1:16:49
  And there was one guy that kept like he'd have another one like
• 1:16:53
  don't like hazy IPA, don't like this one either.
• 1:16:55
  One star, you know, and just going through the whole thing.
• 1:16:57
  And he would put a new one on every 30 seconds.
• 1:16:59
  And he called the brewery, called the tap manager and said,
• 1:17:02
  is there a guy sitting at the bar ordering flights, probably
• 1:17:06
  wearing a kilt? And the guy said, yeah, there
• 1:17:12
  is. He goes tell him his beers are
• 1:17:14
  paid for, it's time to go. Hopefully shit.
• 1:17:19
  On brand for Carl. Yes.
• 1:17:22
  And that's, that's been a conversation that's been a
• 1:17:24
  talking point. Like it all of us have had, you
• 1:17:27
  know, brewery founders and head Brewers and owners on, on our
• 1:17:31
  shows before. And it, it ends up coming up
• 1:17:34
  every single time. You know, what's your thoughts
• 1:17:36
  on untapped? And it's so funny to hear.
• 1:17:39
  It's so funny to hear like the consumer side of things.
• 1:17:42
  And like how it's, it's used is almost like a, almost like a fun
• 1:17:45
  challenge. Like how many beers can you
• 1:17:47
  check in and how many you can do this versus the owner or the
• 1:17:51
  brewery? And you know, some people, they
• 1:17:53
  don't even look at it. They're like, I don't care about
• 1:17:54
  it. It's not real.
• 1:17:55
  I don't care. Other people are like, I don't
• 1:17:58
  understand why someone would give you a four if they think
• 1:18:01
  it's the perfect IPA for that one.
• 1:18:04
  And it's so disjumbled. It's so disconnected from
• 1:18:07
  reality. Like, Untapped should not be the
• 1:18:10
  system in which everybody bases their understanding and their
• 1:18:13
  ratings on a beer, but it's become that way.
• 1:18:16
  Hey. And by the way, by the way,
• 1:18:18
  because it's relevant, I don't know if you guys can see this
• 1:18:20
  right now, but look, you probably can't see it.
• 1:18:25
  I cannot too. Bright.
• 1:18:26
  Yeah, too bright. But it's my untapped app and
• 1:18:29
  this is the Barrick and I'm actually going to, I'm going to
• 1:18:33
  rate the beer that I drank and I'm not going to rate it bad
• 1:18:35
  because I don't rate bad beers on there.
• 1:18:37
  I don't put on there. I hate that beer.
• 1:18:40
  I'm not going to ever drink it again.
• 1:18:41
  And I, I can't admit that I don't have a nine year Duolingo
• 1:18:45
  streak. So I mean, we've gamified
• 1:18:47
  everything at this point. There you go.
• 1:18:52
  It is funny, we've talked to Brewers and it's, you know,
• 1:18:54
  it's, it's hit or miss. Some guys don't want anything to
• 1:18:56
  do with it and other guys take it as a kind of a learning
• 1:19:00
  experience that not to improve their beer so much.
• 1:19:02
  But hey, what are they, what are they saying?
• 1:19:03
  What are consumers saying? What are people saying?
• 1:19:05
  You know, you could probably throw out a guy that's giving
• 1:19:07
  1A1. You know, the overall rating is
• 1:19:09
  a four, right? You just kind of throw that out.
• 1:19:11
  But they want to hear what people are saying.
• 1:19:13
  So we've heard all of it, but we, it has changed our rating as
• 1:19:16
  consumers 180 and not that we were giving shitty ratings
• 1:19:19
  anyway, but but now you realize there's somebody on the other
• 1:19:23
  side of that thing or, or hey, somebody, we had somebody on us
• 1:19:26
  rate to style. If you rate something to the
• 1:19:28
  style that it is, whether you like that style or not, that's
• 1:19:31
  going to give it a fair rating. I think.
• 1:19:33
  So it's all over the place. We, I think we all do a good job
• 1:19:37
  and when we check things in to make sure that we don't give
• 1:19:40
  anybody a shitty rating. Well, I, I I like how Fait La
• 1:19:43
  Force does it. You know, they just, they'll
• 1:19:45
  sell you a small pour. You know, if you want to sample
• 1:19:47
  something, let's sample it. But we don't want to do a flight
• 1:19:51
  because you're not going to really appreciate that fifth
• 1:19:53
  beer in a flight. Yeah, I agree.
• 1:19:57
  This this reminds me of Kayvon telling us the story about
• 1:20:01
  bearded iris's like initial menu.
• 1:20:04
  Decisions were like, I think he said they had 80 plus beers on
• 1:20:08
  their menu in the first year. What?
• 1:20:12
  And it was all because they were trying to talk to the people in
• 1:20:15
  the tap room and getting like immediate feedback like, hey, we
• 1:20:18
  brewed this yesterday, we finished it yesterday, try this.
• 1:20:21
  What do you think? And then they would make
• 1:20:22
  adjustments off of that. And homestyle I don't think was
• 1:20:24
  like in that first year, I think they got to homestyle through
• 1:20:27
  the process of like, I don't know, talking to humans who are
• 1:20:31
  drinking beer in your tap room, you know, like what a novel,
• 1:20:34
  what a novel idea. But it does remind me of that,
• 1:20:36
  that they, they started so broad and then are now very focused on
• 1:20:41
  like well before they sold the very small number of beers.
• 1:20:45
  So it's that's all through trial and error.
• 1:20:47
  On the flip side, talk to him, talk to him about the Beer
• 1:20:50
  Council, Braden. I mean, that's the other way.
• 1:20:51
  I mean, sometimes you do need to drink 120 beers to pick the the
• 1:20:56
  proper 20. I volunteer speak.
• 1:20:58
  For yourself. I'll do it.
• 1:21:01
  No beer council, Chris, you know more about it than I do, man.
• 1:21:04
  ML Rose has this really, really cool evening every year where
• 1:21:09
  they would get people together. And yes, before Julie Merrick,
• 1:21:12
  who's the the kind of the number 2IN charge of ML Rose before she
• 1:21:15
  took over, it was total chaos in anarchy and bacchanalia.
• 1:21:18
  But like like just, and you can imagine, right, Like it's a
• 1:21:22
  bunch of bunch of dudes sitting around and a warehouse drinking
• 1:21:25
  as much beer as possible trying to pick out who which tap should
• 1:21:28
  be at ML Rose. And a very important process
• 1:21:31
  that I assume was way more effective early in the evening.
• 1:21:34
  And and then Julie took over and turned it into like a very
• 1:21:37
  scientific, scientific process. Have you ever been to 1, Chris?
• 1:21:41
  I have, I have. And it's, you know, everybody
• 1:21:43
  wants to be on tap at ML Rose. You know, it's kind of where a
• 1:21:46
  lot of us had a lot of our first craft beers.
• 1:21:49
  But what they do is, you know, the distributors will ship.
• 1:21:54
  Here's our 20 beers that we want you to consider.
• 1:21:57
  And so you're tasting them. But they have.
• 1:21:59
  They've made it down to, they realize that every, every
• 1:22:03
  neighborhood that MO Rose is in doesn't like the same beer.
• 1:22:06
  What they're drinking in Brentwood is not or in Franklin
• 1:22:09
  is not the same as what they're drinking in Melrose.
• 1:22:12
  So they literally take all these beers and make a list for each
• 1:22:17
  restaurant. And that's a tremendous amount
• 1:22:20
  of work. But that's also, I mean, it's a
• 1:22:22
  great job, admittedly, no doubt, but you have to know your
• 1:22:25
  customer more than even what bearded Iris was doing, trying
• 1:22:28
  to throw their own beers against the wall.
• 1:22:30
  You know, you got to have things that fill within style.
• 1:22:32
  You got to have things, OK, we're and it's more than once a
• 1:22:34
  year because they're going to have a winter menu and they're
• 1:22:36
  going to have a summer menu. And it it's quite an
• 1:22:41
  undertaking. And that's the kind of thing
• 1:22:42
  that separates them from what, like a flying saucer was where
• 1:22:45
  you were literally trying to drink 100 beers so you could get
• 1:22:48
  a plate on the ceiling, you know?
• 1:22:52
  Actually didn't know that about ML Rose.
• 1:22:54
  So you can go to different neighbors and it will have
• 1:22:56
  different beer on there. OK, that's really good to know.
• 1:22:57
  I did not know that. I might actually, if you give me
• 1:23:01
  a second, I might actually be able to find.
• 1:23:03
  I actually got a list of their top five beers at each location.
• 1:23:06
  I don't know if I'm supposed to give that out, but that'd.
• 1:23:08
  Be fun information. I actually got it.
• 1:23:10
  Give me a second, I can probably dig it up here.
• 1:23:12
  All right, at the Murfreesboro ML Rose lot of local craft
• 1:23:16
  breweries, Yeah. So like, you know, like lot of
• 1:23:19
  lot of Murfreesboro craft beers are on their cedar glades on
• 1:23:23
  there. They've got two or three
• 1:23:24
  different taps, you know, middle ground, Cedar grade doesn't
• 1:23:26
  describe middle grounds on there as well.
• 1:23:29
  Have they got comments on there? You're talking to me when I at
• 1:23:32
  the time I wasn't getting a lot of sleep, Steve, but not but.
• 1:23:34
  That's OK. That's OK.
• 1:23:35
  I was trying to help you along there, Rich.
• 1:23:37
  No, I. Appreciate it.
• 1:23:38
  Yeah. It's a fine line between trying
• 1:23:40
  to pander to the local audience but also get them beers that are
• 1:23:45
  best in style or fit what you. Think that.
• 1:23:47
  Best for them, you know, there, But it's always going to be
• 1:23:51
  important. I wish we could have done a
• 1:23:53
  whole episode of just the story of the people at Tennessee Brew
• 1:23:57
  Works and the people at and they threw them in the back of vans
• 1:24:01
  and rushed to get to Mountain L Rose to deliver the first one.
• 1:24:05
  And then that night was a craft beer festival at the Tennessee
• 1:24:08
  State Fair. So they had to get those two
• 1:24:11
  kegs over the two places they had to be on the same day.
• 1:24:14
  And that that changed Nashville beer history right there.
• 1:24:18
  Nice. And Christian doesn't want to
• 1:24:19
  admit it, but Carl beat him. First memories of of Emma Rose.
• 1:24:25
  Was the 8th Ave. Location and I.
• 1:24:27
  Think as far as I know, every location does it different, but
• 1:24:31
  we'd always go on Thursdays because it was 2 for one crap,
• 1:24:33
  whether it was craft or domestic.
• 1:24:34
  And you always got a chip, right?
• 1:24:36
  If it was, if you're drinking craft, you got the yellow chip
• 1:24:38
  and every Thursday we'd go for that 2 for one.
• 1:24:42
  But I know like as a Rattingham it was different for different
• 1:24:46
  nights and I don't know if that's the same way.
• 1:24:47
  Because I got multiple locations.
• 1:24:48
  Now, but you know, the the two for one was on a Wednesday
• 1:24:51
  somewhere else and which I don't know what Murfreesboro is, if
• 1:24:53
  they've got one, but I love that for that.
• 1:24:56
  And we'd always look forward to the the the new seasonal menu
• 1:24:59
  would come out because it would always kind of be different.
• 1:25:01
  You're looking for new stuff on there all the time.
• 1:25:02
  So it was always exciting going MO Rose and still is.
• 1:25:06
  Without them, this project probably doesn't happen.
• 1:25:09
  So. Yeah.
• 1:25:10
  Shouts to MO Rose. Yeah, definitely.
• 1:25:13
  Guys, what kind of feedback have you gotten from the podcast
• 1:25:16
  since it's come? Out.
• 1:25:18
  Let's let's do the one negative comment I've had from from.
• 1:25:22
  One for the entire thing, literally no negative comments
• 1:25:25
  from anybody, no negative reviews.
• 1:25:27
  Everybody in the business thought we, and this is honestly
• 1:25:29
  the like the bar and the, I don't know, like the level I
• 1:25:33
  would hold myself to. Like if everybody that's in it
• 1:25:36
  feels like we told the story accurately and well, then that's
• 1:25:40
  sort of like, I feel like I did my job.
• 1:25:42
  And then then it's up to the audience to decide if they like
• 1:25:44
  it or not. Like that's it's out of our
• 1:25:45
  hands. I had one person and I I'm just
• 1:25:49
  the name and who this person is is not important.
• 1:25:51
  But it was about that this person worked in beer and they
• 1:25:55
  worked at a distributor that had both craft and large beers and
• 1:25:58
  was kind of kind of like, man, I just didn't like how, you know,
• 1:26:02
  you guys were explaining big beer and talking about big beer
• 1:26:04
  with these controlling all the taps and you know, so and so
• 1:26:08
  just kind of like, and it was like this person was perfectly
• 1:26:11
  lovely and nice about it, but it was face to face.
• 1:26:13
  It was face to face interaction and literally it's the only
• 1:26:16
  thing. And even then it was sandwiched
• 1:26:19
  with like really loved it. Hey, really appreciate you did
• 1:26:21
  the project right. Like it was still, it was still
• 1:26:23
  very kind, but I've had one, one, one thing and I was like,
• 1:26:26
  God, we're almost perfect there No way you can get everybody to
• 1:26:29
  agree on something in 2026. No, that's fantastic.
• 1:26:32
  Like, well, we listened to it and we we saw it.
• 1:26:35
  Drop. I saw it drop.
• 1:26:36
  Somewhere didn't didn't have any precursor to it or anything and
• 1:26:39
  saw it dropping. Now this is interesting.
• 1:26:40
  I think I sent it like these guys at least told them about it
• 1:26:42
  and started listening to it because this is then this is
• 1:26:44
  good. Like, you know, we're kind of in
• 1:26:46
  it. And I was like, you were
• 1:26:47
  teaching a shit we didn't know or hadn't heard of or I didn't
• 1:26:50
  know there weren't 2 prohibitions in Tennessee.
• 1:26:52
  I didn't know that. And hopefully people that listen
• 1:26:55
  to it will appreciate and. Understand that there's probably
• 1:26:58
  hours and hours and hours of interviews that you did and you
• 1:27:02
  condense these downs to about 20 minutes or so and that takes a
• 1:27:06
  lot of time to to find, you know, the best sound bites and
• 1:27:10
  everything else. It's not an easy process to no
• 1:27:12
  well, I'm I'm hoping to discovery, I'm hoping I'm hoping
• 1:27:14
  to subpoena Braden like the Epstein files to release all.
• 1:27:17
  Of them, I want all, I want all the tapes out.
• 1:27:19
  I want everything out in the public domain.
• 1:27:23
  Release out in a while, then release the beard.
• 1:27:26
  This is no. Cam Ward.
• 1:27:28
  This is no Cam Ward. Documentary that the tapes.
• 1:27:30
  Will be released. No, we did.
• 1:27:33
  I think I've got 31 hours of interviews and and you know,
• 1:27:38
  most of that's Carl. No, Easily.
• 1:27:44
  Easily. Probably 2.
• 1:27:44
  Hours of Linus at like 3. Different.
• 1:27:46
  Time like just. Quickly, if anybody here like if
• 1:27:49
  any of these guys are are listening, like all of them were
• 1:27:51
  so gracious with their time. I give them a lot of credit for
• 1:27:55
  being super engaging and willing to talk and tell their stories
• 1:27:59
  and put up with me busting into their offices and setting up
• 1:28:03
  shop and asking him questions. And Bailey was an hour and 15
• 1:28:07
  minutes and Carl was an hour and 25 minutes.
• 1:28:09
  And Linus was three separate times.
• 1:28:11
  And, you know, Christian and Anthony, like my kids go to
• 1:28:13
  school with Anthony Davis and they're literally in class
• 1:28:16
  together. Christian lives down the street
• 1:28:17
  from me. And like, I was like, hey, man,
• 1:28:19
  I need you to talk about consolidation.
• 1:28:21
  Can you come over here and record this real fast?
• 1:28:22
  And he'd be like, sure, man. And he'd sit down in my in my
• 1:28:25
  house and record with me. So like, they were very, very
• 1:28:28
  gracious, you know, lobbyists had a former mayor, we had City
• 1:28:32
  Council stuff. We had all.
• 1:28:33
  I mean, just again, the the final episode where we've got,
• 1:28:37
  you know, drinkers just telling their story.
• 1:28:39
  And there's two other people I interviewed that told all kinds
• 1:28:42
  of stories about their drinking habits and their family and
• 1:28:44
  their pandemic experiences. And it just wasn't as compelling
• 1:28:47
  as like, so they they don't even exist in the story at all.
• 1:28:50
  And so. Yeah, so many people were
• 1:28:53
  willing and gracious with their time.
• 1:28:55
  And so thank you to all of all of you who helped with that for
• 1:28:57
  sure. Awesome.
• 1:28:59
  I saw on Instagram somebody post on Instagram post or real.
• 1:29:03
  And it was it was small snippets and there were video of several,
• 1:29:07
  maybe all of the interviews that you had.
• 1:29:10
  Like I saw Kramer on there and I saw Anthony Davis and like a
• 1:29:12
  different locations and stuff. Will there be a video aspect of
• 1:29:16
  that somewhere along the way maybe?
• 1:29:17
  Or I mean, I those those were all.
• 1:29:19
  So what's funny is those were all shot.
• 1:29:23
  Much, much later. Those were not part of the
• 1:29:25
  original sit downs, the only like and I and I shot like 4
• 1:29:29
  hours of footage this way and realized it just wasn't
• 1:29:31
  necessarily sustainable. But I had Linus and Bailey and I
• 1:29:35
  had Carl and I think Christian and I had the four kind of
• 1:29:39
  original interviews and all the four, all four of them, every
• 1:29:42
  second is been recorded. But it's just, there's such
• 1:29:45
  massive files and I didn't know. Are we using these for
• 1:29:47
  marketing? There was never an idea to write
• 1:29:50
  the script for video because this is one of the lessons that
• 1:29:53
  I've learned through this. Like writing for the ear is so
• 1:29:58
  different than writing like a book like Chris or an article
• 1:30:01
  for the website or even just like a script for a newscast on
• 1:30:05
  TV. Like they're so different.
• 1:30:07
  You got to show, not tell, which is a phrase my editor told me a
• 1:30:11
  million times. It's now in my head.
• 1:30:13
  And I think that's like it. That's what makes it hard is
• 1:30:16
  trying to, you can't write for a video documentary and a podcast
• 1:30:20
  series. It's it's impossible.
• 1:30:21
  It wouldn't work. And so it's not like a, a Preds
• 1:30:24
  game where you could simulcast the TV Pete Weber onto the radio
• 1:30:27
  and it would be fine because he's Pete Weber.
• 1:30:30
  That's not how this would work. So there'll be some, there'll be
• 1:30:33
  hopefully there'll be like chunks of stuff that comes out
• 1:30:37
  that we can kind of put out and and you know, if Chris, if
• 1:30:40
  Chris's subpoena works and all the files are released in the
• 1:30:44
  video files will be released too.
• 1:30:45
  So well, and you know what I recommend, what I recommend is
• 1:30:48
  if you want to see these people tell.
• 1:30:50
  Their stories. Go to their breweries, buy some
• 1:30:52
  beers, sit down and ask Linus to tell a story.
• 1:30:55
  Sit down and ask Bailey anything you want.
• 1:30:58
  I mean, they are they they, they're there to meet you.
• 1:31:02
  That's why they do this art. Hard agree, the four of us,
• 1:31:06
  Rich, Steven, Mitch and I. We do it anyway, like.
• 1:31:09
  We do the podcast kind of as a subset to us visiting the
• 1:31:13
  breweries and drinking the beer and going in there and it's kind
• 1:31:16
  of one thing leads to the other kind of thing.
• 1:31:17
  But like if this were a Saturday night, I'd be out of here and
• 1:31:21
  I'd go to the brewery. Like I where we're going, you
• 1:31:23
  know, let's go see them kind of thing.
• 1:31:25
  So we we do love to to visit them and see them and talk to
• 1:31:28
  them in the podcast. It's kind of a a continuation of
• 1:31:30
  that. I'm just recommending that for
• 1:31:32
  your listeners. I know you guys are bars so.
• 1:31:36
  Have a look over now it's and see you guys.
• 1:31:38
  Are like, Oh yeah, I see you. It's where all the facial hair
• 1:31:42
  comes from. As we're wrapping up the Where
• 1:31:45
  do you? Guys like to hang out food.
• 1:31:47
  Wise. Very wise.
• 1:31:49
  Where do you guys like to frequent I I do like fate
• 1:31:51
  laforce before AFC game. That's a, you know, it's.
• 1:31:54
  Such a fun, quirky place. And they're not obsessed about
• 1:31:58
  styles, you know, they make things up.
• 1:32:00
  And I think that's fine. If it's delicious, I don't care
• 1:32:03
  whether it's true to style. Now, if you're trying to do
• 1:32:05
  something true to style, then by God, do it.
• 1:32:07
  But if you're not, just make a beer that's fun and interesting
• 1:32:10
  and it'd be a good 20 minute walk from from Giotis.
• 1:32:14
  That's that's a place I like to hang out.
• 1:32:16
  Just make sure it tastes good, right?
• 1:32:17
  Right. Yeah, man, that's.
• 1:32:20
  That's sort of a impossible question to.
• 1:32:21
  Answer shortly because it's. Just like all of them, every
• 1:32:25
  restaurant I try to go to all of them and the breweries as well.
• 1:32:28
  I look, I like MO. This is not a shill here, but MO
• 1:32:31
  rose before SC games with my kids because we park right there
• 1:32:35
  on Craighead and it's a very easy place to go, have a good
• 1:32:38
  meal and head over to an SC game.
• 1:32:39
  Fatal Force after when the kids are going home with mom is a
• 1:32:42
  good, it's a good, it's a good stop.
• 1:32:45
  I love that I if people come to town, like I had some family
• 1:32:47
  come to town. My cousins came to town a couple
• 1:32:50
  of months ago and they're just like, where should, where, where
• 1:32:53
  are we going to go? And I was like, I, I would take
• 1:32:55
  them to try to showcase food and beer together.
• 1:32:58
  I would, I would, I'll probably go to Smith and Lentz.
• 1:33:01
  I can get really good high quality craft beer.
• 1:33:04
  I can get an elite pepperoni pizza.
• 1:33:06
  They can kind of see the, the it's like right kind of close to
• 1:33:09
  downtown like that. That's a place that I recommend
• 1:33:12
  to people because I think it kind of gives everybody
• 1:33:14
  everything. If you want to take a family to
• 1:33:16
  a chill place, go to go to Madison and go to Yazoo.
• 1:33:18
  We really like that for all of our soccer tournaments that we
• 1:33:21
  play in Madison and Gallatin. So we go up to Yazoo either
• 1:33:24
  before or after. So there's, I mean, again, like
• 1:33:27
  Southern Grist has incredible food in the summertime in
• 1:33:30
  particular. I love their food.
• 1:33:32
  I mean, I keep going. Bearded Iris is great.
• 1:33:34
  Like I, you know, yeah. Oh yeah.
• 1:33:35
  Where where to stop? We shout out to Stoke House in
• 1:33:38
  your neighborhood too, because that's that's like getting
• 1:33:40
  invited. To a buddy's house to drink home
• 1:33:42
  brew and he also cooks kick ass barbecue.
• 1:33:46
  And if the kids need to run around and it's a nice day, the
• 1:33:49
  pizza's cheap. But East Nashville beer works
• 1:33:51
  with the dog. It's like it's so easy for the
• 1:33:53
  kids. I was in a huge argument the
• 1:33:55
  other day with my buddy about how kid friendly Nashville is
• 1:33:58
  and they were just like, it's not kid friendly at all.
• 1:34:00
  And I'm like, there's plenty of reasons we could discuss that
• 1:34:02
  make it not kid friendly. But like all the breweries that
• 1:34:06
  you can go to, like again, Outback of Smith and Lentz,
• 1:34:08
  Bearded Iris, like you can take kids to places that where
• 1:34:12
  there's things for them to do because they've thought about
• 1:34:13
  them and they want families to come.
• 1:34:15
  And that's Anthony's brand, maybe too much, but but that's
• 1:34:19
  his brand. Just bring your kids, bring your
• 1:34:21
  dog, come hang out and you can have a good beer and cheap
• 1:34:23
  pizza. He completely solved that issue
• 1:34:25
  with the with the Lebanon location as in as it.
• 1:34:28
  Like hey. You can't the kids can't go
• 1:34:29
  upstairs and he kind of because he was getting complaints.
• 1:34:32
  Hey, you guys are too kid friendly.
• 1:34:34
  He's like, OK, that's right. We'll find a nice balance here.
• 1:34:36
  That's OK. The kids can go downstairs and
• 1:34:38
  they can do anything they want. Bring the.
• 1:34:40
  Dogs, you got everything going on just wherever you go to go to
• 1:34:45
  it more if you can. That's that's the.
• 1:34:46
  Key, I mean Margo. 'S closing this year.
• 1:34:49
  I mean, all kinds of restaurants are closing.
• 1:34:51
  So if you like your brewery or you like your restaurant, just
• 1:34:54
  go that's in your neighborhood, go support it and and learn
• 1:34:57
  about it. That's you can't, can't
• 1:34:59
  reiterate that enough. Totally, totally.
• 1:35:01
  And you live in a great part of town for a lot of those
• 1:35:03
  breweries you just mentioned. I am lucky.
• 1:35:04
  I am very fortunate, spent a lot of time over there 100 and. 50
• 1:35:08
  yards from the Old Southern. Grist location like.
• 1:35:11
  Again, that story about putting. My kids in the stroller was 100%
• 1:35:14
  true. So man, it's big for the vinyl
• 1:35:17
  tap and yeah. Where, Where Carl?
• 1:35:20
  Meyer likes to DJ, in fact. Yep, exactly.
• 1:35:23
  Don't you have a? Great Taco place over that area
• 1:35:25
  too. Like the?
• 1:35:25
  One SO. Now I will say Alebreje is.
• 1:35:30
  The best Taco in the city, but that's my personal favorite,
• 1:35:32
  which is technically just down the street from from us
• 1:35:35
  Breakfast burrito. They just changed their name to
• 1:35:38
  resting burrito face, which is like the best the the the best
• 1:35:43
  burrito in the city for breakfast burritos.
• 1:35:45
  It's online. I saw on the Nashville scene
• 1:35:46
  page earlier I was looking at it's so good.
• 1:35:48
  It's so good it used. To be called.
• 1:35:50
  Like J. Moss, I'd love to know.
• 1:35:51
  What their marketing? Meeting was like, like, I want
• 1:35:53
  to know like J Mos. Everybody just called it J Mos
• 1:35:56
  and now it's RBF, which is hilarious.
• 1:35:59
  But like rusting burrito on that.
• 1:36:01
  That's great. It's a very, very good breakfast
• 1:36:04
  burrito. If if you're in town, so.
• 1:36:06
  Oh, resting burrito face, all right, Yeah.
• 1:36:12
  Mitch's Mitch's wheels. Are turning.
• 1:36:14
  Yeah, I always told him he's. Got up on his page like.
• 1:36:18
  Right above this camera across the street is Yeah.
• 1:36:22
  Across the street is the best burger.
• 1:36:24
  In the city. The Dream Burger in the city.
• 1:36:26
  Dream Burger is the best burger I've had in this city for sure.
• 1:36:29
  Really. OK, I've been over there.
• 1:36:30
  I. Think we had that, Mitch?
• 1:36:32
  They were, aren't they? Right.
• 1:36:33
  Down the road from was. It vinyl tap or do it.
• 1:36:35
  They have their food truck, right?
• 1:36:36
  They're in the in the parking lot.
• 1:36:39
  Yeah, in the parking lot. Yeah, they were awesome.
• 1:36:41
  And they hit the spot easily. Yeah, for you guys.
• 1:36:45
  Anything more for Chris and Brayden?
• 1:36:47
  I'll let them go, I. Think Brayden had a show he
• 1:36:50
  wanted to go watch? There's a lot more, but we're at
• 1:36:54
  a little we're. Definitely at an.
• 1:36:56
  Hour and 40. So yeah, yeah, we'll do this
• 1:37:00
  again. This is longer.
• 1:37:01
  Than our entire podcast. Here's my request.
• 1:37:08
  Here's my request. I don't know if we could do it,
• 1:37:10
  but I'd love to do it again. But if we could record it in
• 1:37:12
  person at a table with some beers, that'd be really cool.
• 1:37:15
  100% Let's figure out where and when, yeah?
• 1:37:20
  Absolutely. We would love it.
• 1:37:22
  We've done it many times. We're happy to.
• 1:37:23
  Do it many more times. Absolutely love to.
• 1:37:27
  Let's do it. Thanks for making the time.
• 1:37:28
  I know you're busy guys. Thank.
• 1:37:29
  You very much. For.
• 1:37:30
  Patriot it is raising. An empty glass to you guys,
• 1:37:33
  Yeah. Cheers.
• 1:37:34
  Cheers to you guys. Serious appreciate.
• 1:37:36
  You see you all soon. Bye bye.