Latest / The Brewery Underground Podcast | Craft Beer Interviews, Reviews and Beer Travel / Stoke House Brewing & Barbecue: East Nashville Craft Beer, BBQ & Building a Brewery | Episode 113

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Stoke House Brewing & Barbecue: East Nashville Craft Beer, BBQ & Building a Brewery | Episode 113 · The Brewery Underground Podcast | Craft Beer Interviews, Reviews and Beer Travel

• 0:01
  Stand by for the brewery underground podcast in Nashville
• 0:13
  Swipe will rise crafts and brews will meet the skies, Steven
• 0:19
  Scott daily the way brewery underground night and.
• 0:24
  Day. Look at that.
• 0:40
  We're live. We're live.
• 0:41
  Well, we're not exactly live, but we're live.
• 0:43
  For, I mean at the moment. We're being live at the moment.
• 0:46
  We're being live. And you know what?
• 0:47
  We we're at a great place, man. We are at Stoke House Brewing
• 0:50
  and Barbecue in East Nashville, Steve and Scott.
• 0:55
  And look at the guy who is sitting next to us, Chabula, the
• 0:59
  man in charge. How are you, Sir?
• 1:01
  I'm all right. Yeah, that's fine.
• 1:02
  Yeah, time. Time doesn't exist.
• 1:05
  Time doesn't exist, That's right.
• 1:07
  It's all. It's all one clump of.
• 1:09
  Yeah, it's just the it's like. A series of naps and taking care
• 1:12
  of things here. And yeah, that's right.
• 1:14
  When you own a brewery, it doesn't matter what time it is,
• 1:17
  right? Well, I mean that's like I think
• 1:19
  that's owning any business or but luckily we do.
• 1:21
  I mean, we've got a good team here and I've got a good
• 1:23
  business partner and Mike as well.
• 1:25
  So it's not too much. It's a lot, but it's not too
• 1:28
  much. Yeah, you know, Yeah, yeah.
• 1:30
  Well, we're, we're great. We're great to, you know, have
• 1:33
  you on our podcast cause we've been talking about this for
• 1:36
  quite a while and we're actually recording this on a Sunday
• 1:39
  morning. Yep.
• 1:40
  And we have beers in hand already.
• 1:42
  Look at this. It is.
• 1:43
  It is officially 945 now. We've had these for several
• 1:46
  minutes already, so we've started early today, but cheers
• 1:49
  guys. Cheers to you.
• 1:50
  Thank you for having us. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:52
  Thank you for. Being on with us and this is my
• 1:54
  third day in a row here. That's.
• 1:56
  Yes, I know. I will take a day off to work,
• 2:00
  luckily you guys are closed tomorrow so you don't have to
• 2:02
  see me. You start busting glasses, I'm
• 2:03
  gonna pay you at this point. You're here enough.
• 2:07
  Get some work out of you, yeah? We'll work for burgers, yeah.
• 2:11
  Our buddy Michael Stokes comes in and he was like, he's got a
• 2:13
  Stoke house at the Stoke and I think somebody maybe was, Jason
• 2:15
  said. Why you sitting around on your
• 2:17
  names on the bill to get to work?
• 2:18
  Yeah, He didn't get off. He didn't get out of the chair.
• 2:23
  So, by the way, what is it that we're drinking from Stoke House?
• 2:26
  We're sipping on the original this morning.
• 2:28
  As a professional, if you start drinking before 10:00, you want
• 2:31
  to go under 5% ABV. Yeah, no, it's, it's our house,
• 2:35
  our house lager, all Tennessee barley, Tennessee corn.
• 2:38
  And then we use some Jasmine rice that's grown over in
• 2:41
  Arkansas. So it's like very Southern.
• 2:43
  One thing I like about it is that Tennessee barley comes so,
• 2:46
  so fresh because we get it from Riverbend.
• 2:48
  Riverbend does a lot of small batch the malting of Tennessee.
• 2:53
  Well, they do all southern green, but we focus specifically
• 2:55
  on the Tennessee only stuff. That and the malted corn.
• 2:59
  They come so fresh. You get this nice fresh like
• 3:01
  grassy character and then that corn comes through like like
• 3:03
  it's very strong. The corn characters, it takes a
• 3:05
  very little bit to get that like nice, kind of like nutty corn
• 3:08
  character in it. And then that Jasmine rice,
• 3:10
  slight floralness, dries it out a little bit, makes a little
• 3:12
  smoother, crisper. One of our conversations in the
• 3:16
  past few weeks when I was talking to you, you've changed.
• 3:18
  You've tweaked this recipe a little bit from the first time
• 3:20
  you've made it. Yeah, sometimes you find that
• 3:23
  you need to, you know, Polish some things here and there.
• 3:27
  On the subject of that Tennessee corn, it comes through so
• 3:29
  strong, decided to dial it back cuz we wanted some of the
• 3:33
  subtleties of that Jasmine rice to come through and pop up a
• 3:36
  little bit more. So slowly dial stuff back.
• 3:39
  You don't wanna do anything too extreme one way or another.
• 3:41
  Just like when you're cooking or baking or something, you know,
• 3:44
  try it. You're not gonna do this is
• 3:45
  good, but I wanted it to be more like this.
• 3:47
  How do I get to that point? And so, yeah, made a couple
• 3:50
  tweaks and it turned out exactly where we wanted to, yeah.
• 3:53
  Where you were going for it? Has anyone been able to tell the
• 3:56
  difference just like your customers or anything like say
• 3:58
  hey did you do anything? Different.
• 3:59
  I mean, they haven't said anything.
• 4:00
  Yeah, yeah. But to you, you would know as
• 4:02
  the burger like that you dialed. Exactly where you.
• 4:04
  Wanted to, but somebody who had one and maybe had the one right
• 4:07
  after it might not even be able to tell the difference.
• 4:09
  Yeah, that's true. And then there's all the QA QC
• 4:12
  that goes along with it. So, you know, like me, Jason and
• 4:14
  Mike, you know, I try to make sure that we all get to taste
• 4:17
  stuff as it's finishing up. And, or if it's to the point
• 4:20
  where it's like we're going to move it to carbonate and then
• 4:22
  keg off and make sure everyone tastes it.
• 4:25
  Try to do a blind everyone, everyone's always like, what's
• 4:27
  this? And my canned response is it's
• 4:29
  beer drinking and tell me what you think, tell me what you
• 4:32
  taste. So we we make sure that so we're
• 4:36
  going to notice it because we're trying it all along the way so
• 4:40
  we can see where it starts, where it develops, where it goes
• 4:42
  and how it comes out of the finish.
• 4:44
  But it's good to have more than just one pallet doing that.
• 4:47
  Yeah. You're, you know, when you're
• 4:48
  tasting like that, you're getting it at different levels,
• 4:51
  very different stages of the beer, and it's coming along the
• 4:53
  way. Yeah.
• 4:53
  Beer like green what? Green beer is beer that's not
• 4:56
  ready to package and be sold yet, but green beer is actually
• 4:59
  pretty fucking gross. Yeah, yeah, you're like
• 5:02
  definitely not ready yet. Yeah, and sometimes you just
• 5:05
  smell and you're like, I, you know what?
• 5:06
  I know exactly where. I'm not even tasting that yet.
• 5:09
  It smells like it should. Yeah, Right.
• 5:12
  Right. And that's usually why I won't.
• 5:14
  I won't, you know, let people like, I'll poll sometimes, you
• 5:17
  know, friends come by or got something I'm excited about.
• 5:19
  Like I'll take some samples off the fermenter, but only for
• 5:22
  people to try, but only when it's done.
• 5:25
  It's like my first career was in photography and stuff.
• 5:27
  And if I started in that when it was still film.
• 5:29
  And so in studio photography, you had these big 4 by 5 cameras
• 5:32
  and they had a special back for them that would do a Polaroid.
• 5:34
  So you could do a test of whatever you're shooting in the
• 5:36
  studio and make sure everything you know, like there weren't
• 5:39
  spots on something or you know, you can see what the, you know,
• 5:42
  like a preview of what the image is going to look at.
• 5:44
  But it's a Polaroid and you do it really quickly and you do it
• 5:46
  more for, you know, the sake of layout than anything and
• 5:49
  exposure than anything else. And they, they were always
• 5:51
  telling us they're like the one thing you don't do.
• 5:53
  Like when you have a client, you don't give them the Polaroid
• 5:55
  because then they'll they'll take it, they'll want it.
• 5:57
  They'll want that. And it's lower quality and it's
• 6:00
  not as good. So don't ever do that.
• 6:02
  So that's, that's kind of the same thing with like green beer.
• 6:04
  Like if I'm going to pull beer off a tank for someone to try,
• 6:07
  it's like, I need to know that it's finished and ready or, or
• 6:09
  just about to be, you know, sometimes with loggers, while
• 6:12
  they're logger and they might get like a little sulfur
• 6:14
  character for a minute. And as long as it's not too bad,
• 6:16
  I'll be like, yeah, that's all for be out of there.
• 6:18
  But try this, you know? But for the most part, yeah, you
• 6:19
  don't want cuz that's what they're gonna, they're gonna
• 6:21
  you're gonna remember something that tastes like shit.
• 6:23
  Yeah, yeah. And and beer that's fermenting
• 6:25
  does not generally taste great. And could a day or two make a
• 6:30
  difference? I'm sure it can, right?
• 6:31
  Well, yeah, just be like that's. I just need another day or two
• 6:34
  on this thing for it to be exactly where I wanted.
• 6:36
  Yeah, I find that a lot, especially doing like BDK tests,
• 6:40
  like testing for diacetyl precursor.
• 6:44
  We use a lot of English yeast which creates a lot of diacetyl
• 6:47
  and diacetyl is not a very, I'm very sensitive to it and it's
• 6:50
  just not, it's just kind of gross.
• 6:53
  So you generally what we'll do. I mean, we use an enzyme called
• 6:56
  ALDC during fermentation that's supposed to help keep diasto
• 7:01
  precursors low. Like like diastole like is
• 7:04
  something like that's something that yeast naturally creates,
• 7:06
  but if you give it long enough, it'll reabsorb it and it kind of
• 7:09
  helps it go into that hibernation stage.
• 7:11
  It like, you know, it's almost like food for it, but if you
• 7:15
  rush things too much, you can start getting a change.
• 7:17
  Or when you dry hop, you might have a low re fermentation and
• 7:20
  then some diastole gets created. That's like what hop creep, if
• 7:23
  you've ever heard the term hop creep, a lot of that is like re
• 7:25
  fermentation and sometimes you get that diastole creation.
• 7:28
  So things like ALDC help us keep those levels low.
• 7:31
  But you always want to make sure the beer is done and that that
• 7:35
  the yeast is done doing what it's doing.
• 7:37
  So sometimes a diet like a VDK test is we just take some to
• 7:41
  take a sample off the fermenter, heat it up for about 3045
• 7:46
  minutes or when I remember to take it out of the take it out
• 7:50
  of the bucket of water. Yeah, we heat it up with like
• 7:51
  170 a 180° water for a while and then let it cool down.
• 7:55
  And then it'll actually, you'll be able to smell or taste the
• 7:58
  diacetyl if the the precursor is there.
• 8:01
  But that's one thing too that you'll be like, you know, you
• 8:03
  can, if it's really strong, it's like, OK, try to get in a couple
• 8:06
  days and then it'll, you'll actually notice it like dropping
• 8:08
  the levels of it dropping. And that's cuz the yeast is
• 8:10
  doing what it's supposed to do, which is reabsorbing all those
• 8:13
  precursors. OK, well.
• 8:14
  That's cool. Yeah.
• 8:15
  So just it could happen that. Quickly, yeah.
• 8:17
  And then same thing with like loggers.
• 8:19
  A lot of logger yeast will create like a little bit of a
• 8:21
  sulfur character. Some of that passes over and
• 8:24
  certain styles it's appropriate and some of it may Passover into
• 8:26
  the packaged beer. But generally if you just let it
• 8:30
  sit cold for a little bit longer, it'll it'll clear up.
• 8:32
  So sometimes it's one day, 2 days.
• 8:35
  I mean, it depends on when you start noticing it.
• 8:37
  And yeah, it's patience is a virtue in making quality beer.
• 8:42
  How many years now going back? I mean, obviously this place is
• 8:45
  new, but from what you do as a Brewer, bring beer.
• 8:48
  How many years is that in for you now?
• 8:51
  I think I'm at like 11, maybe 11 1/2.
• 8:55
  I don't know. Like I said, time doesn't exist.
• 8:57
  And I was working, I was doing like I, I started, I also
• 9:00
  started in like retail beer sales.
• 9:01
  I've been kind of, you know, ancillary in the beer industry
• 9:04
  for a while. And then that doesn't include
• 9:05
  like all the home brewing, all those years that I did that.
• 9:10
  But I try not to count the home brewing part because it's like,
• 9:13
  yeah, you learn the science, but that's about it.
• 9:15
  Like it's not, it's not the same as running a brewery.
• 9:17
  No, but it gave you your start, right?
• 9:18
  At least Maybe even the maybe some of that creativity and some
• 9:22
  of that, yeah, just figuring stuff out.
• 9:24
  Yeah, it's a great foundation, especially about recipe
• 9:27
  development, how certain ingredients work, assesses,
• 9:30
  learning good cleaning and sanitation.
• 9:31
  No matter what, as long as you're doing good cleaning and
• 9:33
  sanitation like you're probably, your beer is probably going to
• 9:35
  be pretty all right. So it does give you a
• 9:37
  foundation. But then you can't expect
• 9:40
  professional brewing to be like home brewing because it's the
• 9:43
  home brewing's a hobby, right? Not that it can't be stressful
• 9:46
  and back breaking, but it's at a different level when the state,
• 9:50
  you know, you raise the stakes, stakes are higher.
• 9:52
  Yeah, if nobody tastes it, if you make a bad beer at home,
• 9:55
  yeah, you're like, OK, well, I'll just dump it or I'll drink
• 9:57
  it myself. Dumping 5 gallons is easier than
• 10:00
  I mean every, every brewery has had to dump beer.
• 10:04
  There's no shame in it. The brews dump bad beer, sure,
• 10:07
  but it's a lot easier to take dumping 5 gallons of beer than
• 10:10
  it is dumping like 80 barrels. See.
• 10:13
  It disappear. You're like, Oh my God, all that
• 10:15
  time and effort and yeah, and money, obviously.
• 10:18
  Yeah, Well, I mean, in the past it's been, I mean, it's been
• 10:22
  other people's money in the past.
• 10:23
  It's not my money, you know, But yeah, there's, there's times
• 10:27
  where I mean, it is, it's discouraging.
• 10:29
  But then you just got to, you know, we just got to move on
• 10:31
  from it. Yeah, I mean, you know, you
• 10:33
  mentioned it's like you're cooking at home, right?
• 10:35
  We've all met, you know, we've all had food we've made.
• 10:38
  And then you go, you know what? Yeah, this isn't.
• 10:40
  I'm not feeling this today, what I've made.
• 10:41
  And yeah, you know, it just happened so.
• 10:43
  Yeah. Or like, yeah, you or you
• 10:44
  accidentally had too much salt or.
• 10:46
  Yeah. Or something.
• 10:46
  Yeah, yeah. Can a bad beer?
• 10:48
  And this probably wide open question, can a bad beer be
• 10:51
  turned into something else when I say bad?
• 10:53
  Like, not spoiled, but maybe that's not what you were going
• 10:56
  for. Well, well, I guess that's a bad
• 11:00
  beer would be 1 wouldn't be necessarily not what you're
• 11:03
  going for. I know many of us have missed
• 11:07
  the mark on, you know, we brew a beer and we missed the mark on
• 11:10
  what we're going for. But we're like, well, it's not
• 11:11
  really that, but it is more of this style.
• 11:14
  And as long as it's, you know, no off flavors, it's drinking
• 11:17
  good and you're happy and, you know, you know, that you're
• 11:21
  putting something of decent quality out there.
• 11:23
  I mean, we've all done that. And so in that sense, you just
• 11:25
  kind of rebranded. Yeah.
• 11:27
  For the most part though, if something is is bad, if it,
• 11:32
  excuse me, if there's like off flavors in it or if it just the
• 11:37
  balance is off in a way that's not palatable.
• 11:41
  I mean, you can try blending it down or throw in some, you know,
• 11:45
  some bugs in it to maybe make sour beer.
• 11:47
  But in general, it's just easy. It's just start over cuz there's
• 11:51
  no guarantee that any of those solutions are gonna solve it.
• 11:55
  And if you then at that point, you've wasted time, more time,
• 11:58
  more money, yeah. It's just easier to say, well,
• 12:01
  OK, what went wrong? Don't do that again.
• 12:03
  Yeah, yeah. And let's, you know, rebrew it
• 12:06
  or move on or whatever it is. Yeah.
• 12:08
  Yeah. It's still gotta be
• 12:09
  heartbreaking. I'll just see it go down the
• 12:10
  drain. Yeah, I mean, I remember, yeah,
• 12:13
  I remember the first time I had to.
• 12:14
  My first, my first job brewing out here was with Black Abbey.
• 12:17
  And I remember the first time I had to like, something went
• 12:20
  wrong. We had to dump like 40 barrels
• 12:21
  of beer down the drain, and I was like, man, that sucks.
• 12:26
  But then there's a point where you're just like, just kind of
• 12:28
  part of it. Yeah, yeah.
• 12:30
  There's no, no, no point in getting hung up on breakups, you
• 12:32
  know? That you learn from that.
• 12:34
  Yeah. Make that mistake again.
• 12:36
  We know what it is. You probably pinpoint what it
• 12:38
  is, I would imagine. Oh, we know what's wrong here.
• 12:39
  Well, we we do our best, you know, generally it's, you know,
• 12:42
  working backwards, you know, you check, you know, if it's
• 12:48
  generally it's going to be something probably in the
• 12:49
  fermenter or in the heat exchange or in your hoses or
• 12:52
  something like that. So you just kind of work
• 12:55
  backwards and or it could be in if you're re pitching yeast.
• 12:58
  But that's why we track some time we re pitch yeast, you
• 13:01
  know, on a recipe sheet, we track the generation and one
• 13:03
  batch of came off of so we can work backwards.
• 13:05
  So if there's, you know, if there's some weird off flavor in
• 13:08
  something, it's like, OK, well, what beer did this yeast come
• 13:10
  off of? Let's go try that beer.
• 13:11
  Is are we getting in this OK, No, it's not the yeast.
• 13:14
  Yes, it's probably the yeast. Or is it in the same fermenter
• 13:17
  as what was the last batch in this fermenter?
• 13:19
  Do we still have some of that? Try that.
• 13:21
  So is it something? Is there a gasket we needed to
• 13:23
  replace? Is something loose and like, is
• 13:26
  it not fully closed off or whatever it is?
• 13:28
  Yeah. But mostly it would end up being
• 13:30
  the heat exchanger. Yeah, those things are, yeah.
• 13:37
  And they take a lot to clean properly.
• 13:39
  And generally if a brewery has an issue, that's probably the
• 13:43
  first place cuz they're just so many little nooks and crannies
• 13:45
  where things can get stuck and grow, especially if you're not
• 13:48
  doing a proper cleaning on them, right?
• 13:51
  Yeah, man, before we we ask you any more questions, we have
• 13:54
  something for. You, yeah.
• 13:56
  And I want you to open it here. Oh my God, Did you give me a
• 13:58
  medal? Yeah.
• 14:01
  Did you actually do that? That's.
• 14:02
  Coming. Well, not quite, not quite.
• 14:03
  OK so so this is a running theme now.
• 14:07
  All right. Guys so so it did kind of run
• 14:11
  out I did start yes so there's. The lips, I love it.
• 14:16
  So I, I guess the back story is you guys had when, when foamies
• 14:19
  were here that they saw that or something and then it got broken
• 14:24
  afterwards. Yeah.
• 14:25
  So we had someone had brought, I think it was Mike or his wife
• 14:30
  had brought an ashtray of these that looked exactly like this.
• 14:35
  And Mitch from Foamy Heads was particularly thought it was
• 14:38
  particularly like it was a funny, it was a funny thing.
• 14:41
  And there was one day that it got and he mentioned it, how
• 14:44
  funny it was and how much like it was like, yeah, it's pretty
• 14:46
  cool. It's wild and kind of gross, but
• 14:48
  kind of like gross in a cool way.
• 14:49
  And then like maybe a week later, it got broken.
• 14:52
  And the next time he was here, he was like, what happened to
• 14:54
  the ashtray? And I was like, oh, well, he got
• 14:56
  knocked off the, you know, the AC units back there or something
• 15:00
  and it broke. And then the next time he was
• 15:03
  here, I wasn't here, but he brought a new one.
• 15:07
  And then like a week after you brought a new one, one of us, it
• 15:11
  might Jason or Mike was out there with the leaf blower
• 15:14
  because all that, all the leaves and stuff, it was turned, you
• 15:17
  know, when that tree was shedding, basically getting all
• 15:19
  the leaves off the patio. And he like went behind that
• 15:23
  little table area we have back there and this was sitting on it
• 15:26
  and enough, it was just enough of wind from the leaf blower
• 15:30
  that it just right off the man. Off it goes.
• 15:34
  And you told me that story because when I I knew they had
• 15:36
  gotten you the 1. And when I came in next time, I
• 15:38
  was like, oh, where's the thing? And it's, oh, you told me that
• 15:40
  stuff. Yeah.
• 15:41
  So I told them and I go OK well we got to get another.
• 15:43
  So we're trying to keep this. Team going for because that's
• 15:46
  right, because again, it's it's such a cool thing and Mitch
• 15:48
  loved it so much. So yeah, we ran up to those.
• 15:51
  It's part it is now ingrained in the Stokehouse lore, yeah.
• 15:56
  If you're without one, it won't be for very long, which we know.
• 15:58
  If you know, if it breaks again, we'll just go get another one.
• 16:00
  Yeah, I'm just gonna. I'll just text you guys next
• 16:03
  time whenever this breaks. I guess at this point we got to
• 16:06
  see how long we have to have like a ranking.
• 16:09
  So that one that Mitch brought probably lasted.
• 16:11
  I think that only lasted a week, so this one will last longer.
• 16:14
  But if it, I don't know if we want if we want to track the one
• 16:18
  that breaks fastest or the one that doesn't, right?
• 16:20
  I mean, maybe we can do both. You know, you know, one day
• 16:22
  we'll be like, is it still exists?
• 16:24
  Day 84. Yeah, I'll just carve it like a
• 16:27
  like an old prison cell. Just carve it on the brick in
• 16:29
  the outside a number of days. There you go.
• 16:31
  Well. Stamp the notes.
• 16:32
  That's not the only thing you're getting today.
• 16:35
  There's the only physical thing that we brought.
• 16:37
  However, you won a couple of awards with us.
• 16:40
  Yeah, Yeah, you were telling me. Yeah, so and please tell.
• 16:43
  Everyone how great I. Am so we do an annual Papa
• 16:47
  awards, free underground podcast awards and and I and I put the
• 16:50
  the post out just this morning before I came in here today.
• 16:53
  You guys won the Papa for the Best New brewery 2025.
• 16:57
  Thank you for the prestigious. Was there another brewery that
• 17:00
  opened in 2025? Though I guess it would be still
• 17:02
  be my question, still the. Best they wouldn't have stood a
• 17:06
  chance anyway. That's right, That's right.
• 17:08
  They had no shot. But also on top of that, you
• 17:10
  also we had, we gave out categories or awards for like
• 17:14
  different categories. You won for American lager,
• 17:18
  favorite American lager for the original that we're drinking
• 17:21
  right now. Yeah, absolutely love it.
• 17:23
  So cheers for that. And you won a bumper for your
• 17:26
  stoke fest as favorite Oktoberfest, Slash Mars and
• 17:28
  slash fest, period. So you won for that too.
• 17:30
  So you walked away with three bumpers.
• 17:32
  Look at that. Now we don't have a physical
• 17:33
  thing yet. But we're good.
• 17:34
  Yeah, just this is This is why I was like, did you actually get
• 17:38
  me a medal 'cause he was telling me about these yesterday and I
• 17:40
  was like, medals. I was like, yeah, so do where I
• 17:42
  want medals. I know we got to get you got.
• 17:44
  To get you a medal, you know? I was going to do at least like
• 17:48
  a print out because we have a, we have a design for like a like
• 17:51
  virtual and I was going to try to print it up.
• 17:53
  I I didn't have access to a color printer.
• 17:55
  Yesterday. But we we'll.
• 17:56
  Revisit that. Yeah, well, that's all the
• 17:58
  physical. It's all good, you know.
• 18:01
  This is This will suffice so. That's part.
• 18:04
  It's all built in there. Well, even even when we did our,
• 18:07
  you know, we, we go to new breweries too, you know, not
• 18:10
  just in Nashville, but throughout the country.
• 18:12
  Well, when I say country, I mean we, we went to some this year
• 18:15
  and he was in Germany, he was in Denver, we were up in Ohio and
• 18:20
  other places as well. It was across Tennessee.
• 18:23
  And we did our like our top ten list of new breweries that we
• 18:26
  went to this year or in 2025, I should say.
• 18:30
  I went to about 25 new breweries.
• 18:33
  How many did you go to? 3047.
• 18:36
  And so Cal's was definitely in my top ten.
• 18:38
  I think you were guys like a #2. Who's number one?
• 18:40
  I'm gonna go find him and do a collab beer with him.
• 18:44
  Do it with Great Lakes because you know, we're trying to bring
• 18:47
  Great Lakes. We.
• 18:47
  Were to Tennessee, oh man, that would be that would be a dream.
• 18:49
  Great Lakes was, as somebody who'd spent a lot of time
• 18:53
  originally from Ohio as we talked about it, my colleges up
• 18:56
  in northeastern Ohio, Great Lakes always will hold a special
• 18:58
  place in my heart. And they're still doing great.
• 19:00
  Things anytime. Anytime I'm anywhere that sells
• 19:03
  Great Lakes beer, I get it every time.
• 19:05
  Yeah, one of these, Well, you know, you know, maybe you could
• 19:08
  help us then maybe you could do a collab with Great Lakes and
• 19:11
  help us get Great Lakes beer in the Tennessee.
• 19:14
  We've been trying for that for a while.
• 19:15
  Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a
• 19:18
  lot that goes into exporting to Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 19:21
  Tennessee doesn't necessarily have favorable laws.
• 19:24
  Yeah. I mean, that's why for a while
• 19:26
  we didn't get a lot of beer here because the the laws were
• 19:29
  anything over 6.3 was considered liquor and was, you know, taxed
• 19:32
  and treated like liquor. So a lot of breweries were like,
• 19:35
  yeah, no, it's not worth, it's not worth all the trouble to
• 19:38
  send things there because a lot of portfolios had a lot of
• 19:41
  things, especially back then when it was a race for AB VS and
• 19:44
  Ibus. They were they were like, well,
• 19:48
  it's not worth it. So but once that law got
• 19:50
  changed, that's when a lot of other breweries started.
• 19:52
  You started seeing, you know, like that's I think when like
• 19:55
  Bells started coming here and a lot of a lot of Michigan
• 20:00
  breweries actually started selling stuff there.
• 20:04
  That was back in my retail days. I'm just blanking on names
• 20:06
  because I'm terrible. That's OK.
• 20:09
  Probably because I was drinking all those beers.
• 20:11
  Yeah. But yeah, I don't know.
• 20:13
  I don't know what Great Lakes like, what their distribution.
• 20:16
  Model looks like necessarily, but I mean right now you're
• 20:19
  probably not seeing a lot of breweries expanding into new
• 20:22
  markets anyway. It's tough and a lot of people
• 20:25
  are are not ramping up production.
• 20:27
  They're either maintaining or, you know, slimming down a little
• 20:30
  bit. Because even if you expand to
• 20:32
  another state, you're still growing.
• 20:33
  But you've got to be able to feed the ones you're already
• 20:36
  right. You can't piss them off.
• 20:37
  And you got to like, OK, can we, can we add the volume we need to
• 20:41
  on top of what we're already doing?
• 20:42
  Kind of. Thing.
• 20:43
  Yeah, exactly. And then you run into the
• 20:46
  problem of a lot of people are like, well, why do I want to buy
• 20:48
  this beer when there's plenty of breweries, you know, I can go
• 20:51
  around the corner or go to the store and I know a brewery
• 20:54
  that's, you know, around here that I like or, you know, people
• 20:56
  would just, and maybe it's not even a local brewery, but you
• 20:59
  know, we all have the things that we all have our normal
• 21:02
  things that we buy, right? Whether it's food, beer, wine,
• 21:05
  whatever, and it's just sitting on, just having stuff sit on a
• 21:09
  shelf in a grocery store. Yeah.
• 21:11
  Doesn't necessarily advertise like, oh, you should try this
• 21:14
  beer this time. Not everyone is always super
• 21:17
  adventurous, you know, And honestly, like my rule is drink
• 21:19
  what you like. So if you know what you like and
• 21:20
  that's what you want to buy, like go buy that.
• 21:23
  We don't have to worry about that so much because we're not
• 21:25
  fighting for shelf space. Like we're not doing, we're not
• 21:27
  looking at a distribution model necessarily.
• 21:30
  We want, we always talk about wanting to make a really cool
• 21:32
  spot for East Nashville and just Nashville in general, but
• 21:36
  specifically this area, cuz this is like, this is where Mike and
• 21:39
  I would hang out, you know, in this, you know, few block
• 21:43
  radius. I've been, I've, I've gotten
• 21:47
  Uber's home from no quarter plenty of times.
• 21:49
  You know, I love no quarter, but that place can be a black hole.
• 21:56
  But so so that was the main goal and it just happens that I think
• 22:02
  Jason just challenged you guys if we.
• 22:04
  Can play some Mario. I just challenged you to a ring.
• 22:08
  We've got a Mario break here that is funny.
• 22:10
  That is funny. But yeah, so we don't, we don't,
• 22:13
  I mean, we, there's a couple bars and stuff that we've been
• 22:16
  like selling some beer too. And I'm going to try to probably
• 22:19
  sell some beer to some more bars and things like that just cuz
• 22:24
  mostly cuz I need kegs empty so I can cut off more stuff.
• 22:29
  But it's not, it's not, it's, it's a hard distribution as a
• 22:32
  new brewery is a really hard game right now.
• 22:34
  Yeah. And that's not what we're
• 22:35
  seeing. A lot of the panic of Oh, Beer's
• 22:39
  doing terrible is because a lot of the statistics are coming
• 22:41
  from major distribution breweries.
• 22:44
  Like you're, you know, Sam Adams, you're seeing Nevadas and
• 22:46
  stuff and they're seeing shipments being down because
• 22:50
  people are drinking less. People are spending less money
• 22:53
  on, you know, things like alcohol or just not a lot of
• 22:57
  people have a lot of money to spend, you know, on extra things
• 23:00
  anyway. So, so that's where a lot of
• 23:02
  that comes. But we see we're seeing
• 23:04
  steadiness and growth in like your regional breweries with
• 23:08
  established footprints already. So, you know, your Black Stones,
• 23:11
  Black Abbey's, Tennessee Brew Works, those kind of places, not
• 23:15
  that they're not, I'm sure they're they've got rough waters
• 23:17
  that they're navigating to, but those places are generally doing
• 23:20
  OK. And then places like this like
• 23:23
  broadcast the tap room focused, like get people in the door that
• 23:29
  like your local watering hole that happens to be a brewery.
• 23:32
  That's what kind of where we've been seeing at least some growth
• 23:36
  or steadiness in the in the market.
• 23:39
  Not that it's been great. Like like alcohol is just down
• 23:41
  in general. And it it makes sense for a lot
• 23:45
  of reasons. But things swing, you know, the
• 23:50
  pendulum swings back and. And now we're in a particular
• 23:52
  month that sucks for breweries as a whole, right?
• 23:56
  January. And you know, a lot of people
• 23:58
  like to do dry January. I don't understand those people,
• 24:01
  but I get it. I mean, I don't get up actually.
• 24:04
  But that's another thing you got to kind of face, right?
• 24:06
  Just people go with your dry day anyway.
• 24:08
  Yeah, yeah, Dry January it definitely, I mean, well one a
• 24:12
  lot of restaurants, most restaurants see drop off in
• 24:15
  business after Thanksgiving anyway, kind of that like
• 24:18
  Thanksgiving to February or now Jason's trying to save you guys,
• 24:22
  I mean. When you start drinking beer at
• 24:27
  9:30 morning, you probably. Need to.
• 24:29
  Yeah. He's like, he's like, start
• 24:32
  driving. Start driving.
• 24:34
  Mario Kart now that you've been drinking.
• 24:36
  We love it. We're going to church to tell
• 24:37
  you how bad that was. Amen.
• 24:39
  We love you, we love being quite the experience here in the tap
• 24:42
  Room. You get all the gimmicks
• 24:44
  covered. But people to say dry January is
• 24:48
  not dry here at Stoke House. No, no, no, no, it's not.
• 24:51
  And I mean, yeah, like people buy less alcohol in January.
• 24:55
  A lot of that is, you know, everyone has been all the
• 24:59
  holidays, all the, you know, people probably, you know, do a
• 25:02
  lot of drinking over Christmas and New Year's and stuff.
• 25:04
  You spend a lot of money during the holidays.
• 25:06
  I know, you know, you know, Christmas, Christmas can be
• 25:09
  expensive anyway. For me, it always sneaks up on
• 25:10
  me and I'm like, oh, yeah. I'm like, oh, shit.
• 25:12
  Like, yeah, I got to at least get stuff for the niece and
• 25:14
  nephew like that. As long as I get stuff for the
• 25:16
  niece and nephew, I'm fine. But you know, it's, you got to
• 25:19
  buy gifts, ship, you know, traveling to meet up, you know,
• 25:24
  go to friends and families parties and things like that.
• 25:26
  So generally most restaurants see you drop after Thanksgiving
• 25:30
  and people are spending less money on, you know, things like
• 25:33
  alcohol and stuff because they've got to save money for,
• 25:36
  you know, taking their vacations at the end of the year, going to
• 25:38
  see family, all those, all those things.
• 25:40
  And then dry January comes around the corner after New
• 25:43
  Year's. But luckily we have, we have a
• 25:47
  pretty ingrained NA program here as well.
• 25:50
  So outside of all the beer, we do those handmade sodas that I'm
• 25:55
  sure you've seen Jason Mixon up, probably talk to him about them.
• 26:00
  So like I make, I make a like a really mean sparkle in mineral
• 26:03
  water. And so we use that as that's the
• 26:04
  bubbles. And then we have all these
• 26:06
  syrups and juices. It's almost like making a
• 26:09
  cocktail, but we have it's like a somewhere between making a
• 26:12
  cocktail and like an old timey soda jerk.
• 26:16
  So, and they're not like, you know, they're not, it's not a
• 26:19
  soda like, you know, Coke or Sprite or something where
• 26:22
  there's like a ton of sugar in it or whatever.
• 26:24
  But they are really, really good.
• 26:26
  They're very tasty. We even do like a sparkling
• 26:28
  lemonade. Jason's working on a couple new
• 26:31
  ones that he has coming out for dry January as well.
• 26:35
  We we're doing a dollar off all of those for the whole month
• 26:38
  just to encourage people like, hey, like, yeah, we're a
• 26:40
  brewery. But if you're not drinking like
• 26:42
  we got you covered. We have a hot water on tap.
• 26:44
  We have a couple guest cans of NA beer, May Pop.
• 26:48
  Of course, the May Pop guys are all of the May pop guys and they
• 26:52
  make a really good products. We, we, we, we make sure that
• 26:54
  we're and then we've got like, you know, coke, diet goats,
• 26:57
  right, all those. But those are really also
• 27:00
  alternative choices for people that, you know, we always talk
• 27:03
  about beer changes, the beer community changes.
• 27:06
  But you're trying to get more people in here and appeal to
• 27:09
  everybody, right? Not just the beer drinker,
• 27:11
  sometimes. Yeah, well, we want to be, we
• 27:13
  want to be inclusive. We know not everybody drinks
• 27:16
  beer, not everybody drinks, not everybody drinks beer, but we
• 27:21
  still have a lot to offer people outside of, you know, just the,
• 27:24
  the beer side of things. The beer side is, you know, a
• 27:27
  big part of the business, obviously brewing and Stoke
• 27:31
  House brewing and BBQ. But the food, you know, we have
• 27:34
  food. We've got a great food program
• 27:36
  and we want people to understand that, like if they don't drink
• 27:39
  or if they don't drink beer, like we've got them covered.
• 27:42
  But you got them so they can. Yeah, they can come in here and
• 27:44
  still enjoy the food and enjoy a Stoke House experience that
• 27:48
  outside of it being a. Brewery there there are lots of
• 27:51
  ways you just mentioned that you can still support a brewery even
• 27:54
  if you're doing dry January. So so do that go out with your
• 27:57
  friends with they're going to drink beer.
• 27:58
  So go with them, get the food, get something out so it's an
• 28:00
  altar. You can still support your
• 28:01
  local. Yeah, most, most breweries are
• 28:03
  going to have an NA option for you, at least one if not
• 28:06
  multiple. Some places, I mean, we're
• 28:08
  working on our liquor license so we can provide cocktails as
• 28:11
  well. Sure.
• 28:12
  So some places have cocktails if you don't drink beer.
• 28:15
  Every place is. I don't.
• 28:17
  I actually don't, I can't think of a brewery.
• 28:19
  I think almost every brewery in town sells May pop, the local
• 28:22
  soda water company, which they make really great stuff.
• 28:27
  And I don't just say that because Keaton and Maddie are
• 28:29
  friends and I love them ton, but but they make a high quality
• 28:32
  product and it's it's got bubbles and it's got flavor.
• 28:34
  I mean, their hop water is, is super refreshing.
• 28:37
  And if you're trying to like cut, even if you're trying to
• 28:38
  cut back on beer, it's a really great replacement for something
• 28:41
  like that. Most breweries now are making
• 28:43
  their own hop waters too, because we all realize we're
• 28:45
  like, why are we buying the bike?
• 28:46
  We've got all the ingredients for this.
• 28:48
  It's probably cheap and quick to make too, right?
• 28:51
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's definitely, you know, like at
• 28:53
  least a day I like to, you know, I I basically have this half
• 28:57
  barrel keg that has a giant Tri clamp attachment on the top of
• 29:00
  it for mixing things or, you know, making like it's not like
• 29:05
  a normal keg when you need a tap for it.
• 29:06
  Like I can just take the thing off so I can just dry hop it
• 29:09
  with whole hops and some hot bags overnight.
• 29:11
  We use the mineral water as the base for it.
• 29:13
  So I Add all the minerals and stuff and then we use a hop
• 29:17
  extract that gives it like a very lemon lime kind of
• 29:19
  character to it, as well as hop extract, normal, regular whole
• 29:22
  hops. The one we have on right now is
• 29:24
  the hop extract. And then Cashmere.
• 29:26
  I picked up some whole hops from, you know, different, like
• 29:28
  I think I've got some citrus and Eldorado.
• 29:30
  So play around with those a little bit.
• 29:32
  So yeah, I think I think most breweries are going to have a
• 29:35
  way if you're not drinking or if you want to support a local
• 29:37
  business, they're going to have a way where you can have an
• 29:39
  experience. You can still have the
• 29:40
  experience of what the brewery wants you to have for coming in,
• 29:44
  and you can have that experience without having to drink alcohol.
• 29:47
  Let's go ahead and get into the food.
• 29:48
  You mentioned food. You can.
• 29:50
  Come here just for the food people.
• 29:52
  Like it's not a sidebar. Like you could come here just
• 29:54
  for the food. It's that damn good.
• 29:57
  Well, and we had, she saw us yesterday.
• 30:00
  We were in here with our friends from Louisville, Tom and Brad.
• 30:02
  They call themselves the Hill Tappers.
• 30:04
  Shout out to them and you know, we, they, they were, they were
• 30:08
  coming down here and we kept telling them we have to take you
• 30:11
  here. We have to take you here.
• 30:13
  And they were really, really, really excited, not just about
• 30:16
  getting the beer, but also the food.
• 30:19
  And Mike, I know my, you know, Mike Marbitzer, who is your
• 30:21
  partner who is out in the food truck right now.
• 30:24
  Maybe we'll get him, wrangle him in.
• 30:26
  But can you talk about that? Because I'm really curious, when
• 30:29
  you all started the concept of this place, was that part of the
• 30:34
  the original plan to do that kind of food?
• 30:37
  Absolutely. And describe what you wait, what
• 30:39
  the food is. Yeah, it was.
• 30:40
  It was the food was absolutely going to be the thing and Mike
• 30:43
  was going to be the one running the food program.
• 30:46
  I'm sure 100 people, 100,000 people have heard me say this
• 30:49
  before, but one of the best parts about I've known Mike for
• 30:51
  many, many years, even before we worked together a tenfold.
• 30:54
  And one of the best parts about being friends with Mike is at
• 30:56
  some point he's going to feed you.
• 30:59
  His his his passion and his ability for culinary is bar
• 31:06
  none, especially for someone who is usually just did it, as was
• 31:10
  for the longest time, just doing it as a hobby or he was the one
• 31:13
  cooking for the wife and kids. And Yep, I mean, he just, he
• 31:16
  loves food. He loves knowing how to make it.
• 31:19
  And he has a steel trap of a mind for everything that goes
• 31:22
  into making anything he wants to make.
• 31:26
  I thought I knew some shit about cooking until I would talk to
• 31:29
  Mike. And then I'd be like, man, I
• 31:31
  know you're trying to help, but I just feel dumb.
• 31:36
  I remember one time like I like, I like baking, like making bread
• 31:40
  and I had a sour some, my girlfriend would give me a
• 31:43
  sourdough starter and I was, it was the first time I was like
• 31:46
  keeping up on keeping it alive and stuff.
• 31:48
  And I was like trying different sourdough recipes and trying to
• 31:50
  like dial it in for like my kitchen or whatever.
• 31:52
  And I was talking to Mike about it was when we were working at
• 31:54
  tenfold. I was talking to Mike about it.
• 31:55
  He was like, Oh, I've got a really good sourdough recipe.
• 31:57
  I'll just, I'll send it to you. And I was like, OK, and he sent
• 32:00
  it to me and it was like 6 pages long and I was just like, this
• 32:04
  is this is, I don't know, time check all these steps.
• 32:07
  Like I was like, maybe, maybe I'm not making sourdough, right?
• 32:12
  But it was just like, it was just like so specific and
• 32:14
  involved and so detail oriented. So when we started talking about
• 32:18
  it, it was always like, like, yeah, I would run the beer side
• 32:21
  of things. He would run the food side of
• 32:22
  things. And the other thing about being
• 32:24
  Mike's friend is when he feeds you, a lot of times it's going
• 32:27
  to be BBQ. You know, he's a Texas boy.
• 32:30
  And like, honestly, that, that offset smoker that we have out
• 32:33
  there was the one in at his house.
• 32:35
  It was just someone at his house, like when he wanted to
• 32:37
  make brisket or ribs or whatever.
• 32:40
  So we brought that over here. So we, we knew it was going to
• 32:43
  be BBQ because one, we were surprised that there was not a
• 32:47
  brewery with BBQ. Like with a dedicated BBQ
• 32:49
  program. Like you'll get places with
• 32:51
  chicken wings where they might have like, you know, one of
• 32:53
  those like gas assisted smokers that give that like kind of
• 32:55
  Propaney kind of flavored everything.
• 32:58
  But we were like, yeah, like Mike's.
• 33:00
  Mike's real passion is, is especially the the barbecue.
• 33:02
  And so we're like, Yep, that'll be cool.
• 33:04
  It'll set us apart. It's not a brewery, burger
• 33:07
  place, brewery, pizza place, brewery, whatever.
• 33:09
  Also, opening a brewery pizza place right down the street from
• 33:12
  Smith and Luntz is just a fool's errand.
• 33:16
  They've got that market locked down on Main Street And so so
• 33:20
  the BBQ was always, always the thing.
• 33:23
  Mike's daughter is a vegetarian and so he always wanted to have
• 33:26
  a vegetarian option. So we always have like at least
• 33:28
  one plant based option as as far as like an entree goes.
• 33:32
  And then things, you know, besides like the coleslaw, we do
• 33:36
  vegan Mac and cheese as well. We do a regular Mac and cheese
• 33:39
  and vegan Mac and cheese, but that the coleslaw, we have fried
• 33:41
  plantains right now. Like we've we've got options for
• 33:44
  people that want to come out and eat and eat something that's
• 33:46
  really good and made really well, but don't necessarily eat
• 33:48
  meat. So like it's kind of like BBQ
• 33:51
  for everyone in some ways. So yeah, it was always part of
• 33:54
  the plan. These days, you can't just be a
• 33:56
  brewery tap room. You got to be a brewery and
• 33:59
  brewery and restaurant brewery and you know, whatever.
• 34:03
  And it's, and it's what, Yeah. So I had some friends.
• 34:07
  I'm going to say I'm going to make a statement and it's going
• 34:10
  to sound worse than I mean it. But in a lot of ways, like
• 34:13
  people just don't kind of care about beer anymore.
• 34:16
  There's a flood, a flood of breweries.
• 34:19
  You know, there's exhaustion. There's a lot of different drink
• 34:22
  options out there. Again, that pendulum swings in
• 34:25
  different ways. So if we wanted to get people
• 34:27
  excited about the spot, we knew that we were going to have to
• 34:29
  have a really good dedicated food program.
• 34:33
  And then, you know, doing things like, like our brisket is
• 34:36
  brisket's amazing. The ribs are incredible, the
• 34:39
  pulled pork is made like everything is really good.
• 34:41
  And then we, we were like the first place around here to start
• 34:44
  doing smoked burgers. And now we've seen some other,
• 34:46
  I'm not saying it's because of us, but we've seen some other
• 34:49
  places around in these pop ups starting to do smoked burgers.
• 34:53
  We do, we do them off of the trimmings from the brisket too.
• 34:56
  So it's so you don't like use, use the whole parts, all the
• 34:58
  parts of the animal. So you get that nice big, it's
• 35:01
  half pound as well. Like most burgers are a quarter
• 35:03
  pound have nice big half pound burger.
• 35:06
  It's brisket meat. It's smoked.
• 35:08
  Like if you, I guarantee most people haven't ever seen a smoke
• 35:11
  ring inside of a burger when you cut it in half and like you get
• 35:14
  that smoke ring in there. And, and I knew, I knew when we
• 35:20
  were talking about this and talking about Mike doing food, I
• 35:21
  knew I could trust him to do it because I had seen how creative
• 35:24
  he can be with food and how much he how, what the, the amount of
• 35:27
  enjoyment he gets out of like making something and making it
• 35:30
  up to his standard, you know? So yeah, it was always part of
• 35:34
  the plan. Again, it's also part of the
• 35:36
  plan to make a rad spot. Like we just want to make a
• 35:38
  really cool spot. So they you got to have food,
• 35:41
  you got to have booze, you got to have NA options, you got to
• 35:44
  have a cool comfortable place and you have to have an N64 with
• 35:48
  Mario Party and Mario Kart. And, and and Joel Osteen too.
• 35:52
  I don't know if that's who that was, but.
• 35:56
  Well, and it's, and it's 2:00 and it's 2 observations.
• 35:58
  So we were, when we came in yesterday, there was a group of
• 36:01
  us were sitting down the corner there and we were talking about
• 36:03
  we all got the BBQ, you know, we all all, all got, you know, the
• 36:06
  Mac and cheese and things like that.
• 36:08
  And I, you know, I said this, I said you can name and, you know,
• 36:12
  obviously Nashville. And that's one of the things
• 36:14
  that when you all searched first started putting out information
• 36:18
  about this place. I'm like, that's so Nashville.
• 36:20
  Nashville's known for great brisket and barbecue and all
• 36:23
  that, right in the, in the South.
• 36:24
  And there are, yeah, maybe you might not, I don't know.
• 36:29
  I don't know. Well, there it has a reputation
• 36:31
  whether or not you want to debate that.
• 36:33
  But I said yesterday, I said when you look at that like the
• 36:36
  Southern BBQ, I said I think it's as good as, not better than
• 36:40
  any place you could name in the Nashville area.
• 36:42
  Yeah, I think you say. Hey, Mike.
• 36:44
  And to Mike, real Mike, I know he's really busy, but hey, Mike.
• 36:47
  He's preparing that delicious food we were just talking about.
• 36:50
  We're bragging about you, Mike. So he's so pretty.
• 36:57
  You guys did see the blonde highlights though, right?
• 37:02
  No, I think as far as I guess, I guess that is a great debate
• 37:06
  around here whether Nashville is known for or has great BBQ or
• 37:10
  just good BBQ or just mediocre. I mean it it I've had I've had
• 37:15
  some good barbecue in Nashville. I've had some terrible barbecue
• 37:17
  in Nashville. I think in Tennessee, Memphis is
• 37:21
  really got the lockdown on on the BBQ thing, which our ribs
• 37:26
  are Memphis style, you know, dry rub.
• 37:29
  But there was there weren't a lot of places doing doing it
• 37:33
  right and doing it really, really well.
• 37:34
  There is a good handful of places that are, you know,
• 37:37
  nailing it. But a lot of places that do BBQ,
• 37:41
  you go there and you're like, well, I guess, yeah, Sir.
• 37:43
  But really, I don't know. And not to, you know, eat what
• 37:48
  you like, drink what you like, all of that.
• 37:50
  But for us, we, we wanted something to be a step above
• 37:52
  what a lot of the places are serving and how a lot of places
• 37:54
  are doing it. So it's not, we're not like
• 37:56
  spending a couple days smoking a bunch of stuff and then holding
• 37:59
  it and then serving it throughout the week.
• 38:00
  It's every day. If we're every day, the smoker
• 38:03
  is going for the next day's food.
• 38:06
  And that's one of the reasons that we have things until we're
• 38:08
  sold out because we, we only make so much and then
• 38:12
  everything's fresh, you know, get it on the smoker, let it go
• 38:15
  for as long as it needs till it's done.
• 38:17
  Wrap it, sit in the warming cabinet because you want that
• 38:20
  meat to rest for, you know, overnight, but you don't want it
• 38:22
  to rest too long. We're not throwing it in the
• 38:25
  fridge, pulling it back out. You know, once you like, like
• 38:28
  take something like a pork butt, like once you start cutting into
• 38:30
  a pork butt, like it's going to, it's going to not be as good.
• 38:33
  You know, So if you have half pork butt left and you throw in
• 38:36
  the fridge and serve it the next day, it's going to there's going
• 38:38
  to be a noticeable drop in like the quality and the freshness of
• 38:41
  it. And top like high quality is one
• 38:45
  thing that Mike and I always talked about, You know, we
• 38:47
  didn't want to take shortcuts. We didn't want to, but what
• 38:50
  we'll make more money if we do it like this.
• 38:52
  And then it suffers the quality of either product, the food or
• 38:55
  the beer. And so that's, that's always
• 38:59
  been kind of one of our main goals in this and focuses is
• 39:02
  like, you know, sometimes you got to take a hit.
• 39:05
  Like sometimes like, you know, yeah, like we're talking about
• 39:10
  dumping beer earlier. Like beer is bad.
• 39:12
  It's, it's got to go. You can't think about like,
• 39:13
  well, that's so much money down the drain.
• 39:15
  Or if we don't sell out of something and it's like, OK,
• 39:19
  well, we didn't sell out of it. Like we, we can't just keep
• 39:22
  serving this tomorrow because it's not going to be as good.
• 39:25
  You know, there is that subject of pairing the bear, the beer
• 39:29
  with food. Yep.
• 39:30
  Yeah, right. You know where I'm going with
• 39:31
  this. So, you know, if I look up on
• 39:33
  the board right now and I say, look, it's a Baltic Porter and
• 39:36
  you go, what food pairing goes well with the Baltic Porter?
• 39:41
  I mean, honestly any any like like fatty meat, like a a beer
• 39:46
  like that that's like roasty and a little bit sweet and higher in
• 39:49
  alcohol is going to go well with any kind of like fatty meats.
• 39:52
  And luckily we're a barbecue joint.
• 39:54
  Yeah. But really like like it shines.
• 39:57
  Like if you have it with the brisket or the brisket burger, I
• 40:00
  think that's where it like really, really shines.
• 40:02
  One of my favorite pairings is classic, our pub beer.
• 40:05
  If you do classic with. With the ribs, classic with the
• 40:08
  ribs is like my, probably my like #1 if people are like, oh,
• 40:11
  like what, what food does this beer go with or what beer goes
• 40:14
  with ribs? It's like classic 100% every
• 40:16
  time. And then I mean, we're lucky
• 40:19
  like for the most part. And that's the thing for the
• 40:21
  most part, like beer and food generally are going to pair
• 40:23
  really well together, especially when you have fattier foods or
• 40:27
  things like, you know, so when you have like burgers or pizzas
• 40:29
  or whatever, like you've got, you know, like with the pizza,
• 40:32
  it's all like the cheese and stuff.
• 40:33
  So you've got that like that fatty cheese on the pizza and
• 40:37
  then the alcohol carbonation helps cut through some of that
• 40:39
  fattiness. And then you have very similar,
• 40:43
  take burgers, for example, like the, you know, when you're got a
• 40:48
  burger on a grill, the Malliard reactions that are happening
• 40:50
  when you're like Browning meat or anything like that.
• 40:52
  It's the same reactions that are happening when you're when the
• 40:55
  maltsters are roasting like darker malts that give a little
• 40:58
  bit of sweetness, a little bit more biscuity character.
• 41:00
  So there's a there's similar science going on.
• 41:02
  So you, you're we're really lucky in the sense that like a
• 41:04
  lot of that science pairs up together really well.
• 41:07
  Yeah. But I do have preferred like,
• 41:09
  like, like if you really want a good experience, like these are
• 41:12
  the things that go together. And I and I like to have that.
• 41:15
  And that's the beers that I brew are brewed partially 2 pair well
• 41:18
  with food. That's one of the main goals.
• 41:20
  Awesome, you you smoke some of your grains too for some of your
• 41:24
  beers. Consider you got the smoker
• 41:25
  right outside. Yeah, yeah, I we smoke them on
• 41:27
  the smoker. No, no, no pipe.
• 41:30
  Yeah, yeah. So we do anytime we do a smoked
• 41:33
  beer, which our signature are year round dark ale, dark
• 41:35
  English ale has a soft and some smoked malt in it.
• 41:39
  So yeah, we we smoke it. It's Tennessee barley smoked on
• 41:41
  Tennessee Hickory. Nice.
• 41:43
  It's a cold smoke. And other than that, that's all
• 41:47
  I know. But it's so cool because you can
• 41:48
  I just, I leave, I leave that up to Mike.
• 41:49
  Like the first time he gave me the first time he did it.
• 41:52
  And he like gave me half a bag just because it was like, well,
• 41:54
  let's start with half a bag and see sure how it does.
• 41:57
  He brought it to me and I was like smelling it, tasting it.
• 41:59
  And I was like, is this, is this your first time doing that?
• 42:02
  And he was like, yeah. And I was like, well, whatever
• 42:04
  you did, I think it worked. Just keep doing that.
• 42:06
  Yeah, just keep doing that. And it's something that we plan
• 42:09
  on like, you know, some collabs in the future, being able to be
• 42:12
  like, well, if we want to make a smoked version of this beer, we
• 42:14
  can. Yeah, the malt.
• 42:17
  And it's just it, it adds a little extra.
• 42:19
  It's a little different than like, buying smoke malt from,
• 42:22
  you know, a place like, you know, one of our big suppliers.
• 42:25
  Like, so like environment smoke malt is like very, very smoky.
• 42:28
  And I love it and it's great. But this is different where you
• 42:31
  get that smoke character. But it's like, you can almost
• 42:34
  get like a little bit of that tinge of the wood in it too.
• 42:36
  And it just adds a little bit extra, like a unique twist on
• 42:39
  the beer. And it's all done in house.
• 42:40
  I mean, you literally, it's just right over there.
• 42:42
  Yeah, you just, you just walk it in here and put it in the beer.
• 42:44
  I mean, that's so cool. Yeah, yeah, you.
• 42:45
  Got that access to it anytime you want to.
• 42:47
  Yeah, and we've we've gotten a lot of mileage with the the pun
• 42:50
  on in house or house maid. You know, one of the, one of the
• 42:54
  cool things that Scott and I, you know, a bunch of us have
• 42:57
  talked about when you all open and the time we're recording
• 42:59
  this, you've been open about 5 months now, I think.
• 43:01
  About, yeah, about 5 months. What is it?
• 43:03
  Yeah, we're about yeah, I guess our first stopped open was on
• 43:06
  August 7th. Yeah.
• 43:07
  So it just seemed like you were prepared from the beginning.
• 43:11
  Yeah. Like you hit the ground running.
• 43:13
  Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, you
• 43:15
  had a couple of beer options. Those have grown since that
• 43:17
  time. You have beer in the cooler
• 43:19
  already for people, the merch. I mean, talk about that because
• 43:22
  the the detail and the planning on that couldn't have been easy,
• 43:26
  right. I mean, you're checking off a
• 43:27
  lot of lists and make sure day one you're ready to go.
• 43:30
  Yeah, well, luckily, like having been in the industry for as long
• 43:34
  as I have, especially like having the experience of running
• 43:37
  a brewery, like for running tenfold.
• 43:39
  I knew, you know, you you kind of have those parameters like,
• 43:43
  you know about how long you need when you need to start brewing,
• 43:46
  you know what stuff you need here, like the the order of
• 43:49
  operations. Like, well, you know, I got to
• 43:51
  get stuff into tanks and I have to have clean kegs, but I have
• 43:53
  to have at least one tank open to, you know, be a bright tank.
• 43:56
  And I have have to have one tank open to be a cold liquor tank or
• 43:59
  whatever. Like those, those kind of that
• 44:01
  kind of stuff work like my mind works well for those kind of
• 44:04
  finding those kind of solutions. So it wasn't, I mean, it like
• 44:10
  it, it's always going to be challenging.
• 44:11
  I'm not, I'm not trying to say it was easy, but I definitely
• 44:14
  had a really good foundation in being able to for beer and stuff
• 44:18
  be able to plan for things like that.
• 44:20
  I mean, we haven't, we haven't had, I mean, honestly, the 1st 2
• 44:24
  beers I brewed, like I was, I was kind of down the system in
• 44:27
  the 1st 2 beers I brewed were so out of spec that I was like,
• 44:30
  well, instead of like trying to brand them to something else,
• 44:33
  I'm just going to dump them. And I'm just going to, I know,
• 44:36
  you know, I know where I need to make changes to keep these
• 44:38
  inspect. Like I ended up just getting
• 44:40
  like better efficiency on my mash than I expected to.
• 44:44
  And it's so everything was just out of balance.
• 44:46
  And it wasn't that it was bad, but you look at like you got to
• 44:50
  look at your cooperage. Like how many kegs do you have?
• 44:52
  How much time do you have? Is it worth it?
• 44:54
  Because we wanted to come out basically with our, you know,
• 44:57
  our five year round beers or we came out with four of them
• 44:59
  because the, you know, the original was still logger in.
• 45:02
  Yep. You can't you can't rush that
• 45:03
  process. But we hit the ground with yeah,
• 45:05
  our four year round beers. I had a buddy of mine that like
• 45:09
  he, he referred to it as that we came out swinging, which I think
• 45:12
  is like, I appreciate that because I I was really happy
• 45:14
  with the quality. I mean, we agree with that,
• 45:16
  right? I mean, you really did.
• 45:17
  You came out swinging, man. Yeah.
• 45:18
  And then we had, yeah, then we had the food to back us up and
• 45:22
  yeah, yeah, yeah. We hit the ground running.
• 45:23
  It took, it took a while. We were doing, you know, we were
• 45:26
  building out here because there were some changes we were making
• 45:29
  to, I mean, we didn't have to be like build the entire brewery
• 45:32
  because been crazy known before. And that was part of the deal
• 45:35
  was getting the brew house and a certain number of fermenters.
• 45:40
  But dealing with, you know, dealing with codes, permitting,
• 45:44
  all that stuff while still working full time and coming in
• 45:48
  here and making some changes, you know, rebuilding the bar,
• 45:52
  taking out the cooler, getting that or they had a closet.
• 45:56
  So taking out that closet and then getting that walk in cooler
• 45:58
  over there. Build all these little things,
• 46:00
  all the painting and then, you know, trying to coordinate with
• 46:04
  our schedules, working full time and then being here.
• 46:08
  I mean, there's a lot of times that it'd be, you know, leave
• 46:12
  work, come straight here, be here until 9 or 10 of the night,
• 46:15
  go home and just fall asleep saying you walk in the door.
• 46:19
  I bet. But but we were, you know, I, I
• 46:22
  had experience building a brewery from the ground up with
• 46:25
  or being on the team that build a brewery from the ground up at
• 46:27
  tenfold. I knew how to run a brewery.
• 46:30
  I knew, you know, I recipe development, I've been doing it
• 46:34
  for so long and so I knew exactly where I want everything
• 46:36
  to be. So it's just a matter of raining
• 46:39
  in that system and knowing like what my efficiency on my mash
• 46:42
  was, how much efficiency I was getting on like around be like
• 46:47
  alpha acid extraction from hops, all that's all that kind of
• 46:49
  thing. And even just like the, you
• 46:53
  know, a tank, the the tank shape can even like kind of change
• 46:57
  things a little bit. The the physics of how
• 47:00
  everything ferments and how things fall out and how much
• 47:03
  yeast you can re pitch and whatever.
• 47:04
  So that was it was about applying all the stuff I knew
• 47:08
  already to a different spot basically.
• 47:11
  Do you remember, like the first conversation that you and Mike
• 47:13
  had around when you start going? You know what?
• 47:16
  We're Brewers for tenfold, man. We want to, we want to open up
• 47:20
  our own place. So not specifically because that
• 47:23
  conversation happens in the back of every single brewery with
• 47:26
  every single person that works in the back of a brewery.
• 47:28
  There's always a time where you start talking about what your
• 47:30
  ideal brewery would be. Sure what you would want to do
• 47:33
  and what how you would want to do it different or what your
• 47:35
  focus would be or the styles of beers that you would brew like.
• 47:37
  Those are things that just naturally happen because I think
• 47:39
  most people, especially if you've been in the industry for,
• 47:42
  you know, more than a couple years, the idea is that you
• 47:45
  would love to own a brewery or do your own thing or like at
• 47:47
  least have a program that you're in charge of.
• 47:52
  So I can't, I don't remember the first one, but we started
• 47:57
  talking about it. And the more we started talking
• 47:59
  about originally we were talking about, oh, yeah, we would build
• 48:01
  from the ground up. Because once we got a little
• 48:03
  more serious about it, we're like, all right, What areas of
• 48:05
  town are lacking? We're looking up at like the
• 48:07
  area I live in, like N Madison area.
• 48:10
  And it was, it was always just, you know, like a fun thing to
• 48:13
  talk about. It's, it's like buying a lottery
• 48:14
  ticket. Like the, the, the value in that
• 48:17
  is the imagination of what you would do with all the money.
• 48:19
  Sure, you know, but there is a point where we started getting a
• 48:21
  little more serious about it then a couple, It was a couple
• 48:25
  January's ago when we got that Blizzard that everyone was
• 48:27
  snowed in for like a week. And we were, we're snowed in.
• 48:30
  And I like, didn't have, didn't really have shit to do.
• 48:34
  And so we've been texting about a few things and I was like,
• 48:38
  maybe we maybe we start writing a business plan.
• 48:42
  And so we just set up a shared Google Drive and looked up and
• 48:46
  looked, we found something that like explained how to write a
• 48:49
  business plan. It kind of had, it was, it was
• 48:50
  very long and had everything like in this section goes this
• 48:53
  stuff. And then we had to figure out
• 48:54
  what some of those things meant, you know, but, but yeah, but we
• 48:58
  had a, we had a pretty clear idea and we knew about, you
• 49:01
  know, I had, I knew exactly, you know, I know COGS, you know,
• 49:03
  cost of goods sold on all the beer stuff.
• 49:05
  Like I, I have, I have really good spreadsheets for that.
• 49:09
  Right. So we, it was easy to like the
• 49:11
  numbers part for me was easier to dial in because I'm very
• 49:14
  focused. Like my mind works very numbers
• 49:16
  focused. So it's just like, OK, so we
• 49:18
  know about based on what prices for everything are now we know
• 49:21
  about we're going to be spending this much of money for beer
• 49:24
  stuff. Here's cost of goods sold.
• 49:25
  Here's what we were charging for everything.
• 49:27
  And we were always kind of eye to eye on what we wanted to buy.
• 49:30
  But whatever brewery we had ever opened bees and working like I
• 49:33
  found out, well, you know, Mike and I worked really, really well
• 49:34
  together. There's a particular amount of
• 49:36
  trust between us where it's like, I know, I know he's doing
• 49:40
  what needs to be done. He knows I'm doing what needs to
• 49:42
  be done. Yep.
• 49:43
  Yeah. So that's so to so a really long
• 49:46
  winded way to answer your question.
• 49:47
  No, no I don't. It's OK.
• 49:50
  You, you, you brought us into a lot that you know that that has
• 49:55
  gotten here today. Yeah, that's.
• 49:57
  Pretty cool. Was finding the location the
• 49:59
  hardest part ultimately. Like he could do all that stuff
• 50:01
  on paper and they're like, where?
• 50:02
  Where are we going? Yeah, So I it was kind of weird.
• 50:06
  So that was part of like why we're right in the business plan
• 50:09
  and kind of figuring out. We were working with a a friend
• 50:12
  of ours who's a graphic designer who did all of our all of our
• 50:15
  graphic design, all the branding and stuff she did.
• 50:18
  She did an amazing job. Maddie, you did an amazing job.
• 50:20
  Thank you so much. So we're looking, finding
• 50:23
  commercial real estate was not something I've ever looked for
• 50:25
  before. So we're looking for commercial
• 50:27
  real estate and I see what was available up in up in that N
• 50:30
  Madison, like Rivergate area and what was viable, you know, is it
• 50:34
  big enough? Is there enough parking?
• 50:35
  All the all these other things that you don't think that you
• 50:37
  need to think about, but you start once you start looking at
• 50:39
  all these different spots. And that's important because
• 50:41
  you're going to be tap room forward that location matter.
• 50:44
  Yeah, yeah. People have to get.
• 50:46
  There, yeah and then we found this, but there.
• 50:49
  But there were other things too. There were certain, certain
• 50:51
  parts of the business plan, like certain number of things and
• 50:53
  counting things that I was trying to figure out how to like
• 50:56
  how to have a framework for it. So I could explain how we were
• 50:58
  going to do, you know, how we're, we're going to do payroll
• 51:00
  and how we're going to do this and how we're going to do that.
• 51:02
  And I had no experience in that stuff.
• 51:03
  So there was a day that I called, I called Grayson one day
• 51:06
  and I was like, hey, man, if you got time this week, I'd love to
• 51:08
  grab a couple beers with you up at Yazoo because Yazoo's right
• 51:11
  by my house. Yeah.
• 51:13
  And it has a big enough patio. And we were, we were kind of, we
• 51:15
  were, we were getting serious about it, but we still weren't
• 51:17
  sure it was the right move due. So we didn't really want like
• 51:21
  the, you know, how the rumor mill is around here.
• 51:23
  And generally they're absolutely wrong about everyone.
• 51:28
  So we didn't we didn't want. And so we Yazoo is kind of an
• 51:31
  easy place to like, like it's not weird that I would be there
• 51:34
  talking to Grayson because I go there a lot.
• 51:36
  Grayson goes there, you know, would go there once in a while
• 51:38
  too. Like we've been there drinking
• 51:39
  beers just as friends before. So he met up with me and I was
• 51:42
  like, I'm buying all your beers. I'm going to tell you why in a
• 51:44
  minute. And so I had these, you know,
• 51:46
  particular questions for him about, you know, part of it was
• 51:49
  like, how do we know we're finding it?
• 51:51
  Like, what are we looking for in a spot?
• 51:53
  How do I do this accounting thing?
• 51:55
  Like one of my like, how do you do XY and Z?
• 51:58
  Because we're thinking about doing it this way, but I don't
• 51:59
  know if that's the right way to do it.
• 52:01
  So we talked for a couple hours and, and he was really, really
• 52:04
  helpful. And at the end of it, when we're
• 52:06
  getting ready to leave, he was like, or, you know, I'm trying
• 52:09
  to, you know, sell the lease out of Crazy Gnome.
• 52:10
  So if you guys were interested in that.
• 52:12
  And I think it was like half a joke because I, I, we were
• 52:15
  literally talking about like having a whole kitchen and
• 52:17
  everything. And so Mike and I, like a week
• 52:19
  or so after that, Mike and I were meeting down at Barique
• 52:21
  just to go over some things instead of doing it over Google
• 52:24
  Drive, go over the business plan stuff, like talk out certain
• 52:27
  things that we were like hoping that we were doing correctly.
• 52:30
  And I was like, oh, yeah, Grayson.
• 52:33
  Grayson was like, oh, you can buy out the crazy home lease and
• 52:35
  equipment and it would only cost this much.
• 52:37
  And I was like, but I was like, but then we'd have to build a
• 52:39
  whole, I don't know where we'd build a kitchen in there and
• 52:41
  everything. And Mike, who was at the time
• 52:43
  every Sunday working on the brand Idiot food truck, he was
• 52:45
  like, I can do it out of a food truck.
• 52:47
  And I was like, well, yeah, I don't know.
• 52:49
  That's not really what you want to do, right?
• 52:51
  That's not, like, the ideal, right?
• 52:52
  Like we were still very much in that, you know?
• 52:54
  Yeah, that fantasy of everything could be ideal because we
• 52:57
  hadn't, like, pulled the trigger on anything yet.
• 52:59
  And I started thinking about it. I was thinking like for a couple
• 53:04
  days I was thinking about it and then I was driving into work.
• 53:09
  It's a Monday or Tuesday and I just, and the radio has been
• 53:12
  broken in my car for a couple years.
• 53:13
  So it's just like mulling it over, like I'm just alone with
• 53:15
  my thoughts, which is usually a bad thing.
• 53:17
  And I was mulling it over, mulling it over and I was like,
• 53:19
  wow, like I like that part of town.
• 53:21
  We wouldn't have to worry about build out equipment acquisition.
• 53:25
  It's actually cheaper. Like it's a, it's a kind of like
• 53:28
  a cheaper way to get in. We can use it as proof of
• 53:30
  concept if we want to start getting more funding later or
• 53:33
  grow. So I was mulling over, mulling
• 53:36
  over and I got in. I got into work and Mike was
• 53:38
  already there. And I was like, all right.
• 53:40
  I was like, don't hate me. He was like, what?
• 53:42
  I was like, really? You really want to do that out
• 53:45
  of a truck? You're like, you want to do a
• 53:46
  BBQ out of a truck? He's like, yeah, man, I could do
• 53:47
  it. It'll be fun.
• 53:48
  It's mostly just prep work. You know, it's just service out
• 53:50
  of the truck. I was like, OK, I was like, so
• 53:54
  you want to start writing a second business plan where we
• 53:56
  take over Crazy Gnome instead of building from the ground up?
• 53:58
  And he was like, he was like, yeah, let's do it.
• 54:01
  And the more we looked at it, especially numbers wise,
• 54:03
  especially money wise, because we're, we're pretty much
• 54:06
  entirely self funded and we're, we've both been Brewers for a
• 54:10
  long time. So we don't have a lot of a lot
• 54:12
  of money to self fund. You know, this is not a, this is
• 54:15
  not a high dollar, you know, a bunch of, you know, a bunch of
• 54:20
  investment bankers or doctors or whatever.
• 54:23
  You know, we don't come from families with a ton of money or
• 54:25
  anything like that. So we started looking at it and
• 54:28
  we were like, yeah, this might make the most sense.
• 54:30
  And like I was saying earlier, this is the area of the town
• 54:32
  that we would hang out in if we were hanging out anyway, We're
• 54:35
  like, all right, Started looking at more and more and it made
• 54:37
  more sense. And so that's, that's how we
• 54:39
  moved on to. So to answer your question in a
• 54:42
  real long winded way, yes and no.
• 54:44
  It it wasn't easy, but the until it was.
• 54:47
  I I, and I think, I think we've, we've talked about this before,
• 54:50
  but this podcast episode, I think it's, it's worth
• 54:53
  repeating. So we remember when Crazy gnome
• 54:57
  opened their new location and we saw you there and you know, I
• 54:59
  walked in and I'm like, hey, Chad, you know, and like, hey.
• 55:03
  And then about two weeks later, you know, the one day it was
• 55:06
  either sent to me or I saw the post, the first one, and I
• 55:09
  texted God, I said, that's Chad, is that Chad?
• 55:11
  Well, I just saw him two weeks ago.
• 55:13
  And you're like, you really, you were, you were kind of a kid in
• 55:16
  the candy store at that point, you know, ready to release the
• 55:20
  information. I mean, there were probably some
• 55:21
  people obviously close to you that knew, but it was just kind
• 55:24
  of funny to find out that way, too.
• 55:25
  Like yeah, man, go you go, guys. Yeah, yeah, We were.
• 55:28
  We were just really cautious again about that rumor mill.
• 55:31
  The the beer rumor mill around town is, I mean, I guess I come
• 55:34
  from a position where sometimes I kind of know what's going on
• 55:37
  with, well, one with us or with other places or, you know, it's
• 55:40
  casual comes up in casual conversation, but you know
• 55:42
  better than they're like, I don't ever want to be like part
• 55:45
  of it and be like, well, actually what's really going on.
• 55:48
  But you read things or you hear people talking about things and
• 55:50
  you can't help just sometimes just being like, man, you, you
• 55:53
  absolutely have it 100% wrong. It just like it'll work itself
• 55:57
  out eventually. But yeah, they're just at their
• 55:59
  chirp. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 56:01
  So the yeah, the rumor mill, we're trying to avoid any rumor
• 56:04
  mill stuff. And you know, people trying to
• 56:07
  act like they knew us or what was going on or also like not
• 56:11
  getting the slew. Like I get so many junk emails
• 56:14
  from places trying to get me to like just advertising the most
• 56:17
  predatory of loans. Like everyday it's, it's like
• 56:20
  the same AI makes the same fucking, you know, base e-mail
• 56:24
  and they just change their name in it.
• 56:26
  There's, there's like 3 particular, you know, formats of
• 56:29
  it. And it's just like, I, I know
• 56:32
  how numbers work and you're either a liar or this is a
• 56:36
  terrible, terrible deal. So yeah.
• 56:39
  So we just wanted to prevent a lot of that stuff like and just
• 56:43
  like do it on our terms, like announce on our terms and build
• 56:46
  hype on our terms as. Well, kind of wondering this
• 56:48
  last night because we were like blocks away from downtown where
• 56:50
  your location is and there's so much growth down there.
• 56:54
  We know a new Dome is coming for the Titans and that's gonna
• 56:57
  probably eventually bring bigger events, you know, maybe Super
• 57:00
  Bowl or whatever down the road. Do you, I mean, do you ever
• 57:02
  think that big picture you're going, we could really
• 57:04
  capitalize on people coming into town and you know, that that
• 57:08
  kind of thing? I mean, is that, is that
• 57:10
  something that you get excited about when you think about long
• 57:12
  term too? Yeah, I mean, it's always as a
• 57:16
  place that sells things to people.
• 57:18
  It's always a benefit to have more people around, especially
• 57:22
  people that are coming in from out of town and they're, you
• 57:24
  know, want a certain kind of food.
• 57:26
  And like we're talking earlier, like natural BBQ doesn't always
• 57:28
  hit depending on where you go. So having a reputation for that,
• 57:32
  being a brewery that's close to downtown, an easy drive from
• 57:35
  there, all those things are going to be beneficial for us
• 57:39
  and a lot of and many of the surrounding businesses.
• 57:42
  I guess I was about to say all but that's not true with what's
• 57:44
  going on with Breek and eminent domain and all that stuff.
• 57:50
  But yeah, having an like, like tourist, like, I know we all, we
• 57:54
  all are kind of like tourist season's here when it comes.
• 57:59
  But as a business, like it's yeah, tourist season is it's a
• 58:03
  good it's a good bump that that's that's money coming into
• 58:06
  places, you know, And if we can lure people off Broadway and
• 58:09
  show them that Nashville has more to offer than honky tonks
• 58:15
  that are named after country stars or, you know, country
• 58:19
  pseudo stars or whatever, then, you know, it might be better,
• 58:22
  You know, it shows people Nashville as more than just
• 58:24
  Broadway. And then people might find like,
• 58:26
  oh, you know, if somebody comes down, comes into east and they
• 58:28
  come here and they're like, oh, well, where else can I like, I
• 58:31
  don't want to go back downtown. Where else can I go?
• 58:33
  And we can be like, well, if you're parked, you can walk to
• 58:36
  Honey tree, you can walk to Smith and Luntz.
• 58:38
  You can go down to no corner and play some pinball and get
• 58:41
  schwested if you wanted to. You know, there's, there's out
• 58:43
  of our like we can, and I know other places do it for us too.
• 58:47
  We can always, it's not just us, but we can help bring that and
• 58:50
  spread that around outside of just the major like downtown
• 58:53
  Broadway area by, you know, and we, we get a lot of tourists in
• 58:58
  here. We got a lot of people from out
• 58:59
  of town in here and they'll ask us like where, where else should
• 59:01
  I go? And you know, we'll always name
• 59:04
  our, you know, favorite people's places and our favorite places
• 59:06
  to go. And a lot of them are within
• 59:08
  walking or short driving distance from here too.
• 59:10
  So. It's great about this part of
• 59:11
  town. It's literally, and we like to
• 59:12
  do this when we go somewhere. What else is around?
• 59:15
  Oh, there's three or 45 breweries close by.
• 59:18
  Boom. Let's hit them all.
• 59:19
  Yeah, you know, And it's, it's, if you're part of that, it's.
• 59:21
  Oh, yeah, we're gonna make that stop.
• 59:22
  We're gonna make that stop. Yeah, especially when the
• 59:23
  weather's a nice and it's easy to just kind of walk around from
• 59:26
  from bar to bar. We literally walked to Smith and
• 59:29
  Lynch when we left here yesterday.
• 59:30
  Yeah, it was twofold. It was close.
• 59:31
  It was a nice day. Also, we were so damn full we
• 59:35
  had to walk it off so everyone's like, it's only a tenth of my.
• 59:38
  Week. Yeah, that's an hour, Yeah.
• 59:39
  It's a it's a block like you could, you could hit it with a
• 59:41
  rock from here if you needed to, Yeah.
• 59:43
  That's another thing to another observation.
• 59:44
  When you come here, expect to be in a food coma after you have
• 59:49
  the the great beer and the great food.
• 59:51
  Yeah. It costs actually, to take a nap
• 59:53
  on the couch. You may not eat the rest of the
• 59:56
  day. In fact, we went to a couple of
• 59:58
  breweries afterwards and I think I may have gotten 1/2 slice of
• 1:00:01
  pizza last night at the last stop and it was like, no, I'm
• 1:00:04
  full. I literally was at the point I
• 1:00:06
  had I got the the half rack of ribs and I had two pieces
• 1:00:10
  leftover and I go I was at the cusp of you know how that when
• 1:00:13
  you get really full and really miserable, one more bite would
• 1:00:16
  have put me there. Yeah, and I'd have been.
• 1:00:17
  That way, the rest of the day, just ride that line.
• 1:00:20
  I said I'm just going to hold off.
• 1:00:22
  But it's so amazing. It's just the food is so good.
• 1:00:24
  Of course I got sides to go with it.
• 1:00:25
  Yeah, well, the good thing, the cool thing, my favorite thing,
• 1:00:28
  if I, I mean, we, we usually sell out of ribs.
• 1:00:30
  So I don't, I actually don't eat ribs that often.
• 1:00:32
  Ribs is probably the usually the first thing we sell out of most
• 1:00:34
  is because they are, they're they're, they are incredible.
• 1:00:38
  I mean, there's big thick pork spare ribs, just dry rub on
• 1:00:41
  them. But if you have leftovers, if
• 1:00:44
  you have a couple of bones leftover with the meat on them,
• 1:00:48
  take them home, cut that meat off the bone and throw it in
• 1:00:51
  with some fried rice because you get some of that dry rub gets in
• 1:00:54
  with the fried rice. Get some spice.
• 1:00:56
  You got that nice fatty meat. It's one of the best things I
• 1:01:01
  found to do other than just mounting them down late at
• 1:01:05
  night. Cold, we may have the fridge.
• 1:01:07
  We may have. To rename, we may have to rename
• 1:01:10
  this episode of Brewing and Cooking Tips.
• 1:01:13
  That's. Bad.
• 1:01:13
  Yeah, totally. Hey, I'm curious.
• 1:01:15
  So if we look on the board right now, we see all the beer options
• 1:01:18
  that you have are, are, are you satisfied as far as like is
• 1:01:23
  there a, a core group of beers like 8 or 9 that you always want
• 1:01:27
  to have? Are you going to, you know,
• 1:01:28
  rotate different ones throughout the year?
• 1:01:30
  How's that? How's that going to look out?
• 1:01:33
  We're we're starting right now with five year round options.
• 1:01:37
  So we've got the original, classic, premium, reserve and
• 1:01:39
  signature. Those are our core beers and
• 1:01:42
  I've, I've, I like having those as core beers because they cover
• 1:01:48
  a lot of tastes. We have originalist we've been
• 1:01:49
  drinking, which is your, you know, your crispy, crispy oil
• 1:01:52
  lager. So when you get people in from
• 1:01:54
  out of town or people that are here for barbecue and they're
• 1:01:57
  like, what do you, you know, what do you got that's closest
• 1:01:59
  to one of the big threes, you know, Bud Miller Coors kind of
• 1:02:02
  this option reserve and premium are, are West Coast and
• 1:02:06
  AZIPASIPAS are absolutely necessary.
• 1:02:09
  A lot of in a lot of ways pay the bills at a lot of breweries.
• 1:02:13
  A lot of people know craft beer as you know, IP as and high
• 1:02:18
  octane stouts and things like that.
• 1:02:19
  So they expect, you know, that's what they expect.
• 1:02:21
  A lot of people, I mean, Ipas are good.
• 1:02:23
  Like I'm not going to lie, I love them.
• 1:02:26
  But we, we try to do the, we do the West Coast and then the East
• 1:02:29
  Coast hazy IPA as well, just to cover both of those sides.
• 1:02:33
  I love the West Coast IPA as a style and it's seeing a little
• 1:02:36
  bit of a resurgence, which I'm really happy about.
• 1:02:39
  Classic is our pub beer, our English style pub beer.
• 1:02:42
  It's just that, you know, for people in the know, it's an ESB,
• 1:02:45
  but you don't call it an ESB because people see the word
• 1:02:47
  bitter and they're like, well, I don't want a bitter beer, right?
• 1:02:49
  It's like, well, I got news for you.
• 1:02:53
  But so we so we branded it a little different.
• 1:02:56
  So people understand what they're getting and we feel
• 1:02:58
  comfortable that we're telling them correctly what they're
• 1:03:00
  getting. But that's just like you're I
• 1:03:03
  mean that beer just it's the beer that you sit around and you
• 1:03:05
  know, watch you drink while you're watching sports with
• 1:03:07
  friends and stuff like that. And then the signature our dark
• 1:03:10
  ale was talking about earlier that we have that smoked malt in
• 1:03:12
  doesn't sit heavy. Not really.
• 1:03:15
  We call it a dark English ale because it done.
• 1:03:17
  There's not really wait, we don't know what else to call it.
• 1:03:20
  It is all those things and not really a Porter, not really a
• 1:03:23
  stout, not any kind of like Scotch ale or anything, but just
• 1:03:26
  a lightly smoky dark ale that's not going to sit heavy that you
• 1:03:30
  can actually have a couple with while you're eating BBQ.
• 1:03:34
  It's got some of that sweetness to it, but it's, I always joke
• 1:03:36
  with people, it's like the driest dark beer they'll have in
• 1:03:38
  Nashville. Probably because a lot of people
• 1:03:41
  see a dark beer and they expect it to be heavy and high octane
• 1:03:44
  and you know, it's just not, it's not how it is.
• 1:03:48
  There's one that just came out two days ago and I was here for
• 1:03:51
  it. That was like day one of the
• 1:03:53
  three in a row, but it came specifically for it because my
• 1:03:56
  club members, he got to try it free or not free.
• 1:03:58
  He got to try it first. Yep.
• 1:04:00
  And it's the the big Schwartz, the Schwartz beer he just came
• 1:04:02
  out with. I had it yesterday.
• 1:04:03
  Fantastic. It is amazing and that's that's
• 1:04:05
  exactly what he's like. It look, it is dark as shit, but
• 1:04:07
  it doesn't drink that way. It's not that everything you're
• 1:04:10
  talking. About yeah, exactly.
• 1:04:11
  And a Schwartz beer shouldn't shouldn't be, but yeah, we're
• 1:04:15
  really that one that one came out.
• 1:04:16
  I was telling you, I think I was like a lot roastier than I
• 1:04:18
  expected, but I'm not mad about it.
• 1:04:21
  But it yeah, it drinks it drinks really nice.
• 1:04:23
  We did that one and it's, it's big Schwartz cuz it's 6.8% but
• 1:04:28
  we did that one. We brewed that beer in
• 1:04:30
  conjunction with Jackson Down Liquors over in Donaldson
• 1:04:33
  because they gave us a barrel and we were talking about what
• 1:04:36
  to put in the barrel and I was like, how do you guys feel about
• 1:04:38
  a shorts beer? And they because I really wanted
• 1:04:40
  to do a barrel, a shorts beer and they were into it.
• 1:04:42
  So we bailed that and the other half kicked off to serve clean.
• 1:04:47
  And so but being in a barrel, doing a barrel aged beer, I was
• 1:04:50
  like, wow, got to get, got to get that alcohol up there a
• 1:04:52
  little bit. Just an extra, extra protection
• 1:04:55
  for like lower, lower ABV beers don't necessarily age that well
• 1:04:58
  in barrels, especially for extended period of time.
• 1:05:00
  Like our plan is to release that that beer for Black Friday next
• 1:05:05
  year. So that's sadly at least 10
• 1:05:07
  months in a barrel. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:09
  So we bumped it up and but yeah, it's not boozy.
• 1:05:13
  It's it's got real smooth body to it, super roasty, a little
• 1:05:17
  bit, a little bit of sweetness from that alcohol in there, but
• 1:05:19
  not in like a a sharp, you know, like gas station vodka way.
• 1:05:24
  It's, it's beautiful. It's it is freaking beautiful.
• 1:05:27
  Thank you. Thank you.
• 1:05:28
  Just everything about it is perfect.
• 1:05:29
  We're we're super, we're super, super happy with it and it goes
• 1:05:32
  so well with BBQ, especially that roasty character and
• 1:05:35
  something like super indulgent like that smoke burger or
• 1:05:39
  something like the pulled pork sandwich because got the fatty
• 1:05:41
  meat, that mustard sauce, toasted bun and everything.
• 1:05:44
  Although like that extra roasty character helps cut through a
• 1:05:47
  lot of those those strong flavors that we're getting for
• 1:05:51
  the barbecue and bounce everything out.
• 1:05:52
  I love it. Come get the Schwartz beer it.
• 1:05:54
  Is come get. It I had ever, as a matter of
• 1:05:56
  fact. Well, I hadn't had it yet today,
• 1:05:58
  but I had it Friday. I had it Saturday.
• 1:06:00
  I'll have it today. I've had every beer up there and
• 1:06:03
  loved each one. Thank you so much.
• 1:06:05
  Crave, I sometimes actually crave the original.
• 1:06:08
  Just that that clean. Everything about it is great.
• 1:06:11
  I sit around like and I got some at home thank God I bought some
• 1:06:15
  beer and bought some cans home and stuff like that.
• 1:06:17
  Literally crave it. I would never say that about a
• 1:06:19
  lager before. Thank you.
• 1:06:20
  Yeah. Well, and, and the other, I'm
• 1:06:22
  sorry. And the other, the thing that
• 1:06:23
  just comes into my mind, and I meant to say this earlier, and
• 1:06:26
  I've, I've said this to you when I've come in here before, is
• 1:06:29
  it's cool because we've known you for a little bit now to see
• 1:06:32
  honestly, how enthusiastic you are.
• 1:06:35
  Obviously you want to be, but how enthusiastic you are, how
• 1:06:38
  happy you guys are about this place.
• 1:06:41
  And I know I came in here, it was like the day after
• 1:06:43
  Thanksgiving and I walked through the parking lot, I saw
• 1:06:45
  you and you're like, man, I just put that Baltic Porter up there
• 1:06:48
  and the and the mild and, and you got to go get it.
• 1:06:51
  I mean, it's infectious, man. I mean, you really have that
• 1:06:55
  you're way about you so. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:06:56
  Well, we we'd know. It's part of it is, yeah.
• 1:07:02
  When you I've, I've learned this being this, this being the first
• 1:07:04
  business I've owned that like you're always in that mode of
• 1:07:07
  like trying to promote the business.
• 1:07:10
  But we're also lucky that we opened a business of things that
• 1:07:13
  we're, we are super passionate about.
• 1:07:15
  And knowing people that are excited, like I said earlier,
• 1:07:17
  like people just don't get excited and don't really care
• 1:07:19
  about beer anymore. Folks like you that we know that
• 1:07:21
  are excited about beer and understand like are going to
• 1:07:26
  appreciate it in the same way that we do.
• 1:07:28
  Yeah. It, it is also very exciting to
• 1:07:32
  pass that on to you guys and be like, oh man, I know you're
• 1:07:34
  going to like this. I know you're going to be
• 1:07:35
  excited about this. We got something new.
• 1:07:37
  I mean, he's in here all the time.
• 1:07:38
  He's probably border repairs already.
• 1:07:40
  He works down the street. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:42
  That way I'm like, I'd love if I work down the street too.
• 1:07:45
  I'd be a once or twice a week going OK, what do you got next?
• 1:07:48
  And yeah. He was like, you know, we got
• 1:07:52
  this mug club member thing in this mug club and I was like, I
• 1:07:55
  thought, you know what? It's but not to I'm, I'm Mug
• 1:07:57
  club #8 by the way. So I got in there early.
• 1:08:00
  Club. The clubhouse, actually.
• 1:08:01
  It was OK, yeah. Again, again, we get we get a
• 1:08:04
  lot of leeway or we get a lot of mileage on the the ponds with
• 1:08:07
  the house and and with being stoked and.
• 1:08:11
  That's a great segue. Can you talk, and I know we've
• 1:08:13
  had this conversation before, can you talk about the name,
• 1:08:16
  where it came from and the logo? Because it's actually
• 1:08:18
  everything's kind of is purposeful.
• 1:08:20
  Yeah, so the name came from actually like Mike for a minute
• 1:08:26
  a long time ago had a BBQ catering company and it was
• 1:08:29
  called Stoke. Like he would do pop ups at
• 1:08:31
  Smith and Muntz before they had the pizza pre tornado.
• 1:08:36
  And you know, because he had that giant smoker at home.
• 1:08:39
  So so there was there was already that name out there.
• 1:08:43
  We were talking about what do we call the business blah, blah,
• 1:08:46
  blah. Like I'm not always great at
• 1:08:48
  naming things. And it had, it had to be right.
• 1:08:52
  You know, it had to like hit correctly.
• 1:08:53
  And there was one day that we were talking about it and we
• 1:08:55
  were like, I was like, so I didn't really want to like, I
• 1:08:58
  don't want to jump on your thing, but would you be
• 1:09:01
  comfortable if we called it Stoke?
• 1:09:03
  And he was like, man, I didn't want to seem like I was going to
• 1:09:06
  be pushing like the name that I'd already used on you or
• 1:09:09
  anything. I'd be like, yeah, it would
• 1:09:10
  probably. I was like, it works on a lot of
• 1:09:12
  levels. Stoke in the fires for BBQ, you
• 1:09:16
  know, Stoke in the fire, so to speak to, you know, get water
• 1:09:19
  hot to make a mash to boil work, you know, even down to our
• 1:09:24
  suppliers that the malt houses, you know, that stoke the fires
• 1:09:27
  to malt grain. It's like, OK, and then we could
• 1:09:31
  call it Stoke house and spelled Haus.
• 1:09:33
  Cuz we're, you know, English beers and loggers are kind of
• 1:09:37
  our focus. Well, we'll eventually be more
• 1:09:40
  as we grow, you'll see more and more that focus.
• 1:09:42
  I mean, I guess you can see it on some of the stuff that we've
• 1:09:44
  released now. And then.
• 1:09:47
  Yeah, we started working on some ideas for the logo.
• 1:09:50
  We had a couple things down and then our graphic designers kind
• 1:09:52
  of took it from there and then she did an amazing job with
• 1:09:55
  everything. That's good.
• 1:09:56
  It's great. And that's, I love when you tell
• 1:09:58
  me that. And it's like, oh, now I see it
• 1:10:00
  now you know what I mean? Yeah, so I didn't realize that
• 1:10:02
  they were going to open a place down the street called Doghouse.
• 1:10:05
  Which was, you know, at least kind of, yeah, accidentally, I
• 1:10:08
  guess. Yeah, I don't really know.
• 1:10:10
  I've never been in, so I can't what I'm saying.
• 1:10:11
  But I drove by the other day and I was like, oh shit, All right.
• 1:10:15
  All right. You had it first.
• 1:10:17
  You came. You were here first.
• 1:10:18
  That's right. I mean, I hope, I don't know,
• 1:10:20
  maybe people go in there and they're like, where's the BBQ?
• 1:10:24
  You mentioned seeing him a crazy gnome before and when I was here
• 1:10:29
  for your soft opening, the turn out was amazing.
• 1:10:31
  And when I say it, not just the volume of people, the people
• 1:10:34
  that are in the look the craft beer community, I just came to
• 1:10:37
  one day. I think you had another day of
• 1:10:39
  it. And probably more that the the
• 1:10:40
  faces that I recognize that have their own breweries or in the
• 1:10:43
  industry or just we know from a beer thing we're here.
• 1:10:46
  Yeah, I'm porting you. And then I was like, that's a
• 1:10:48
  cool thing. We saw you when Grayson was
• 1:10:51
  opening his new place there. You and Park, like I kind of the
• 1:10:54
  same thing as that community there.
• 1:10:55
  You guys all respect each other, support each other.
• 1:10:57
  These are even as other breweries.
• 1:10:59
  I mean, I think that's a really great thing.
• 1:11:00
  Yeah, definitely. And some of us, some of us don't
• 1:11:05
  have the beers we want to drink on tap that day and other people
• 1:11:07
  do or, you know, we're all, we're all pretty friendly in
• 1:11:10
  this. Like honestly, my entire my
• 1:11:13
  entire social network is revolved around the beer
• 1:11:16
  industry. Thanks for that.
• 1:11:18
  Like even even the Wendsey, the girl I'm seeing, you know, she
• 1:11:23
  runs the the lab in the fermentation science department
• 1:11:26
  at MTSU and she teaches some fermentation classes down there
• 1:11:29
  as well. Like, so part of that is, yeah,
• 1:11:32
  it's basically just all the people I know, the only people I
• 1:11:35
  know are people in the industry, are people ancillary related to
• 1:11:39
  the industry. But there is a lot of
• 1:11:41
  camaraderie. And I think, I think you see
• 1:11:44
  that in craft beer just in general, all around.
• 1:11:47
  It's we're all small fighting at the same things.
• 1:11:50
  We all also know each other and we're in an industry that's like
• 1:11:53
  pretty laid back and it's fun to drink beers and get to know
• 1:11:57
  people. And there's not a lot of
• 1:12:01
  assholes in this industry. It's it's hard to be an asshole
• 1:12:04
  and survive in this industry. Yeah, Yeah, it's great.
• 1:12:06
  It just, it just awesome. I talked to you before fairly
• 1:12:09
  recently and you were talking about some collabs maybe
• 1:12:12
  possibly coming up. Can you talk to that?
• 1:12:14
  And then there's kind of a story behind one of the reasons you
• 1:12:16
  might be doing a collab, if you could talk to that.
• 1:12:18
  So we have, I've been, I've been putting some feelers out and
• 1:12:22
  trying to set up some collabs for this year.
• 1:12:24
  I've got two set up currently, one with E Natural Beer Works
• 1:12:28
  and one with Johnson City Brewing.
• 1:12:32
  E Natural Beer Works. I've always I've I got to see
• 1:12:35
  that place when they just had the trench drains dug.
• 1:12:38
  So that's a place that I've been going to pretty frequently over
• 1:12:42
  the years. It's actually on my way home.
• 1:12:45
  So that makes it easier. Their their head Brewer.
• 1:12:49
  Mitch and I have been friends since we were both low men on
• 1:12:51
  the totem pole at different breweries and they have a good
• 1:12:54
  crew there. Mike used to work there.
• 1:12:57
  So we set up we're doing a Black Eyed PA with them.
• 1:13:01
  I actually came upon a good amount of Cascade hops and I've
• 1:13:05
  always wanted to do a so the the black IPA, the official name of
• 1:13:08
  black IPA, like the style was Cascadian dark Ale.
• 1:13:11
  And so I've always wanted to do a, a black IPA with a bunch of
• 1:13:14
  cascades and call it cascading rhythms and release it around
• 1:13:17
  like daylight savings time. So I think that's what, so we're
• 1:13:20
  gonna, we're gonna end up doing that.
• 1:13:21
  And by the way, not, not to interrupt, but not like
• 1:13:24
  continue. I, I can't get away from making
• 1:13:26
  this point. We have had so many
• 1:13:28
  conversations with other guys to the Lovecraft year that talk
• 1:13:32
  about we want more, we want to see more black IPA's, right?
• 1:13:36
  I mean, really it's. Yeah, they just don't, they
• 1:13:37
  don't sell their exact. I know, I know, you know that's.
• 1:13:40
  Why? That's why.
• 1:13:40
  Well, let's do it in a collab. Because they don't have to sell.
• 1:13:42
  Maybe. That's our selfishness.
• 1:13:44
  But yeah, I mean, you know, I, I think that that's a subject.
• 1:13:48
  It's come up a few times and just conversations like, you
• 1:13:50
  know, black IPA, so. 2026 is going to be the year for Black
• 1:13:53
  IPA. Yeah, we're going to make it
• 1:13:54
  happen. It's going to happen.
• 1:13:56
  And then Johnson City Brewing, their owner Eric and I have been
• 1:13:59
  serving on the Guild board together.
• 1:14:01
  Eric, just for the last two years have been president of the
• 1:14:04
  Guild. And so and I got in during a
• 1:14:07
  special election because someone closed the brewery so they
• 1:14:10
  couldn't technically be on the Guild.
• 1:14:11
  So I got in. I was in there for like a year
• 1:14:13
  and a half, but but Eric and I got, you know, Eric.
• 1:14:16
  Eric, you guys have met Eric? Yep, he's he's he's he's a great
• 1:14:19
  dude. And I went there.
• 1:14:20
  I went to their brewery. Yeah, over the summer I I was in
• 1:14:23
  Johnson City. Yeah, I haven't gotten out there
• 1:14:25
  yet. I'm I'm hoping to sometime soon.
• 1:14:28
  It's it's just hard to leave. But, but he's, he's, he's a
• 1:14:31
  great guy And we, we've became pretty good friend, very
• 1:14:34
  friendly over the last year and a half that we've been working
• 1:14:38
  on the board together. And so and he was supported.
• 1:14:40
  He's been like, there's, there's times because he drives out here
• 1:14:43
  from Johnson City to deliver beer to the liquor store next
• 1:14:45
  door. And there is, there's been a
• 1:14:47
  couple times he's like walked in at like 8:30 in the morning.
• 1:14:50
  He's just like, hey, sorry, I was dropping beer off.
• 1:14:52
  I just, I want to come by and support.
• 1:14:54
  Can I buy a six pack right now? And it's like, OK.
• 1:14:56
  And then, and then he's out because he's got more deliveries
• 1:14:58
  due and he's got to drive all the way back to Johnson City.
• 1:15:01
  So we're talking about doing kind of a beer going into spring
• 1:15:04
  beer and I was talking to you about being in Cincinnati not
• 1:15:09
  too long ago and one of the, I always like to stop at Mad Tree
• 1:15:12
  and I sitting at the bar at Mad Tree and I was just watching.
• 1:15:15
  There's like 3 different beers that they were just like
• 1:15:17
  pouring, pouring, pouring, pouring, pouring.
• 1:15:19
  One of them was a citrus wheat beer.
• 1:15:21
  I was talking to Eric and I was like, what if we did something
• 1:15:23
  like that, but it was like 1/2 of Eisen and we just used some
• 1:15:26
  like orange peel and lemon peel or something.
• 1:15:29
  He was like, yeah, it would be really good with some rye in
• 1:15:31
  there too. And then he got his, the woman
• 1:15:34
  that is his, his Brewer now because yeah, we've had, yeah,
• 1:15:38
  he's, yeah, he's not, he's not as much back house anymore
• 1:15:41
  because he's, you know, they've grown enough that he has to
• 1:15:44
  spend more time running the business.
• 1:15:45
  And so we got on a group text and worked out some of the, the
• 1:15:48
  details. They're going to come down here
• 1:15:50
  in February, So knock that out. Because they had a check dark
• 1:15:53
  logger shady links when we were up there in May of 2025 that I
• 1:15:59
  had that was just outstanding. Yeah, I really, I do need to get
• 1:16:02
  down there. I've had I've had their beer
• 1:16:03
  feed mostly at festivals and stuff is when I get to because I
• 1:16:07
  really, I don't I'm one of those people that doesn't really spend
• 1:16:09
  money on beer. 1. I don't need to.
• 1:16:12
  I spend money on beer, but I do it from the grains and I do it
• 1:16:15
  from raw ingredients on. But it's also just like, I, I, I
• 1:16:21
  got the beers I want to drink here, you know?
• 1:16:23
  Well, and, and I have to also talk about that because I the
• 1:16:26
  only beer, one of the lonely beers and last year that I rated
• 1:16:30
  really high was one of theirs, obviously yours.
• 1:16:33
  And then from them I I was up there around the holidays and I
• 1:16:37
  saw it and it was a collab with the party source up there big
• 1:16:40
  beer store and it was a barrel aged called Whispering Pines.
• 1:16:44
  And man, that thing was like 12%.
• 1:16:47
  Yeah. They do a lot of good stuff.
• 1:16:50
  Yeah. Well, the good news is you can,
• 1:16:51
  like you just said, they've got Johnson City next door over
• 1:16:54
  here. He does a good job of like, I'll
• 1:16:55
  go in there, I'll find new stuff all the time that he's brought
• 1:16:57
  specifically from there. So he had one of the best
• 1:17:00
  pumpkin beers I've ever had this year.
• 1:17:01
  He uses real pumpkin in it. And I've told this story on
• 1:17:04
  there, but it says on the can, it says it's Eric saying it.
• 1:17:08
  He goes every year. I debate whether or not to make
• 1:17:10
  this beer cut. It's kind of a pain in the ass
• 1:17:11
  or whatever. And his wife always talks him
• 1:17:13
  into it and he's always glad he did after it's got real pumpkin
• 1:17:16
  in it versus just spice and stuff.
• 1:17:18
  So they're doing great beer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:17:21
  They're doing a great job. And again, Erics a great guy and
• 1:17:24
  I'm sure he's a great guests on the show.
• 1:17:26
  He can, he can from his time being a journalist, everyone can
• 1:17:29
  talk to anybody. Yeah.
• 1:17:30
  And the conversation generally will turn into all of a sudden
• 1:17:33
  you're like, I've never answered this many questions about
• 1:17:35
  myself. He he generally, he generally is
• 1:17:37
  just curious about people. He's he's super inquisitive.
• 1:17:40
  When he was on with us, I think the very first time he was, he
• 1:17:42
  was asking us about us, what's happening, what are.
• 1:17:44
  You guys doing? The old switch room 1.
• 1:17:47
  One thing I'd like to just kind of end on, there's hope and we
• 1:17:50
  could talk as much as you want, but talk about Jason for a
• 1:17:53
  minute and I heard your story about how you got him on the
• 1:17:55
  foamy heads thing, but how important has he been for you
• 1:17:58
  guys opening up, you guys being here because of the experience
• 1:18:01
  and background? He's he's been clutch.
• 1:18:03
  It was going to be, we knew going into it that we're like,
• 1:18:07
  we need someone that's going to run the front of house because
• 1:18:10
  Mike's going to be full of the food.
• 1:18:12
  I'm going to be full of the beer.
• 1:18:14
  And I also do a lot of the like the accounting and you know, all
• 1:18:17
  that kind of stuff because again, numbers focused
• 1:18:19
  spreadsheets. So we knew we had seen it before
• 1:18:24
  in breweries that had suffered because somebody tried to do too
• 1:18:27
  many things and stretched himself too thin.
• 1:18:29
  And then all the things they were trying to do suffered
• 1:18:31
  someone way or another. So we're like, we needed to find
• 1:18:33
  someone solid for the front of house.
• 1:18:37
  And I've known Jason for a number.
• 1:18:39
  He was used to be the GM over at Tennessee Brew Works.
• 1:18:41
  So I know him from his time the Tennessee Brew Works.
• 1:18:43
  Very knowledgeable guy, very curious, very into if something
• 1:18:47
  doesn't work, he's going to figure out how to make it
• 1:18:49
  fucking work. And he, you know, he's open
• 1:18:54
  plenty of bars and worked at, in plenty of bars around in East
• 1:18:57
  Nashville. Most like if you've been in East
• 1:18:59
  Nashville for the last 10 years, you probably sat next to him
• 1:19:01
  drinking a beer or he's served you a beer or a cocktail or
• 1:19:04
  something. So we knew we had the experience
• 1:19:06
  and originally we were just asking him to put some feelers
• 1:19:10
  out because he was kind of out of, he wanted to be out of the
• 1:19:11
  business. He'd been out for a little bit.
• 1:19:13
  So we asked him if you could put some feelers out or put us in
• 1:19:15
  touch with some people that would like that would work.
• 1:19:18
  And eventually he was like, wow, I mean, I'm not going to retell
• 1:19:22
  the story exactly like I did on the foamy head spot because you
• 1:19:24
  can listen to foamy heads podcast, but this is one of my
• 1:19:27
  favorite pieces of Stoke House Lords.
• 1:19:30
  It was a couple weeks after our first meeting with them, just
• 1:19:32
  kind of explaining what we're doing here and what we're
• 1:19:34
  looking for in a Tapper manager. And he sent me a text and he was
• 1:19:37
  like, so hypothetically, and I was like, he's got him.
• 1:19:41
  And so and so he's, he came in and he knows, you know, just the
• 1:19:45
  second meeting we had with him, he even he had a tape measure
• 1:19:47
  with him to, so we can measure behind the bar and figure out
• 1:19:50
  where he's going to figure out where everything is going to go.
• 1:19:52
  You know, setting up a bar is not, you know, just, you don't
• 1:19:55
  just throw things there. It's not just an intuitive
• 1:19:57
  thing. It needs to be really
• 1:19:58
  intentional. Just, you know, knowing how much
• 1:20:01
  money to keep in, you know, OK, the registers need this much
• 1:20:05
  changing on, but we need a bank with this much change, how much
• 1:20:07
  change to keep in there. Like those are things that like,
• 1:20:09
  I didn't have any idea about, Mike didn't have any idea about.
• 1:20:12
  We didn't have time to figure it out.
• 1:20:14
  So someone coming in with that and that could put it.
• 1:20:16
  And he put a really great team together.
• 1:20:19
  We everyone that's on our team still on for the on the bar side
• 1:20:23
  has been here since day one, which is awesome.
• 1:20:26
  And they all do a really great job.
• 1:20:28
  And then he came up with the whole sodas, the handmade sodas
• 1:20:31
  program because originally I was like, yeah, I'm going to have,
• 1:20:33
  we want to lean on NA. So I'm going to have a hot
• 1:20:35
  water, sparkling mineral water. I'm going to have the sparkling
• 1:20:37
  lemonade, all these on tap. And he was like, well, actually
• 1:20:41
  I have some ideas. Focus on the sparkling mineral
• 1:20:44
  water cool and then he came back with a whole series of juices
• 1:20:47
  program that'll eventually translate to cocktails when we
• 1:20:50
  get our liquor license as well. So he really, you know, he knew
• 1:20:54
  the vibe we wanted to set in front of house.
• 1:20:56
  He put the team together to do that.
• 1:20:57
  He gave us a built in NA program that also makes us, you know,
• 1:21:02
  more inclusive and welcoming, especially to families and stuff
• 1:21:05
  like that. And, and he, he helps us run
• 1:21:09
  things like when we have advice, when sometimes we we're like,
• 1:21:11
  OK, we have this issue and we think we should handle it this
• 1:21:14
  way. And it's like, Jason, we know
• 1:21:16
  you've had experience in this, like does Howard the man handle?
• 1:21:18
  Like, what do you think? You know, what have you done in
• 1:21:20
  the past? What have you seen work and not
• 1:21:22
  work? What are we thinking about?
• 1:21:23
  So he's been absolutely clutch in this, in this whole thing.
• 1:21:26
  Like Stoke House would not exist as it is now without Jason.
• 1:21:29
  Trust you talking about like you trust Mike and Mike trusts you,
• 1:21:32
  You have the same trust in. Jason, yeah, absolutely.
• 1:21:34
  There's there's never been an issue where it's been like, I
• 1:21:36
  don't think Jason's is not doing something right that needs to be
• 1:21:39
  done. You know, a lot of times it's
• 1:21:41
  just like, oh, hey, like when is when it when it when do you plan
• 1:21:46
  on being finished with this? Just so I can know, just because
• 1:21:48
  I'm curious, it's not like a get a fire under your ass.
• 1:21:51
  It's like it's like, Oh yeah. But I remember we were talking
• 1:21:53
  about this last week. Where are we on that?
• 1:21:55
  Where how can I help with that? Like what do you need from me?
• 1:21:57
  Are we like covering all those things?
• 1:21:58
  But no, it's been great. Like the three of us worked
• 1:22:00
  really well together and it's nice again, we if if we had
• 1:22:04
  tried to been running the front house ourselves, it would have
• 1:22:07
  it would have been a mess because neither of us would have
• 1:22:09
  been able to focus on it, give that really great hospitality
• 1:22:11
  experience. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:22:13
  I've got to know him just for being here in his great Greece.
• 1:22:15
  Remember my name from the first time I ever came in that kind
• 1:22:18
  of. And he can, he can, he's just
• 1:22:20
  like Eric. That guy can talk to anybody and
• 1:22:21
  he will. If you sit at the bar and start
• 1:22:23
  talking to him, man, he's going to, you're going to, you're
• 1:22:25
  going to learn some things. You're going to be in a
• 1:22:26
  conversation longer than you thought you would be.
• 1:22:28
  And you're not going to be mad about it.
• 1:22:29
  You're going to walk away like. Smarter than I was when I came.
• 1:22:32
  In yeah, yeah. So and, and that's, and that's
• 1:22:35
  about, you know, that, that friendliness, that, that
• 1:22:36
  hominess, that being feeling welcome and not feeling like
• 1:22:39
  you're trying to like we're trying to push you out so we can
• 1:22:41
  get another person come in and spend money in that bar seat.
• 1:22:44
  Or we're not trying to necessarily flip tables super,
• 1:22:46
  super fast. Like we want people to be able
• 1:22:48
  to come here and, and chill and feel kind of like they're part
• 1:22:51
  of it in a certain way, Not just not just a guest, but they're
• 1:22:54
  like, you know, part of the field of the place.
• 1:22:56
  Well, I've definitely gotten that vibe since they won't, of
• 1:22:58
  course, it just know you, but it's still the vibe is the
• 1:23:00
  people that came in yesterday with us first year for the first
• 1:23:03
  time, right, and they completely loved it and loved vibe and just
• 1:23:06
  we spent many hours here yesterday.
• 1:23:08
  Yeah, yeah, if. You want to get to these other 4
• 1:23:10
  breweries you want to go to, you better leave.
• 1:23:12
  Or you could just stay here. Exactly.
• 1:23:14
  That's like, you got the best beer.
• 1:23:17
  So. Anything else for you, Steve?
• 1:23:18
  You know what I was going to see if we could coke Mike's over
• 1:23:21
  here just to say hey to him real quick.
• 1:23:23
  Hey, Mike. Hey, Mike.
• 1:23:25
  It's 2 minutes. I know you're.
• 1:23:25
  Just two minutes. Flip that, Microsoft.
• 1:23:28
  On I know he's busy and you guys are about that open.
• 1:23:30
  Just to say hi, we're wrapping up.
• 1:23:31
  Anyways, like we're wrapping up, but we just, we had to, we had
• 1:23:34
  to bring you over. There's Mike.
• 1:23:35
  We never worry. About to start cooking but we
• 1:23:37
  want to just thank you as well for being a part of the brewery.
• 1:23:41
  Experience. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
• 1:23:42
  You know, it's my pleasure. I mean, this is, it's a dream
• 1:23:44
  for, you know, us for sure. But like a lot of people in our
• 1:23:48
  position and, and the fact that we've been want to do this and
• 1:23:51
  had the vision and been able to execute it fairly well to, you
• 1:23:55
  know, what we're looking for in our standards that we've set for
• 1:23:58
  ourself. It's cool, man.
• 1:24:02
  It feels good. So it's right, we love the
• 1:24:05
  experience with other than you guys are doing the food, the
• 1:24:07
  beer combination of the. Yeah, no, that's what was crazy.
• 1:24:10
  You know, it's, it's like, obviously, like we, we have our
• 1:24:12
  thing, you know, and not a lot of people are doing beer and BBQ
• 1:24:15
  together, but it's like that's not even what we were doing.
• 1:24:19
  We were like, we were both brilliant, you know, So it's
• 1:24:21
  just cool that we've been able to do it and do it well.
• 1:24:23
  I think it's, it's, it's, you know, it's a jump.
• 1:24:26
  You jump off and you hope that you can fly and we're flapping
• 1:24:29
  our wings. We were just talking about the
• 1:24:33
  trust you guys have in each other to handle the.
• 1:24:35
  Oh yeah. It's got to be such a relief,
• 1:24:37
  right, So I could focus on my thing.
• 1:24:39
  That was the biggest thing. And like whenever I wanted to
• 1:24:42
  open up a brewery, I've always wanted to do, I've always wanted
• 1:24:47
  food to be a big aspect. And then the more I got into
• 1:24:49
  brewing and the more, you know, kept being into food, the more I
• 1:24:52
  realized I think I want to do the food side of stuff.
• 1:24:55
  But I was already in the beer industry and I wanted to make
• 1:24:57
  sure that I did every job, whether it was packaging or
• 1:25:00
  cellar work or, you know, running a brewery.
• 1:25:02
  And I pretty much did everything, including sales and
• 1:25:04
  stuff. But I never wanted somebody to
• 1:25:07
  be able to bullshit me, you know, and I'm working with Chad.
• 1:25:10
  It was cool because there was always small things and we'd be
• 1:25:13
  tired and he'd be like, well, let's just get this done and
• 1:25:16
  let's make sure that I saw that there was no corners being cut.
• 1:25:19
  And that wasn't because of me enforcing it is because that was
• 1:25:22
  his own standards and I didn't have to.
• 1:25:24
  And I hate the term babysitting, but I didn't have to babysit and
• 1:25:26
  I could know, I knew that he had the same mindset as far as, you
• 1:25:29
  know, not slacking and that was big.
• 1:25:31
  And then for me with the food, honestly, that was him just
• 1:25:34
  understanding my passion. But that was that's probably
• 1:25:38
  nerve racking up a little bit because it's not like I had this
• 1:25:40
  crazy experience with anything food related.
• 1:25:45
  And so he just trusted me. And that was that was kind of
• 1:25:47
  blind faith, I think. But again, we're doing good.
• 1:25:50
  Yeah, it's worked. It worked out.
• 1:25:51
  You were talking about making beer to kind of pair the food.
• 1:25:53
  Is there? Is there the food that you're
• 1:25:55
  making this stuff? Obviously it's barbecue and
• 1:25:57
  stuff. Do you think about what you're
• 1:25:58
  making? Are you going to make like the
• 1:25:59
  smoked burger 2 pair with the beer also kind of go in that
• 1:26:02
  direction? It kind of works.
• 1:26:04
  It kind of works its way out itself because a lot of the food
• 1:26:08
  I have that I enjoy pairs with beer, but also like you can
• 1:26:14
  almost pair anything with food, like any beer with there's so
• 1:26:17
  many different styles and stuff. But I think one of the best
• 1:26:19
  things we do here is our beers are straightforward and simple
• 1:26:23
  and they're things that are, they're all sessionable, you
• 1:26:27
  know, they're all enjoyable and crushable.
• 1:26:29
  Even our dark beers, you can sit and have 3 or 4 pints, you know,
• 1:26:33
  and that's I think the best way to go with food.
• 1:26:35
  It's, it's like refreshing it, you know, it's a palate cleanser
• 1:26:38
  and then you can dig in deeper and get those nuances of, you
• 1:26:42
  know, how it complements the food and whatnot.
• 1:26:44
  But everything that I have for the most part on the menu,
• 1:26:47
  almost everything is, is nostalgia based and something
• 1:26:50
  that I either grew up with or there's a point in my life where
• 1:26:52
  I really love this item. And since I've been drinking
• 1:26:57
  beer since I was 21 years old, you know, on the die.
• 1:27:02
  And so anytime I was eating food, I'd, I'd have a beer with
• 1:27:05
  it. And being in San Diego, you
• 1:27:07
  know, for that whole time of my early, you know, 20s, San Diego
• 1:27:12
  is such a beer of Mecca that it's, it's part of the culture,
• 1:27:15
  not it's, it's part of a culture in a way that if you're not from
• 1:27:18
  a beer city, you would not really understand how much it is
• 1:27:23
  ingrained in the city and in the, the community itself.
• 1:27:27
  So I was having beer with every food item I had.
• 1:27:31
  And that's just how I learned to cook.
• 1:27:32
  And I learned how I, you know, learned to eat is just with
• 1:27:36
  beer, which sounds crazy, but it's, it's, it's true.
• 1:27:40
  So. You get a lot of West Coast.
• 1:27:44
  There yes, absolutely. Oh my gosh, no, I'll never
• 1:27:47
  forget some of that. You know, those times having
• 1:27:49
  like fish tacos and and pairing it with the West Coast or, you
• 1:27:52
  know, really anything out there. It's just it's fantastic, good
• 1:27:56
  food and good beer. But that's just kind of part of
• 1:28:00
  like my ethos, you know? Right.
• 1:28:04
  Yeah, absolutely. Chad kind of gave me a look
• 1:28:06
  earlier because I had sort of mentioned like, I guess
• 1:28:09
  Nashville is sort of known for BBQ.
• 1:28:11
  I don't know, it's the basic right.
• 1:28:13
  But I said we were talking yesterday, you know, you met
• 1:28:16
  some friends that we're in here. But I said it's as good, it's
• 1:28:18
  better than anything in town. Thank you, Nashville saying, you
• 1:28:22
  know, we're the hell of a BBQ. We're not home.
• 1:28:23
  But you know, you know people love BBQ.
• 1:28:26
  And, and they do come to Nashville.
• 1:28:28
  They do. Here.
• 1:28:30
  Yeah, here. I think it's better than
• 1:28:32
  anywhere else you can go. Thank you.
• 1:28:34
  Whenever I, I've always loved barbecue and growing up in
• 1:28:36
  Texas, BBQ is everywhere. And even whenever I was a young
• 1:28:40
  kid, I always, you know, loved BBQ.
• 1:28:43
  I thought it was such a cool food.
• 1:28:45
  The idea of it was just really, I don't know, rough around the
• 1:28:49
  edges. And I thought it was
• 1:28:51
  interesting. And then whenever I got into
• 1:28:52
  cooking it as I got older, you know, I enjoyed it.
• 1:28:55
  So I was anywhere I ever went, I would always seek out BBQ,
• 1:28:59
  especially in like the South and whatnot.
• 1:29:01
  But I was so excited to move to Tennessee and move to Nashville
• 1:29:05
  for some like eating that barbecue and having that
• 1:29:07
  experience. And the whole time I was driving
• 1:29:09
  here, I had my windows down. I was music, you know, was just
• 1:29:11
  blasting and I was smelling all these smells where I was like,
• 1:29:14
  I'm going to hold off until I get to Nashville.
• 1:29:16
  I'm gonna wait till I get to Nashville.
• 1:29:17
  And to be honest, whenever I got to Nashville, I was a little
• 1:29:20
  disappointed because I thought they would be a little bit
• 1:29:23
  better quality. I thought it'd be more like
• 1:29:25
  prevalent top tier stuff, you know, and just just seeing how
• 1:29:28
  that can be in like Austin and, and even Houston and whatnot.
• 1:29:31
  I was expecting to just be everywhere.
• 1:29:33
  And there's some good spots, you know, here in Nashville for
• 1:29:36
  sure. It's just not as saturated as I
• 1:29:38
  thought. And so I knew that that was also
• 1:29:39
  still a good opportunity, you know, to, to, to pursue and also
• 1:29:43
  to do it to my style and my quality, you know, that I that I
• 1:29:47
  wanted to put out. And again, there's some really
• 1:29:49
  great spots and I will support them forever.
• 1:29:52
  And I, I was even other spots, you know, close by.
• 1:29:55
  I've been thinking about going to, just to go say hey and, and,
• 1:29:58
  and whatnot, because it's kind of like the beer community, that
• 1:30:00
  camaraderie. It's, it could be the same
• 1:30:02
  thing, But I, I knew I could have a spot.
• 1:30:06
  I just had to set it up and and follow through with it and bring
• 1:30:10
  more. Sure.
• 1:30:11
  Beer and and. Barbecue.
• 1:30:13
  It's cool. I feel like we've been putting
• 1:30:15
  out some cool hits, you know, from the ribs to the brisket to
• 1:30:18
  the burger, it's, it's all been well received and I, I, you
• 1:30:21
  know, I love the feedback and I appreciate it.
• 1:30:24
  Real quick from Texas, there's a lot of beef in Texas.
• 1:30:27
  Yeah, 100%. Oh, they're not that hard to do
• 1:30:30
  now. I would say, honestly, a beef
• 1:30:32
  rib might even be easier than brisket, and I think brisket's
• 1:30:35
  pretty easy. It's just people can
• 1:30:37
  overcomplicate things. But beef is king in Texas for
• 1:30:40
  sure. You know, there's classes,
• 1:30:42
  there's you can go to Texas A&M and it's that's all you studied,
• 1:30:45
  you know. Yeah, for sure.
• 1:30:48
  But beef ribs will definitely be on the menu.
• 1:30:50
  Sausage will be on the menu. I finally have somebody on the
• 1:30:52
  trailer. I'm not doing everything single
• 1:30:54
  handedly on with food like I was for the first like 3 months.
• 1:30:58
  I have people helping me now with some prep work which is
• 1:31:00
  extremely big. We've been able to add some more
• 1:31:02
  sides, whether it's the plantains or Brussels sprouts
• 1:31:05
  which were short lived because of a shortage I guess in the
• 1:31:08
  supply chain. We're going to be adding some
• 1:31:10
  like crispy chickpeas as bar snack that we'll be having that
• 1:31:13
  be seasoned really awesomely and all sorts of things.
• 1:31:16
  I was just talking with Jason about adding dessert and how
• 1:31:18
  important that is. Greens, you know, we get
• 1:31:20
  questions about that, but then also things like chicken wings,
• 1:31:23
  you know, smoked and fried chicken wings.
• 1:31:24
  I want that on the menu. So I've been able to expand and,
• 1:31:27
  and having Thai now on the trailer for me has allowed us to
• 1:31:31
  also start thinking about that and have time to even consider
• 1:31:36
  it because I can step away for a minute and, you know, get the
• 1:31:40
  beef ribs on the menu, get a plan to make some sausage.
• 1:31:42
  I know we have a bangers and mash event coming up on the
• 1:31:45
  15th. I don't know if Chad's talked
• 1:31:47
  about that, but it's going to be really cool.
• 1:31:49
  I'm making sausage for it. Spinning records.
• 1:31:52
  But those are the bangers. Sausages are the bangers.
• 1:31:54
  Yeah, and yeah, then the mashes. Here, Yeah.
• 1:31:58
  So I'll be doing some classic Texas style cheddar jalapeno,
• 1:32:01
  which I've done before. If people have had that sausage
• 1:32:04
  at, you know, other places that I've either worked or at my
• 1:32:07
  house or whatnot. So it's going to be the first
• 1:32:08
  round. I did some other sausage before
• 1:32:10
  some Nashville hotlings that were really great and I used up
• 1:32:12
  Ray Video hot chicken seasoning and those were fantastic.
• 1:32:16
  We did Bratwurst. Those were turned out way good.
• 1:32:19
  So good. Those are awesome.
• 1:32:21
  So I'd like to get sausage more, you know, in the mix.
• 1:32:24
  It just is a labor intensive thing that takes time.
• 1:32:27
  But with having people help me out, I'm able to actually, I can
• 1:32:32
  not just tread water, I can start, you know, swimming and,
• 1:32:35
  and I think we're, we're heading the great direction for that.
• 1:32:38
  Yeah, Yeah, it's kind of like the first step of of growth for
• 1:32:41
  us was like, all right, we need give Mike some help, give it get
• 1:32:44
  him some relief so he can focus on expanding the menu, bringing
• 1:32:48
  more options for. Because as you talk.
• 1:32:50
  About more specials and things like that you have.
• 1:32:51
  To just make it 3 days ahead and take 3 days.
• 1:32:54
  Oh yeah, absolutely. I know it's I'm, I'm here as
• 1:32:57
  soon as I can be before opening to get everything set, get
• 1:33:00
  everything going. And usually I'm cooking.
• 1:33:02
  And I mean, up until this week, I've been almost every day.
• 1:33:08
  But you know, for the most part, unless it was like on a Monday
• 1:33:10
  or something like that, first one in, last one leaving, you
• 1:33:12
  know, I'd lock up after the bartenders.
• 1:33:14
  I'd be in here before the bartenders, you know, and every
• 1:33:16
  once in awhile Jason would beat me in, I come in and chat would
• 1:33:18
  be in here doing something, you know, like he was in here today
• 1:33:21
  before me. But it's a long, it's a long
• 1:33:25
  process for it. But I mean, if, if it's
• 1:33:28
  something that you want, you have to do it And you, there's
• 1:33:33
  certain steps you can't, you can't half ass anything.
• 1:33:35
  And I, I want to put out a great product.
• 1:33:37
  I want people to be blown away by it.
• 1:33:39
  And that this is part of it. It's part of the process.
• 1:33:41
  Now, if you don't serve raw chicken, you have to cook it.
• 1:33:44
  Well, to serve great BBQ, I have to cook it.
• 1:33:45
  It takes time. You know, it's just a long
• 1:33:47
  process, you. Don't get you don't get to roll
• 1:33:49
  out of bed just before you. Get some of it.
• 1:33:51
  Sure. That doesn't work like that.
• 1:33:52
  And and I could cut corners. I could, you know, hold things,
• 1:33:55
  cook things and and with certain things that actually will be OK,
• 1:33:57
  like I want to smoke and fry chicken wings.
• 1:34:00
  Well, I can do a big batch, smoke the chicken wings, hold
• 1:34:03
  them and then fry them, you know, for the day.
• 1:34:05
  That's different than something like pulled pork or ribs.
• 1:34:08
  You know, you don't want to dry your ribs out.
• 1:34:10
  You don't want your brisket to, you know, overcook or, you know,
• 1:34:14
  dry out as well. Like there's you.
• 1:34:16
  You really want to do that day before, hold it and rest it and
• 1:34:20
  have it ready for that day, you know, that next day.
• 1:34:22
  Yeah. I'm not doing things, you know,
• 1:34:24
  all on Monday and then serving up until Saturday or Sunday.
• 1:34:28
  It's not not my bag. I, you know, I, I'm glad we got
• 1:34:32
  them both on today. You guys have been extremely
• 1:34:35
  generous with your time and we appreciate it and you know,
• 1:34:38
  we'll we'll be seeing again a lot here.
• 1:34:41
  Yeah, well, thank you guys. I'm glad you included me.
• 1:34:43
  Anything else? We we didn't talk to him.
• 1:34:44
  You want to talk about anything real?
• 1:34:46
  Quick. No, I think we covered guys.
• 1:34:48
  You guys pretty thorough. Yeah.
• 1:34:49
  Yeah, If you haven't been here, come in, come say hey, don't be,
• 1:34:53
  you know, afraid to say hi to me or Chad.
• 1:34:55
  You know, we're both friendly people.
• 1:34:57
  If you come in for food, definitely grab a beer.
• 1:35:00
  If you come in for beer, definitely try the food.
• 1:35:02
  I feel like there's sometimes people don't realize that it's
• 1:35:04
  all one thing that I think that is something, you know, that
• 1:35:07
  that can pop up is is people might think that like the food
• 1:35:11
  is a separate thing. It's all.
• 1:35:12
  It's all one thing. That you get.
• 1:35:13
  Trust us, we know first hand. Yeah, you get the full brewery
• 1:35:17
  experience. That's right.
• 1:35:18
  That's. Awesome.
• 1:35:18
  You absolutely will see Chad and like every time you're in here.
• 1:35:20
  I know I do. And then you're like.
• 1:35:23
  I love it. I love the familiar faces,
• 1:35:25
  absolutely. But you guys are around all the
• 1:35:28
  time. But thank you again so much.
• 1:35:29
  Yeah. Thank you guys.
• 1:35:30
  I really. Appreciate it.
• 1:35:31
  I mean, you guys always be good to us.
• 1:35:33
  We appreciate it and we're we're, you know, happy for you
• 1:35:35
  guys and. We'll have more questions one
• 1:35:36
  day, hopefully soon again we'll we'll come back and do it again.
• 1:35:40
  So. Well, I know he'll be here
• 1:35:41
  Wednesday and Thursday and Friday.
• 1:35:44
  You're. Going to put me to work at some
• 1:35:47
  point. Like I said earlier, if you
• 1:35:49
  start busting glasses, I may pay you.
• 1:35:51
  We'll. Be Scott in the back.
• 1:35:53
  I just started taking. It, Chad and Mike and Steven
• 1:35:57
  Scott here for the Underground podcast from Stokow.
• 1:35:59
  Thanks, guys. Thanks.
• 1:36:00
  Cheers.