Each issue, The Growler Craft Beer Handbook invites two brewers to sit down (over beer, of course) and discuss the craft, the industry and the beer.
For our next issue, we have Strange Fellows’s Iain Hill and Brassneck’s Conrad Gmoser, both of whom cut their teeth working for local brewpubs Yaletown Brewpub and Steamworks Brewpub, respectively, before starting their own highly respected craft breweries.
This is an excerpt from a much longer conversation the two had last month. Check out another part of that conversation in The Growler’s third issue, available Aug. 1 at a brewery near you.
CONRAD GMOSER: You were really one of the first brewers in the B.C. to put out a sour beer –
IAIN HILL: Second probably after Storm [Brewing].
CG: Yeah. You made a point of making sour beer under tough circumstances –
IH: Totally.
CG: – and I think probably there weren’t that many regular Yaletown customers who were interested in what you were doing. How do you feel about sour beers now that there’s a demand for it?
IH: Well first off, when I started doing Oud Brun – and it came along and developed as the years went by – I was brewing in an arduous situation. I used to keep barrels up in my office in the grain room originally, which was crazy! I had four barrels at one point and the office wasn’t that big. Eventually I kept them down in the brewery, but even then it was dreadful.
GROWLER: What was the interest like at the time for sour beers?
IH: It was kind of split. Some people didn’t know what it was, some people did. Some people cared, some people didn’t care. I didn’t really care myself what people thought in the beginning, because I knew that at some point people would think good of it or enjoy it. I always knew there would be people who thought it was too way out there for them. I don’t know. I didn’t really care.
CG: I heard bartenders at Yaletown across the bar telling customers, ‘Don’t order that.’ [laughs]
IH: I think some would and some wouldn’t. I mean, you’d get the same thing with beers over where you were. It depends on the individual. I think there were a lot of people coming to Yaletown looking for that beer, and that might have led to some puzzlement on the part of people who were serving there, I suppose.
I have to say, one of the things that really allowed that beer to become what it was, was just the fact that the Alibi [Room] existed. Honestly, if the Alibi had not existed to take that beer, and to really market it, I don’t believe anything would have happened to it. That’s absolutely the truth.
GROWLER: So it was sold outside of Yaletown?
IH: Most years I sold basically half of it at Alibi and half of it at Yaletown.
GROWLER: So Nigel [Springthorpe, Alibi Room owner and Gmoser’s business partner at Brassneck] championed that beer.
IH: Hugely.
CG: That’s also where the faithful went to find things like that.
IH: Yeah. That’s an interesting point. It never would have gotten off the ground if it wasn’t for the Alibi selling it. I would have made it, some people would have been excited, no one would have said very much. I probably would have made it for a couple of years and someone would have said, “You shouldn’t make that anymore.” I would have struggled with that and maybe I would have made a different version. You know, it wouldn’t have been what it was.
CG: When we don’t have something sour on, it’s one of the most requested beers that people ask for. It gives me hope for the next 20 years of brewing, because there’s just so much you can do. It’s so interesting. It’s neat to put in almost 20 years and have something come around that can take you in another direction.
IH: Back to the point about how things have changed, it’s funny. I can remember years ago, servers in the brewpubs not really caring at all about the beer. Then I can remember, just a few years ago at Yaletown, a pretty woman server coming up to me and asking all these questions about homebrewing, wanting to get in to home brewing. And I remember that moment. I was like, “What? This is wrong! You don’t want to get involved in homebrewing!” But she did. It’s so weird because it’s such a big shift.
The Growler Craft Beer Handbookis a quarterly craft beer guide featuring profiles of every brewery in B.C., features on beer culture, and an array of pretty illustrations, in case you’ve drunk too much to actually read anything. Our third issue is out August 1.
